In July 1967, during the Summer of Love, Gregory Bateson spoke at the Dialectics of Liberation Congress at the Roundhouse in London. The title of his talk was “Conscious Purpose Versus Nature.“1 In it, he made several important moves. First, he ontologized cybernetics, so to speak. Cybernetics is more or less defined by its interest in feedback loops, and Bateson went one step further by insisting that nature—the world itself—is a swarming tangle of feedback loops, collectively holding each other in check. Back in the 1950s, Stafford Beer had defined cybernetics as the science of exceedingly complex systems—meaning ungraspable assemblages that science somehow bounces off—and Bateson’s swarming loops brought Beer’s vision of complexity to life.2
Bateson’s second key move was to point to the impossibility of what he called “lineal control” of this feedback world. He noted that we can indeed act on such a world by changing some of its parameters or adding or subtracting elements. But instead of a calculable cause-and-effect relationship, the upshot would depend unpredictably on variables growing or shrinking in the interplay of loops until a new equilibrium might emerge. Bateson thus pictured an uncontrollable world as the other side of his cybernetic ontology.
There is, however, a complication that arises here, namely that we actually do seem to have some degree of lineal control over the world. Antibiotics, for example, are remarkably effective in treating microbial infections. Bateson conceded this at the Dialectics Congress, describing modern medicine sarcastically as a “bag of tricks—some of them very valuable tricks.”3 His message was that we know how to do some specific tricks, but that we fail to understand the overall complex systems they act on.
In 1970 Bateson went further, arguing, in effect, that these tricks are themselves dangerous.4 Today we might think of antibiotic resistance as an instance of this, but Bateson’s example was the one on everyone’s mind in those days: the use of DDT as a pesticide. DDT does kill insects, and using DDT is a good trick in that sense. However, as Rachel Carson showed in her 1962 best-seller, Silent Spring, DDT also does something else at the same time. It kills songbirds.5 And generalizing from this, we could add several more elements to the cybernetic analysis.
Even when successful, our attempts at lineal control of nature are imperfect and imprecise. This is what we have to expect in dealing with exceedingly complex systems. And this imperfection often takes the form of what I call a “performative excess,” in which unintended side effects, like killing songbirds, come along with successful tricks like killing insects. The tricks echo unpredictably through complex ecosystems and resurface in unexpected ways in unexpected places.6
We can see this excess as an example of the dark side of lineal control. Silent spring as the dark side of pesticide use; global warming as the dark side of fossil fuels; the Anthropocene as the dark side of all of the tricks we’ve invented to control nature. The environmental horrors of the Anthropocene—global warming, species extinctions, wildfires, floods—are not just bad luck playing itself out in history. These horrors are the necessary complement of our mastery of nature. And as our mastery grows, so do the horrors. Wolfgang Schivelbusch pointed to the increasing “falling height,” as he called it, of modern technology.7 The greater the powers we possess, the greater the wreckage when they fail.8
Thus Bateson’s cybernetic analysis of the environmental crisis. But so what? What follows from it? How should we respond? Bateson’s own response was that we need to think differently. We have to get past dualist thinking and recognize that we are part of nature and entangled with it, not its masters. But I find this insufficient. What if we do think differently? What should we do? How might we act out this different pattern of thought in our relations with nature and the environment?
I have become fascinated with ways of engaging with the environment that do not act out fantasies of lineal control, but instead foreground a recognition that nature is one of Beer’s exceedingly complex systems. I am interested in ways of acting with nature rather than acting on it—ways which, following Martin Heidegger, I call poiesis, rather than what he called enframing.9 Enframing is our usual way of going on, a dominating stance—treating nature as a “standing reserve” for human projects—that we all recognize and which has brought us the environmental crisis. Poiesis is the strange and unfamiliar other way that seems to offer a new way forward for navigating the Anthropocene.10
One prime example of poeisis concerns attempts at restoring the ecosystem of the Colorado River. The story begins in 1963 with the completion of the Glen Canyon Dam on the Colorado, upstream of the Grand Canyon. We can think of the dam as one of Bateson’s tricks of control. It successfully held back large quantities of water in what became Lake Powell and generated reliable quantities of electricity as intended. As we should expect, it also did more than that. The dark side of control in this instance was that the downstream ecosystem began to degrade: the dam drastically reduced the amount of sediment carried by the river, with the result that sandbanks eroded, native plants and fish were endangered, and alien species started to move in.
