Futurist and author Robert Theobald died in November of 1999. Two years before his death, he gave a series of lectures that eventually became his final book which was published as Reworking Success .  In the last of that series of lectures, Robert Theobald shared his vision of our near future.

Our Near Future

Robert Theobald

In this final talk I’d like you to imagine I’m speaking in the year 2011 and reflecting on the fifteen years which have passed since 1996. My scenario assumes that continuation of current trends will lead to major breakdowns. We need to face our current situation squarely and honestly. It is only after we have done this that we shall be ready to act in ways which will improve conditions. This is why I define myself as a hopeful realist.

As a result of my experience in presenting this type of material over the years, I expect different reactions depending on your personal views. If you are already convinced that we face immediate and highly dangerous crises, then you will see my scenario as hopeful. Those who hope that current dynamics can continue will usually experience the radical changes I foresee as negative.

Scenarios are not designed to forecast the future: In today’s turbulent conditions, massive surprises are inevitable. They can, however, open up thinking if their fundamental assumptions are sound. There are three critical bases for my ideas. First, that ecological limits require an immediate end to our current maximum economic growth strategies and that the consequences will inevitably alter all our socioeconomic structures, particularly our assumptions about jobs and employment. Second, the changes we need can only be made if our core future commitment is to the maintenance and development of social cohesion, rather than acceptance of a growing split between rich and poor both within and between countries. Third, the only way we can change directions is for citizens to commit to continuing involvement in creating the future they desire.

I repeat: scenarios are not designed to forecast the future: All attempts to do this are bound to fail. They can, however, be highly successful at opening up new avenues of thought and this is my purpose here.

The late 1990s were a time of growing concern about the direction of the international economy. The downward pressures on wages and the upward pressures on unemployment were increasingly disturbing, while economic inequality was growing throughout the world, particularly in the United States.

Everywhere you looked there was a reactionary push toward efficiency regardless of its impact on people. This approach was generally justified by the argument that companies were engaged in global competition and that surplus workers had to be laid off for the good of the whole institution, because keeping them on the job would eventually lead to bankruptcy and more suffering. The language that was used to talk about these situations was dehumanizing. A whole series of euphemisms, such as downsizing or rightsizing, hid the people behind the unemployment statistics rather than forcing us to face the human suffering caused by corporate and government strategies.

Just under the surface, however, new voices were emerging to propose radically different futures. Unfortunately, so many directions were being suggested that most people found themselves unable to understand what the real issues of the time were, let alone get together to produce more favourable directions. Some people were arguing for greater technological efficiency. Some bemoaned the loss of a value-based culture. Some argued for social justice. Others demanded that attention be paid to the environment and ecological systems. And then there were some who saw the Internet as the way to a new politics.

Alternative Visions of Reality

Starting in the mid-nineties, it became clear that there were two non-compatible ways of perceiving the world. One of them accepted that industrial-era goals and methods were still essentially sound, that the capitalist market would eventually balance itself out naturally, and there was no clash between maximum growth strategies and ecological needs. The other argued that our extraordinary success had led to the point that these old approaches were making the chronic problems of unemployment, social inequality and environmental degradation worse and would continue to do so.

My own view was that we had no choice but to develop radically new directions and success criteria. I argued that it was impossible to have it both ways. Either the industrial era culture still worked and it was irresponsible to strive for profound change, or it was in the process of collapsing, in which case it was stupid to struggle to maintain it.

I also showed that the acceptance of this absolute necessity for rapid and dramatic change required us to search for common ground. Those attempting to preserve industrial-era systems saw no need for common-ground strategies and rejected this approach. Those who saw the need for fundamental change recognized that no individual or group could be sure they were right and that conflict could lead to new understandings and synergies if everybody were willing to listen carefully to each other.

Bringing together the needed coalition for change was, of course, difficult. It was certainly true that many people had, during the last three decades of the twentieth century recognized that the status-quo was not viable. Unfortunately, the resulting shifts in thinking were not broadly visible because the gatekeepers controlling the communication processes — politicians, academics, and journalists — often blocked the dissemination of emerging ideas.

