There are places where pedagogy becomes physical.
Tvergastein, Arne Næss’ mountain hut in the Hallingskarvet mountain range, is such a place. It explains Deep Ecology from a distance; it invites people to walk, carry, get cold, listen, reduce, enter carefully, and feel their own scale again.
For the ETH Zurich DRRS program — Designing Resilient Regenerative Systems — the two days that we spent moving toward, staying at, and descending from Tvergastein became one of the deepest experiential anchors of our ten-day Norway Field Design Trip (▻https://medium.com/regenerative-systems/drrs-field-design-trips-learning-to-design-regenerative-systems-from-within-) — the light and then the intense part.
It was a short episode in time, the 7th and 8th day of the trip, yet it condensed many of the program’s central questions:
How do we learn from place? How do we sense systems with the whole body? How do we guide without over-controlling? How do we reduce to the essence? How do we become more accountable to the traces we leave — physical, relational, emotional, cultural, and inner?
This was an excursion to a famous eco-philosopher’s hut, and it became a living learning situation in which mountain weather, porridge oats, wet feet, snow patches, silence, stories, group rhythm, discomfort, leadership, meditation, and return all became part of systemic education.
Day 1: Packing, carrying, entering
The day began with logistics at our shelter from the previous night, Vantnahalsen hotel which we reached by train from Bergen and from Oslo, and our place of meeting with the rest of the group between the light and the now starting intense part of the FDT of CAS 2 Beyond Systems Thinking.
Bags had to be packed. Food had to be distributed. Breakfast oats were divided. Freeze-dried meals were assigned. Maps were downloaded. Participants negotiated weight, warmth, snacks, water, rain protection, and the uncertainty of what the plateau might ask from them.
Already here, before any explicit philosophical framing, an important DRRS learning appeared. When scarcity becomes tangible, the body wants backup. A little more food. One extra layer. Another chocolate bar. A safety margin. The group began to notice how quickly the human reflex toward surplus appears, even when the explicit practice is reduction.
The 40–50-liter backpack, the 10kg weight logic, the simple rations, the careful equipment choices — these were outdoor techniques and also design principles. What is essential enough to carry? What do we carry because of fear? Which objects are genuinely needed, and which ones belong to an imagined sense of control?
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In systemic design and regenerative practice, these questions reach far beyond mountain equipment. Organizations carry too much. Institutions carry too much. Many of us carry too much. Projects carry old assumptions, redundant processes, protective language, status symbols, and accumulated complexity. The mountain makes this visible through the shoulders.
Foundation reflection — Simple in Means, Rich in Ends
As our bags were packed with simple rations of porridge oats and prepared for the cold, logistics were quickly transformed into a philosophical exercise. This is close to the core of Arne Næss’ principle of being “Simple in Means, Rich in Ends.” He argued that true quality of life does not spring from material abundance, but from intense presence in nature. By stripping away everyday comforts and replacing them with the simple necessities of mountain life, the wilderness opened a deeper form of meaningful activity that the students could immediately feel in their bodies.
After the practical preparation, the journey began to shift. The train carried us out of the more familiar world and into snow, ice, open ranges, and a stronger sense of mountain scale. At the trailhead, the group bought food, overestimated a little, carried the consequences, and started moving.
The entrance into the mountain was marked by a song.
Hilde Karlsen, a local inhabitant, heritage steward, outdoor guide and singer-artist, opened the walk by singing across the landscape. For many in the group, this became a threshold moment. The singing was felt as attunement. A human voice moved through the plateau air and changed the quality of entry. Suddenly the group was invited into a relational field.
Participants later described the bodily resonance of the voice: how singing makes the body itself an instrument; how it carries meaning through vibration; how it restores something almost forgotten in contemporary learning cultures. The song helped open a respectful relation to the non-human world around us: snow, water, moss, rock, wind, low vegetation, birds, mountain, weather.
Then came the Deep Time Walk(►https://www.deeptimewalk.org).
Geological and evolutionary time were translated into steps. One meter became one million years. Planetary history unfolded through movement. Most of the walk seemed, in human terms, almost empty. And then, very late, life, animals, mammals, humans, and human civilization compressed into the tiniest final fraction. At the scale of the whole walk, a human life became nearly invisible.
