Tree intelligence

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A new dialogue with our human nature

This passage Fritjof Capra’s 1997 feels book relevant to our time. 

“ A NEW DIALOGUE WITH NATURE

The conceptual shift implied in Prigogine's theory involves several closely interrelated idcas. The description of dissipative structures that exist far from equilibrium requires a nonlinear mathematical formal-ism, capable of modelling multiple interlinked feedback loops. In living organisms, these are catalytic loops (i.c. nonlinear, irreversible chemical processes) which lead to instabilities through repeated self-amplifying feedback. When a dissipative structure reaches such a point of insta bility, called bifurcation point, an element of indeterminacy enters into the theory. At the bifurcation point the system's behaviour is inherently unpredictable. In particular, new structures of higher order and complexity may emerge spontaneously. Thus self-organization, the spontaneous emergence of order, results from the combined effects of non-equilibrium, irreversibility, feedback loops, and instability.

The radical nature of Prigogine's vision is apparent from the fact that these fundamental ideas were rarely addressed in traditional science and were often given negative connotations. This is evident in the very language used to express them. Nonequilibrium, nonlinearity, instability, indeterminacy, etc., are all negative formulations. Prigogine believes that the conceptual shift implied by his theory of dissipative structures is not only crucial for scientists to understand the nature of life but will also help us to integrate ourselves more fully into nature.

Many of the key characteristics of dissipative structures - the sensitivity to small changes in the environment, the relevance of previous history at critical points of choice, the uncertainty and unpredictability of the future - are revolutionary new concepts from the point of view of classical science, but are an integral part of human experience. Since dissipative structures are the basic structures of all living systems, including human beings, this should perhaps not come as a great surprise.

Instead of being a machine, nature at large turns out to be more like human nature - unpredictable, sensitive to the surrounding world, influenced by small fluctuations. Accordingly, the appropriate way of approaching nature to learn about her complexity and beauty is not through domination and control but through respect, cooperation, and dialogue. Indeed, Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers gave their popular book, Order out of Chaos, the subtitle 'Man's New Dialogue with Nature'

In the deterministic world of Newton, there is no history and no creativity. In the living world of dissipative structures, history plays an important role, the future is uncertain, and this uncertainty is at the heart of creativity. "Today, Prigogine reflects, "the world we see outside and the world we see within are converging. This convergence of two worlds is perhaps one of the important cultural events of our age.”

And the last page of the book:

“ In ecosystems, the role of diversity is closely connected with the system's network structure. A diverse ecosystem will also be resilient, because it contains many species with overlapping ecological functions that can partially replace one another. When a particular species is destroyed by a severe disturbance so that a link in the network is broken, a diverse community will be able to survive and reorganize itself, because other links in the network can at least partially fulfil the function of the destroyed species. In other words, the more complex the network is, the more complex its pattern of interconnections, the more resilient it will be.

In ecosystems, the complexity of the network is a consequence of its biodiversity, and thus a diverse cological community is a resilient community. In human communities, ethnic and cultural diversity may play the same role. Diversity means many different relationships, many different approaches to the same problem. A diverse community is a resilient community, capable of adapting to changing situations.

However, diversity is a strategic advantage only if there is a truly vibrant community, sustained by a web of relationships. If the community is fragmented into isolated groups and individuals, diversity can easily become a source of prejudice and friction. But if the community is aware of the interdependence of all its members, diversity will enrich all the relationships and thus enrich the community as a whole, as well as each individual member. In such a community information and ideas flow freely through the entire network, and the diversity of interpretations and learning styles - even the diversity of mistakes - will enrich the entire community.

These, then, are some of the basic principles of ecology - interdepen-dence, recycling, partnership, flexibility, diversity, and, as a consequence of all those, sustainability. As our century comes to a close and we go towards the beginning of a new millennium, the survival of humanity will depend on our ecological literacy, on our ability to understand these principles of ecology and live accordingly.”

