The global population has surpassed 8 billion. Today, we continue to rely on fossil fuels while fighting one another just to sustain everyone. The 21st century is an era of confronting global-scale challenges.
The issue of our collective survival—the key to sustaining Earth’s civilization—lies right beneath our feet. It is about restoring soil health, expanding biodiversity, and strengthening ecosystems.
Yet, we cannot learn how to do this through compulsory education or university curricula. This is not found at the far end of hyper-specialization, but rather in a philosophy of nature-based management reached through becoming a true “polymath.”
We’d love to hear your thoughts. Feel free to share your comments!
Profile
Yati Obara
Editor-in-Chief, Scientific Montessori
Based in Japan, born in 1989. CEO of Motherhand and Co-Director of the nonprofit think tank Polymath Research. Holds an M.Eng. and is an AMI-certified teacher. Focused on Montessori developmental theory and AI. Mother of two.
Hiro Obara
Publisher, Scientific Montessori
Based in Japan, born in 1990. Works as a software developer and a weekend farmer. Father of two.
We are kept alive by invisible relationships.
Yati
Today’s topic is “nature education.” We’ve talked before about the importance of touching real nature, but Montessori education doesn’t stop there. That’s what sets it apart from other approaches. I wanted to summarize that here.
Hiro
Don’t start a fight with Steiner education, or Waldorf education as it’s known in some countries, right off the bat. [laughs]
Yati
[laughs] In Montessori education, we discuss macro perspectives with children: the cosmic view, the planetary view, and across time, what happened long ago and how things evolved. I’d like you to organize that for us. You’ve been talking recently about “global collapse,” but it’s an unfamiliar term, so please explain.
Hiro
There’s a book that recently came out called Extended Ecosystems. It’s by someone named Funabashi, whom I’ve been following on my own. He’s a researcher at Sony’s lab. Early in the book, he points out that everyone says, “Save the Earth,” but the Earth isn’t the one that needs saving. The real question is whether humanity can be saved. It’s civilization that needs rescuing. In other words, in the discussion of environmental protection, subject and object are reversed.
Yati
So it’s not us saving the Earth, but whether the Earth can save us. The Earth itself won’t break?
Hiro
Right. Looking at Earth’s history, it’s been turbulent. There were periods so hot that rocks melted, and periods when everything froze into a snowball, completely iced over. Through all that, we arrived at the present. Even if you set off tons of nuclear bombs and weapons, the Earth won’t break. It just becomes a planet where life can’t survive. So “war” is humanity’s collective apoptosis. We’re just destroying the civilization we built ourselves. And that includes ecosystems.
Yati
I see.
Hiro
So humanity’s ultimate question is: Can we save ourselves? Can we sustain civilization? That’s point one. And ecosystems are what matter most. But most people don’t really understand what “ecosystem” means.
Yati
True. What is an ecosystem?
Hiro
Wherever there’s life, an ecosystem always emerges. You don’t create it intentionally. It forms on its own. And without an ecosystem, life cannot survive.
Yati
Can you give a concrete example?
Hiro
Say a honeybee stings and kills some king. The king’s people declare it a terrible crime and decide to kill all the honeybees. Then they themselves die afterward.
Yati
Because without honeybees, there’s no pollination. Nothing bears fruit, and food disappears.
Hiro
So if you remove something quietly supporting an established ecosystem, you eliminate the ecosystem, and all living things are affected and can’t survive. Everyone thinks, “I earn money through my own effort,” but at the very root of economic activity is the ecosystem. For example, we talk about primary and secondary industries, but there’s actually a zeroth industry that no one talks about, and that’s the ecosystem.
Yati
“Zeroth industry” isn’t a common term.
Hiro
I made it up. Polymath Research terminology.
Yati
So recently, the zeroth industry, the ecosystem, is breaking down, and that’s affecting primary industries.
Hiro
Right. Salmon aren’t returning upstream. Seafood can’t be caught near Japan’s coasts. Kelp can’t be harvested. It’s all starting. Even shiitake mushrooms. In Japan they’re grown outdoors on cut logs from trees like sawtooth oak, and now those logs are becoming unavailable. Rice yields are down too. When ecosystems are destroyed, it massively impacts our economic activity, and only then do people finally notice.
Yati
That ecosystems are important.
