 |
BIO:
Physicist and philosopher, internationally famous author and
co-author of a dozen publications and a screen play, Fritjof
Capra is also a teacher and an environmental activist.
He is one of the founders of Berkeley,
California’s Center for Ecoliteracy, a non-profit organization
that develops and funds environmental education programs at
elementary, secondary and high schools. He also frequently
conducts environmental management seminars for top executives
of international corporations and business schools.
Frijtof lives with his wife and daughter
in Berkeley, California.
Links:
FritjofCapra.net
Center
for Ecoliteracy
Fritjof
Capra Seminars
|
| |
|
INTRO:
During the past thirty years there have been
two major advances in human thought, new perceptions necessitated
by failures of the old order to deliver the intellectual and material
goods needed to sustain us. One was the recognition that living
systems are self-organizing networks. The other was the development
of the concept of sustainability, the realization that humankind
can survive only by adopting the means by which natural ecosystems
perpetuate themselves. To these two paradigm shifts Fritjof Capra
recently has added a third, the extension of biological systems
theory into the social and cognitive realms and the syntheses of
all of these concepts into what he calls a "Science of Sustainability."
Author, systems thinker, and "ecoliteracy"
crusader Capra first made his mark on the international scene with
his best selling classic the Tao of Physics in 1975. He followed
that triumph with his 1981 book The Turning Point: Science, Society
and the Rising Culture, an in-depth critique of analytic science
and its fallout in culture that concludes with proposals for revamping
our perspective and our society along holistic, sustainable lines.
In 1996 Capra published what turned out,
for all practical purposes, to be the first of a two-volume series
The Web of Life: A
New Scientific Understanding of Living Systems. In The
Web of Life, Capra provides an indispensable overview of the
development and current state of systems thinking in biology, with
continuing references to mankind’s relationship to the millions
of other organisms that share our planet.
His most recent work, The
Hidden Connections —Integrating the Biological, Cognitive and
Social Dimensions of Life into a Science of Sustainability,
builds on the biological theories explained in The Web of Life
and extends them into human culture. Taken together, the two
works provide a critically needed underpinning for a theory of sustainability.
Here, Capra discusses them and their ramifications for our collective
future.
PHILIP S WENZ
INTERVIEW:
ECOTECTURE: You’ve recently published
The Hidden Connections—Integrating the Biological, Cognitive
and Social Dimensions of Life into a Science of Sustainability.
How’s the book doing?
CAPRA: It’s doing very well. I
have a lot of really good feedback. I’ve had some excellent
reviews, the last one in Nature which just came out a week
or two ago. Also, I have had a very good response both from the
scientific community and from the activist community, from the community
of NGOs, of ecologists, social change activists and so on. I have
been invited, for example, to speak at the World Social Forum in
Porta Alegra in Brazil in January. This is the meeting of the global
coalition of NGOs (Non-Governmental Organizations). There will be
about 50,000 people there in southern Brazil to talk about alternatives
to economic globalization, ecological design and related issues.
So I’m very happy with the book. It’s getting around and
the response is excellent.
ECOTECTURE: How long has it been out?
CAPRA: It came out in August, so just
a few months.
ECOTECTURE: Quite recently. And it’s
published in both Britain and the United States?
CAPRA: That’s right, yes. It’s
also published in Germany, Italy, Brazil, Holland and it’s
coming out in Spain. So there are several editions.
ECOTECTURE: And in those languages as
well?
CAPRA: That’s right.
ECOTECTURE: I see. Excellent. That’s
good, very good feedback. Was that anticipated, do you think . . .
CAPRA: Well, I think so because, you
know, this is not my first book. I now have a readership. This book
actually follows quite closely my previous book, The Web of Life,
where I presented a systems approach to life and a systemic understanding
of life that takes into account recent developments in complexity
theory, chaos theory and recent knowledge of self-organizing systems
and so on. I integrated that into a systemic view of life, mainly
of biological life. In The Hidden Connections I expand that
to the social domain, talking not only about living networks in
cells, organisms and ecosystems, but also living networks in human
societies. Then I explore the social and cultural dimensions. So
the two books really hang together.
ECOTECTURE: That was definitely my impression.
You’d want to read the first one in order to fully appreciate
the second one.
CAPRA: Right. In The Hidden Connections
I have lots of references to The Web of Life. I don’t
talk, for example, very much about the mathematics of complexity
because that’s all covered in The Web of Life. So there
are a lot of references back.
ECOTECTURE: In the second part of The
Hidden Connections, "the Challenges of the 21st
century," you discuss a variety of issues including politics,
sociology, ethics, education, philosophy and design, and you call
for changes in our thinking in many of these areas. On the surface,
fields such as politics and ethics are not scientific in the strict
or traditional sense of the word. Are you saying that we should
design society scientifically in the strict sense of that word?
