Designing Biodiverse Futures: Lessons from the Black Mountain
- Y'ael Vorster
- Nov 3, 2025
- 6 min read
The founding story of Facilitated Emergence®
“For sheer uncompromising aridity, for stark grotesque naked horror, these mountains stand probably unsurpassed on the face of the globe.”— William Charles Scully (of Ghaamsberg Mountain)
The line I drew
Winter sun, thin and unforgiving. A compass set to north. A blunted pencil that left a moody graphite shine on the page.
I stood on the flank of Ghaamsberg—the Black Mountain—not of Mordor, but of Aggeneys, where the air is a hard, clean sound and the rock keeps its own counsel. I traced the sweep of a syncline that had folded on itself long before humans had language for such things. One gesture across paper, millions of years compressed to a curve.
Someone took a picture of me with my hammer and hand-lens, the outcrop behind me like a shoulder. I was never much good with the hammer. Still, one chip was enough. Galena’s dull gleam; a matrix of grains catching in the light. Copper. Lead. Zinc. Silver. A secret disclosed by force and heat.
I drew the diagram, then decorated it with angles and arrows, coordinates and ages—little glyphs that anchored an observation to time and place. A tiny act, private, precise, and ordinary. It felt like nothing more than what a student should do.
When a note becomes a future
But a line, once drawn, begins to travel.
Field sheets are fed to spreadsheets, which are fed to models, which are fed to meetings. Drill cores add sections to the story. Seismic and satellite sharpen the outline. Numbers turn into a prospectus. A prospectus becomes roads, fences, diesel drums, high-vis vests, new pay slips, new Christmas parties.
A pit opens. Pumps thrum below the water table. There are shift changes at dusk. There are risk registers and floodlights and winter mornings that smell like dust and coffee and iron.
The sketch becomes an economy. The economy becomes a season. People arrive. Some stay. Species recede. Entire bioregions reorganise around lines first made on paper.
I did not yet have language for this, only a sense that my notebook had passed beyond me, that a private mark could alter the shape of a public place.
The name of the place
Aggeneys. A kloof on a farm and a name with more than one origin. Perhaps the name of a San man, Aggedap, who lived in the mountain’s shadow. Perhaps a Nama phrase—“place of reeds,” “place of red clay,” or, chillingly, “place of blood.”
The McGregor Museum’s scoping notes spoke of rock art and early Stone Age sites. A rumoured massacre in a gorge, a commando of farmers, the San wiped out. On an aerial photograph, someone drew a boundary around a piece of land where something irretrievable was said to have occurred.
I learned these things later, long after the photograph with the hammer. At the time, my data was cold and frictionless. It had no history, no grief. It did not yet know the people of that place, or the animals, or the ghosts.
Warmth
Nora Bateson calls it warm data—information carried in the relationships that make a system a system and not just a collection of independent facts. The phrase moved through me like weather. It explained, with a tenderness that felt stern, why the spreadsheet had not been enough.
I thought about how easily cold data scales. How faithfully it services an investment thesis. How it draws the straightest possible line between an ore body and a futures contract. How flawlessly it can be used to build without ever once asking what should be built, where, by whom, and at what cost to the future.
And I thought about how warmth resists that velocity. How context slows the hand. How story can dilate time just enough for ethics to enter.
Engineers of the bioregion
Exploration is never only technical. It is architectural. We become hyper-engineers—not just of shafts and stopes—but of entire bioregions. The hydrology shifts. The road network blooms like wiregrass. A clinic opens; a school expands; a tavern gets a brighter sign. Distant capital learns the name of a place it will never visit.
Commodity prices twitch; wages follow; payrolls shrink; a generation leaves for other towns. The ore body is a pump, and what it pulls through the rock is money and hope and sometimes harm.
The line I drew on paper had a longer shadow than I knew. It was humbling to admit to myself that the smallest units of our professions—notes, maps, memos—can ripple until they change the weather of a place.
The unbearable pit
On that trip, we were driven down into a strip mine. The pit was like an amphitheatre scooped out of stone, tiered and pale, the trucks moving along their courses like bright insects. I’m not a Luddite. I know what metal does for a civilisation. But under that hard light I realised I would not be the one to tell a digger where to go.
Other geologists could do that. My work would be to find the imagination and the discipline to use data differently—to turn it toward futures where life increases, where memory is respected, where “progress” does not require amnesia.
That decision didn’t arrive as rhetoric. It arrived as a nausea that didn’t pass, a small refusal that became, over years, a larger vow.
The San in the story
The San of the Northern Cape are one of the few remaining ancestral clusters to whom all of us are related. Their paintings live in the backs of caves, ochre and breath, evidence of a relationship with this land older than most languages. The scoping reports recommended salvage and museums; the hills recommended silence and listening.
I understood then that the Black Mountain was not just an ore deposit. It was a library. It could not be read with a hammer alone.
What a different sketch could be
I think often about how different the first drawing might have been if I had known what I know now. Not the geology—those lines were sound—but the annotations around them. The second map—the one of voices and risks and kinships and memory and thresholds. A page that could hold cold data and warm data without one being used to erase the other.
What would it mean to make that kind of sketch first? To let context lead? To ask, before extraction, whether there is something else the land is asking for?
The seed of Facilitated Emergence®
Years later, when I began to shape a way of working that could honour what the Black Mountain had taught me, I called it Facilitated Emergence®. Not as a slogan, but as shorthand for a discipline born of that field lesson: listen long enough for the system to recognise itself; imagine futures that do not flatten the past; act in ways that let coherence grow on its own terms.
If there is a founding myth, it is not tidy. It is a student with a pencil doing something ordinary, and that ordinary act waking her to consequence. It is a mountain that held more than minerals. It is a page that had room for a syncline but not yet for a massacre’s rumour, for rock art, for names. It is the slow discovery that design must carry both.
What the mountain keeps
The Ghaamsberg keeps its dark humour. The ore is still there in its chemistry and in balance sheets. The sky is still severe and beautiful. Somewhere, my old field notebook exists in a box, the graphite line still bright on the page.
I cannot redraw the past. But I can say that the Black Mountain taught me how to draw differently.
It taught me that data births futures, and that the kind of futures born depends on the warmth we allow into our measurements. It taught me that bioregions are not backdrops to business cases. They are protagonists. It taught me to distrust the speed at which numbers move when separated from their histories. It taught me to listen until I could hear the sound of life increasing or receding, and to take that sound seriously.
Lessons from the Black Mountain
First: a sketch is never just a sketch. It is a seed. Be careful what you plant.
Second: cold data moves the world; warm data decides which world gets moved.
Third: there are places where a line on paper becomes a road, becomes a shift roster, becomes a birth certificate, becomes an empty house. Draw with that knowledge in your wrist.
Fourth: if you cannot hear the people who were there before you, and the beings who are there still, you are not yet designing—you are only arranging.
Fifth: some futures demand a different imagination. They will not be engineered into being; they must be midwifed.
Coda
I went to the Black Mountain to learn geology and left apprenticed to a different craft.
The craft has a name now—Facilitated Emergence®—but its beginning was simpler: a person, a place, a page, and the slow dawning responsibility to let data grow a kinder world.
The mountain remains. The lesson remains with it.
