The Systems View of Life: A Unifying Vision

by Fritjof Capra

Because of social and cultural conditioning, people often find it impossible to release their stresses in healthy ways and therefore choose – consciously or unconsciously – to get sick as a way out. Their illness may be physical or mental, or it may manifest itself as violent and reckless behavior, which may appropriately be called social illnesses.

Sustained life is a property of an ecological system rather than a single organism or species. Traditional biology has tended to concentrate attention on individual organisms rather than on the biological continuum. The origin of life is thus looked for as a unique event in which an organism arises from the surrounding milieu. A more ecologically balanced point of view would examine the proto-ecological cycles and subsequent chemical systems that must have developed and flourished while objects resembling organisms appeared.

Indeed, according to Gaia theory (discussed in Section 8.3.3), the evolution of the first living organisms went hand in hand with the transformation of the planetary surface from an inorganic environment to the self-regulating biosphere. “In that sense,” writes Morowitz (1992, p. 6), “life is a property of planets rather than of individual organisms.”

ecological communities were conceived as networks of organisms interlinked through feeding relations. This idea led not only to the concepts of food chains and food cycles,

principal theoretical framework for subsequent generations of ecologists – the flow of energy and matter from one organism to another.

“trophic” – from the Greek trophe (“food”) – to discuss feeding relations.

The only waste generated by the ecosystem as a whole is the heat energy of respiration, which is radiated into the atmosphere and is replenished continually from the sun through photosynthesis.

In addition to the dynamics of ecological cycles and flows, ecologists from the very beginning studied the directional structural changes of an ecosystem as a whole, known as ecological succession.

Its interactions with the environment are cognitive – that is, determined by its own internal organization.

the concept of autopoiesis is glaringly absent from the literature on systems ecology.

The defining feature of an autopoietic system is that it continually recreates itself within a boundary of its own making

We conclude from these considerations that the question of whether, and how exactly, the concept of autopoiesis applies to ecosystems, is still wide open and well worth in-depth discussions within the conceptual framework of systems ecology.

According to Gaia theory, the Earth's atmosphere is created, transformed, and maintained by the biosphere's metabolic processes.

The Gaia system is clearly self-generating. The planetary metabolism converts inorganic substances into organic, living matter and back into soil, oceans, and air. All components of the Gaian network, including those of its atmospheric boundary, are produced by processes within the network.

According to Margulis, the concept of a planetary autopoietic network is justified because all life is embedded in a self-organizing web of bacteria, involving elaborate networks of sensory and control systems which we are only beginning to recognize.

The key to an operational definition of ecological sustainability is the realization that we do not need to invent sustainable human communities from scratch but can model them after nature's ecosystems, which are sustainable communities of plants, animals, and microorganisms.

Hence, sustainability does not mean that things do not change. It is a dynamic process of coevolution rather than a static state.

we need to understand the principles of organization that ecosystems have evolved to sustain the web of life. In recent years, this understanding has become known as ecological literacy, or “ecoliteracy”

the planet's ecosystems have organized themselves in subtle and complex ways so as to maximize their sustainability. This wisdom of nature is the essence of ecoliteracy.

The success of the whole community depends on the success of its individual members, while the success of each member depends on the success of the community as a whole.

Understanding ecological interdependence means understanding relationships. It requires the shifts of perception that are characteristic of systems thinking – from the parts to the whole, from objects to relationships, from quantities to qualities

The fact that the basic pattern of life is a network means that the relationships among the members of an ecological community are nonlinear, involving multiple feedback loops. Linear chains of cause and effect exist very rarely in ecosystems.

Thus a disturbance will not be limited to a single effect but is likely to spread out in ever-widening patterns. It may even be amplified by interdependent feedback loops, which may completely obscure the original source of the disturbance.

A major clash between economics and ecology derives from the fact that nature is cyclical, whereas our industrial systems are linear. Our businesses take resources, transform them into products plus waste, and sell the products to consumers, who discard more waste when they have consumed the products.

“Life did not take over the globe by combat, but by networking.”

A sustainable human community interacts with other communities – human and nonhuman – in ways that enable them to live and develop according to their nature.

The flexibility of an ecosystem is a consequence of its multiple feedback loops,

the original disturbance generates a fluctuation around a feedback loop, which eventually brings the fish/algae system back into balance.

The web of life is a flexible, ever-fluctuating network. The more variables are kept fluctuating, the more dynamic is the system, the greater is its flexibility, and the greater is its ability to adapt to changing conditions. As we discussed in our previous chapter, loss of flexibility always means loss of health.

These considerations lead to the important realization that managing a social system – a company, a city, or an economy – means finding the optimal values for the system's variables. If one tries to maximize any single variable instead of optimizing it, this will invariably damage the system as a whole.

The diversity of an ecosystem is closely connected to the system's network structure. A diverse ecosystem will be resilient, because it contains many species with overlapping ecological functions that can partially replace one another.

In other words, the more complex the network is, the richer is its pattern of interconnections, and the more resilient it will be; and since the complexity of the network is a consequence of its biodiversity, a diverse ecological community is resilient.

However, diversity is a strategic advantage only if there is a truly interconnected 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.

ecology itself is essentially a science of relationships

the focus of the ecoliteracy curriculum is on relationships, patterns, and context.

the first three principles of ecology are networks, flows, and cycles.

Finally, the students can easily observe that not all changes are cyclical, that there are also changes of development.

Qualities arise from processes and patterns of relationships among the parts.

Hence, we cannot understand the nature of complex systems such as organisms, ecosystems, societies, and economies if we try to describe them in purely quantitative terms.

Quantities can be measured; qualities nee...

Since all qualities arise from processes and patterns of relationships, they will necessarily include subjective elements if these processes and relationships involve human beings.

These considerations imply that, to properly assess the health of an economy, we need qualitative indicators of poverty, health, equity, education, social inclusion, and the state of the natural environment – none of which can be reduced to money coefficients or aggregated into a simple number.

creativity – the generation of new forms – has been recognized in the systems view of life as a key property of all living systems. Life continually reaches out to create novelty.

As living systems mature, their growth processes shift from quantitative to qualitative growth.

From the ecological point of view, the distinction between “good” and “bad” economic growth is obvious. Bad growth is growth of production processes and services that externalize social and environmental costs,

In addition to well-known images of manliness like physical strength, toughness, and aggression, Gilmore found that in culture after culture, “real” men have traditionally been those who produce more than they consume.

globalization has proceeded through a process that is characteristic of all human organizations – the interplay between designed and emergent structures

Once the global financial networks reached a certain level of complexity, their nonlinear interconnections generated rapid feedback loops that gave rise to many unsuspected emergent phenomena. The resulting new economy is so complex and turbulent that it defies analysis in conventional economic terms.

But their models turned out to be wrong, because physicists and mathematicians are not experts in human behavior, and human behavior cannot be modeled mathematically.

The new economy consists of a global meta-network of complex technological and human interactions, involving multiple feedback loops operating far from equilibrium, which produce a never-ending variety of emergent phenomena.