Moral Vertigo: When Distant Events Reshape Everyday Life

A friend cancels a trip. Petrol prices climb. A flight route disappears. None of it looks broken, but something doesn’t quite behave normally anymore.

It's April 2026, as the world watches a war reshape ordinary life from thousands of kilometres away.

This episode sits inside that feeling. The strange disorientation of being physically safe, untouched by violence, and already inside its ripple.

Using a biomimicry lens, Pia explores how systems respond to disturbance - not just where the disruption happens, but far beyond it. From the “landscape of fear” in ecology to the way human systems subtly reconfigure under pressure, this is an attempt to understand what we’re actually sensing. Not to solve it. Not to make it feel better. Just to see it more clearly.

Because when systems shift, the effects don’t stay local. And noticing that isn’t nothing.

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Created and hosted by Pia Williams
Clever by Nature. Feral by Design.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:05

What the hell does urea have to do with war? Who knew? It's like I'm learning a new language through osmosis, the straits, kamikaze drones, interceptor missiles, fuel reserves, iron domes. I think there's golden domes as well now. Urea and ammonia and fertilizer, and so it goes. This war, honestly, it has me on like a crash geolingo course on military infrastructure, factional geopolitical terms. I feel one part ignorant and one part overwhelmed. And though I don't live there per se, I'm not outside of it either. I've been noticing that in smaller, slightly unsettling ways. A friend of mine was mid-flight, five hours in trying to get back to Australia from Europe, and had to turn around. The airspace closed on them in real time. Ten hours later, and she's right back on the tarmac where she started. More and more friends are saying they're staying at home this Easter, no road trip this year. Petrol's too high, and you can't guarantee even finding it at every station along the way. And these cancelled plans stuck with me because Easter travel, that's not just a trip, right? That's towns, cafes, obviously petrol stations, small businesses, all counting on that movement. And even just staying local. I noticed the numbers on the petrol station walls climbing higher and higher as I do my morning walks. They just keep going up. But compared to others who have families and big cars, I've got a relatively small footprint. It's not really hitting me yet. I heard the other day that things like our rubbish collection might start being disrupted. And that one will hit a lot of us. That's close enough to smell. And that's when I catch myself because other people right now don't have a home anymore. Just piles of rubble where it used to be. You know, this morning off the back of this, I went on my morning walk and I just turned around and looked at my house and tried to visualize it as a pile of rubble. And that is still sitting with me right now. I don't know what to do with the fact that both of these things are true at the same time. Our rubbish, their pain and rubble. It's the same system, same moment. And that's what this episode is about. I'm Pia, and this is Feral by Design. And this isn't one of those episodes where nature hands us a neat solution. Sometimes it just hands us a way of seeing, and this is one of those. There's a particular kind of disorientation that doesn't have a clean name. It's not grief, it's not fear exactly, and it's not guilt, though there's a bit of all of that in the mix for sure. It's more like the ordinary day keeps arriving. You make a cup of tea, you reply to your emails, and you walk the dog. And at the same time, you carry this low hum, a background frequency or noise. Something enormous is happening somewhere, and the day doesn't look different for it. The supermarkets look the same, the streets look the same, but things are behaving oddly. A friend cancels a trip she was actually really excited about. A product that you usually buy on autopilot is suddenly expensive for no obvious reason you can see from here. A flight or a route that's always been there isn't. I was flying this week for work, and a flight that is always there is no longer available with that airline. None of it looks broken. It just doesn't quite behave normally anymore. I've been sitting with that feeling, the weirdness of being physically safe and completely untouched by violence, and also already inside its ripple. I wondered if a biomimicry lens could shine a bit of light on it. Not to solve it, not to feel better about it, just to understand it. So I started by looking at what disturbances do to landscapes, already knowing about a principle sometimes called the landscape of fear. Sounds like a bad theme park, right? I know. It's essentially this: a predator doesn't have to kill an animal to change its life. It's like ever turned a corner into a laneway and stopped a few meters in, just sensing something isn't quite right? Your senses sharpen. Do you keep walking, headphones in, or do you alter your route, your behavior? Like that. Animals stop grazing in the open, they move differently, they avoid certain areas and become more vigilant, you know. Ears pricked right up, and noses wet and twitching, just more reactive. And the