Too much and for too long, we seemed to have surrendered personal excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our gross national product, […] if we judge the United States of America by that — counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children. Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.

Senator Robert Kennedy, 1968

We have known for a long time that judging an economy’s progress and success in quantitative (financial) terms leads to dangerous distortions and misplaced priorities. In 1972, Limits to Growth warned of the potentially devastating environmental effects of unbridled growth and resource depletion on a finite planet. While some of the predictions made were delayed by the extraordinary resilience of the planetary system, recent research suggests that we are now very close to witnessing the collapse scenario of ‘business as usual’ that the authors warned of. In their 30 years up-date to Limits to Growth the authors emphasized:

Sustainability does not mean zero growth. Rather, a sustainable society would be interested in qualitative development, not physical expansion. It would use material growth as a considered tool, not a perpetual mandate. […] it would begin to discriminate among kinds of growth and purposes for growth. It would ask what the growth is for, and who would benefit, and what it would cost, and how long it would last, and whether the growth could be accommodated by the sources and sinks of the earth.

Meadows, Randers & Meadows (2005: 22) 224

The calls for ‘de-growth’ (Assadourian, 2012), post-growth economics (Post Growth Institute, 2015), prosperity without growth (Jackson, 2011), and a ‘steady state economy’ (Daly, 2009) have become louder and have found a much wider audience in recent years. All these more or less anti-growth perspectives make important contributions to our rethinking of economics with people and planet in mind, but they might be over-swinging the pendulum.

As a biologist who is aware of how growth in living systems tends to have qualitative and quantitative aspects, I feel uncomfortable with demonizing ‘growth’ altogether. What we need is a more nuanced understanding of how as living systems mature they shift from an early (juvenile) stage that favours quantitative growth to a later (mature) stage of growing (transforming) qualitatively rather than quantitatively.

It seems that our key challenge is how to shift from an economic system based on the notion of unlimited growth to one that is both ecologically sustainable and socially just. ‘No growth’ is not the answer. Growth is a central characteristic of all life; a society, or economy, that does not grow will die sooner or later. Growth in nature, however, is not linear and unlimited. While certain parts of organisms, or ecosystems, grow, others decline, releasing and recycling their components which become resources for new growth.

Fritjof Capra and Hazel Henderson (2013: 4)

Capra and Henderson argue that “we cannot understand the nature of complex systems such as organisms, ecosystems, societies, and economies if we describe them in purely quantitative terms”. Since “qualities arise from processes and patterns of relationships” they need to be mapped rather than measured (p.7). There are close parallels between the difference in how economists and ecologists understand the concepts of growth and development. While economists tend to take a purely quantitative approach, ecologists and biologists know how to differentiate between the qualitative and quantitative aspects of both growth and development.

It appears that the linear view of economic development, as used by most mainstream and corporate economists and politicians, corresponds to the narrow quantitative concept of economic growth, while the biological and ecological sense of development corresponds to the notion of qualitative growth. In fact, the biological concept of development includes both quantitative and qualitative growth.

(ibid: 9)

Life’s growth patterns follow the logistic curve rather than the exponential curve. One example of aberrant quantitative growth in living systems is that of cancer cells which ultimately kill their host. Unlimited quantitative growth is fatal for living systems and economies. Qualitative growth in living organisms, ecosystems and economies, “by contrast, can be sustainable if it involves a dynamic balance between growth, decline, and recycling, and if it also includes development in terms of learning and maturing” (p.9). Capra and Henderson argue:

Instead of assessing the state of the economy in terms of the crude quantitative measure of GDP, we need to distinguish between ‘good’ growth and ‘bad’ growth and then increase the former at the expense of the latter, so that the natural and human resources tied up in wasteful and unsound production processes can be freed and recycled as resources for efficient and sustainable processes.

(ibid: 10)

The distinction between good growth and bad growth can be informed by a deeper socio- ecological understanding of their impact. While bad growth externalizes the social and ecological costs of the degradation of the Earth’s eco-social systems, good growth “is growth of more efficient production processes and services which fully internalise costs that involve renewable energies, zero emissions, continual recycling of natural resources, and restoration of the Earth’s ecosystems” (p.10). Capra and Henderson conclude: “the shift from quantitative to qualitative growth […] can steer countries from environmental destruction to ecological sustainability and from unemployment, poverty, and waste to the creation of meaningful and dignified work” (p.13).

Nurturing qualitative growth through the integration of diversity into interconnected collaborative networks at and across local, regional and global scales facilitates the emergence of regenerative cultures.