This was one of the clearest didactic moments of the day. The group simply walked deep time, instructed by Reidar Goffeng. The lesson moved through legs, lungs, distance, pause, and fatigue. Abstract magnitude became bodily scale.
For DRRS, this is central. Complexity learning cannot remain in diagrams alone. The mind understands numbers poorly when they exceed lived proportion. The body can help translate them. Step by step (in time), the students could feel how brief the human project is — and how absurdly large its current impact has become.
Arriving at Tvergastein
The climb toward Tvergastein was partly wet through boggy areas, cold when clouds covered the sun and wind picked up, beautiful, and playful. Feet got soaked. Streams were crossed. Snow patches interrupted the path. Mountain water became a strong presence. It was described by one host as “alive” — freshly aerated, moving through stone, different from water that has been processed, piped, stored, and distanced from its source.
There was also laughter. A spontaneous snowball “fight” moment softened the seriousness of the philosophical pilgrimage. This mattered. Deep Ecology does not need solemnity all the time. A living relationship with place includes reverence, play, irritation, cold toes, technical problems, hunger, and unexpected joy.
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At the hut, single tents (freshly acquired from the producer Liteway Equipment in Ukraine) were pitched in wind and dropping temperatures. Participants helped each other with gear, repeating a pattern that had grown through the wider field design trip: when someone struggled, others stepped in. Dinner was cooked outside near a stone wall on our mountaineerign gas stoves. Freeze-dried meals, steam, gloves, cold fingers, tea, and a vast evening view shaped the scene. The temperature later dropped to around minus two degrees Celsius.
Later, after dinner, around 9pm, entering the hut required care. We had been briefed that Tvergastein was not simply an object of heritage. It was a place of discipline, thought, simplicity, and relation. Inside, warmth, silence, wood, history, and stories of Arne Næss created a special density. Participants described a quality of silence they had rarely experienced elsewhere: not an empty silence, rather a present one.
Næss’ long relation to the mountain became palpable. The hut, the landscape, and the stories around his life opened questions of intimacy with place. What does it mean to know a mountain across decades? What kind of philosophy becomes possible when thinking is shaped by weather, distance, stone, effort, and return?
The group also noticed a delicate tension: how to honor the legacy of Arne Næss while keeping the living field wider than the person. The strongest moments were those where Næss’ thought, the hut, the mountain, the water, the hosts, the group, and the more-than-human world spoke together. In such moments, Deep Ecology was practiced.
Foundation reflection — Deep Ecology and the intrinsic value of life
The shift from controlling systems toward belonging within them is foundational to Deep Ecology. Næss challenged anthropocentric worldviews and maintained that all living beings have intrinsic value, independent of their utility for humans. For future designers and systems thinkers, this means learning to stop treating nature as an external resource and to begin creating in deeper harmony with the living world of which we are already part.
This reflection connects directly to the DRRS learning intention. The program works with systems thinking, systemic design, complexity theory, resilience science, regenerative practice, meta-cognition, self-reflection, and multiple forms of inquiry. Yet Tvergastein reminded us that thinking “about” systems reaches a limit. At some point, the designer has to feel what it means to be part of a living system.
The cold helped.
Day 2: Cold, meditation, reflection, and descent
The second day began during the night.
Some participants barely slept. One woke around 1:30 a.m., shivering, ran around outside to warm up, returned to a mattress that kept deflating, and slept only in fragments. Another described not sleeping at all, only “continuing to exist” inside the tent, wondering whether a second cold night would be possible.
These accounts were important because they brought vulnerability into the learning field. The cold was not romantic; it was real. It raised questions of resilience, pride, self-image, limits, and the difficulty of admitting discomfort in a mountain context.
Others experienced the same night differently. One participant had feared the cold beforehand, then discovered that the situation was uncomfortable but survivable. Hearing animals and natural sounds at night created a sense of being outside in a way that was both exposed and grounding.
This is the fine line of good experiential pedagogy: enough discomfort to shift perception, enough safety to keep learning open.
In the morning, the guided meditation inside the hut became a way to return to warmth. Bodies softened. Breath slowed. The group gathered again. The following reflection session with Lars was experienced as intense, personal, and meaningful. Participants brought their own Quest themes and life questions into the hut’s atmosphere. Lars listened, mirrored, and offered concise reflections from long teaching experience. Many felt that their own questions became clearer there.