landscape shifts with them. Riverbanks change shape and vegetation returns in places it hasn't been for decades. The river itself starts to meander differently. All of this without it having to kill anything directly. Just the pure presence of a predator somewhere in the landscape and the shift in behavior that it causes and the whole system reconfigures around it. When something destabilizes a system, the effects don't stay local. They don't stay linear, they overshoot, they move in directions nobody predicted, and they don't end with the initial disturbance. That's just the beginning of the story. In this landscape we're in now, I see war as behaving a bit like a predator, changing how everything else is moving around it. I want to be clear about something before I go further. What's happening is catastrophic, full stop. The scale of destruction, the displacement, the deaths. None of what I'm about to say changes that, or softens that in any way. But there's something else sitting alongside this horror, and I think it's worth naming. What if some of what we're experiencing isn't only the war's damage? But the war revealing damage that was already there? The system isn't just failing under pressure, it's showing us what it was really made of before the pressure even arrived. The petrol price sensitivity, that fragility was already baked in. The airline rooting vulnerabilities in global airspace, already there. The margins that small regional businesses operate on, the supply chains stretched so thin that one distant disruption pulls them sideways. Already precarious, already closer to the edge than the normal days we knew made it look. The war didn't just create all of this fragility, it helped reveal it. Pressure doesn't just break systems, it exposes their true shape. It's like a system caught in headlights, covering its bits with its pants down. And I think there's something really important about being able to see that, not to soften what's happening, but to understand it more fully. A system that looks stable because nothing had hit it yet is not the same as a system that is actually stable. Think of like a house that looks stable, it's been built nice and strong until the first big storm, and then the roof leaks. Close your eyes for a second, if you can. A healthy ecosystem has layers of sound, insects, birds, water, movement. Think also of any city. Morning traffic, kids, the constant low cacophony of life doing what life does. Now think about what it sounds like when that stops. Not gradually, suddenly. That's what's happening in the places this war has torn through, for sure. Not just destruction, but the absence of the sounds that were there the day before, the market that isn't running, the school that isn't full or even standing, the street that used to have a particular noise and now has none at all. Silence in a living system is never neutral. It's more like a like a vacuum, and it means something has left. I've heard a version of that silence once, during Black Summer, the 2019-2020 bushfires. I was driving out to the edges of the fire grounds to leave water for wildlife that had somehow survived. So I was in nature, and yet completely quiet. Deafening. The kind of silence that has weight, the kind of silence you feel. No birds, no insects, not even oh gosh, I remember, not even leaves to rustle. Nothing moving. Just the particular enormity of this landscape, more like a moonscape, that had been full of sound the week before, and just wasn't anymore. And I knew at that moment that I was looking at an injured system. It brought tears to my eyes. And that's what a wounded system sounds like. First the silence, then, much later if the conditions allow, the slow return of sound. I don't know when that returns for the places caught up in this. I don't know if it ever does for everyone. But I notice the quieting here too in much smaller ways. The stillness of a road that should have Easter traffic on it, or the gaps on the shelves at the moment, and the plans that just didn't happen. The birds are leaving slowly and in stages before anything looks visibly broken. So what does it mean to live in a world where distant violence moves through ordinary local life like this to be genuinely safe and genuinely not safe from the impact at the same time? Both are true. You feel the petrol price, someone else has lost their home or their lives. Those two things exist in the same system, in the same moment. And I think a lot of us are struggling with the moral vertigo of that. The sense that you shouldn't register the inconvenience when someone else has lost absolutely everything. But the inconvenience is real, and the cancelled trip is real, and the quiet on that road at Easter is real. And it's reaching further than road trips and daily commutes. Farmers are watching diesel prices climb to the point where getting the food out of the ground and onto trucks is becoming increasingly difficult, and crops without fertilizer is coming into play as well. That's the food system starting to feel it. Conditions conducive to life, being eroded one supply chain at a time from a war happening 10 to 12,000 kilometers away. You don't have to resolve any of that. I don't know that it does resolve. Really, picture that for a second. Ginormous neurofin, anyone? And inflamed systems respond differently, don't