[This is an excerpt from my book Designing Regenerative Cultures, published by Triarchy Press, 2016.]

Photo by Tim @ Photovisions

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BARRIO SOLAR was created on September 21st, the day after Hurricane Maria devastated the island nation of Puerto Rico.

Our team at BARRIO SOLAR has developed a simple and cost-effective way to ship a variety of solar devices to the island, where they will be distributed to shelters, community centers and homes – especially the small towns in the center and south of the island – where immediate aid and reconstructed power sources are least likely to be deployed.

The solar devices to be shipped to Puerto Rico will be collected and distributed by a network of 35 women’s shelters and aid organizations under the leadership of Paz para la Mujer. By partnering with these women’s networks, we will be avoiding the risk of black market profiteering and, as we are at this moment a fully volunteer network, the entire distribution effort will be done for free.

Our goal is to raise $25,000 within the next few weeks, and to have the products on the ground in Puerto Rico by the first week of December.

We have purposely limited this fundraiser to $25,000, because it will be the first run of our new distribution network, and we want to ensure that our partners at Paz para la Mujer are able to accommodate this volume of solar devices.

We have teamed up with CENSA, the Center for the Studies of the Americas in Berkeley, CA, as our fiscal sponsor. They will ensure that the funds we raise go directly to purchase the solar kits and lights noted above.

With your help, we can provide immediate relief to thousands of people in Puerto Rico, who currently have no power or fresh water.

Once our goal of $25,000 is met, we will buy the products and have them immediately shipped directly to Puerto Rico within the first week of December.

People have asked us: why bother with this initiative when so many other larger organizations are taking solar power to Puerto Rico?
Our response? We at BARRIO SOLAR are proud to be among the many organizations that are bringing fossil fuel independence to the island of Puerto Rico via solar technologies, and we are excited to be part of these self-organizing solar support networks.

Please be generous in your support for the people of Puerto Rico.

Gracias! Thank You!

Fritjof Capra, Indira Cortes and Elizabeth Hawk for BARRIO SOLAR

Click here to contribute to the campaign

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Back to the Present

Trumpeted as ‘the most significant innovation in beekeeping since 1852’, the Flow Hive  was pitched to a crowd-funding site in 2015 as the bee keeper’s dream product.

‘Turn the tap and watch as pure, fresh, clean honey flows right out of the hive and into your jar’ gushed the website; ‘No mess, no fuss, no expensive equipment – and all without disturbing the bees’.

Helped by glowing reviews in Forbes, Wired, and Fast Company, Flow Hive’s pitch on Indiegogo worked like a dream; having sought $70,000 to launch the product, more than $6 million had been committed on Indiegogo at the time of writing.

Too good to be true? Sadly, yes.

As news of Flow Hive spread, natural beekeepers described Flow Hive’s approach as ‘battery farming for bees’. The modular plastic comb at the heart of Flow Hive’s design might well be convenient for honey-loving humans, they charged – but what about the welfare of bees?

As Kirsten Bradley explained, the combs in Flow Hive are far more neat and orderly than the ones bees make on their own. Left to themselves, bees set their own cell size according to the season, and the colony’s particular needs at that moment.

A beehive, in other words, is not just a factory; it’s part of a super-organism within which the comb functions as a central organ. The hive is the bees’ home, and supports their chemically enabled communication system.

The replacement of an adaptive wax hive a rigid by man-made plastic one creates a functionally depleted and sometimes toxic environment. The imposition of standardised cells prevents the bees from breeding drones throughout the hive; this reduces genetic diversity among surrounding bee populations, and resilience is reduced.

Instead of thinking of the colony as a complex living system, the inventors of Flow Hive seem to have imagined insects as components of a production machine in which they are manipulated to suit the human desire for profit and efficiency.

Flow Hive is just one example, among myriad human inventions, of a design approach that impedes inter-connectedness between the elements, and the whole, in healthy living systems.

In a perpetual search for order and control, we privilege the abstract over the lived, and impose idealised solutions that are at odds with how healthy living systems actually behave.

We strive for perfect, static, utopian solutions that are different, in kind, from real-world ecologies that are dynamic and constantly changing.

This habit of mind is not limited to the engineering of hard systems. Some visions of nature itself have been utopian in this sense.

Until recently, conservation research tended to focus on the individual species as the unit of study – for example, by looking at the impact of habitat destruction on an individual’s situation. But there is now increasing recognition that species interactions may be much more important.

