Photo by Todd Hoskins
Episode 35: Landscapes—Animals Build Ecosystems with Simon Mustoe
What if 50% of wildlife species are actually recovering—and no one's talking about it? Wildlife ecologist Simon Mustoe challenges the catastrophe narratives dominating conservation, revealing a radically different picture of what's happening on Earth.
In this Landscapes episode, Simon explores how animals don't just inhabit ecosystems—they build them. From whales fertilizing ocean food webs to elephants shaping forests, wildlife carries the cultural knowledge and behaviors that create the stability we depend on. He introduces the concept of the "air gap"—the space between our minds and Earth—and why floating brains that can move through landscapes make animals the builders of living systems.
Hosts Marti Spiegelman and Todd Hoskins dive deep with Simon into questions that challenge conventional thinking: What if the greatest obstacle to conservation is constant human intervention? What if "doing less" could achieve more? How do we shift from control to participation in the ecosystems we're part of?
The conversation weaves together original human wisdom and modern ecology, examining how collective knowing surpasses individual scientific prediction, why humans need to remember they're animals too, and what it means to let wildlife lead the restoration of our world.
Marti's Potentialities segment explores the power of awe as an evolutionary force—and why our linear minds trap us from experiencing the very rapture that could change everything.
Topics include: rewilding consciousness, the paradox of action versus awareness, Tom Brown Jr.'s teaching on sensory capacities, the Yaqui understanding of perception as the core of being human, and why dreaming about wildlife might be the truest sign you're connected to life.
Guest: Simon Mustoe
Simon Mustoe is a wildlife ecologist, author, and founder of Wildlife in the Balance. With thirty years of experience as a researcher, expedition leader, and conservationist, he has worked across the globe—from the frigid North Atlantic to Madagascar's remote dry forests to the coral reefs of West Papua.
Simon's work challenges conventional conservation thinking by revealing how animals don't just inhabit ecosystems—they build them. His books, including Wildlife in the Balance: Why Animals are Humanity's Best Hope and How to Survive the Next 100 Years: Lessons from Nature, have received critical acclaim for their revolutionary perspective on the essential role of wildlife in creating a habitable planet.
Based in Melbourne, Australia, Simon manages biodiversity and socio-ecological projects for nature restoration while leading expeditions to Indonesia's Coral Triangle. His mission is to reconnect humans with the natural world and empower communities to understand their place within living systems.
Learn more at simonmustoe.blog and wildiaries.com
Series: LANDSCAPES
In a time when many feel unmoored from both the natural world and their own sense of purpose, the Landscapes series offers essential navigation tools for finding your way. As global upheaval reshapes everything we thought we knew, the wisdom of belonging to place becomes vital for thriving.
This series challenges the Western illusion of separation that leaves us exhausted, anxious, and ineffective. Whether you're leading an organization through uncertainty, seeking personal direction, or simply trying to make sense of chaotic times, understanding how landscapes both external and internal shape consciousness provides pathways forward. We'll explore how becoming skillful wayfinders—learning to read the territories we're crossing and work with larger forces of change—can restore capacity to create abundance and evolve into states of thriving when traditional approaches have failed.
Photo by Pia Kealey
Timeline
01:00 Introducing guest Simon Mustoe
01:27 Todd's introduction: The age of catastrophe narratives
02:28 Seeing the whole vs. seeing only collapse
03:35 What if the world is being reborn?
04:19 Participation vs. observation in landscapes
06:39 Animals aren't residents—they're the builders
07:51 Disconnecting internal landscapes from external ones
08:25 Humans as stewards of consciousness
09:32 Awakened partnership, not human dominion
10:08 How do our brains float above the planet's surface?