However, two critical new directions were already visible by 1996. One was the recognition that the number of hours people would need to be employed over their life-times was declining dramatically. Instead of the lock-step 40-hour week, 50-day year, 40-50 year work-life, highly idiosyncratic uses of time were already developing. The process was highly confusing, of course, because few people understood why the changes affecting them were taking place. It was also, of course, easier for most people to see the negatives, rather than the positives.

At the same time as work patterns were changing, a growing number of people were decreasing consumption. More and more people decided that the rat race was simply not worthwhile. The mid-nineties therefore saw the beginning of the dialogue which has dramatically altered not only the way we think about work but also patterns of income distribution.

Internet Potentials

The change in thinking was supported by the Internet. The Internet was a critical tool after the Masseys were cancelled in September 1996 before their planned broadcast in October. It made it possible to hold a planned tour together and enhance it where necessary. It also enabled me to get a wide range of reactions to the decision and to see the most effective method of structuring my response.

The mid-nineties were also the period of exponential growth of the World Wide Web, whose successors are now commonly seen as the incarnation of Teilard de Chardin’s noosphere, linking human beings practically and spiritually. The Internet served us in two ways. It allowed interactive preparation of the talks: Many of the ideas were suggested, or developed, by people other than myself.

The Internet also facilitated the organization of several kinds of face-to-face discussion. For example, people gathered in small groups to examine their reactions. Some Canadians were reminded of the old church basement and living room conversations that used to take place in the 1940s in conjunction with the CBC radio broadcasts called Farm Forum and Citizens Forum. Others took an Internet class in early 1997. Still others worked with materials developed for Lent 1997 to challenge Christians to rethink how to live in the twenty-first century.

It was also possible to send messages to a complex World Wide Web site which became a significant arena for the exchange of ideas with people around the world. These local and international conversations, facilitated by the Internet, were just one of the many social inventions which developed rapidly at the end of the twentieth century. It was the same kind of explosion of creativity which took place at the end of the nineteenth century.

The difference, however, was that the energy was diffused rather than centralized. At the end of the nineteenth century, a small group of people worked together to develop service clubs, settlement houses, and new approaches to supporting the poor which were widely adopted. This time large numbers of people came up with their own ideas to develop social cohesion. Those were catalogued, using the Internet, under twin titles: Ten Thousand Discoveries and Ten Thousand Stories.

New Images of Citizenship

The year 2000 came to symbolize the potential for a vastly enhanced understanding of citizenship. By the turn of the century it was no longer acceptable in most circles to argue that maximum rates of growth would resolve our problems. It was broadly understood that the critical questions were profoundly different from those which had dominated the twentieth century, though it was still usually assumed that most problems had to be dealt with on the national, provincial, and state level, rather than locally or globally.

It was also still thought that power was the best way to bring about change. This belief persisted despite the fact that more and more initiatives were achieved by networks of servant leaders: Those who sought to empower others rather than control them. The Internet had become the organizing mechanism for citizen movements: When it was used imaginatively it proved stronger than the power of governments and corporations.

The year 2000 also saw the emergence of the second generation of the Internet. Basic levels of access were provided to all rich country citizens, as a matter of right, just as free libraries had been established a century ago. The Internet was increasingly organized as a place where it was easy for people to find material about whatever interested them most, whether in audio, video, graphics, or text. The 1996 trend toward overloads, both personal and technical, were overcome by greatly improved computer architecture and groupware which facilitated interactions.

Rethinking Inequality

Probably the main challenge at the turn of the century was to the entrepreneurs who had accumulated far more resources than the Carnegies and Rockefellers could ever have imagined. The cry for equity, within and between countries, had become louder and louder. The arguments for economic structures which permitted unlimited accumulation of wealth and increased the polarity between the very rich and the very poor, were no longer persuasive to most people.

One of the threads which caused the development of this new thinking was, quite improbably, the arguments for traditional religious Jubilee years. This was brought to broad attention through the Apostolic Letter of Pope John Paul II released on November 14, 1994 called As the Third Millennium Draws Near.