A path forward for living laboratories

The following ideas are drawn from my rough draft notes for a research white paper I’m writing at the moment based on my articles since 2007. The paper is intended to be a survey and my reflections of some of the emerging ideas and ages old wisdom born from our community of practice over the last 35-50 or so years, and how we can improve the creations and contributions many of us are making to serving and evolution of capital markets, economic development, business systems, ecological management, regenerative agriculture, circular economy, impact investing, restoration and reconciliation, etc. and all the various approaches you can imagine to find better ways forward:

There is an imperative for a new paradigm that goes beyond sustainable development, one that involves a collective vision for redesigning our civilization, drawing inspiration from nature through biomimicry. At the heart of this transformation is working within planetary boundaries and embracing a city-to-city, citizen-to-citizen cooperative community of practice within a larger bioregional framework. This framework accounts for local community efforts and nature's context within each bioregion from which cities operate. 

For example, Mediterranean cities—or leaders within cities residing in Mediterranean climates in one of the four bioregions of that template—can cooperate with each other since they face very similar conditions of climate and the challenges of those unique environments.

To fulfill the grand aspirations of regenerative development and economic transformation, it is essential to establish guiding principles for future inquiry and create contexts that are resilient and adaptable. Adopting a localized approach to development and financing allows for improved coordination and tailors solutions to the needs of specific communities. 

There needs to be a new era of cooperation emerging, benefited from the technosphere—the conscious cultivation of communities across the planet harnessing relational bonds that can now be formed through ubiquitous tools like communication networks, videoconferencing, peer learning platforms, cooperative tools, and AI.

Yet to underwrite evolutionary cooperation—a hallmark of the emerging Symbiocene—we need resources. Among these are the eight types of capital, of which money is only one. 

We must transcend the logic of the global casino toward a culture of care—place by place, culture by culture, people to people. This new ethos provides a responsibility to steward the collective through this conceptual emergency. Like sailors navigating treacherous narrows, we require deft leaders—systems leaders—who operate with full responsibility to care equally for future and current generations.

This must be grounded in ecological principles, evolutionary systems thinking, and multidisciplinary approaches to resilience. Cooperation has brought humanity this far; we must partner together in new and innovative ways for a win-win society. Emerging scholarship on Darwin’s thinking reveals that cooperative systems increase survival as organisms learned over eons that working together gets us farther than working apart.

From intergenerational wisdom such as the Golden Rule, we must also listen to life's principles through biomimicry and symbiosis—patterns tested over nearly four billion years on Earth—to guide civilization design. For example, we can create curricula inspired by living systems for human settlements, land use planning, and urban-rural landscape regeneration.

By integrating scenarios for opportunities emerging from today’s chaos, we harness collective intelligence to co-creatively architect better futures. This involves creating bioregional regeneration communities of practice—peer-to-peer learning laboratories designed to improve life for families today while ensuring better outcomes for future generations in hometowns, cities, states, and countries worldwide.

We must design ways to steward our heritage and wealth as fiduciaries for our collective inheritance. This requires fully recognizing the incalculable value of Earth's life-support systems that have enabled humanity’s existence.

By reevaluating notions of value, risk, and growth, we can develop a new Modern Portfolio Theory encompassing all treasures—whether tied to places like cities or bioregions or families or neighborhoods. Our worldview must evolve beyond calcified 20th-century models into frameworks suited for 21st-century challenges.

If money makes the world go round, we must redesign how it is managed to unlock wealth embedded in living systems around us. Just as a caterpillar uses its gifts to become a butterfly, we must integrate impact investing with economic development through regeneration—not mere sustainability.

This perspective nurtures ecosystems and communities while fostering innovation through living laboratories that test frameworks for development. Fiduciary responsibility should extend beyond financial capital to encompass all eight types of capital—reflecting holistic views on wealth.

Rather than hoarding insights privately, these tools should serve as public utilities empowering sovereign communities toward stewardship over their collective inheritance.

The fusion between cooperative mindsets across disciplines is essential for integrating impact investing with bioregional development rooted in living systems principles. Observing how plants or animals harmonize with nature offers profound lessons for designing finance aligned with ecological resilience.

Such systems embrace complexity while fostering connectivity, diversity promotion, resilience cultivation—all grounded locally yet regenerative globally—and community-led approaches holistically integrated into finance models ensuring thriving futures.

Were finance allowed evolution serving humanity's needs alongside ecosystems under "Five R’s" (Relationship/Resilience/Regeneration/Reconciliation/Reverence), it would awaken humanity’s sense belonging within interconnected webs spanning life itself.