However, an emergency release of large quantities of water from Lake Powell in 1983 accidentally turned out to address these problems by rebuilding sandbanks and recreating habitats—though only temporarily. And this observation led in turn to what became known as the Glen Canyon Adaptive Management Program—the AMP for short—to see what could be achieved in the longer term to restore the Colorado ecosystem. The AMP entailed periodically staging artificial floods by opening the floodgates in the Glen Canyon Dam, monitoring their effects downstream, and recalibrating succeeding floods in light of the observed ecosystem transformations. Again, this achieved beneficial effects though still only temporary ones: sandbanks that were rebuilt by each flood later eroded, and so on.
The next step in the AMP centered on two other rivers that join the Colorado below the dam—the Paria and the Little Colorado River. These were sources of additional sediment, and the new idea was to synchronize artificial floods from Lake Powell with periods when the Paria and Little Colorado were carrying more sediment than usual due to heavy rainfall, sediment which could in turn contribute further to restoring sandbanks on the Colorado. This move was incorporated in the operating protocol for the dam and it worked. Though adverse effects continued to reappear between floods, the new protocol succeeded in “rebuilding [and maintaining] beaches, sandbars and other environmental resources.”11 A way had been found, then, of restoring, to a degree at least, the Colorado ecosystem. It is worth noting that synchronized flooding was not a once-and-for-all final solution to the problem of environmental degradation, but rather a technique to be reapplied through time.
The AMP is an example of acting with nature, poiesis. I call it acting with because it is a pattern of action centred on finding out what nature wants to do—by staging experimental floods in this case—and then tuning ourselves into that—by modulating flood profiles and timing and by gearing together waterflows on several rivers. The contrast here is with acting on nature or enframing—imposing our will on the world, come what may, as in imposing a dam on the Colorado River to turn it into a source of electricity. Enframing is our usual way of going on; poiesis is a different pattern of action that generally goes unrecognized.
Restoring the Colorado ecosystem is a so-called wicked problem, in the sense that it is not the sort of thing that scientists and engineers can calculate their way through (in contrast, say, to building a dam; dams are pretty easy to calculate). Correspondingly, the AMP was not a trick of lineal control in Bateson’s terms. It was a different pattern of acting in the world. Bateson himself always emphasized thinking differently, but in the AMP the engineers found a way of acting differently, which is both much harder and much more important.
It is worth emphasizing that the AMP has been successful in restoring the Colorado ecosystem. In general, poiesis offers a principled approach to wicked problems that science can’t handle—a new way forward—and wicked problems are everywhere, not just the Anthropocene.
If the Adaptive Management Program can be described in terms of Bateson’s environmental cybernetics, it also reveals how poiesis in general is in itself cybernetic. At the heart of the AMP is what I call a “dance of agency,” a back and forth of actions and performances coupling together the dam operators and the behavior of two or three rivers.12 The engineers do something—releasing massive quantities of water—to find out what the ecosystem will do in response—to which the engineers tune their subsequent actions, and so on, back and forth throughout the history of the AMP (which is still going on today). And this dance of agency is nothing more than a feedback loop—or a feedback spiral—which is definitional of cybernetics.
This sort of performative back-and-forth—a spiral of actions rather than words—runs through the history of cybernetics, especially in Britain, from Grey Walter’s tortoises and Ross Ashby’s homeostats in 1948 to Paskian cybernetic art, variants of Beer’s Viable System Model of organizations, and Syntegration today. The dam operators in the AMP act, for example, just like Ashby’s homeostats, emitting signals—experimental floods—and reconfiguring themselves in response to whatever comes back.13
This performative and poetic skeleton of actions called forth by actions tends to get forgotten in current cybernetics. That it is hard to focus on is a reflection of the humanism of today’s cybernetics, its focus on people and relations between people. The Anthropocene instead calls for a posthumanist and decentered analysis of relations between people and things.
It has been argued that once upon a time humanity lived in tune with nature, as just another responsive element of the overall complex system. But around 10,000 years ago—with the development of farming and fixed settlements—we started to go off the rails. Our lineal tricks of control have broken our reciprocal connections with nature, thus precipitating the dark side of the Anthropocene.14 From this perspective, poetic techniques of acting with nature like the AMP help put us back on the rails. Exploring how ecosystems react to experimental floods is a way of finding out what nature wants to do—in contrast to imposing our will on it. And the upshot of the AMP, synchronizing artificial floods on the Colorado with the behavior of the Paria River in what I call a “choreography of agency” is precisely a way of plugging ourselves back into the rhythms of nature. The image of derailment and getting back on the rails is a good way to think more generally about what needs to be done in the Anthropocene.
The AMP is just one example of poiesis, but there are many more. All of them hinge on recognizing the agency of nature and acting with it.