10:49 The difference between plants and animals
13:18 We carry our intelligence with us—the air gap
14:33 Human migration as spreading knowledge
15:32 We were part of the creation process, not destroyers
17:25 Why AI can't solve the planet's problems
19:23 Intelligence vs. knowledge—playing with language
22:37 Collective knowing surpasses scientific prediction
24:49 Original human wisdom—listening to the world
26:21 Trees that walked—seeing into dimensions
26:48 There's no subconscious—everything is conscious
27:57 Systems reset without us when we try to control
31:19 Connecting community values to ecosystem features
35:35 Original human wisdom—everyone is indigenous to someplace
36:41 Remembering our place in the great family of things
37:55 Wakatobi, Indonesia: A perfect restoration program
44:57 Authentic action vs. forcing outcomes
47:02 Getting beyond right and wrong
47:55 When awareness is woven into the world
48:43 Action vs. inaction
54:18 The monumental shift in how people are thinking
54:42 The fishers who wanted to restore community, not catch more fish
56:25 Encountering sperm whales in Fiji
58:41 Potentialities (Marti): A journey of awe
01:16:44 Takeaways
01:21:10 Closing and thank yous
01:21:33 Outro music and credits
Quotes
"If we can only see collapse, we can't participate in regeneration." -- Todd Hoskins
"If we can only see endings, we miss the beginnings that are always simultaneously emerging." -- Todd Hoskins
"How do we know the world isn't in a state of being reborn? Not metaphorically, but actually materially, ecologically being rebuilt by the intelligence of billions of organisms." -- Todd Hoskins
"The greatest obstacle to conservation might be the thing conservationists are most committed to action, more doing more programs, more intervention, more human control." -- Todd Hoskins
"The difference between plants and animals is that plants are rooted to the spot...They have the key to building ecosystems because they can move things from one place to another." -- Simon Mustoe
"We have this gap between us and the earth—we can jump in the air and we can create a gap between us and the earth, which makes us extremely special in evolutionary sense. The evolution of land animals as a collective consciousness was the starting point for everything that we currently understand about the ecology and ecosystems of planet." -- Simon Mustoe
"Unless AI can interrogate the minds of ants and magpies like the one that just came through the door here, it won't have enough information to be able to guide us on how to solve the planet's problems. And it doesn't need to because we already have actual intelligence." -- Simon Mustoe
"Our human nervous systems, whether we are aware of this or not, we are collecting data from the world around us 24 7 through a radius of at least five miles. It's in your nervous system. It's in your brain...But modern people don't know how to put their awareness to all that data." -- Marti Spiegelman
"His [Malidoma Patrice Somé] elders would always tell him that Nature is intelligence as it stands...They were so deep into consciousness in their connection to nature. They were seeing into dimensions that modern people can't see yet." -- Marti Spiegelman
"There's nothing subconscious. The whole thing out there is conscious. It really is. And there's no collective unconscious. There is collective consciousness, which is all the known wisdom in our world and all the known wisdom in the universe." -- Marti Spiegelman
"We are in that way, stewards of consciousness and stewards of collective wisdom. But if we step out of that essential dialogue with Nature and all things energetic, we step out of the dynamics of a living system and try to think our way into a position of control, then we have a way of disrupting that system to the point that it starts to reset without us." -- Marti Spiegelman
"It's not really collapsing, it's just resetting without us." -- Marti Spiegelman
"Five to seven years, you know, you can have whole systems reform and natural processes [restored]." -- Simon Mustoe
"Everyone is indigenous to someplace. That someplace that we come from put an imprint in us...The land has spoken into every single human being on the planet." -- Marti Spiegelman
"The first question he said to the local people was, what do you need and how can I help? And everything blossomed from there." -- Simon Mustoe
"This Consciousness does not change. It will always work the way it works, but what it produces is contextual." -- Marti Spiegelman
"Animals are the only entities in the known universe that have the agency to change the environment they live in...But nothing we do has individually has any bearing on the outcome whatsoever. This is the ultimate life paradox." -- Simon Mustoe
"Everything we do is in some measure, both right and wrong at the same time." -- Simon Mustoe
"If we are in that state of being connected to the world—connected to life—we can trust that when we take actions, it's going to be in support of life." -- Todd Hoskins
"The core of our being human is the act of perception, which means knowing the world through the senses...That is taking action, that is participating." -- Marti Spiegelman
"[Sperm whales] are the only animal on planet earth that has a planetary home range...We can't exist without that. We have to have every, every animal acting synchronously at all those scales." -- Simon Mustoe
"Our capacity for awe...might be key to everything." -- Marti Spiegelman
"We are so engaged in doing things to achieve purposes of outer value that we forget the inner value. We forget the rapture that is associated with being alive and that rapture is what it's all about." -- Marti Spiegelman (quoting Joseph Campbell)
"The elders tell us that we developed language as humans so we can share our dreams. Not so we can reason ourselves out of opportunity." -- Marti Spiegelman
"That linear part of our brains where most of our awareness is sitting, is not the part of us that experiences awe. It's just the part that follows instructions that have already been created. It's the doing center." -- Marti Spiegelman
"The experience of awe quantum leaps us into a dimension of consciousness that drives participatory behavior. Awe changes us into the people we're looking to be." -- Marti Spiegelman
"We're not on our journey to save the world...but in that you do save the world." -- Marti Spiegelman
"Try tending that plant to its best fruition, not yours. Its best fruition." -- Marti Spiegelman
"The goal of life is to make your heartbeat match the beat of the universe, to match your nature with nature." -- Marti Spiegelman (quoting Joseph Campbell)
"Don't worry about naming things . . . just marvel in it. But maybe just now and again, have a think about what that thing you saw might be doing still, it still exists. It's still out there getting on with its life, and it's doing something good for the world." -- Simon Mustoe
"If you can get yourself to the point where you are dreaming about wildlife, which happens to me all the time...then I think you're there." -- Simon Mustoe
"Humans, we need to remember that we're animals. We really do...We have an impact that we don't pay any attention to." -- Marti Spiegelman
"We have superpowers." -- Simon Mustoe
Links
Talking to plants is beneficial
Credits
Theme music courtesy of Cloud Cult