Redesigning Civilization as a Healthy Living System - the Thinking of Elisabet Sahtouris

“Why is it that our culture, which is made up of people who are alive (so presumably we are a living system), knows so little about living systems?” (Elisabet Sahtouris)

“The problem is we have tried to tell the human story without telling the Earth’s story.” (Thomas Berry)

“The difference between the way the red man does science and the way the white man does science is interesting. The white man isolates a piece of nature and takes it into the laboratory to study it because he wants to control it. The red man goes into nature because his purpose is to integrate with it.” (Greg Cajete, author of Look to the Mountain: An Ecology of Indigenous Education)

“If we as human beings don’t understand ourselves as living systems within larger living systems, on which we’re dependent, we aren’t going to make it in this game.” (Elisabet Sahtouris)

“How, how do we explain to younger brother that he is destroying the mother?” (a Kogi elder)

“What an astonishing thing it is to watch a civilization destroy itself because it is unable to re-examine the validity, under totally new circumstances, of an economic ideology.” (Sir James Goldsmith, London Times, Feb 1994)

“Although I have made a fortune in the financial markets, I now fear that the untrammeled intensification of laissez-faire capitalism and the spread of market values into all areas of life is endangering our open and democratic society. The main enemy of the open society, I believe, is no longer the communist but the capitalist threat.” (George Soros, Atlantic Monthly, Feb 1997)

“Survival means the survival of humankind as a whole, not just a part of it…. If the South cannot survive, the North is going to crumble. If countries of the Third World cannot pay their debts, you are going to suffer here in the North. If you do not take care of the Third World, your well-being is not going to last, and you will not be able to continue living in the way you have been for much longer.” (Thich Nat Han, “The Heart of Understanding”)

“Everything that forms in nature incurs a debt which it must repay by dissolving so that other things may form.” (Anaximander, Greek philosopher)

“My tradition helps us learn that individual and group needs must be met in ongoing ways for the People to survive as a People… As we try to consciously and conscientiously fit economics and business back into a holistic approach to life and living; there is much that can be learned from societies and communities that have never forgotten that wholeness;… communities that understand Life as flows of energy,… [in which] everyone receives basic support…. everyone contributes… no part is separate from any other part… the health of the whole enables the health of any part thereof… sickness of the smallest part impacts the whole.” (Paula Underwood, World Business Academy Journal, vol. 10 no 4, 1996)

“The repeating pattern of evolution is the sequence from unity to diversification, which produces conflict that instigates negotiations, resulting in resolution leading to cooperation, and thus back to unity in the form of a higher level of organization . . . It [is] obvious that human affairs have reached the danger level at which cooperation must restore the imbalances of aggressive competition and hoarding if we are to survive.” (Elisabet Sahtouris)

 

The Need to Learn from Living Systems

Our ailing civilization

We face an enormous crisis because the most central and important aspect of globalization — its economy — is currently being organized in a manner that so gravely violates the fundamental principles by which healthy living systems are organized that it threatens the demise of our whole civilization.

Will our seriously imbalanced civilization survive? Historian Arnold Toynbee studied twenty-three past civilizations, looking for common factors in their demise. The two most important ones, it seems, were the extreme concentration of wealth (George Soros’ warning) and inflexibility in the face of changing conditions within and around them (Sir James Goldsmith’s warning).

To understand this situation and to see what we can do to alter the course of events toward a healthy future for all humanity, we need to look at the inherent contradictions between these current economic developments and the democratic, ecologically sound economic system we could develop.

As a biologist, I find that the easiest way to comprehend this contradiction is by looking at humanity as a whole in its natural context, thus recognizing ourselves as a living system and comparing our current unhealthy economic situation with the economics of healthy living systems. In doing so we will see clearly why the “Wake-up” call is being sounded and how to respond with the biological resilience that is our evolutionary heritage, privilege and responsibility.