Bioregional financial systems being developed globally promise flourishing cooperative economies supporting humans alongside ecosystems alike—a transformation requiring expanded imaginal capacities distributing solutions innovatively across cities/bioregions alike accelerating adoption best practices enhancing quality-of-life everywhere.

Expanding Our Perceptual Range: A Systems View of Life, Economy, and Consciousness

 Thank you AI:

“ Expanding Our Perceptual Range: A Systems View of Life, Economy, and Consciousness

In the face of mounting global challenges, from climate change to social inequality, it is becoming increasingly clear that our current economic and social paradigms are inadequate. To address these issues, we must fundamentally transform our understanding of life, economy, and consciousness itself. Drawing on decades of research and insight from systems thinking, ecology, physics, and economics, we propose a new framework for perceiving and interacting with our world.

The Limits of Our Current Perception

Our civilization has long operated under a mechanistic worldview, seeing the universe as a collection of separate parts rather than an interconnected whole. This perspective, rooted in Cartesian dualism and Newtonian physics, has led to reductionist approaches in science, economics, and governance. As Fritjof Capra notes, “The major problems of our time cannot be understood in isolation. They are systemic problems, which means that they are interconnected and interdependent.”

Hazel Henderson aptly observes that “the humanoid is a perceiving/differentiating device of limited range inevitably distorts the visioning of the totality.” This limitation in our perceptual apparatus has profound implications for how we understand and interact with the world around us. Our tendency to categorize, separate, and reduce complex phenomena into simpler components has allowed for significant technological progress, but it has also blinded us to the intricate web of relationships that sustain life on Earth.

The Systems View of Life

To transcend these limitations, we must adopt what Capra and Luisi call “the systems view of life.” This perspective recognizes that living systems are inherently interconnected, self-organizing, and emergent. As Buckminster Fuller reminds us, “Synergy is the only word in our language that means behavior of whole systems unpredicted by the separately observed behaviors of any of the system’s separate parts.”

This systems view extends beyond biology to encompass social, economic, and ecological realms. It reveals that the challenges we face are not isolated problems but symptoms of a larger crisis in perception and values. Climate change, biodiversity loss, and economic inequality are all interconnected manifestations of our failure to recognize the fundamental interdependence of all life.

Rethinking Economics and Wealth

Our current economic models, fixated on quantitative growth and monetary metrics like GDP, fail to capture the true wealth and well-being of societies. As Gregory Wendt points out, “We need to recognize these blind spots in our current way of doing business. Once we do so, we can reshape the current model by incorporating these values and ways of seeing the world.”

Hazel Henderson’s work on redefining progress and wealth has been instrumental in this regard. She argues for a more comprehensive understanding of economics that includes the “love economy” of unpaid work, the value of natural capital, and the importance of social and ecological well-being. This expanded view of wealth aligns with Riane Eisler’s concept of a “caring economy” that values nurturing, empathy, and collaboration.

Qualitative Growth and the New Prosperity

Capra and Henderson’s concept of “qualitative growth” offers a crucial reframing of economic development. Unlike unlimited quantitative growth, which is unsustainable on a finite planet, qualitative growth focuses on development that enhances the quality of life without necessarily increasing material consumption. This aligns with what Tim Jackson calls “prosperity without growth” – a vision of human flourishing that doesn’t rely on ever-increasing GDP.

As Buckminster Fuller presciently stated, “We are called to be architects of the future, not its victims.” This requires us to design economic systems that mimic the cyclical, regenerative processes of nature. Concepts like the circular economy and regenerative agriculture are steps in this direction, but they must be part of a broader shift in how we conceive of progress and development.

Expanding Consciousness and Perception

To implement these new models, we must expand our individual and collective consciousness. This involves not just intellectual understanding but a profound shift in how we perceive and experience reality. As Henderson suggests, we need to “write the observer back into the equation” – recognizing that our consciousness shapes the world we perceive and interact with.

Fuller’s concept of “Spaceship Earth” provides a powerful metaphor for this expanded awareness. By seeing our planet as an integrated, finite system of which we are all crew members, we can begin to grasp the true nature of our interdependence and shared responsibility.

This expansion of consciousness has practical implications for decision-making in business, government, and civil society. It calls for what Capra terms “ecoliteracy” – a deep understanding of the principles of ecology and systems thinking applied to social organization.