Hiro
And we’ve been ignoring them until now. Treating them as if they didn’t exist. We farm however we like to maximize profit. For example, the amount of rice a given paddy can produce is determined by ecosystem function. There’s an ecological limit. To exceed it and harvest more, people add chemically synthesized fertilizers: nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium. Pushing things that hard leads to disease and increased insect decomposition. Then they apply chemicals. They’re called “pesticides,” but essentially, you’re spreading poison. Insecticides. When you say “pesticide,” it sounds like you’re applying something good for plants. But “insecticide.” Doesn’t that sound off-putting?
Yati
It is. Food sprayed with insecticide.
Hiro
But without insecticides, you can’t get enough rice anymore. That’s how degraded the ecosystem has become.
Yati
A dire situation.
Hiro
There are several pesticides, or really insecticides, and neonicotinoids and pyrethroids are especially toxic. Because they work so well on insects, they’re used on rice, fruit trees, and all kinds of crops. The harm isn’t being publicized at all. Especially in Japan, people don’t know. The herbicide glyphosate is also terrible.
Yati
Studies in Science and Nature have shown that neonicotinoid pesticides have fatal effects on honeybees, and some researchers point to them as a cause of developmental disorders in humans. In response, Europe has banned them, but Japan has actually loosened regulations. Usage keeps increasing year after year. Why is this happening? Why isn’t it known?
Hiro
Because advertisers shape what gets covered. It’s never covered on TV. The sponsors are the big companies that make and sell these products. They run commercials, so the media never reports it. Plus there’s school education. It’s truly terrible, teaching lies. They say fertilizer is necessary. “Plants need sunlight, water, and fertilizer.” That’s false. This knowledge comes from organizations like Japan’s national farm cooperative, which also sells the agrochemicals it researches. Their research assumes pesticides and fertilizers are normal. That’s how wrong information spreads. It’s not scientific. The correct statement is: “Sunlight, clean water, healthy soil with diverse microorganisms, and organic exchange with insects, birds, and other living things.” If you’re fine with abnormal plants, maybe the textbook definition is okay. But healthy natural plants don’t need added fertilizer. Microorganisms bring what’s needed. There’s a network for that.
Yati
After being so thoroughly educated, believing that scientists and research institutions wouldn’t do bad things or tell lies, it’s full of realities that are hard to believe.
Hiro
We really live not knowing so many things. And the greatest ignorance? A poor understanding of ecosystems.
Yati
Even adults and experts don’t understand. Ecosystems aren’t even included in compulsory education. Why not?
Hiro
Because it requires speaking comprehensively. It involves plants and animals, climate, atmosphere, element distribution, water cycles, rock cycles, all kinds of planetary science. In other words, it’s polymath in nature. Montessori’s six to twelve elementary curriculum does cover it properly, but conventional education can’t handle it.
Yati
You mean ecosystems can’t be studied by extracting a single part?
Hiro
You can’t extract parts. If it were a matter of “matter,” you could just look at matter. But it’s not about “matter.” It’s about “relationships.” The essence is in the relationships. Synergy.
Yati
Because it’s about relationships, ecosystems are invisible. “What is essential is invisible to the eye.”
Hiro
Yes. It demands imagination. And right now, ecosystems are deteriorating more and more. When ecosystems deteriorate, ecosystem services decline. To put it simply: when a town becomes depopulated and shrinks to a village, services get worse, right? Administrative services. This is the nature version.
Yati
Schools close, infrastructure can’t be maintained. And many organisms are facing that kind of problem.
Hiro
So many living things. Insects, fish, birds. These are creatures humans often dislike. We’re alive because of them. Mole crickets, water striders. Even the creatures nobody sings about. Everyone is needed, everyone matters.
Yati
So we really have been supported by the zeroth industry. Like a pyramid.
Hiro
No, it’s not a pyramid. Thinking of it as a pyramid prevents you from understanding the essence. Everything is interconnected.
Yati
Not a pyramid. A network.
Hiro
The essence is in the relationships, not the matter. It’s not that a place becomes rich because some great person is there. It becomes rich because there are many diverse connections.
Yati
I see. If you understand this through nature from an early age, you realize everything works that way. If you understand humans as a network too, everything is connected, so instead of blaming someone, you need to look at the whole.
Hiro
Right. When people say “nature education,” they tend to extract elements, like “Let’s study birds,” and specialize. But if you treat nature as nature itself without extracting, the basic unit is the ecosystem. The network.
Yati
So you need to be a polymath, not a specialist.
Hiro
Viewed as an ecosystem, you can’t separate things, so you can’t specialize. You can’t treat insects, birds, primates, and plants as separate categories. But what’s strange now is that specialists in “agricultural science” are handling agriculture, which is ecosystem management technology. That’s why things go wrong.