As the ecologist Jane Memmott has explained, all organisms are linked to at least one other species in a variety of critical ways – for example, as predators or prey, or as pollinators or seed dispersers. Each species is embedded in a complex network of interactions.

The extinction of one species can lead to a cascade of secondary extinctions in ecological networks in ways that we are only just beginning to understand.

Since the 1980s, scientific discoveries have confirmed the proposition that no organism is truly autonomous.

In Gaia theory, systems thinking, and resilience science, researchers have shown that our planet is a web of interdependent ecosystems. The dead, mechanical object that has shaped scientific thought for most of the modern age turns out to have been misguided.

From the study everything from sub-microscopic viruses, yeasts, ants, mosses, lichen, slime moulds and mycorrhizae, to trees, rivers and climate systems, a new story has emerged. All natural phenomena are not only connected; their very essence is to be in relationship with other things – including us.

On a molecular, atomic and viral level, humanity and ‘the environment’ literally merge with one another, forging biological alliances as a matter of course.

Although our culture does not equip us well to grasp these hidden connections, this knowledge is literally vital.

For thinkers such as Fritjof Capra, the greatest challenge of our time is to foster widespread awareness of the hidden connections among living – and nonliving – things.

In a powerful follow-up to Capra’s challenge, Stephan Harding, in his book Animate Earth, describes how the world works not only at the macro level – the atmosphere, oceans, or Earth’s crust – but also on a micro level. Plankton and bacteria contribute to the formation of clouds by acting as nuclei for water droplets; micorrhizal fungi team up with plants that grow in poor soils; chemical signals called pheromones allow ant colonies to behave like a super organism.

Co-evolution – the formation of biocultural partnerships – turns out to be how our fertile planet thrives, says Harding. Although we have have ruptured these relationships, it is not to late to build bridges so that Earth can become healthy and self-regulating once again.

These scientific findings resolve a question that has vexed philosophers more than any other: Where does the mind end, and the world begin?

Until recently, we tended to think of the nervous system as a glorified a set of message cables connecting the body to the brain – but from a scientific perspective, the boundary between mind and world turns out to be a porous one.

The human mind is hormonal, as well as neural. Our thoughts and experiences are not limited to brain activity in the skull, nor are they enclosed by the skin. Our metabolism, and nature’s, are inter-connected on a molecular, atomic and viral level.

Mental phenomena – our thoughts – emerge not merely from brain activity, but from what Teed Rockwell describes as “a single unified system embracing the nervous system, body, and environment”.

The importance of this new perspective is profound.

If our minds are shaped by our physical environments – and not just by synapses clicking away inside our box-like skulls – then the division between the thinking self, and the natural world – a division which underpins the whole of modern thought – begins to dissolve.

Having worked hard, throughout the modern era to lift ourselves ‘above’ nature, we are now being told by modern science that man and nature are one, after all.

New materialism

Ecological networks also involve things.

In today’s world we are taught to perceive the things around us as lifeless, brute, and inert. Nature, insofar as we think about it at all, is a nice place to go for a picnic. With this picture of the world in mind, we fill up our lives, lands and oceans with junk without a second thought.

But we used to think quite differently: The idea that things might be ‘vital’ was first expounded formally by Greek philosophers known as ‘hylozoists’ – ‘those who think that matter is alive’; they made no distinction between animate and inanimate, spirit and matter.

For Roman sages, likewise: In his epic work On The Nature of Things, the poet Lucretius argued that everything is connected, deep down, in a world of matter and energy.

Ancient Chinese philosophers also believed that the ultimate reality of the world is intrinsically dynamic; in the Tao, everything in the universe, whether animate or inanimate, is embedded in the continuous flow and change.

In Buddhist texts, images of “stream” and “flow” appear repeatedly; they evoke a universe that’s in a state of impermanence, of ceaseless movement.

In seventeenth century Europe, the Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza conceived of existence as a continuum, an inseparable tangle of body, mind, ideas and matter. And just seventy years ago, Maurice Merleau-Ponty was an advocate of not only being in the world but also belonging to it, having a relationship with it, interacting with it, perceiving it in all dimensions.

The belief that matter matters, so to speak, was obscured by the fire and smoke of the thermo-industrial economy. Fossil fuels powered economic growth so powerfully since the nineteenth century that we lost sight of the fact that this model might be of limited duration thanks to resource constraints.

Now, as those constraints make themselves felt, many of these ideas are resurfacing. For thinkers in the ‘new materialism’ movement, our relationship with the material world would be more respectful, and joyful, if only we realised that we are part of the world of things, not separate from it.