CAPRA: No. You see, although I am a
scientist by training and work with a scientific mind, none of my
books are only scientific. I mean, science plays a big part in all
of them, but they are also philosophical books and they are also
books that are socially engaged. So here I call for a change of
values, a change of politics, a change of attitudes, with the general
goal of building a sustainable society and the future that is sustainable
and believable for our children.
Now in order to do that, for example, in order to change the economy
in such a way that it becomes sustainable, you do need to understand
the world economy, the global economy, which today is a network
of computers, a network of flows of money and information and power
that extends globally. So we need to understand this network and
we need to understand how we can introduce a different set of values
into the global economy. In order to do that, we need to understand
the relationship between living networks and values and human choices
and politics. So it needs both. It needs a certain kind of philosophy
and I would say even a spiritual stance or spiritual background,
but it also needs the scientific understanding. I have both of these
aspects in all of my books.
| . . . we need to understand how we can introduce
a different set of values into the global economy. |
ECOTECTURE: When you say the relationship
between philosophy, ethics and the scientific understanding—could
you say a little bit more about that?
CAPRA: Well, at the very core of my
framework is the analysis of networks, of living networks and the
comparison of biological and social networks. And first, as I did
already in The Web of Life, I identified a set of key characteristics
of living networks. One of them is that these networks are self-generating,
that is, every part in the network contributes to continually generate
and regenerate the whole. For example, in a cell, you have a network
of chemical processes and the food comes in from the outside, simple
molecules, sugars, oxygen and so on, come in from the outside, and
the cellular network builds all the structures—the proteins,
the enzymes, the DNA—all that is built and continually rebuilt
and regenerated and maintained by the cellular network.
Now in human society, we’re not talking about chemical processes,
we’re talking about processes of communication. A human community
is a network of communications. This network of communications also
generates itself continually. What it generates, though, are not
so much material structures but ideas, information, meaning. These
are nonmaterial structures. When a conversation or a communication
happens, it gives rise to ideas or information, which then trigger
new communications. The entire network also sustains itself and
continually regenerates conversations and communications.
Another similarity would be that both types of networks, the biological
and the social, create their own boundaries. So a cell, again, creates
its boundary, which is semipermeable. That is, it lets certain substances
in and others it doesn’t let in, and it gives the cell its
identity in this way. The boundary is created by the cell itself.
Similarly, of course, multicellular organisms have other kinds of
boundaries—we have our skin, you know, the various boundaries
of organisms. A social network of communications also creates its
boundaries but again, they are not primarily material boundaries,
although these also exist, but they are cultural boundaries.
When you have a community, you know who belongs to the community
and who doesn’t, and you would treat them differently, you
would have different expectations as to their behavior, you would
share information differently—some things you would tell people
in the community and not tell people outside of the community and
so on. This is a boundary of trust, a boundary of expectations,
a boundary of values and meaning. It is also continually generated
and renegotiated by the network, by the community.
Those are some of the similarities, but then there are also big
differences. The main difference that I focus on is that in a human
network of communications, you have the whole realm of human consciousness
and culture, with its various characteristics such as thinking,
conceptual thought, symbols, values. We also have design in human
communities, we have strategies, plans, goals. None of those exist
in biological networks. In order to understand human networks, it’s
not only necessary to understand the complexity and the dynamics
for which you can use complexity theory very usefully, but it’s
also necessary to understand the meaning that goes on in these conversations.
If you don’t—if people talk and you don’t know
why they talk and you don’t know what the meaning of the conversation
is, you won’t understand the network of conversations.
When you talk about why something happens, about the cause of something
happening, you can say that, for instance, when it snows there’s
precipitation and there are certain weather conditions, there are
certain temperatures and pressures. You can explain. It’s actually
quite a complex process whereby, say, a snowflake is formed, but
we can explain and understand that in terms of a collection of processes
and forces, of cause and effect that leads to the snow. You would
say the snow falls because something has gone on before and you
can follow it back to the causes of the snow.
| . . . there is a lot of confusion about sustainability,
even within the environmental movement. |
When I tell you, for instance, that last night I went to Oakland,
and if you ask me why did I go to Oakland, then I wouldn’t
say, well, I had dinner and that gave me some energy and I could
use my muscles, and explain to you how my muscles carried me to
the car and how the car functions and how I got to Oakland. No,
I would say I went to Oakland because I wanted to see a movie. That’s
the explanation. But that’s a very different type of explanation
from the biological. It has meaning, purpose. First of all, I wanted
to do something, I had a certain desire which implies a value that
I had. I wanted to see a movie. Then I did something to follow that
desire, I had a plan for getting there. So these are all the qualities
that we have in human consciousness and culture.
When you ask then what kind of a movie did I see, that will depend
on my personal predilections, my intellectual and emotional history.
It would also depend on the culture. I would typically not see a
Brazilian movie because there are not many Brazilian movies playing.
So the whole culture comes in. These types of explanations are of
a very different nature from the explanations given in biology,
and therefore when we study human networks, which are also always
networks of communications, we need philosophy, anthropology, social
science, political science and so on.
|