Therefore, I will discuss in some detail the natural organization of living systems, with their endlessly negotiated “political economies” as we are only now coming to under-stand them. If you bear with me in this discussion, a new and coherent understanding of our global crisis and its solutions will emerge very clearly. The challenge of crisis confronts us; our opportunity lies in responding positively and actively.

 

Think community of life

To think of ourselves as a living system, we must see ourselves in community with all other people at local, national and global levels. While this may seem superficially easy, it is actually not. Western culture, now globally dominant, has systematically trained us to think and act as though we are separate individuals, often in competition with each other for scarce resources of one sort or another, primarily money, which has become the perceived means to all we want and need in life.

Thus we see that it is not globalization per se that is undesirable. The cause of the enormous crisis we face is the manner in which the most central and important aspect of globalization, its economics, is currently organized. For this reason, we must become more conscious participants in the process of globalization, to avoid letting a handful of powerful players lead us all to doom.

First and foremost, we must recognize globalization as a biological process — something that is happening to a natural living system we call humanity.

Then we can see how an economics that violates the fundamental principles by which living systems are organized currently threatens the demise of human civilization.

Fortunately life is resilient, and we are witnessing a growing storm of protest rising from calmer discussions of economic globalization. These are healthy reactions that can help lead us to survival, for they indicate increasing recognition and concern that communal values have been overridden in a dangerous process that sets vast profits for a tiny human minority above all other human interests.

Most people looking at problems of “market-driven capitalism” are becoming aware on some level that the measure of human success must shift from money to wellbeing for all. To do this, communal values must be reclaimed and acted upon in a way that ensures a balance of global interests with local interests and with the interests of all other species.

We must realize that the evolutionary process is an awesome improvisational dance that weaves individual, communal, ecosystemic and planetary interests into a harmonious whole.

As the more enlightened view gains prominence — that life is far too intelligent and naturally cooperative to proceed simply by blind accident and dominance struggles–it will be increasingly translated, to our collective benefit, into a more enlightened view of our human society in all its social, economic, political and cultural ramifications.

My purpose is to help with that translation, for we humans, no matter how spiritual, are inescapably biological creatures, and the solutions we seek are readily available in nature’s experience. We are a living system embedded in a larger living system, and we could benefit greatly from the lessons already learned in the five-billion-year dance of our planet.

Learning from Nature

Hierarchy vs. Holarchy

All living systems are arranged as holons in holarchies. That’s Arthur Koestler’s elegant word for the embeddedness of natural entities, which he calls holons (Janus: A Summing Up, 1978). Each relatively self-contained system, such as a cell, an organism, a family or an ecosystem, is a holon, while holarchy refers to their interdependent embeddedness within each other, and was intentionally derived but distinguished from the term hierarchy to avoid its value implications of superiority at the top and the metaphor for command-and-control systems.

Take the living system most intimately familiar to all of us: the human body. We’ve long known that our bodies behave as a community of cells, which are organized into organs and organ systems. The central nervous system functions as the body’s government, continually monitoring all its parts and functions, ever making intelligent decisions that serve the interest of the whole enterprise. Its economics are organized as an equitable system of production and distribution, with full employment of all cells and continual attention to their wellbeing. The immune ‘defense’ system protects its integrity and health against unfamiliar intruders. It can be thought of as a kind of global political economy with organs as bioregional units, their different tissues as communities, cells as families or clans, and the organelles within cells as individuals (which many of them once actually were, as we will see shortly).

 

The human body as an economy

On the whole, our bodies work in remarkably harmonious health. But imagine what would happen if our bodies tried to implement an economic system such as we humans practice in our world at present:

How would your body fare if the raw material blood cells in bones all over your body could be mined as resources by more powerful “northern industrial” lung and heart organs, transported to their production and distribution centers where blood is purified and oxygen added to make it a useful product? Imagine it is then announced that blood will be distributed from the heart center only to those organs that can afford it. What is not bought is thrown out as surplus or stored till the market demand rises. How long could your body survive that system? Is it an economic system that could keep any living entity healthy? You can see that it would kill the body to do economics in that way because some of the parts of the body that couldn’t afford the blood (which now might be bottled until the price goes up) would now be starving and dying off.