Timothy Morton, for example, is adamant that there is more to “things” than we know in the ‘vast, sprawling mesh of interconnection without a definite centre or edge’ that constitites our world.

Another philosopher, Jane Bennett – responding, in her words, to a ‘call from our garbage – advocates a patient, sensory attentiveness to what she calls the ‘vibrancy’ of matter and the nonhuman forces that operate outside and inside the human body.

Our wasteful patterns of consumption would soon change, she reckons, if we saw, heard, smelled, tasted and felt all this litter, rubbish, and trash as lively – not just inert stuff.

‘Sometimes those sticking their heads in the sand are looking for something deep’ quips yet another philosopher, Peter Gratton. When everything around is understood to be ‘vital’, he asks, what political and ethical consequences follow? Do bacteria count as life? Viruses? A robot? Is the eco-system itself a life?

If the answer to any of these questions is yes, or even maybe, Gratton argues, then the assumption that we humans have a right to exploit the world to our own ends begins to break down.

How innovation happens

In this context change and innovation are no longer about finely crafted ‘visions’ and the promise of a better reality described in some grand design for some future place and time. Change is more likely to happen when people reconnect – with each other, and with the biosphere – in rich, real-world, contexts.

This proposal may well strike some readers as being naive, and unrealistic. But given what we now know about the ways complex systems — including belief systems — change, my confidence in the power of the Small to shape the Big remains undimmed.

We’ve learned from systems thinking that profound transformation can unfold quietly as a variety of changes, interventions, and often small disruptions accumulate across time. At a certain moment — which is impossible to predict — a tipping point, or phase shift, is reached and the system as a whole transforms.

It’s a lesson confirmed repeatedly by history: “All the great transformations have been unthinkable until they actually came to pass” writes the French philosopher Edgar Morin; “the fact that a belief system is deeply rooted does not mean it cannot change”.

The eco-philosopher Joanna Macy describes the appearance of this new story as ‘The Great Turning’, a profound shift in our perception, a reawakening to the fact that we are not separate or apart from plants, animals, air, water, and the soils.

There is a spiritual dimension to this story – Macy is a Buddhist scholar – but her Great Turning is consistent with recent scientific discoveries, too – the idea, as articulated by Stephan Harding, that the world is “far more animate than we ever dared suppose”.

Explained in this way — by science, as much as by poetry, art, and philosophy — the Earth no longer appears to us as a repository of inert resources. On the contrary: the interdependence between healthy soils, living systems, and the ways we can help them regenerate, finally addresses the ‘why’ of economic activity that we’ve been lacking.

This new story does not negate the value of a proactive and systematic approach to design, but it does mean paying at least as much attention to the connections and interactions between elements of a system, as to discrete components.

As we saw with the Flow Hive, the danger in a product-only approach is that it imposes a too-rigid framework on a situation in which a community – like the bee colony as a super-organism – needs constantly to change if it is to remain healthy and resilient.

A growing worldwide movement is looking at the man-made world through a fresh lens. Sensible to the value of natural and social ecologies, they are searching for ways to preserve, steward and restore assets that already exist – so-called net present assets—rather than think first about extracting raw materials to make new components from scratch.

Designers and manufacturers have an important contribution to make in this movement. Designers can very usefully cast fresh and respectful eyes on a situation to reveal material and cultural qualities that might not be obvious to those who live in them.

This kind of regenerative design re-imagines the built world not as a landscape of frozen objects, but as a complex of interacting, co-dependent ecologies.

Photo by Miroslav Becvar

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A holistic understanding of modern evolutionary biology suggests that life evolves by a process of diversification and subsequent integration of diversity through collaboration (John Stewart in BioSystems, 2014). As our focus shifts from individuals and individual species as the unit of survival to the collective of life — its complex dynamic interactions and relationships — we begin to see that collaborative and symbiotic patterns and interactions are of more fundamental importance than competition as a driving force of evolution. Life’s key strategy to create conditions conducive to life is to optimize the system as a whole rather than maximizes only some parameters of the system for a few at the detriment of many (Wahl, 2016).

The patterns of evolution show a general trend of diversification and subsequent or parallel integration at a higher level of systemic complexity. This integration tends to happen predominantly through the creation of more complex organismic or social entities, primarily by collaboration and symbiosis. John Stewart suggests that this is moving us towards a ‘global entity’ (2014). Maybe this entity already exists in the life-sustaining processes of the biosphere?

