I just published a blog post on EnviroSociety about studying African floodplains as coupled systems. The post is inspired by a quote from Gregory Bateson, “The major problems in the world are the result of the difference between how nature works and the way people think”, from the documentary Ecology of Mind (2011) that Nora Bateson made about her father. The quote captures one of the key themes in his work: the way we perceive and conceive of the world is poor match for how the world really works (Bateson 1972, [1979] 2002). The mismatch between our theoretical models and the world we are studying is a key problem in scientific research. I argue that the match between the conceptual model of coupled systems and the world of the Logone Floodplain is actually quite good. The only problem is that learning never stops when you use the model of coupled systems to study a dynamic system. But that is not necessarily a bad thing. Or as Gregory Bateson argues, "learning never stops".