The most important lesson learned in the course of its evolution, thus, is that no level of holarchy may be sacrificed without killing the whole!

Let’s explore this driving dynamic as it plays out in our everyday human experience. The Greek playwright Aristophanes said of marriage partners a long time ago: Can’t live with ‘em; can’t live without ‘em. Look at this familiar situation anew: A couple is a holon in which two individual holons (the partners) are embedded. This is thus a two-level holarchy, the levels being that of couplehood and that of the individuals. The couple will survive in good health only if each of the three holons’ self interest is negotiated with the other two! Once you see this, then extrapolation to family is easy. Now try community.

Like this, a mature ecosystem–say a rainforest–is a complex ongoing process of negotiations among species holons and between individual species and other parts and levels of the self-regulating holarchy comprised by the various micro and macro species along with air, water, rocks, sunshine, magnetic fields, etc. As Soros pointed out in the Atlantic Monthly, “Species and their environment are interactive, and one species serves as part of the environment for the others. There is a feedback mechanism…” among levels.

So, what is it that prevents your cells, or your organs, from pursuing their self-interest competitively such that relatively few “win” and most “lose?”

The superficial answer is that they are part of a cooperative community in which the health of every level in the body’s holarchy promotes the health of individual cell and organ holons. But what is it that makes our individual cells and organs behave communally? If we can answer this critical question biologically, we will gain important insight for applying the lessons of nature to our human affairs.

Let us now look at a fuller complement of the principles by which these interwoven living systems operate, so that we may get on with analyzing our global human crisis more effectively.

 

Benchmarking civilization with the principles of living systems

Xilonem Garcia, a Meshika elder in Mexico, in this statement, “Anyone who knows how to run a household, knows how to run the world”, expresses her intuitive knowledge that anyone who understands the principles of living systems can apply them to any holon at any level of its holarchy.

If we think about it, we can all be aware of such principles operating in our bodies. And we seem to intuit and practice them reasonably well at the family level. Not many people starve three of their children to overfeed the fourth, for example, or beautify one corner of their garden by destroying the rest of it. At the level of our local communities or towns, we begin to lose sight of those principles, and when we consider our nations or the world, we seem to have forgotten them entirely, despite the fact that these are living systems, too.

Let us look, then, at a list of the main features and principles of all healthy living systems or holons, be they single cells, bodies, families, communities, ecosystems, nations or the whole world (see above). By understanding these principles, we can assess the health of any particular living system and see where it may be dysfunctional. This in turn will give us clues to making the system healthier.

Main Features and Principles of Living Systems

1. Self-creation (autopoiesis)
2. Complexity (diversity of parts)
3. Embeddedness in larger holons and dependence on them (holarchy)
4. Self-reflexivity (autognosis–self-knowledge)
5. Self-regulation/maintenance (autonomics)
6. Response ability–to internal and external stress or other change
7. Input/output exchange of matter/energy/information with other holons
8. Transformation of matter/energy/information
9. Empowerment/employment of all component parts
10. Communications among all parts
11. Coordination of parts and functions
12. Balance of Interests negotiated among parts, whole, and embedding holarchy
13. Reciprocity of parts in mutual contribution and assistance
14. Conservation of what works well
15. Creative change of what does not work well

I leave it to the reader to consider this list in detail, and to choose a familiar living system, such as an organization or community, to analyze for its adherence to each principle in turn. Our purpose here is to learn to do such analyses in order to understand in what ways our living systems are healthy and in what ways they are not. We want especially, in this discussion, to apply there principles to the process of political, economic and cultural globalization–of forming our new “body of humanity.”