The biologist Peter Corning, former president of the International Society for Systems Science and director of the Institute for the Study of Complex Systems, suggests that “one aspect of this more complex view of evolution is that both competition and cooperation may coexist at different levels of organization, or in different aspects related to the survival enterprise. There may be a delicately balanced interplay between these supposedly polar relationships” (Corning, 2005; p.38). He emphasizes that collaboration has been a key factor in the evolution of our own species. The socio-economic payoffs of collaboration in response to ecological pressures and opportunities among early humans have shaped the evolution of languages and cultures, both require and enable complex patterns of collaboration.

If a society is viewed merely as an aggregate of individuals who have no common interests, and no stake in the social order, then why should they care? But of society is viewed […] as an interdependent collective survival enterprise,’ then each of us has a vital, life-and-death stake in its viability and effective functioning, whether we recognize it or not.” — Peter Corning, 2005, p.392

If we want to re-design economics based on what we know about life’s strategy to create conditions conducive to life, we need to question some basic assumptions upon which the narrative underlying our current economic systems is built. The narrative of separation has predisposed us to focus on scarcity, competition, and the short-term maximization of individual benefit as the basis on which to create an economic system. Life’s evolutionary story shows that systemic abundance can be unlocked through collaboratively structured symbiotic networks that optimize the whole system so human communities and the rest of life can thrive.

We are not the masters of life’s diversity, and have the potential to become a regenerative presence in ecosystems and the biosphere.

Both collaboration and competition contribute to how life creates conditions conducive to life. The biologist Andreas Weber explains: “The biosphere is not cooperative in a simple, straight-forward way, but paradoxically cooperative. Symbiotic relationships emerge out of antagonistic, incompatible processes” (Weber, 2013: 32). Weber stresses that we have to understand how the works of the economist Adam Smith and the political economist Robert Malthus influenced Charles Darwin in his attempt to construct a theory of evolution.

Example of collaboration in leaf-cutter ants.

The limited narrative of separation, with its exclusively competition- and scarcity-focused understanding of life, is supported by outdated biological and economic theories. Weber calls this an “economic ideology of nature” and suggests that an ideologically biased perspective “reigns supreme over our understanding of human culture and world. It defines our embodied dimension (Homo sapiens as a gene-governed survival machine) as well as our social identity (Homo economicus as an egoistic maximizer of utility). The idea of universal competition unifies the two realms, the natural and the socio-economic. It validates the notion of rivalry and predatory self-interest as inexorable facts of life” (pp.25–26).

The optimization of resource-sharing and processing in order to (re)generate and share abundance and systemic health, rather than competition for scarce resources, is the basis of life’s way of doing economics! In attempting to create a life-friendly economy, we need to understand the profound implications that the emerging ‘systems view of life’ has for our undertaking. Here is a 7min video of Fritjof Capra presenting the book with explicit reference to economics.

Fritjof Capra on ‘The Systems View of Life — A Unifying Vision’, Capra & Luisi 2014 (7 minutes)

As the twenty-first century unfolds, a new scientific conception is emerging. It is a unified view that integrates, for the first time, life’s biological, cognitive, social, and economic dimensions. At the forefront of contemporary science, the universe is no longer seen as a machine composed of elementary building blocks. We have discovered that the material world, ultimately, is a network of inseparable patterns of relationships; that the planet as a whole is a living, self-regulating system. […] Evolution is no longer seen as a competitive struggle for existence, but rather a cooperative dance in which creativity and constant emergence of novelty are the driving forces. And with the new emphasis on complexity, networks, and patterns of organization, a new science of qualities is slowly emerging.” Fritjof Capra and Pier Luigi Luisi (2014b)

Integrating economy and ecology with wisdom

The evolutionary biologist and futurist Elisabet Sathouris describes how in the evolution of complex communities of diverse organisms a ‘maturation point’ is reached when the system realizes that “it is cheaper to feed your ‘enemies’ than to kill them” (personal comment). Having successfully populated six continents and diversified into the mosaic of value systems, worldviews, identities (national, cultural, ethnic, professional, political, etc.) and ways of living that make up humanity, we are now challenged to integrate this precious diversity into a globally and locally collaborative civilization acting wisely to create conditions conducive to life.