The Mississippi
Throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first century, the US Army Corps of Engineers has tried to dominate the Mississippi River by pinning it down with levees and control structures. This is one of the world’s great projects of enframing. As usual, it has had several unintended dark sides, including the fact that trying to contain the Mississippi seems actually to have intensified flooding. But from a different angle, the Mississippi story also includes examples of poiesis. Before the artificial construction of levees, Native Americans inhabited the floodplain nomadically, moving back and forth poetically in response to flooding—acting with the river, tuning themselves into its rhythms. In the present day, diversions—artificial breaks in the levees—allow river sediment to spill out and recreate land that has been lost to the sea. This amounts to a poetic letting go, allowing the agency of nature to repair prior damage.
Water Engineering in the Netherlands
As in the case of the Mississippi, water control measures in the Netherlands have proved self-defeating, as flooding has become more intense over time, and this has precipitated an overall paradigm shift from enframing towards poiesis, a shift that includes a move back towards the premodern nomadism of Native Americans around the Mississippi. In the “Room for the River” project, dykes have been partially removed or moved back from the Rhine River, so that the land itself absorbs minor floods, while farmers oscillate poetically between the floodplains and artificially raised platforms for farmhouses. The rewilding project at the Oostvaardersplassen, a polder rescued from the sea, is also, if only imperfectly, another instance of letting go—a poetic surrender to nonhuman agency to find out what it will do—the polar opposite of domination.
Natural Farming
“Natural farming” is the name of a do-nothing alternative to conventional farming that rejects weeding, ploughing, flooding, and the use of chemicals—all the usual agricultural techniques. It was developed in Japan after World War II by Masanobu Fukuoka in a poetic process isomorphous with the AMP on the Colorado, staging a deliberate dance of agency, trying out different strategies for redistributing the straw left after threshing, taking advantage of duck droppings to encourage the decomposition of the mulch, experimenting with various techniques to discourage sparrows and rodents, and so on. After several years of this back-and-forth, this dance settled down into a regular pattern or technique, in which scattering straw from the previous crop and sowing overlapping summer and winter crops and clover are timed and synchronized with changes in the weather to inhibit weeds and diseases—another choreography of agency like that of the dam operators on the Colorado.
Fire
Ironically, the intensity of recent wildfires around the world is partly a spin-off of attempts at control. The usual tactic of extinguishing small fires as soon as they break out turns out to lead to the accumulation of combustible material and disasters waiting to happen—another dark side of enframing. In this context it is interesting to look at traditional Aboriginal fire-techniques in Australia. There, frequent small burns once served to obviate devastatingly large fires, but went much further. Tuning their practices into the agency of nature—the wind and weather, specifics of landscape, wildlife and vegetation—Aborigines used fire in very productive ways to modulate the distribution of grass and trees, to encourage the flourishing of desirable animals and birds, to control insects, and so on. Again, this poetic choreography of agency, analogous to the AMP, restructured and maintained the entire landscape of Australia prior to European settlement.
Spirits
To widen our sense of agency, we could think about Amazonian shamanism. Using various technologies of the self, including psychedelic drugs, shamans put themselves in a position to communicate with spirits, called xapiri by the Yanomami. Both the shaman and the xapiri exhibit forms of agency unrecognizable by science, and there is an important symmetry here of human and nonhuman agency. Unlike our modern asymmetry of the domination and control of nature, shamans are at the mercy of the spirits who can choose to help or harm, even kill, them. Shamanism, and animism in general, is thus once again poetic in tuning into the unpredictable and emergent agency of nature. Following on from this, it is interesting to reflect that animism is an excellent standpoint to appreciate at once both the power and the dark side of enframing. Nuclear power stations as temperamental gods… Gaia…
Poiesis, Science and Nonmodern Philosophy
If the difference between poeisis and enframing is primarily about doing things—what we do in the world, what the world does, and how these doings relate to and structure one another—what about knowledge, namely scientific knowledge? Historically, science has been entangled with projects of control, dominating nature and enframing it: Galileo, for example, worked at the Venetian Arsenal studying the flight of cannonballs. Science is now central to our mastery of the world, but at the same time it is itself necessarily bound up with the dark side of mastery, certainly including the environmental crisis. It is therefore relevant to note that science is more or less absent from most of the above examples of poiesis—rewilding, natural farming, Aboriginal fire techniques, animism. Those all foreground actions; none of them depend on science. Poiesis, in this sense, is doing without science. This is a measure of just how strange and unfamiliar the poetic paradigm is.
