Crazy Wisdom
Episode #556: From Meow Wolf to Synthetic Landscapes: Designing Conservation Through Deep Time
- Meow Wolf
- creativity
- naturalist
- yoga
- stress and creativity
- synthetic landscapes
- SCI-Arc architecture school
- climate change
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Timestamps
- 00:00Stewart introduces Oliver Polzin from Meow Wolf's founding team and discusses how his yoga teaching there inspired the podcast's exploration of creativity and stress relationships.
- 05:00Oliver describes his architecture graduate program studying climate and conservation through synthetic landscapes, contrasting dark green naturalist ecology with bright green capitalist environmentalism.
- 10:00Discussion of conservation ethics and AI's potential for monitoring environmental systems, with Oliver explaining his journey from painting to experimental mud construction at early Meow Wolf.
- 15:00Stewart shares his robotics learning journey with ESP32s in Buenos Aires while Oliver questions humanoid robot design, suggesting functional form factors matter more than human resemblance.
- 20:00Oliver explores cardboard as material obsession and explains treasure hunt mechanics in Meow Wolf exhibits, creating dopamine-driven discovery experiences through layered storytelling.
- 25:00Stewart describes creating treasure hunts for Spanish learners in Buenos Aires parks while Oliver validates experiential art's growing importance in an increasingly digital culture.
- 30:00Conversation shifts to three-d printing flexible filaments for architectural models and Oliver's megafauna book project about La Brea Tar Pits Pleistocene fossils.
- 35:00Oliver connects Earth consciousness to Pale Blue Dot perspective, arguing humans face developmental threshold understanding planetary responsibility after 300,000 years as anatomically modern species.
- 40:00Deep dive into end-Pleistocene extinction events and megafauna loss, discussing two-ton capybaras and how predator relationships shaped human psychology and anxiety responses.
- 45:00Oliver presents speculative Great Plains biopreserve concept with de-extinct megafauna, contrasting holistic rotational grazing with destructive monoculture agriculture systems.
- 50:00Discussion concludes with Amazonian dark earth technology and indigenous landscape management, emphasizing need for biophilic culture embracing deep time ecological perspective.
Key Insights
- Oliver Polzin is part of the founding team of Meow Wolf and is currently studying at SCI-Arc in Downtown LA in a postgraduate program called Synthetic Landscapes, which examines global scale climate and conservation issues through an architectural lens. Architecture exists between art and science, and he believes architectural thinking offers a valuable framework for designing interventions for climate and conservation challenges. This program represents a significant evolution from his earlier work at Meow Wolf, where he created immersive experiential art installations using materials like adobe and cardboard.
- There is an important distinction in ecological thought between what Paul Kingsnorth calls dark green and light green approaches to environmentalism. The dark green strain represents the older naturalist movement from the early twentieth century, focusing on biological systems, ecosystems, and endangered species. Light green emerged in the 1970s after the Earth Day movement and centers on clean energy, solar panels, and wind power as a way to maintain our current lifestyle. Oliver argues that the bright green approach represents a capitalist overlay that has captured the conservation movement, whereas true conservation requires focusing on actual biological systems rather than just technological solutions.
- The experiential art form that Meow Wolf pioneered still has enormous untapped potential, particularly as society becomes increasingly digital. Oliver believes there will be a huge wave of experiential desire in this decade as people crave human connection and real-world excitement. The treasure hunt and scavenger hunt format represents a compelling form of real-life RPG that creates meaningful human interactions. This type of experience design, which Meow Wolf developed through installations like the House of Eternal Return, plays with human dopamine systems by compelling people to open doors, explore spaces, and follow narrative threads through physical environments.
- The architectural model or dollhouse concept represents a crucial rhetorical tool that Oliver is learning to apply to climate and conservation work. Architects have long created physical models to show stakeholders what a building will be like, and this practice of showing a story in compelling ways for different types of brains is essential for getting traction on projects. While architectural models used to be made from foam core, paper, and balsa wood, they are now largely created through 3D printing, which allows for incredibly complex forms and interlocking structures that would have been impossible to construct manually.
- Oliver is obsessed with megafauna and the end Pleistocene extinction event that occurred roughly twelve thousand years ago. For three hundred thousand years, anatomically modern humans existed alongside massive beasts like short faced bears and American lions, and we were the smaller creatures in the ecosystem. The extinction of over one hundred genera of animals over ninety nine pounds, combined with sea level rise of nearly four hundred feet, fundamentally changed human existence and led to the development of agriculture and civilization. Much of our current psychological development, including anxiety responses, is still based on this time period when we lived among these massive animals.
- The current food system in the Great Plains is fundamentally broken compared to the historical managed food system maintained by Plains tribes, who sustained thirty to sixty million bison through 1800. Oliver explored a speculative project about turning the Great Plains into a massive biopreserve of de-extinct megafauna, contrasting the natural system of rotational grazing where predators keep herds moving with the current monoculture crop agriculture that requires external inputs like fertilizer, pesticides, and herbicides. The natural system builds soil and increases fecundity, while industrial agriculture degrades soil, creates toxic runoff, and produces genetically modified crops that feed animals in toxic concentrated feeding operations.
- The fundamental challenge facing humanity now is creating what Oliver calls a biophilic or ecophilic culture that is loving of other species and our home planet. This requires both psychological shifts and changes in how we design systems at all scales. The Amazon provides a powerful example of this, as recent LiDAR mapping has revealed that what appeared to be pristine wilderness was actually a vast tended garden created by indigenous civilizations who developed technologies like Amazonian dark earth through burning middens with various additives. These cultures understood how to be embedded in a web with other species while playing an important orchestrating role, offering a model for how humans might relate to other forms of life in our current era.
Episode transcript
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Welcome to the Crazy Wisdom Podcast. I've got Oliver Paulsen here, and he is part of the founding team of Meow Wolf and he's also a naturalist. welcome to the show.
Yep. and we did some crazy work at, Meow Wolf. I was teaching people yoga, and, in Meow Wolf. And actually I actually started the show, because of my time at Meow Wolf. And I was like, everybody's so creative here and I want to figure out where, where is it coming from? and I now, I started with the question, what is the relationship between stress and creativity? and, then I did that for four or five years and then I became unbounded. and now I just go wherever the wind takes us. what have you learned about creativity recently? What are you studying, in art right now?
So I'm actually in this postgrad, program at Sci Arc in downtown la. it's called Synthetic Landscapes. And this is sort of a divergence from my career so far, but a very welcome and exciting one. it's essentially, looking at global scale climate and conservation issues through an architectural lens. So Sci Arc is an architecture school and their tagline is School of Architectural Thinking, which I think is a super compelling idea, especially in this age. yeah, architecture exists in this place kind of between art and science. It's definitely neither. it has interesting kind of criticisms of both. but the idea that we can sort of design projects, that we can design, interventions is I think very interesting for climate and conservation stuff.
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