The words and deeds of Jesus thus represent the fulfillment of the whole tradition of jubilees in the Old Testament. We know that the jubilee was a time dedicated in a special way to God. It fell every seventh year, according to the law of Moses: This was the “sabbatical year,” during which the earth was left fallow and slaves were set free…. In the sabbatical year, in addition to the freeing of slaves, the law also provided for the cancellation of all debts in accordance with precise regulations. And all this was to be done in honor of God. What was true for the sabbatical year was also true for the jubilee year, which fell every 50 years. In the jubilee year, however, the customs of the sabbatical year were broadened and celebrated with even greater solemnity. As we read in Leviticus: “You shall hallow the 50th year and proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants; it shall be a jubilee for you, when each of you shall return to his property and each of you shall return to his family.” One of the most significant consequences of the jubilee year was the general “emancipation” of all the dwellers on the land in need of being freed. On this occasion every Israelite regained possession of his ancestral land if he happened to have sold it or lost it by falling into slavery. He could never be completely deprived of the land, because it belonged to God; nor could the Israelites remain for ever in a state of slavery, since God had “redeemed” them for himself as his exclusive possession by freeing them from slavery in Egypt.

The prescriptions for the jubilee year largely remained ideals-more a hope than an actual fact… Justice, according to the Law of Israel, consisted above all in the protection of the weak. The foundations of this tradition were strictly theological, linked first of all with the theology of creation and with that of divine providence. It was a common conviction, in fact, that to God alone, as Creator, belonged the dominium altum — lordship over all creation and over the earth in particular. If in his providence God had given the earth to humanity, that meant that he had given it to everyone. Therefore the riches of creation were to be considered as a common good of the whole of humanity. Those who possessed these goods as personal property were really only stewards, ministers charged with working in the name of God, who remains the sole owner in the full sense, since it is God’s will that created goods which should serve everyone in a just way. The jubilee year was meant to restore this social justice. The social doctrine of the church, which has always been a part of church teaching and which has developed greatly in the last century, particularly after the encyclical Rerum Novarum, is rooted in the tradition of the jubilee year.

The specifics of the Jubilee year could obviously no longer be applied in 2000. But the idea that great wealth and deep poverty were unacceptable in a just society became one of the great rallying points for a changed vision adopted by a growing segment of the population. These dramatic changes in public commitments and goals altered the political landscape. Instead of having two or more political parties essentially proposing the same directions, and arguing about details, the central disagreement was between those who wanted to continue the industrial era and those who were committed to creating a changed culture.

A New Belief Structure

Elections in the early years of the twenty-first century were fought across this fault line. A transnational coalition, using the Internet, developed which created an agreed global statement of the opportunities which could be seized — and the dangers which would develop if we failed to grasp them. The primary shift was from concentration on the quantity of goods to a commitment to enhancing the quality of life.

The efforts of these new political parties around the world were guided by a set of generally agreed principles. Although these are now well known, I repeat fifteen of them here in the hope that you can recapture a sense of how fresh they seemed at the end of the two-century long industrial era.

1. Stress the opportunities in a situation rather than the problems. The opportunities in situations usually have to be discovered rather than being obvious. Creative thinking is required to see what can go right rather than wrong.

2. Encourage thinking which supports individuals and groups in moving toward more open and creative thought and activity.

3. See healthy relationships as essential to effective activity. The time put into really knowing the people with whom one works is essential to common ground work.

4. Acknowledge the importance of spirituality. We are spiritual beings. Denying this reality impoverishes not only ourselves but those around us and our work. We need poetry and art and drama as well as intellect.

5. Recognize the importance of using values — honesty, responsibility, humility, love, faith, cooperation and a respect for mystery — as a compass which guides our choices.

6. Move beyond dichotomized thinking. Recognize how both/and language, which is inclusive, rather than either/or language, which is exclusive, aids the process of finding colleagues.

7. Understand that while everything is connected, we must “bound” the realities we consider if we are to be able to think or act at all. This approach contrasts with the past when we tried to develop a complete, objective picture of “reality.”