We have now reached a new tipping point where enmities are more expensive in all respects than friendly collaboration; where planetary limits of exploiting nature have been reached. It is high time for us to cross this new tipping point into our global communal maturity — an integration of the economy and ecology we have put into conflict with each other, to evolve an ecosophy.” –Elisabet Sathouris (2014)

The challenge of a fundamental re-design of how we do business, of our patterns of production and consumption, of the types of resources and energy we use, goes hand in hand with the structural redesign of our economic systems. We have to challenge economic orthodoxies and basic assumptions, and find ways to integrate multiple perspectives if we hope to redesign economies at multiple scales and learn how to manage our household with wisdom (oikos + sophia).

If our Homo sapiens sapiens wants to continue its fascinating yet so far relatively short evolutionary success story we have to evolve wise societies characterized by empathy, solidarity and collaboration. Wise cultures are regenerative and protect bio-cultural diversity as a source of wealth and resilience (Wahl, 2016).

[In the remainder of this module on Economic Design of Gaia Education’s course Design for Sustainability] we will take a closer look at the social and ecological impacts of the current economic and monetary system, and will explore why the globalized economy behaves as it does before we explore strategies for re-design and inspiring examples of best processes and practices in the transition towards sustainable and regenerative economic patterns at multiples scales. By revisiting basic assumptions about economics we can begin to integrate ecology and economy in full reconnection of the interbeing of nature and culture. We need wisdom to re-design an economic system fit for life. Here are some insights that can help us:

• The rules of our current economic and monetary system have been designed by people and we can therefore re-design them.
• We have to question the role of scarcity, competition, and the maximization of individual benefit has cornerstones of our competitive economy.
• In redesigning economic systems at local, regional and global scale we should pay special attention to how the system incentivises regenerative practices, increases bio-productivity sustainably, restores healthy ecosystem functioning, while nurturing thriving communities.
• Modern evolutionary biology transcends and includes Darwinian justifications of competition as ‘human nature’, as it acknowledges that complex patterns of collaboration have enabled the evolution of our species and the continued evolution of consciousness towards planetary awareness.
• Our ability to cooperate has shaped who we are in equal and possibly more profound ways than competitive behaviour, hence we need to re-design economic systems to establish a healthy balance between the way competition and collaboration are incentivised in the system.
• Rather than maximizing isolated parameters or the benefit of a select few, a re-design of our economic system to serve all of humanity and all life will have to optimize the health and resilience of the system as a whole (understanding humanity as nature; and the economy as a sub-system of society and nature in interconnected eco-social systems).
• The dominant narrative of separation creates a focus on scarcity, competition and individual advantage, while the emerging narrative of interbeing challenges us to create a win-win-win economy based on the understanding that it is in our enlightened self-interest to unlock shared abundances through collaboration.

AUTHOR’S NOTE: This is an excerpt from the Economic Design Dimension of Gaia Education’s online course in Design for Sustainability, which I recently revised and re-wrote on the basis of an earlier version by Jonathan Dawson (now head of economics at Schumacher College). The 400 hour on-line course offers a whole systems design approach to taking part in the transition towards thriving communities, vibrant regional economies and diverse regenerative cultures everywhere. The Economic Design Dimension starts on March 6th, and runs for 8 weeks (80 study hours). The above is a little preview of the nearly 140 pages of text, links and videos, that participants explore under the guidance of experience tutors and as part of a global community of learners. For more information take a look at the content of this on-line training for global-local change agents in economic design. Much of the material I used in authoring the curriculum content for this course is based on the years of research I did for my recently published book Designing Regenerative Cultures.

Photo by ..Gratefulhume..

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“This insight can help us imagine and build a new “ecolegal order” that has three strategic objectives, they argue: to disconnect law from power and violence (by reconfiguring the nation-state’s authority); to make communities sovereign (by empowering commons); and to make ownership generative (by integrating property rights with stewardship responsibilities). An eco-friendly legal order would recognize the holistic perspectives of commons in integrating costs and risks that market economies strive to externalize onto nature, communities and future generations.”

Book: Fritjof Capra and Ugo Mattei. The Ecology of Law, 2015

David Bollier reviews the argument for a law of the commons:

“State law is largely philosophically hostile to, or simply noncomprehending of, the very idea of commons and commoning. Civil law as administered by the state is focused on individual, private property rights and market exchange; it is structurally focused on “things” in isolation from dynamic social relationships, history, culture and ecosystems. The struggle to inscribe a “commons-based law” within the edifice of conventional state law is therefore an ambiguous or paradoxical challenge; some say it is impossible.

And yet it is absolutely needed because the nation-state is suffering a decline in legitimacy and efficacy as global capital becomes even more powerful, and as the scale and complexity of problems outstrip the capacity of corporate and governmental bureaucracies to solve them. Many people are starting to realize that the profound problems of modern life cannot be rectified by using the tools and mindset of modernity.

