What if life doesn’t fight decay, but feeds on it?

In this episode, I explore metabolic ontology, a way of seeing being, learning, and ethics as continual re-organization. Entropy, loss, and transformation aren’t problems to fix; they’re the medium through which life keeps composing itself.

Drawing from my work in regenerative education, I look at how this shift from stability to metabolism changes everything: how we understand learning&doing, assessment, and the role of institutions. Regeneration isn’t preservation; it’s participation: the willingness to let forms, including our own, decompose when vitality demands it.

This episode is an invitation to see education, and life itself, as becoming-through-loss: coherence renewing through change, vitality re-organizing through decay.

In this episode of the Coconut Thinking Podcast, I take a hard look at what school really does, and what it would cost to truly change it. We keep saying education needs fixing, but maybe it’s doing exactly what it was built to do: sort, rank, and hold the world in place.

Drawing on Bourdieu, cultural capital, and the myth of meritocracy, I unpack why mastery and competency models only repaint the same house, why knowledge has to be understood as situated rather than transferable, and why real transformation demands letting go of the symbolic capital many of us depend on.

From learning&doing in service of Life to the testimonies of humans and more-than-humans, this episode asks: if learning isn’t serving Life, what are we still schooling for?

What if the way we eat could root us back into place, instead of tearing it apart?

In this episode, I speak with Elspeth Hay. Elspeth is a writer, public radio host, and food systems advocate whose work explores what it means to live thoughtfully in place. Raised in Maine by birdwatcher parents, she grew up seeing how species adapt seamlessly to their ecosystems, while human communities eroded them, often just to feed ourselves.

For more than 15 years, Elspeth has interviewed farmers, harvesters, cooks, policymakers, and visionaries, asking how we might eat and live without extraction. Her work reveals a paradox: humans are highly adaptable to ecosystems everywhere, yet we’ve forgotten how to belong to them. Based in Wellfleet, Massachusetts, she co-founded the Wellfleet Farmers Market and Commons Keepers, and works on community food initiatives like the Wicked Oyster restaurant.

We discuss:

🥥 How food connects us to place and to all the living beings we share it with.

🥥 The flow state that comes from engaging with what grows around us.

🥥 How disconnection from story shows up materially, and why storytellers must tell stories of what we are for to nurture imagination and possibility.

Check us out: www.coconut-thinking.com

Check out Elspeth's website: https://elspethhay.com/