As soon as we begin checking this list, we see that while globalization of humanity is bringing about a complex, self-organizing process and is embedded within our ecosystems (1,2,3), it does not meet most of the other requirements because only a relatively small part of humanity is involved in decisions and has the power to serve its own interests, often at the expense of other parts.

We must question how well it knows itself (4), for the process to date has not been fully conscious, at least among the vast majority of humans. Most of us feel swept along by its tides with far less than real knowledge of what the process is all about.

We have not adequately taken into account our embeddedness in and dependence upon the Earth holon with all its various sustaining ecosystems. As a result, our self-regulation (5) is woefully inadequate. To wit, the input of matter and energy from our ecosystems into our human systems (7) has been unsustainably rapacious, transforming them to our use as though they were simply resources put there for our benefit. Our output back into those ecosystems, in the form of waste and pollution, has further despoiled them rather than restored them.

While our human system certainly has the complexity and diversity of parts common to all living systems, we have not recognized that as an asset. Rather, we have tried to make the system’s human components as uniform as possible by imposing a Western consumer ethic and other Western cultural patterns of industrialization, education, fashion, etc. on the world as a whole.

We had better take into account that monoculture is a very strange concept we humans have introduced into Nature and that it does not make a lastingly workable living system. Monoculture fails in agriculture as in social culture, in economics as in religion. Social monoculture is rooted in an outmoded and ignorant fear of difference and of scarcity. It is time we learned to respect and cherish our human (and biological) diversity as the creative source of harmonious complexity.

As we continue through the list it is readily apparent that our worldwide system of humanity is not functioning well as a living system. The system neither empowers nor employs all humans (9). While our communications (10) are technologically impressive, we do not use them to coordinate parts and functions (11) in ways that foster a balance of interests at all levels (12) of the human system (individuals, families, communities, bioregions, nations, world), nor is there yet an intent for reciprocity in mutual contribution and assistance (13). As for conservation (14) and creative change (15), we are entirely unused to seeing that both are necessary parts of a single system because of our pervasive “either/or” syndrome, which I would like to discuss in some detail afterwards.

 

Beyond left and right

Nature interweaves conservation and change to protect what works and change what doesn’t. And we would do well to adopt that strategy, as Alvin Toffler suggested some time ago in urging us to stop looking left and right, but rather to assess any idea in terms of whether it will lead us forward or backward.

In practice, it turns out, there was more in common between capitalism and communism than their professed either/or ideologies indicated. Alvin Toffler was the first author I recall talking about parallels between the Soviet East and the Capitalist West. Both, he pointed out, were unfairly exploiting the Third World to support their large industrialist economies.

Now David Korten goes further, telling us “a modern economic system based on the ideology of free market capitalism is destined to self-destruct for many of the same reasons that the Marxist economy collapsed in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union.” (Mander & Goldsmith, editors. The Case Against the Global Economy and For a Return to the Local, Sierra Books 1996). He spells out these common features as:

1. the concentration of economic power in unaccountable and abusive centralized institutions (state or transnational corporations);
2. the destruction of ecosystems in the name of progress;
3. the erosion of social capital by dependence on disempowering mega institutions;
4. narrow views of human needs by which community values and spiritual connection to the Earth are eroded.

Note that all of these illustrate systems in which the “top” level is empowered by disempowering local and individual levels. We are accustomed to understanding this about communist systems, but we have ignored the erosion of our own democratic principles in the process of capitalist globalization.

 

A balance of all levels

In relation to this, another way of seeing holarchy starts with the individual within family within community within nation within world. You can cut these different ways using ecosystems, using galaxies, whatever. But always there is this embeddedness and interdependence.

Seeing holarchically has interesting consequences. Consider evolution theory. Darwin held that evolution proceeds by competition among individuals. Others noticed a lot of altruism within species and came up with a theory that it was really competition among different species for ecological niches that drove evolution. Then Dawkins came along and said, “No, you’re both all wrong, it’s the individual gene, it’s the competition among selfish genes seeking expression to maximize their presence in the gene pool.”