8. Understand that reality is born largely from the beliefs and boundaries we co-create with those around us. Although we need these boundaries and beliefs to function, we should not take them too seriously.

9. Acknowledge and empower competence based on knowledge, skills, abilities, wisdom, perspectives and experience rather than accepting the dominance of coercive power.

10. Be aware that strengths always carry weaknesses with them. All strengths, when overplayed, are destructive.

11. Learn that we can make progress together to the extent we control our ego needs and grow beyond them.

12. Recognize that people operate in their perceived self-interest because they have to screen reality through their own senses and the “stories” and “myths” they have learned. This does not mean that people will necessarily see their “self-interest” narrowly or selfishly because they will be aware, to a greater or lesser extent, of community values, nature’s requirements, system feedback patterns, and the implications of “mystery.”

13. Learn that different people will inevitably see the world from varied viewpoints and that reactions will therefore be highly diverse.

14. Discover that our collective intelligence, our ability to see, think and respond together, depends largely on how consciously and creatively we use our diversity to learn from the disturbances we face because they can show us the opportunities of our time.

15. Support the emergence of new systems which will enable us to continue to grow without damaging the ecological patterns on which we depend for survival.

The fundamental change parties tackled many of the taboo issues and voters rallied to them because they were tired of being fed pablum. The parties recognized that all addictions — to alcohol, smoking and to legal and illegal drugs and many other destructive behaviors — could only be broken as people developed a sense of personal self-esteem. Instead of concentrating on the problems caused by addictions, it aimed to support family and community structures which provided a sense of self-worth. This commitment also reduced teen-aged illegitimacy and the felt need of teenagers to join gangs in order to gain a sense of power and purpose.

The parties also faced up to the growing demand for a right to death as the population aged. The psychic costs of keeping people barely alive in helpless misery were recognized. The fact that no set of safeguards could prevent some people from encouraging grandparents to die had been recognized as a danger to be guarded against, but was broadly regarded as a smaller problem than the misery caused by warehousing millions of the elderly. Life was redefined as the ability to develop oneself and support others: death when these conditions were no longer met. Moving our attention away from concentration on a heart beat and brain wave, enabled a new consensus to emerge about the importance of supporting the sanctity of life and the infinite complexity of doing so in the real world.

The Election of 2004

In the United States the election of the year 2004 was the bellwether. A new party developed immediately after the depressing 1996 campaign resolved to raise the real issues. The party gained a few Congressional seats in the year 2000 and 20 percent of the popular vote for President. This provided the launching pad which enabled it to win the 2004 election.

By the year 2006, the commitment to finding new cultural forms was emerging in much of the world. One primary goal which was now widely accepted aimed to limit the amount of life-time hours people spent on the job. Declines in the percentage of people actually in the work force at any moment were now seen as a gain rather than a loss.

The widely shared desire to enable better parenting was one of the primary drivers of this change. Social priorities and economic structures changed so those who wanted to stay home and raise their children were encouraged to do so. Two broad learnings supported this trend. People with multiple incomes began to discover that the net earnings from a second or third job, after taxes and all expenses were deducted, were often small or even negative.

The choice of holding a job or not increasingly became a life-style, rather than an economic, choice for dual-parent families. The ability to make this choice was enhanced as parents with children increasingly decided that divorce was an unacceptable option, except in extreme circumstances. Women then felt freer to stay home because they were less fearful that they might at any moment be forced to fend for themselves.

The growing commitment to social cohesion led to a second learning. It was recognized that it was more important for children to have parents in the home than for parents to hold minimum-wage jobs. Pressures for everybody to be employed throughout their lives eased dramatically. Good parenting was seen as a contribution to society and a way to limit costs caused by delinquency and crime.

New Authority Structures

Today, in 2011 new ways of seeing the world are finally dominant. The most important shift is one that has become so commonplace that most people have forgotten how dramatic a change it really is. In 1996, it was popularly believed that there were absolute answers to all questions and that these answers could be found at the top of hierarchical structures: “Experts” knew, “bosses” knew, “presidents” knew.