Technology and Collective Intelligence

Emerging technologies, particularly in the realms of artificial intelligence and global communication networks, offer unprecedented tools for expanding our perceptual range. As Wendt suggests, we must ask, “How does the tool of AI harness the collective wisdom of our human, the noosphere, to create futures which enable our planetary species to evolve far beyond the implicit cognitive limitations of our human conditioning?”

These technologies, when aligned with systems thinking and ecological awareness, can help us visualize and manage complex global systems in real-time. They can facilitate new forms of participatory democracy, collaborative problem-solving, and collective intelligence that transcend traditional boundaries of nation-states and disciplines.

A New Story for Humanity

Ultimately, what we are proposing is a new story for humanity – one that recognizes our fundamental interconnectedness with all of life and our potential for conscious evolution. As Thomas Berry put it, we need a new “story of the universe” that provides a meaningful context for our existence and guides our actions toward a sustainable and flourishing future.

This new narrative must integrate the insights of modern science with the wisdom of indigenous cultures and spiritual traditions. It must bridge the artificial divide between the material and the spiritual, recognizing, as Fuller did, that “Unity is plural and, at minimum, is two.”

Conclusion: Toward a Planetary Civilization

The transformation we are calling for is nothing less than the birth of a new planetary civilization – one that operates in harmony with Earth’s ecosystems and realizes the full potential of human consciousness. This vision, while ambitious, is not utopian. It is grounded in our growing scientific understanding of living systems and the creative potential of human collaboration.

As we face the converging crises of the 21st century, we have the opportunity to make a evolutionary leap in our collective development. By expanding our perceptual range, rethinking our economic systems, and cultivating a deeper awareness of our interdependence, we can co-create a future of shared prosperity and ecological harmony.

The path forward requires us to embrace complexity, cultivate empathy, and develop new forms of governance and economic organization that reflect the true nature of living systems. It calls for a revolution in consciousness as profound as any scientific or technological revolution in human history.

In the words of Buckminster Fuller, “We are called to be architects of the future, not its victims.” The choice is ours, and the time for action is now. By expanding our perception and reimagining our relationship with each other and the living Earth, we can navigate the challenges ahead and realize our potential as conscious agents of evolution.”

Systems View of Life Book Article

This is a 2014 review from Resurgence Magazine https://www.resurgence.org/magazine/article4162-the-systems-view-of-life.html

Fritjof Capra and Pier Luigi Luisi explain how their new book captures a different understanding of how life works. The Systems View of Life: A Unifying Vision by Fritjof Capra and Pier Luigi Luisi is published by Cambridge University Press, 2014. ISBN: 9781107011366.

The great challenge of our time is to build and nurture sustainable communities, designed in such a way that their ways of life, businesses, economy, physical structures, and technologies respect, honour, and cooperate with Nature’s inherent ability to sustain life. The first step in this endeavour, naturally, must be to understand how Nature sustains life. It turns out that this involves a whole new conception of life. Indeed, such a new conception has emerged over the last 30 years.

In our new book, The Systems View of Life, we integrate the ideas, models, and theories underlying this new understanding of life into a single coherent framework. We call it “the systems view of life” because it involves a new kind of thinking – thinking in terms of relationships, patterns, and context – which is known as “systems thinking”, or “systemic thinking”. We offer a multidisciplinary textbook that integrates four dimensions of life: the biological, cognitive, social, and ecological dimensions; and we discuss the philosophical, social, and political implications of this unifying vision.

Taking a broad sweep through history and across scientific disciplines, beginning with the Renaissance and the Scientific Revolution, we chronicle the evolution of Cartesian mechanism from the 17th to the 20th centuries, the rise of systems thinking in the 1930s and 1940s, the revolutionary paradigm shift in 20th-century physics, and the development of complexity theory (technically known as nonlinear dynamics), which raised systems thinking to an entirely new level.

During the past 30 years, the strong interest in complex, nonlinear phenomena has generated a whole series of new and powerful theories that have dramatically increased our understanding of many key characteristics of life. Our synthesis of these theories, which takes up the central part of our book, is what we refer to as the systems view of life. In this article, we can present only a few highlights.

