What the forest can teach us about resilience

I’ve spent much of this summer outdoors. And the forest keeps reminding me of lessons essential to business and life: resilience comes from networks, strength from cooperation, longevity from balance. The wild teaches what boardrooms and MBAs rarely can.

In a Noema essay, the forest ecologist and author Suzanne Simard explores how trees offer us a different kind of wisdom: they are part of a living intelligence, bound together through underground networks of fungi that share carbon, nutrients, and even resilience across species.

The forest, in other words, is a society. It thrives because the community adapts, shares, and endures together. Perhaps that realization may feel like a mirror for our own lives. “Ecosystems are similar to human societies — they’re built on relationships,” she writes. “The stronger those are, the more resilient the system.”

Key quote: “And since our world’s systems are composed of individual organisms, they have the capacity to change. We creatures adapt, our genes evolve, we can learn from experience. A system is ever-changing because its parts — the trees and fungi and people — are constantly responding to one another and to the environment. Our success in coevolution — our success as a productive society — is only as good as the strength of the bonds with other individuals and species. Out of the resulting adaptation and evolution emerge behaviors that help us survive, grow and thrive.”

AI’s infinite loop problem

In Big Think’s first-ever print edition, neuroscientist Anil Seth explains why AI systems can get stuck in endless loops — repeating the same action forever — while conscious beings rarely do.

From a jet bridge in Madrid endlessly “trying” to dock with a plane, to the deeper mathematical limits laid out by Alan Turing, Seth shows that no matter how advanced, algorithms always risk spiraling into recursion without end. The reason humans don’t suffer the same fate, Seth argues, is because we’re grounded in time and entropy.

Consciousness is inseparable from the body’s constant fight against disorder — the metabolic drive to stay alive in a world where the clock never stops ticking. Intelligence alone can’t break free from infinite loops; but embodied consciousness, entangled with the arrow of time, can.

Key quote: “Computer scientists have wrestled with this problem for nearly a century. In 1936, Alan Turing proved that no algorithm can always determine whether another algorithm, given some input, will stop or run forever. Here’s an example to capture the intuition. Imagine you’re writing code telling a robot what to do. Some programs are simple — the robot completes the task, and the algorithm ends. But others are complex, with loops and conditions: “Keep moving until you see a red object.” If the robot never sees a red object, or if the logic is flawed, it may follow its instructions endlessly. And no matter how advanced your code, there might be no way to predict whether it will ever stop.”

OUTLAST field notes: Byron Bay — On myth, memory, and long-term thinking

Last week, I was in Byron Bay, on Bundjalung Country, walking on a coastal trail with Delta Kay, an Arakwal Bundjalung custodian and cultural educator renowned for her storytelling and deep-rooted connection to the land.

As we wandered through the rainforest, Delta spoke of Dreaming stories, of the ancestral beings embedded in rock and creek, of how the land holds memory in waves and trees. She described how spirits — whether ancestral or those recently passed — are understood to return through the rhythms of the land and life as part of an ongoing flow.

This perspective isn’t “reincarnation” in the standard sense, but it shares an intuitive logic — that life, death, and renewal are interwoven. Conception is not an isolated event but a continuation of ancestral presence. The land doesn’t start or stop with any one of us; it lives on, and life on Country is continuous.

As Delta shared these stories, I felt these concepts resonated deeply within me. If our aim is to create something intergenerational — be it a business, a community, an investment, or a cultural legacy — we must embrace that the world persists without us. Our task isn’t to conquer or consume, but to situate ourselves within a longer cycle, to act as caretakers rather than owners.

I’m not asking you to believe in this tradition, but to consider it as an instructive worldview.

Long-term thinkers need to cultivate humility and stewardship — to build with the next century, not just the next quarter, in mind. To move away from the myth of limitless extraction, and toward a model of continuity, shaped by our respect for what precedes and will endure beyond us.

A few more links I enjoyed:

Annual Review: On the Shortness of Life – via Alfred Lua

Key quote: “‍Environment drives defaults, especially when my willpower is running low. And my willpower was often low this year. When I had brownies in the fridge, I ate brownies; when I had blueberries, I ate blueberries. When I had social media apps on my phone, I checked them whenever I had spare moments. Without them, I read with the Kindle app or write with my Notes app. I’m still crafting my environment. I placed books around my house so that I grab them, instead of my phone, in my free time. My TV is never left on in the background, and I even put books on my TV console.”

The Inheritance of Dreams – via Patrick Dowd

Key quote: “‍Each generation must wrestle with the dreams they inherit: some are carried forward, consciously or not, and others are released or transformed. That was always hard enough. Today, we must also grapple with the dreams that are increasingly suggested to us by invisible algorithms. AI systems may not dream as we do, but they are trained on the archives of human culture. Just as a parent’s unspoken dream can shape a child’s path, a machine’s projections can influence what we see as possible, desirable, or real. As machines begin to dream alongside us, perhaps even for us, questioning where our dreams come from and remembering how to dream freely has never been more important.”