I say they’re all right, but only together! When you have selfishness at every level of holarchy, what happens? If each person is looking out for their own interest within, say, a family, how does family integrity happen? There have to be negotiations that recognize family integrity as having its own self-interest at its own level of holarchy.

Couplehood is a simple, two-level holarchy where the individuals are not only negotiating with each other, but with their couplehood, that second level of the holarchy. The integrity of couplehood demands certain sacrifices, doesn’t it? It demands certain times when you have to back down and not get your way in order for couplehood to flourish. Budget, lifestyle, location and other “pooled” interests are those of couplehood. Seeing this may make negotiations less personally antagonistic. These negotiations must continue as long as couplehood survives. And it goes on as long as life goes on because we are always in some holarchy and this tension, as I said earlier, is the fundamental source of all creativity.

It is of the utmost importance that we not let economic globalization override the interests of people and their local economies and ecosystems, for this would be a grave violation of the principles of living systems, as we have just seen. Local economies are holons within the global human holarchy, and must have the power to negotiate effectively, in their own self-interest, with other levels of that holarchy.

The importance of self-interest at all levels to drive negotiations and cooperation in any viable living system.

 

Toward an Organic and Healthy Civilization

A better globalization: glocalization

The solution to our currently imbalanced globalization thus is not to oppose globalization; it is to do globalization better.

We can easily see that balance among the interests of the global holon and those of the regional and local holon economies it comprises is as important as the balance between the interests of any local economy (as a holon) and those of the individual people and non-human species which comprise it.

The self-interest of ordinary people, of local economies and of nations that aren’t represented in the WTO and even in the United Nations is coming out more strongly all the time. It’s a process of glocalization! That’s exactly how living systems work, with all levels expressing their needs. It’s not about making a choice between having either healthy local economies or having a healthy world economy. That’s not possible. That would be like your body trying to run itself at the expense of its organs!

Taking our cues from our bodies, or from the Earth itself, with its diverse ecosystems, we can see that bioregionalism–basic local self-sufficiency economics which takes all species, including humans, into account — is as necessary and important an aspect of healthy globalization as are equitable international trade relations. Certainly no one part of a healthy globalized economy will be able to exploit another. That means local economies will have to protect themselves against unfair trade and strong economies will have to permit that protection in their own interests of seeing a healthy global economy.

Soros points out in his Atlantic Monthly article that in nature, “Cooperation is as much a part of the system as competition” and again, “The doctrine of laissez-faire capitalism holds that the common good is best served by the uninhibited pursuit of self-interest.” But unless self-interest is “tempered by a recognition of a common interest,” the society, on which the market rests, “is liable to break down.” This is an excellent example of understanding living systems principles.

That is, “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” by all people must be possible within the global economy

 

From competition to cooperation

In historic terms, capitalism and communism are human social systems experiments that looked good in theory but proved problematic in practice. One has failed; the other is still being tested. Both have imbalanced the interests of individual and community by making one subservient to the other, rather than putting them in balance with each other.

It is still a lesson to be learned from many native cultures that humankind is but one holon within the Earth holarchy. In such awareness, we all would see clearly the advantage in negotiating (not eliminating) our human differences, and we would also cease and desist immediately our denial of planetary interests and our profligate destruction of the ecosystems sustaining us with ever more difficulty.

If we were an intelligent species–and that remains to be demonstrated, given our knowing destruction of our own life support system and our rather juvenile antagonisms over what belongs to whom–we would look to the planet that spawned us for guidance in human affairs, as was the original purpose of natural and political philosophy in ancient Greece. It would then become obvious that human affairs have reached the danger level at which cooperation must restore the imbalances of aggressive competition and hoarding if we are to survive.