Yati
It really is strange that people at pharmaceutical companies and food safety committees, who don’t understand ecosystems, are making all the decisions about pesticides and fertilizers.
Hiro
Right. If I had to pick the most polymath field among today’s specialized disciplines, I’d personally say computer science.
Yati
That’s surprising. Why?
Hiro
Take complex systems, for example. It’s a research field about complex networks. Thinking about combinations in complex networks basically leads to combinatorial explosion. Even computers hit combinatorial explosion, so humans certainly can’t do better. But thanks to computers, we can handle more phenomena. Through massive records and precise repeated calculations, we can understand multiple individual events as a network. The internet is a network. Without computers, you can’t handle the vast combinations of event networks. And computers are applied to everything, agriculture, nature everywhere. That’s polymath.
Yati
I see. Computer science is mathematical, but it’s applied to so many things. You can’t draw boundaries like “math” or “agricultural science.”
Hiro
So I’m not trying to justify what we do, but since we’ve been working with computers for so long, we generally understand. We can see when people say, “What’s true in other fields doesn’t apply here.” Algorithms that can’t be applied elsewhere, programs without reproducibility, those are just bugs.
Yati
Right. It’s really strange to say something doesn’t apply to other fields.
Hiro
The chemical story being pushed in agriculture, “You can’t grow rice without this medicine,” is wrong. Because in other fields, that thinking doesn’t hold. Debug it properly. Pun intended.
Yati
Stink bugs are swarming, so they spray insecticide on the rice. Then the stink bugs develop resistance, so they need even stronger insecticides, and in that cycle, all life is affected, organisms keep dying, and ecosystems are on the verge of collapse. This direction is clearly wrong. Conversely, if you push in the direction of enriching ecosystems to the extreme, will problems arise?
Hiro
It just gets incredibly rich. [laughs] From Earth’s beginning, there were long periods with no plants or animals. Just single-celled organisms near deep-sea volcanic vents. Now life is everywhere. How rich is that? Without that richness, humans wouldn’t have been born. That’s thanks to ecosystems becoming richer. So what we need to do is, as members of the ecosystem, enrich it further. Through that, let new life forms naturally emerge. Create an environment for birth. Give rise to beings far wiser, kinder, and more loving than us. Not AI. Organic life.
Yati
Is that what “extended ecosystems” means?
Hiro
Yes. It’s the idea: “How can human intelligence enrich ecosystems?” Humanity has never thought this way before. You treat complex things as complex, and they become more complex, but through self-organization, entropy actually decreases locally. Pretty lofty. [laughs]
Yati
It’s getting complicated, so those who are interested should read Funabashi’s book, though it runs to 696 pages. For parents raising children, what should they do to promote correct understanding of ecosystems?
Hiro
Opportunities to touch real nature are essential. Not abstract nature. Not quasi-experiencing nature through picture books or fantasy. Real nature. Don’t leave the soil. Traditions all over the world say that if you leave the soil, you’ll grow into an abnormal human being.
Yati
People demand rice and vegetables that look flawless like industrial products, and they end up being the ones who force insecticide spraying. Japan grades rice by appearance, and when stink bugs suck the juice, about two grains in a thousand get discolored. That alone drops the grade and cuts the farmer’s price, so let’s spray insecticide. That’s an abnormal way of thinking. If you actually touch soil and grow vegetables, your perspective changes.
Hiro
“Live with the soil, don’t leave the soil.” That’s one policy. It’s a problem that people who never received proper nature education complain, hold power, and shape society to their standards. The stink bug problem, and the bears now coming down into Japanese towns. If we leave it to those people, we’ll keep going in the wrong direction. Both are problems caused by planting conifers against nature’s way. After the war, Japan replaced natural broadleaf forests with cedar and cypress plantations, and the animals lost their food. We need to solve that, or we’ll struggle forever.
Yati
At Polymath School of Morioka, we’re starting to keep Japanese honeybees, the native species. By working with the real thing and introducing the research I mentioned, we’re deepening our understanding of ecosystems with the children, along with the taste of real honey, including the problem of bees being affected by pesticides.
Hiro
It’s uncertain whether Einstein really said it, but there’s the famous quote, “If honeybees disappeared from the face of the Earth, humanity would have only four years left.” It’s starting to come true. I want many children to know this. A rich harvest depends on the work of insects.