For DRRS, this moment touched the inner dimension of systems thinking and design. The future designer, researcher, entrepreneur, planner, facilitator, or change-maker does not work from nowhere, since each person carries biography, ambition, wound, projection, fear, desire, and longing. Regenerative systems work asks for methods and frameworks, and it also asks who is using them, from which inner posture, with which kind of attention.
After breakfast, the group planned the descent toward Geilo. Weather was shifting. Rain was expected. The originally planned route had to remain open to change. Participants took guiding roles: front guide, co-support, tail sweepers — and a “guiding from within” theme. The descent became one of the strongest leadership laboratories of the trip, and embodiment of DRRS complexity didactics.
The group moved through snowfields, creeks, muddy patches, rocky sections, wet vegetation, and open terrain. A guiding question emerged almost immediately:
How much space does a guide give? Too little space, and people feel constrained. Too much, and the group can fragment or drift into risk. Good guiding became visible as situated orchestration: reading terrain, weather, group energy, individual needs, pace, sight lines, safety margins, and mood.
One participant later reflected that, while following, they became so focused on doing it “right” that they lost contact with the landscape. Another group member came into a moving-medidative “flow” state, listening to music and mentally drifting off. This opened a powerful DRRS question: how many systems, projects, organizations, and educational settings do the same? People follow the line so carefully that creativity disappears. Yet without a line, the group may lose coherence.
Guiding from within, as outlined in Leave (No) Trace, means holding this paradox. The guide creates enough structure for safety, enough freedom for agency, and enough listening to adjust both in real time.
A snowfield incident made this concrete. One participant got stuck. Several people wanted to help. The person later shared that the care was appreciated, while the many eyes and voices also created pressure. The most helpful support was calm, practical, and spacious. The group reflected on when to intervene, when to step back, and how to let someone solve a difficulty themselves while knowing that support is present.
This became a small but exact example of regenerative leadership. Care is not always more action. Sometimes care means reducing noise and giving space. Sometimes support means staying near without taking over. Sometimes the best intervention is a delayed one. Sometimes, non-intervening can be an intervention, too.
Later, rain and terrain led the group to change plans. At a stopping point, we set up a tarp, fueled the stoves for a warm meal and a tea, reassessed, and chose a shorter route toward Geilo. The original plan had served its purpose. It had prepared options, clarified risks, and made adaptation possible. As one participant summarized: planning is everything; the plan is nothing.
This is complexity literacy in action. Plans are living scaffolds, not contracts with reality.
From plateau to forest, from exposure to return
The descent carried us through an ecological gradient. Sparse high plateau, snowmelt, wet ground, salix shrubs, streams, lichens, mosses, birds, flowers, and eventually forest. One participant described the experience as following water downward into biodiversity. The landscape thickened as we descended.
The gray, wet weather shifted attention. Without dramatic visibility, perception moved closer to the ground. Moss, lichen, wet stones, small flowers, textures, colour relations, tiny details. Photography became a mindfulness tool, a way of sharpening attention. What first seemed cold and unattractive opened into fine-grained beauty.
This is another DRRS learning: systems sensing changes with attention. The world we perceive depends on the scale, rhythm, and quality of our looking.
Arriving in Geilo brought a strong contrast. Warm interiors, dry clothes, dinner, sauna, intense heating, closed rooms. At first, this was relief. Soon, it also felt strange. After Tvergastein, tents, streams, stone, mud, and wind, the built environment appeared both comforting and disconnected. The hotel became a mirror of civilization: protective, convenient, excessive, and oddly sealed from the living world outside.
The return was part of the teaching.
Foundation reflection — Self-realization and expanded identity
Næss’ concept of self-realization is not modern ego-cultivation. It is an expanded identity. Human development and quality of life are linked to our ability to identify with the nature around us — whether moss on the Hardangervidda plateau or salmon fighting their way up the Akerselva river. When we destroy nature, we destroy part of ourselves. The group’s journey shows that deep systems thinking requires us to expand our sense of self to include the living ecosystems we are called to steward.
This expanded sense of self became a bridge to other parts of the Norway Field Design Trip. Earlier and later conversations around salmon restoration, Akerselva, the Oslo Fjord, Deep Ecology, friluftsliv, and more-than-human relations folded into the Tvergastein experience. Moss, water, salmon, human bodies, cold, learning groups, and design practices began to belong to the same field of inquiry.
