Patterns of Connection Quotes

“Evolution is no longer seen as a competitive struggle for existence, but rather as a cooperative dance in which creativity and the 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, Patterns of Connection: Essential Essays from Five Decades

“We shall try to show in the following that the views of modern physics are in agreement with the two ideas basic to Eastern philosophy that have been described above: the idea that the universe is an organic unity whose parts are interdependent and inseparable, and the idea that the cosmos is alive. Both of these ideas also arise in quantum mechanics and in relativity theory and find their clearest modern expression in quantum field theory.”
― Fritjof Capra, Patterns of Connection: Essential Essays from Five Decades

“The illusion of the viability of unlimited growth is maintained by economists who refuse to include the social and environmental costs of economic activities in their theories.”
― Fritjof Capra, Patterns of Connection: Essential Essays from Five Decades

“The fundamental dilemma underlying the major problems of our time seems to be the illusion that unlimited growth is possible on a finite planet. This, in turn, reflects the clash between linear thinking and the nonlinear patterns in our biosphere—the ecological networks and cycles that constitute the web of life. This highly nonlinear global network contains countless feedback loops through which the planet balances and regulates itself. Our current economic system, by contrast, is fueled by materialism and greed that do not seem to recognize any limits.”
― Fritjof Capra, Patterns of Connection: Essential Essays from Five Decades

“Thinking systemically, we will recognize the major problems of our time as systemic problems—all interconnected and interdependent.”
― Fritjof Capra, Patterns of Connection: Essential Essays from Five Decades

“The challenge of the 21st century will be to change the value system of the network society, so as to make it compatible with the demands of human dignity and ecological sustainability.”
― Fritjof Capra, Patterns of Connection: Essential Essays from Five Decades

“A sustainable business organization would be embedded in an “ecology of organizations,” in which the waste of any one organization would be a resource for another.”
― Fritjof Capra, Patterns of Connection: Essential Essays from Five Decades

“And here the fundamental dilemma appeared. The grim picture of cosmic evolution painted by the physicists—an engine that is slowly running down and grinding to a halt—was in sharp contrast to the evolutionary thinking of the biologists, who observed that the living universe evolves from disorder to order, toward states of ever increasing complexity.At the end of the 19th century, then, Newtonian mechanics, the science of eternal, reversible trajectories, had been supplemented by two diametrically opposed views of evolutionary change—that of a living world unfolding toward increasing order and complexity, and that of an engine running down, a world of ever increasing disorder. Who was right, the physicists or the biologists?”
― Fritjof Capra, Patterns of Connection: Essential Essays from Five Decades

“To solve these problems, we need systemic solutions, in which we can turn the interconnectedness of the problems to an advantage, so that one action can solve several problems at the same time. For example, if we changed from our chemical, large-scale industrial agriculture to organic, community- oriented, sustainable farming, this would contribute significantly to solving three of our biggest problems. It would greatly reduce our energy dependence, because we are now using one-fifth of our fossil fuels to grow and process food. The healthy, organically grown food would have a huge positive effect on public health, because many chronic diseases are directly linked to our diet. And finally, organic farming would contribute significantly to fighting climate change, because an organic soil is a carbon-rich soil, which means that it draws CO2 from the atmosphere and locks it up in organic matter.”
― Fritjof Capra, Patterns of Connection: Essential Essays from Five Decades

“We must teach our children, our students, and our political and corporate leaders the fundamental facts of life—for example, that one species’ waste is another species’ food; that matter cycles continually through the web of life; that the energy driving the ecological cycles flows from the sun; that diversity assures resilience; that life, from its beginning more than three billion years ago, did not take over the planet by combat but by networking.”
― Fritjof Capra, Patterns of Connection: Essential Essays from Five Decades

“What is sustained in a sustainable community is not economic growth but the entire web of life on which our longterm survival depends.”
― Fritjof Capra, Patterns of Connection: Essential Essays from Five Decades