The physicist Fritjof Capra and law scholar Ugo Mattei recently shed light on this problem in their 2015 book, The Ecology of Law, which sees the history of law as an artifact of the scientific, mechanical worldview.

Capra and Mattei argue that we must transcend this legacy if we are to overcome many contemporary problems, particularly ecological disaster. They criticize modern state law because it privileges the individual as the principal agent despite the harm that this produces for the collective good and ecological stability. Law also presumes that the world can be governed by simplistic, observable cause-and-effect, mechanical relationships, ignoring the more subtle dimensions of life, especially the power of human subjectivity, caring and meaning. Capra and Mattei note the important parallels between natural science and jurisprudence over the course of history. Both science and law, for example, reflect shared conceptualizations of humans and nature articulated by John Locke, Francis Bacon, Rene Descartes, Hugo Grotius and Thomas Hobbes. All of them saw a cosmological order that is rational, empirically knowable, and governed by atomistic individuals and mechanical principles. This worldview continues to prevail in economics, social sciences, public policy and law.

The Ecology of Law explains how this understanding of the world prevents us from effectively addressing our many ecological catastrophes, and how jurisprudence as now conceived is a key part of the problem. Modernity is based on the sanctity of private property and state sovereignty, write Capra and Mattei. It is an order that presumes to be an “objective,” natural representation of reality, and that regards distinctions such as “private” and “public,” and “individual” and “collective,” as self-evident descriptions of reality.

Any practicing commoner knows that this is a highly reductionist and misleading way of understanding the world. In actual experience, individuals are nested within collectives, and they develop and flourish as individuals only through cooperating with others. Similarly, subjective experience and objective fact are not isolated and separate; they blur together. The either/or divisions of modernity function as a kind of consensual social fiction, with law affirming and enforcing these (misleading) categories of thought. For example, modern law presumes that if there is no external limit imposed on an individual citizen, each should be free to act as a “rational actor” to extract as much from nature as he/she wishes. This is presumed to improve upon nature, create value and advance human progress. In the modernist worldview that law embodies, individuals are imagined as the primary agents of change, and as isolated agents without history, social commitments or context. This gives individuals permission to be self-regarding and hedonistic in the face of collective and ecological needs – a capitalist-libertarian delusion that is celebrated and defended.

Imagining a post-capitalist future, then, is not simply about passing a new law or instituting a new set of policies. It requires that we confront our deep assumptions about worldview as embodied in law. What we need, Capra and Mattei argue, is a major paradigm shift in science and law that reflects a different understanding of nature and human beings. Instead of seeing the Earth and human societies as a machine of parts, we must see them as a holistic, indivisible ecological system: the world as a network of interdependencies. Law is not something that exists independently “out there” as an objective reality. It is a socially constructed order – a power that we must reclaim. “Law is always a process of commoning,” Capra and Mattei write, reminding us that law originates in social practice and norms; it emerges from communities of commoners. This insight can help us imagine and build a new “ecolegal order” that has three strategic objectives, they argue: to disconnect law from power and violence (by reconfiguring the nationstate’s authority); to make communities sovereign (by empowering commons); and to make ownership generative (by integrating property rights with stewardship responsibilities). An eco-friendly legal order would recognize the holistic perspectives of commons in integrating costs and risks that market economies strive to externalize onto nature, communities and future generations.”

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An important new book offering a vision of commons-based law has just arrived!  The Ecology of Law:  Toward a Legal System in Tune with Nature and Community, argues that we need to reconceptualize law itself and formally recognize commoning if we are going to address our many environmental problems.

The book is the work of two of the more venturesome minds in science and law – Fritjof Capra  and Ugo Mattei, respectively. Capra is a physicist and systems thinker who first gained international attention in 1975 with his book The Tao of Physics, which drew linkages between modern physics and Eastern mysticism. Mattei is a well-known legal theorist of the commons, international law scholar and commons activist in Italy who teaches at Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco, and at the University of Turin. He is also deputy mayor of Ch­ieri in the northern region of Italy.

The Law of Ecology is an ambitious, big-picture account of the history of law as an artifact of the scientific, mechanical worldview – a legacy that we must transcend if we are to overcome many contemporary problems, particularly ecological disaster. The book argues that modernity as a template of thought is a serious root problem in today’s world.  Among other things, it privileges the individual as supreme agent despite the harm to the collective good and ecological stability. Modernity also sees the world as governed by simplistic, observable cause-and-effect, mechanical relationships, ignoring the more subtle dimensions of life such as subjectivity, caring and meaning.