 

The coming change in civilization

From my point of view, the concept of living systems should be the overarching concept for all of our educational institutions. In other words, we should be teaching the politics of living systems, the economics of living systems, the science of living systems. All of these things would be united by that central concept. This is what would help us as humans to form healthy living systems. I used to think that the mechanical world view had imposed on us mechanical structures and that our societies are really built like machines. But the fact is that you can’t turn living things into machinery. You can try to force them to behave like machinery but they will not be machinery. That is exactly why our economists can’t predict anymore and our politics is falling apart. We don’t understand them as unhealthy living systems. We’re trying to fix them like machines. It’s very different to cure a person and to fix a machine.

Just like the example of body economics mentioned beforehand, this is exactly what you see, of course, in the human world. We exploit some parts of humanity to the benefit of other parts. That cannot work in a living system. If your body decided to value the heart over the liver, or tried to turn the heart into a liver or something like that (which is the kind of crazy things we do as humans) it just couldn’t function. It requires diversity. It requires that every cell look out for its own interest as well as for the communal interests of its tissue, its organ, and the whole body.

No one in nature asks anyone to make a decision between personal interest or communal interest. You don’t decide whether to be on the left or the right, whether to be a conservative or a radical. You have to have both in nature. It is the source of all creativity — this tension between the individual and the collective, the part and the whole. It is the fact that their interests are somewhat at odds that fires the creativity toward solutions. And then again there is always another imbalance in the system that has to be resolved. This is the great driving force of all creativity. We are never going to be able to reach perfection, and we are never going to be in total chaos. We are always going to operate between those two. We have to recognize the value of both sides.

Capitalism is inherently no more viable than the communism that was practiced in the Soviet Union and some other places. One asked the individual to sacrifice himself to the whole, and the other asks the individual to sacrifice the whole to himself, which isn’t viable either. So we are going to find a lot of chaos in this country as we begin to regroup, begin to understand living systems better, and begin to obey the principles of living systems as we develop an alternative society for the future.

Fortunately, things are already turning around in the sense that a lot of alternative ways of living have been developed around the world, whether people are creating their own money systems, or developing communal agriculture, or organic agriculture, alternative education systems. These are all the new forms of the future.

I like to use the metaphor of the butterfly. In metamorphosis, within the body of the caterpillar little things that biologists call imaginal discs or imaginal cells begin to crop up in the body of the caterpillar. They aren’t recognized by the immune system so the caterpillar’s immune system wipes them out as they pop up. It isn’t until they begin to link forces and join up with each other that they get stronger and are able to resist the onslaught of the immune system, until the immune system itself breaks down and the imaginal cells form the body of the butterfly.

I think that is a beautiful metaphor for what is happening in our times. The old body is going into meltdown while the new one develops. It isn’t that you end one thing and then start another.

So everybody engaged in recycling, in alternative projects, in communal living, in developing healthier systems for themselves and each other is engaged in building the new world while the old one collapses. Its collapse is inevitable. There is no way around that.

We must, for example, shift to organic agriculture. There is so much unemployment in the world that it’s very feasible. It can now be done with computers on the farms, with culture coming in, and with farm sitters, as in Denmark that permit the farmer to go to the city for a while. There are many ways to do it.

Indigenous cultures show us that it can be done much more simply, much more efficiently. You’ve got John Jevins here in California doing his biointensive agriculture. He is already up to 4 to 7 times the production of large-scale agriculture. In the recreation of pre-Inca agriculture in the altiplano of Bolivia and Peru, the production went from two and a half tons per hectare to forty tons per hectare in five years, and it is an agriculture that requires very little work. It’s possible to do really healthy agriculture that’s more productive than green revolution agriculture, and far, far more energy efficient and far, far less destructive. So that is a place, agriculture, where our technology has been used totally inappropriately and purely for the sake of profits for a handful of people. It’s inhuman to perpetrate that kind of agriculture in the face of the starvation it brings.

On the other hand, our communications technology is vital, so that we can connect self-sufficient living communities with each other into a global web. So I think this is where we integrate native techniques and modern technology — that we have the have the communications system to share the way we work at the local level in the bioregions working in healthy, organic community.