An exception to this is the adaptive management of the Colorado, which does have a noticeable scientific component, including both scientific monitoring and modeling of the phenomena involved. What to say about that? Monitoring seems straightforward. You cannot see at a glance how the Colorado ecosystem is changing, so measurements and statistics help keep track of this. Modeling is more interesting. When I was a physicist, I thought of modeling as a way to pursue the hidden truths of nature, but the AMP scientists do not think of it like that. They are clear that there is more going on in the world than they can possibly recognize and calculate. As Kai Lee, one of the pioneers of adaptive management put it, “Surprise is unexceptional… Predictions often go wrong, expectations unfulfilled, and warnings hollow.”15
Models, from this perspective, should thus be seen not as approximations to hidden truths but as revisable guides to seeing in the dark, as better than nothing in trying to grasp exceedingly complex systems. Beer had the right idea here. His vision of the Viable System Model included all sorts of models and simulations of organizations and their environments, but he spoke of plans and models as “continuously aborting”—meaning that we should keep track of their performance and modify or get rid of them when they go wrong.16 This, I think, is how to put science in its place, as ancillary, at most, to poiesis.
Finally, we can move to the opposite pole from science and note how some nonmodern and non-Western concepts can help think about a neo-cybernetic approach to the environment. In his 1995 book The Propensity of Things, François Jullien discusses the Chinese concept of shi—which refers to the tendency or propensity of things to act one way rather than another.17 Right action is understood as acting in accordance with the shi of whatever situation one faces. A standard example is the general who exploits the shi of geography and equipment so well that the enemy is powerless and there is no need to fight. What remains puzzling in Jullien’s account is how we can know the shi of a given situation. But the AMP suggests an answer. Experimental floods on the Colorado serve to map out the shi of the river’s ecosystem—its propensities to act this way or that in different conditions—and the dam operators modify their practice accordingly. Right action.
Another Chinese concept that comes up here is wu wei. Wu wei is usually translated as “not doing,” and this neatly describes poetic practices like the removal of levees on the Mississippi and the Rhine, as well as Fukuoka’s “do-nothing” approach to farming. But rather than simply a lack of action, wu wei can also mean abstaining from attempts at what Bateson called lineal control, in favor of the Daoist idea of going with the flow. Again, wu wei is a fitting analysis of the choreographies of agency mentioned. The AMP on the Colorado, natural farming, Aboriginal fire techniques, Amazonian shamanism all, in this sense, explore the flow of becoming and tune our practices into it—getting ourselves back on the rails. Think of wu wei and you get the hang of poiesis, and vice versa.
It is striking that traditional Chinese thought offers us simple and direct concepts like shi and wu wei for getting the hang of poiesis, while modern science and engineering can hardly recognize it or give it a name. This only emphasizes the strangeness of acting with nature, and its incommensurability with how we usually think and act.
Gregory Bateson, “Conscious Purpose Versus Nature,” in Steps to an Ecology of Mind (University of Chicago Press, 1972).
Stafford Beer, Cybernetics and Management (London: English Universities Press, 1959).
Bateson, “Conscious Purpose Versus Nature,” 439.
Gregory Bateson, “The Roots of Ecological Crisis,” in Steps to an Ecology of Mind (University of Chicago Press, 1972).
Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1962).
Andrew Pickering, “In Our Place: Performance, Dualism, and Islands of Stability,” Common Knowledge 23, no. 3 (2017): 381–95.
Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century (Oakland: University of California Press, 1986).
For a recent exemplification of this point, see the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore harbor when it was struck by the enormous container ship, Dali on March 26, 2024: “Baltimore Francis Scott Key Bridge collapse: What we know about ship and bridge,” BBC News, March 27, 2024, ➝.
Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings, ed. David Krell (London: Routledge, 1977).
These examples are all discussed at greater length in Andrew Pickering, Acting with the World: Agency in the Anthropocene (Duke University Press, 2025).
“Glen Canyon Dam High Flow Experimental Release,” United States Bureau of Reclamation,” 2019, ➝.
Andrew Pickering, The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency, and Science (University of Chicago Press, 1995).
Andrew Pickering The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of Another Future (University of Chicago Press, 2010).
Personal communication from Peter Robinson, March 1, 2024.
Kai Lee, Compass and Gyroscope: Integrating Science and Politics for the Environment (Washington, DC: Island Press, 1991), 58.
Stafford Beer, “The Aborting Corporate Plan: A Cybernetic Account of the Interface between Planning and Action,” in Perspectives of Planning: Proceedings of the OECD Working Symposium on Long-Range Forecasting and Planning, Bellagio, Italy, ed. Erich Jantsch (OECD Publications, 1969).
François Jullien, The Propensity of Things: Toward a History of Efficacy in China (New York: Zone Books, 1999).