“Farmers used to plant different crops every year, rotating them so that the balance in the soil was preserved. No pesticides were needed, since insects attracted to one crop would disappear with the next. Instead of using chemical fertilizers, farmers would enrich their fields with manure, thus returning organic matter to the soil to reenter the ecological cycle.”
― Fritjof Capra, Patterns of Connection: Essential Essays from Five Decades

“Just as the decay of last year’s fallen leaves provides nutrients for new growth this spring, some institutions must be allowed to decline and decay, so that their capital and human talents can be released and recycled to create new organizations.”
― Fritjof Capra, Patterns of Connection: Essential Essays from Five Decades

“In the 20th century, ecologists discovered that in the self-organization of ecosystems, cooperation is actually much more important than competition. We constantly observe partnerships, linkages, associations—species living inside one another, depending on one another for survival. Partnership is a key characteristic of life. Self-organization is a collective enterprise.”
― Fritjof Capra, Patterns of Connection: Essential Essays from Five Decades

“In the process of photosynthesis, green plants take up energy from the sun, transform it into chemical energy, and use it to build complex organic substances out of minerals and water—proteins, carbohydrates, fats, and so on. These are then taken up by the animals feeding on the plants and on other animals, and finally, the animals’ organic wastes (and ultimately the animals themselves) are reduced to inorganic substances by microorganisms, ending up as minerals to be taken up again by plants.”
― Fritjof Capra, Patterns of Connection: Essential Essays from Five Decades

“The view of living systems as networks provides a helpful new perspective on the so-called hierarchies of nature. For example, we can picture an ecosystem schematically as a network with a few nodes. Each node represents an organism, which means that each node, when magnified, appears itself as a network. Each node in the new network may represent an organ, which in turn will appear as a network when magnified, and so on.In other words, the web of life consists of networks within networks.”
― Fritjof Capra, Patterns of Connection: Essential Essays from Five Decades

“Since the early days of ecology, these multileveled arrangements have been called hierarchies. However, this term can be misleading, since it is derived from human hierarchies, originally from the Catholic Church and now from the military and corporate worlds. These have fairly rigid structures of domination and control, quite unlike the multileveled order found in nature.”
― Fritjof Capra, Patterns of Connection: Essential Essays from Five Decades

“Interdependence  When you look at an ecosystem—say at a meadow—when you study it and try to understand what it is, the first thing you will recognize is that there are many species there. There are many plants, many insects, many microorganisms. And they’re not just an assemblage, or collection, of species. They are a community, which means that they are interdependent. They depend on one another in many ways, and the most important way, in which they depend on one another, is a very existential way: they eat one another. That’s the most existential interdependence you can imagine.”
― Fritjof Capra, Patterns of Connection: Essential Essays from Five Decades

“Solar energy, transformed into chemical energy by the photosynthesis of green plants, drives all ecological cycles.”
― Fritjof Capra, Patterns of Connection: Essential Essays from Five Decades

“A living organism is primarily engaged in renewing itself, cells continuously breaking down and building up their structures, tissues and organs replacing their cells in continual cycles. While these continual structural changes take place, however, the organism maintains its identity and overall pattern of organization. This coexistence of stability and change is one of the hallmarks of life.”
― Fritjof Capra, Patterns of Connection: Essential Essays from Five Decades

“The most complex ecosystems on Earth are the tropical coral reef and the tropical rainforest. Both are characterized by large numbers of species, a rapid turnover of matter and energy, and extensive recycling of all essential materials. In both of these ecosystems, the principles of ecology are exhibited clearly and beautifully.”
― Fritjof Capra, Patterns of Connection: Essential Essays from Five Decades