Let’s view the coming change in paradigm from civilization as mechanism into civilization as organism from the perspective of the economy’s core institution, the corporation

MECHANISM (Corporations)	ORGANISM (The Web)
Allopoietic	Autopoietic
Inventor created	Self-created
Hierarchic structure	Holarchic embeddedness
Top-down command	Holarchic dialog/negotiation
System engineered	System negotiated
Repaired by engineers/experts	Repairs itself
Evolution by external redesign	Evolution by internal redesign
Exists for product or profit	Exists for health and survival
Serves owners’ self interest	Serves self/society/ecosystem

The influence of the Web on the corporate world is enormous — so much so that the corporate world will follow suit in coming alive, in reorganizing itself from mechanism to organism, as a few pioneers have already done. After all, life works, and corporations are made of people! Why would they want to continue behaving like machines once it is obvious that life works better.

What will a corporation look like when it makes the change? The new corporate organization’s interests will be compatible with the interests of its own stakeholders, their families, and all society. We can guess that it will:

• Be autopoietic (self-creating) and holarchic
• Create value both internally and externally for all constituencies
• Make “shared destiny” moral contracts with employees and society
• Shift from absentee shareholders to involved stakeholders
• Ensure the recycling of all products not consumed
• Treat other organizations as respected equals (friendly competition)
• Have triple bottom lines: profits, social development, ecosystem health

In this transition lies our greatest hope for becoming a mature species in time, for corporations are the most powerful human institutions on the planet today, the only ones with the resources and ability to make the transition from our acquisitive species adolescence to wise maturity, leading the way for us all.

 

Growing wiser as a healthy civilization

The picture of globalization and the needs and aspirations of the human community are clarifying now and we can get on with the task of insuring our civilization against demise. We can prove ourselves a mature species, ready to learn from our parent planet’s four and a half billion years of experience in evolving workable living systems.

The beloved American author Mark Twain tells the story of a young man returning from his first forays out into the world, amazed on hearing his father speak–surprised at all his father has learned while he was gone. It is of course a characterization not of new learning in the father, but in the son. The son’s budding maturity lies in his new ability to listen to an elder’s accumulated wisdom.

When we humans, after all a very young species, drop our adolescent arrogance of thinking we know it all and read the wisdom in our parent planet’s accumulated experience of living systems design, we too will mature as a species, to our own benefit and that of all other species, as well as the planet itself.

(Elisabet Sahtouris, Ph.D. is an American/Greek evolution biologist, futurist, business consultant, event organizer and UN consultant on indigenous peoples. She is a popular lecturer, television and radio personality, author of EarthDance, Biology Revisioned co-authored with Willis Harman and A Walk Through Time: From Stardust To Us (with prologue by Brian Swimme and epilog by Sidney Liebes).
Dr. Sahtouris has taught at the Univ. of Massachusetts, M.I.T. and was a science writer for the NOVA/ HORIZON TV series. She has lived extensively in Greece and the Peruvian Andes. Her vision is the sustainable health and well-being of humanity within the larger living systems of Earth and Cosmos)

 

References and Further Readings

This article is summarized from:

1. “Living Systems, the Internet and the Human Future” by Elisabet Sahtouris, Ph.D. Talk presented 13 May 2000 at Planetwork, Global Ecology and Information Technology, a conference held at the San Francisco Presidio.
2. “The Biology of Globalization” by Elisabet Sahtouris, Ph.D. Adapted from first publication in Perspectives in Business and Social Change, September 1997.
3. “From Mechanics to Organics: An Interview with Elisabet Sahtouris”. This interview was adapted from the radio series Insight & Outlook, hosted by Scott London. A translation of the interview appeared in the February 1999 issue of Thot, a Brazilian journal.

Read other great articles by Elisabet Sahtouris @ LifeWeb: The Writings of Elisabet Sahtouris.

Her book EarthDance: Living Systems in Evolution (1999) is available to download for free here.