As a corrective, Capra and Mattei propose a new body of commons-based institutions recognized by law (which itself will have a different character than conventional state law).

It’s quite a treat to watch two sophisticated dissenters outline their vision of a world based on commoning and protected by a new species of “ecolaw.” Capra and Mattei start their story by sketching important parallels between natural science and jurisprudence over the course of history. Both science and law, for example, reflect shared conceptualizations of humans and nature.  We still live in the cosmological world articulated by John Locke, Francis Bacon, Rene Descartes, Hugo Grotius and Thomas Hobbes, all of whom saw the world as a rational, empirically knowable order governed by atomistic individuals and mechanical principles. This worldview continues to prevail in economics, social sciences, public policy and law.

The audacity of The Ecology of Law is its claim to explain the pathologies of modernity as they affect life today:  how this worldview prevents us from effectively addressing our many ecological catastrophes, and how jurisprudence as now conceived is a key element of this problem.  Modernity is based on the sanctity of private property and state sovereignty, write Capra and Mattei, an order that presumes to be an “objective,” natural representation of reality. Distinctions such as “private” and “public,” and “individual” and “collective,” are also presumed to be self-evident descriptions of reality.

For those of us involved with the commons, of course, we know that this is a highly reductionist and misleading way of understanding the world.  Commoning proposes more integrated categories for understanding how human beings function in the world.  In actual experience, individuals are nested within collectives, and they develop and flourish as individuals only in cooperating with others.  Similarly, subjective experience and objective fact are not isolated; they blur together.  The either/or divisions of modernity are a kind of consensual social fiction.

Law in modern societies is one of the most important tools for affirming (misleading) categories of thought.  For example, law presumes that if there is no external limit imposed on an individual citizen, each is free to act as a “rational actor” to extract as much from nature as he/she wishes.  This is presumed to improve upon nature, create value and advance human progress – a social DNA that has run amok and is destroying the planet.  In the worldview of modernity, individuals are imagined as the primary agents of change, and as isolated agents without history, social commitments or context.  This gives individuals permission to be as self-regarding and hedonistic as they wish, a dangerous capitalist-libertarian delusion that continues to hold deep sway.

Imagining a post-capitalist future, then, is not simply about passing a new law or instituting a new set of policies.  It requires that we confront our deep assumptions about worldview.  What we need, Capra and Mattei argue, is a major paradigm shift in the worldview of science and law that reflects a different understanding of nature and human beings.  We need to shift from a paradigm that sees the world as a machine, to a systemic, ecological paradigm that sees the world as a network of interdependencies.

We need to see that law is not something that exists independently “out there” as an objective reality.  It is a socially constructed order; a power that we must reclaim.  “Law is always a process of commoning,” Capra and Mattei write, reminding us that law emerges from communities of commoners.  This insight can help us build a new “ecolegal order” with three strategic objectives, they argue:  to disconnect law from power and violence (the nation-state); to make communities sovereign; and to make ownership generative.

It’s impossible to summarize all of the rich threads flowing through The Ecology of Law, so let me settle here for sharing a flavor of the argument made by the authors:

The most important structural solution to the rush toward final disorder is to restore some harmony between human laws and the laws of nature by giving law back to networks of communities. If the people were to understand the nature of law as an evolv­ing common, reflecting local conditions and fundamental needs, they would care about it. People would understand that the law is too important to remain in the hands of organized corporate interests.  We are the makers and users of the law.

An ecological understanding of law, the only revolution pos­sible through culture and genuine civic engagement, overcomes both hierarchy and competition as “correct” narratives of the le­gal order. It seeks to capture the complex relationships among the parts and the whole—between individual entitlements, duties, rights, power, and the law—by using the metaphor of the network and of the open community sharing a purpose.

Instead of being alienated from the law governing them, the participants in [commons] are their own law-givers and en­forcers; they stand outside of any power concentration and or any claim of monopoly over violence. They overcome the artificial dis­tinction between a private and a public sphere of their lives. Inter­pretation of law is here a nonprofessional exercise in the sharing of collective meaning. Law, when it is separated from depending on power and violence, is like language, culture, or the arts: it becomes a way through which a collectivity communicates and decides about itself.

The post Highly Recommended Book of the Day:: Capra & Mattei’s “The Ecology of Law” appeared first on P2P Foundation.