they? Faster, harder, with less tolerance and less nuance. Think of our own bodies. Inflammation is actually a defense response, right? It's meant to isolate a threat and protect the system, your body. But when it goes systemic like this, the defense becomes the danger. That's the global nervous system right now under chronic stress. You can feel it in how quickly conversations tip, how fast people reach for certainty, how little room there is for the I don't knows. It starts to feel a little like the world of 2020, you know. Maybe the system was still holding a little residual inflammation from then. Quick aside, I'm recording this self-isolating over Easter to protect some family members, just in case. Slow on the uptake, me. Stuck in the crisis of yesteryear, while the rest of the world has moved on to this new one. And underneath all of it, beneath the petrol prices and the closed air spaces and the background hum, is something being chipped away at and eroded in real time. In biomimicry, there's an idea I come back to more than almost any other, and it's creating conditions conducive to life. Not survival in the short term, not winning, the conditions that let life continue and regenerate and hold. And where we are now, I can feel it starting to slip. So, can we use any of nature's genius? Can we steal from her to navigate this current period of inflammation we're in? I think yes. Not to fix it, but to move through it without going numb or going under. Here's what nature tells us about systems under stress. The organisms and networks that hold up best during breakdown aren't the ones that contract and protect, even though some might say a very human go-to reaction in the same situation. They're the ones that stay locally connected and attuned. They keep sensing, using that as feedback and adjusting as they go. They don't catastrophize and they don't normalize. They just read what's actually in front of them as accurately as they can and respond to that. And they redirect resources to where their system is most under strain or stress. In practice, for a person like me, like you, living a normal life inside an inflamed system. I think it looks a little something like this. Don't let the scale of it push you into numbness. The petrol number, the cancelled plan, the gap on the shelf, let those things land and don't feel guilty for noticing them. They are real signals from a real system. Stay porous. Not catastrophizing, hard, I know, not scrolling into the void, but not sealing it all off either. Let the small wrongnesses be wrong, instead of rationalizing them or swishing them into the too hard basket for right now, and then respond where you actually can, closer to home, where you've got some control, where something small can be adjusted, supported, steadied, redistributed. Because that's what living systems do. They don't try to fix everything. They respond locally and shift energy to where it's most needed. A system where everyone goes numb or looks away loses its capacity to respond. And we've already seen what happens when early signals get ignored. Now, I reckon some of you are quietly nudging me, going, go on, there's a little elephant in the room. What if nature had something to say to the people actually making these huge decisions that cascade down to our Easter road trips and our petrol stations and our food crops? It's a question I chew on a lot. I am absolutely not suggesting biomimicry can solve a war. But when you sit with the function that actually needs solving, how do you run a global system in a way that creates conditions conducive to life, not just for some but across the whole? Biomimicry gets a little armchair interesting very quickly. Because nature has tried every version of winner takes all, of taking more than the system gives back, of complexity being flattened in the name of efficiency. And the fossil record, carved in stone, is very clear on how those experiments end. What prevails across time are systems built on resource cycling, diversity, self-organization, on no part taking more than the whole can regenerate. Not because they're noble, because they work. That gap between what we know creates conditions conducive to life and what is currently happening in the decisions being made right now is cavernous. But feral be damned, that's probably best kept for a dining table chat with some wine, not for this podcast. So where are we now? Nature doesn't go back. After a real disturbance, a system doesn't restore itself to what it was. It morphs and moulds and reconfigures around what's survived. Sometimes things are permanently lost as a result, and sometimes some new things come through, but it rarely ever looks like what came before. And maybe that's where we are right now. Not at the beginning, not at the end, just in the part where everything is still shifting. I don't know what comes next. I don't think anyone does. But noticing is not nothing. Staying attuned to the small wrongnesses in the ordinary day, letting them tell you whatever they're telling you, that's not anxiety. That's you inside the system, still connected, paying attention. And right now, that might be exactly what's needed. You may feel this episode sit a little differently, and that's okay. God knows, come join me there. I'm Pia. This is Feral by Design. Nature owns the patent, some assembly definitely required.