The brilliant Lynn Margulis was a guest lecturer at our University. In her late 50s, she presented on her new (r)evolutionary theory of symbiogenesis that basically re-writes biology. It turned the evolutionary “tree” into a messy network that folds back into itself. It re-defines “organism” into consortia of multiple species. It re-focused evolution from the DNA to the living cell. It questions whether the notion of “I” has any rational basis, humans should rather recognize themselves as “we”. Lynn also gave Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis its microbial foundation. Thank you for fundamentally screwing my believes, Lynn!

In high school in the early Ninetees, I read the book “Factor 4 – doubling welfare with half the resource use”. To the ringing of the first climate panic, its authors Ernst Ulrich von Weizsäcker, Armory and Hunter Lovins proclaimed the hopeful message that our behavioral choices can change, and in combination with modern technologies we can curb our ecological footprint and live eye-to-eye with nature. Unfortunately, the “technology” aspects of this book quickly dominated the discourse – whereas behavioral adjustments were overlooked.

Joachim Schellnhuber, and especially his late post doc Gerhard Petschel, supervised my master thesis at the  Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Studies (PIK). Gerhard’s way of looking at complexity, and recognizing patterns in chaos, led to the development of “Syndromes of global change”. He also inspired the use of multiple scenarios to assess potential futures – as lead contributor to the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment scenario group. In their presence, I started to believe that climate change may just as much be a result of ecosystem degradation by human land-use as by our Greenhouse gas emissions. Something that the IPCC still struggles with.

Holistic grazing pioneer Allan Savory learned by mistake – and learned from his mistakes. His insight that dryland ecosystems are stabilized by the interaction of plants and animals, more precisely by the behavior of ruminants that are hiding in herds to escape predation. By reading landscapes and adapting the management of livestock herds to these observations, Allan Savory and numerous students have demonstrated how ranchers can reverse desertification and bring drylands back to life. This way, planned grazing can simultaneously boost profits, provide wildlife habitat, and draw carbon into the soil. His theory is contested by academia because its the management paradigm, not any individual practice, that brings the outcome – and runs counter the standard scientific method of varying one factor at a time. Founder of the Savory Institute.

My first Aikido teacher Wolfgang Sambrowski also left a lasting impression on me. The simplicity of Wolfgang’s life as an Aikido teacher is mesmerizing – yet, his lifestyle created a person that stands out among many. He is a strong opponent to “discipline” as he believes that most evil in this world originated from disciplined workers. Yet, he chose a fairly rigid structure for his own life – and aligned his longings with this structure. Thank you for embodying the idea of “learning with an empty mind”.

These giants were a great encouragement to take my own path and forget about dominant conventions. And a reminder to keep the ship steady in moments of doubt.