“Our major social institutions are tied to the same outdated perceptions whose limitations are now producing the multiple facets of our global crisis.These views and perceptions form the so-called old paradigm, which has dominated our culture for several hundred years, during which time it has shaped our modern Western society and significantly influenced the rest of the world. This paradigm consists of a number of ideas, among them the view of the universe as a mechanical system composed of elementary building blocks (the influence of Cartesian philosophy and Newtonian science); correspondingly, the view of the human body as a machine, which is still the conceptual basis of the theory and practice of our medical science; the view of life in a society as a competitive struggle for existence (inherited from the Social Darwinists); and the belief in unlimited material progress to be achieved through economic and technological growth. During recent decades, all of these assumptions have been found severely limited and in need of radical revision. Such a revision is now indeed taking place. ”
― Fritjof Capra, Patterns of Connection: Essential Essays from Five Decades

“From the new systems point of view, knowledge is part of the process of life, of a dialogue between object and subject. Knowledge and life, then, are inseparable, and therefore, facts are inseparable from values.”
― Fritjof Capra, Patterns of Connection: Essential Essays from Five Decades

“One of Prigogine’s greatest contributions has been to create a new thermodynamics to describe living systems.The organizing activity of living, selforganizing systems, finally, is cognition, or mental activity. This implies a radically new concept of mind, which was first proposed by Gregory Bateson.
Mental process is defined as the organizing activity of life. This means that all interactions of a living system with its environment are cognitive, or mental interactions.”
― Fritjof Capra, Patterns of Connection: Essential Essays from Five Decades

“In the new paradigm, every structure is seen as the manifestation of an underlying process. The entire web of relationships is intrinsically dynamic. The shift from structure to process is evident, for example, when we remember that mass in contemporary physics is no longer seen as measuring a fundamental substance but rather as a form of energy, that is, as measuring activity or processes.”
― Fritjof Capra, Patterns of Connection: Essential Essays from Five Decades

“Because of its narrow, reductionist framework, conventional economics is inherently anti-ecological. Whereas the surrounding ecosystems are self-balancing and self-adjusting organic wholes, our current economies and technologies recognize no self-limiting principle. Undifferentiated growth—economic, technological, and institutional—is still regarded by most economists as a sign of a “healthy” economy, although it is now causing ecological disasters, widespread corporate crime, social disintegration, and the ever increasing likelihood of nuclear war.”
― Fritjof Capra, Patterns of Connection: Essential Essays from Five Decades

“In the last chapter of The Turning Point, titled “The Passage to the Solar Age,” I predicted that the ecology movement, the feminist movement, the peace movement, and other grassroots movements would soon form alliances and coalesce into new political parties. Indeed, while I was writing these words, the first Green Party was already forming in Germany. In March 1983, the Greens, as they called themselves, entered the German national parliament. One month later, I went to Germany to interview their leaders, following a suggestion by my colleague Charlene Spretnak, and in 1984, Spretnak and I published Green Politics, which introduced the Green movement to the United States and was instrumental in the formation of the American Green Party.”
― Fritjof Capra, Patterns of Connection: Essential Essays from Five Decades

“In atomic physics, the sharp Cartesian split between mind and matter, between the I and the world, is no longer valid. We can never speak about nature without at the same time speaking about ourselves.”
― Fritjof Capra, Patterns of Connection: Essential Essays from Five Decades

“All things are forms of the same universal reality that is simultaneously spiritual and material. The whole cosmos is a unity and the whole cosmos is alive.”
― Fritjof Capra, Patterns of Connection: Essential Essays from Five Decades

“In the Eastern view, then, the division of nature into separate objects is artificial and comes from our measuring and categorizing mind. Such artificial discrimination of objects that in reality are fluid and ever changing, without identity of their own, is called maya, “illusion,” in Hinduism. Eastern philosophies make no difference between living and dead things, nor between spirit and matter: “The Dharmakaya can manifest itself in various corporeal forms just because it is the real essence of them. Matter and mind from the beginning are not a duality.”
― Fritjof Capra, Patterns of Connection: Essential Essays from Five Decades