One of the most important insights of the systemic understanding of life is the recognition that networks are the basic pattern of organisation of all living systems. Wherever we see life, we see networks. Indeed, at the very heart of the change of paradigms from the mechanistic to the systemic view of life we find a fundamental change of metaphors: from seeing the world as a machine to understanding it as a network.

Closer examination of these living networks has shown that their key characteristic is that they are self-generating. Technically, this is known as the theory of autopoiesis, developed in the 1970s and 1980s by Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela. Autopoiesis means “self-making”. Living networks continually create, or recreate themselves by transforming or replacing their components. In this way they undergo continual structural changes while preserving their web-like patterns of organisation. This coexistence of stability and change is indeed one of the key characteristics of life.

In our synthesis, we extend the conception of living networks from biological to social networks, which are networks of communications; and we discuss the implications of the paradigm shift from the machine to the network for two specific fields: management and health care.

One of the most rewarding features of the systems view of life is the new understanding of evolution it implies. Rather than seeing evolution as the result of only random mutations and natural selection, we are beginning to recognise the creative unfolding of life in forms of ever-increasing diversity and complexity as an inherent characteristic of all living systems. We are also realising that the roots of biological life reach deep into the non-living world, into the physics and chemistry of membrane-bounded bubbles — proto cells that were involved in a process of “prebiotic” evolution until the first living cells emerged from them.

One of the most important philosophical implications of the new systemic understanding of life is a novel conception of mind and consciousness, which finally overcomes the Cartesian division between mind and matter. Following Descartes, scientists and philosophers for more than 300 years continued to think of the mind as an intangible entity (res cogitans) and were unable to imagine how this “thinking thing” is related to the body. The decisive advance of the systems view of life has been to abandon the Cartesian view of mind as a thing, and to realise that mind and consciousness are not things but processes.

This novel concept of mind is known today as the Santiago theory of cognition, also developed by Maturana and Varela at the University of Chile in Santiago. The central insight of the Santiago theory is the identification of cognition, the process of knowing, with the process of life. Cognition is the activity involved in the self-generation and self-perpetuation of living networks. Thus life and cognition are inseparably connected. Cognition is immanent in matter at all levels of life.

The Santiago theory of cognition is the first scientific theory that overcomes the Cartesian division of mind and matter. Mind and matter no longer appear to belong to two separate categories, but can be seen as representing two complementary aspects of the phenomenon of life: process and structure. At all levels of life, mind and matter, process and structure, are inseparably connected.

Cognition, as understood in the Santiago theory, is associated with all levels of life and is thus a much broader phenomenon than consciousness. Consciousness – that is, conscious, lived experience – is a special kind of cognitive process that unfolds at certain levels of cognitive complexity that require a brain and a higher nervous system. The central characteristic of this special cognitive process is self-awareness. In our book, we review several recent systemic theories of consciousness in some detail.

Our discussion also includes the spiritual dimension of consciousness. We find that the essence of spiritual experience is fully consistent with the systems view of life. When we look at the world around us, whether within the context of science or of spiritual practice, we find that we are not thrown into chaos and randomness but are part of a great order, a grand symphony of life. We share not only life’s molecules, but also its basic principles of organisation with the rest of the living world. Indeed, we belong to the universe, and this experience of belonging makes our lives profoundly meaningful.

In the last part of our book, titled Sustaining the Web of Life, we discuss the critical importance of the systems view of life for dealing with the problems of our multi-faceted global crisis. It is now becoming more and more evident that the major problems of our time – energy, environment, climate change, poverty – cannot be understood in isolation. They are systemic problems, which means that they are all interconnected and interdependent, and require corresponding systemic solutions.

We review a variety of already existing solutions, based on systems thinking and the principles of ecodesign. These solutions would solve not only the urgent problem of climate change, but also many of our other global problems – degradation of the environment, food insecurity, poverty, unemployment, and others. Together, these solutions present compelling evidence that the systemic understanding of life has already given us the knowledge and the technologies to build a sustainable future.

Fritjof Capra, physicist and systems theorist, has been engaged in a systematic examination of the philosophical and social implications of contemporary science for the past 35 years. Pier Luigi Luisi is Professor of Biochemistry at the University of Rome. His main research focuses on the experimental, theoretical, and philosophical aspects of the origins of life