There were already, of course, all sorts of cracks in these structures. Companies were reorganizing into teams in order to become more effective – the concept of the primacy of rank was being challenged. Thinkers like Charles Johnson, author of Necessary Wisdom were proposing ways to live in the tension between apparently contradictory ideas. Scientific theories were being challenged and debunked. Listen, for example, to what Richard Lewontin said in his 1990 Massey Lecture: Biology as Ideology:

“Despite its claims to be above society, science, like the Church before it, is a supremely social institution, reflecting and reinforcing the dominant values and views of society at each historical epoch.”

Back in the nineties, most people still thought science was objective and value free, but Lewontin’s view to the contrary was gathering force. A significant group of people came to believe that it was impossible to build any theory without relying on unprovable first assumptions that could not be usefully compared or challenged.

In its extreme form, this way of thinking led to total cultural relativism and the argument that there can be no valid way to judge behaviour. If a particular pattern occurs in a culture, and the culture appears functional, then those supporting this model argued that nobody had the right to challenge it. For example, if slavery was accepted in a culture, then outsiders needed to accept it rather than denounce it.

This way of thinking supported a strong intellectual thesis for several decades. “Political correctness,” in all of its finally bizarre forms, held that it was inappropriate to challenge the behaviour of various groups. Vigorous debate became all but impossible because people were afraid of each other. The fear was partially personal. For public figures, however, the risk was the loss of all credibility if they trespassed beyond the limits of acceptable discourse even if they raised a valid issue or voiced an unpalatable truth.

Today the dominant style is profoundly different. People recognize that everybody will inevitably see the world differently based on their experiences, genes, sex, age, et cetera. We now recognize that there can be no absolutely correct answer when dealing with complex, open questions. Decisions today can only be effectively made on the basis of personal authority rather than power.

This shift away from power strategies has, perhaps, been the greatest change in human history. It has only been accomplished because citizens became so angered by power games and the danger they were posing to human survival. This shift away from power is the primary change that the new political parties around the world have made as they create new cultural norms. They are committed to enabling people of different views to live together, to accept that conflict remains inevitable but it does not have to lead to violence. 2011 is therefore no Utopia, but we are moving toward collaborative decision-making models which seek to navigate the rapids of change with minimum cost and pain.

How Society is Organized

One way to catalogue the changes which are taking place is to look at various scales of decision making. The family is once again the core of society, but in a different way than it was in the past. Instead of defining families in terms of blood-relationship or marriage, we consider any group of people who make a commitment to love and care for each other as a family. We recognize that families are necessarily small, for it is only possible to intensively care for, and support, a limited number of people.

The nature of marriage is changing. People see relationships in increasingly varied ways. It had already become clear by the 1990s that many people no longer saw the need for either the church or the state to have any part in determining when and how they lived together.

On the other hand, society increasingly demands high levels of commitment from those who intend to raise children. Essentially error-proof contraception at very low cost has made birth a choice rather than the accident it still so often was in the late twentieth century.

Small, geographically based neighbourhoods are now seen as the basis for much activity: They tend to range from 200 to 500 people. People in these neighbourhoods are deeply committed to each other and aim to grow and produce much of what is needed for living through local activity. Neighbourhood gardens have made a come-back and two-way relationships with local farmers are also important. These neighbourhoods usually support a full-service community structure. It is often based in an extended family’s home and contains the complex technology required in today’s world. In addition, it is a safe house and a support system for those in trouble. It also manages the exchange of goods and services within the local neighbourhood and arranges for exchanges with other local groups and Internet groups, using local currencies.

These small neighbourhoods of 200 to 500 people are the base of the political system. Each one elects a representative (who must live in the area) to the next level of government. The procedures in these elections vary widely, but there is one common thread: People who show any sign of wanting an office so as to exercise power are usually denied it. Instead, representatives are sought on the basis of their competence and knowledge. People are “drafted” by their peers who have observed past actions.

The next level of government links, typically, anywhere from ten to fifty of the smallest levels of government into a “conviviality,” a new word coined to describe this institutional level. All the representatives from the smaller areas meet to consider issues where cooperation is felt to be helpful. Now that energy taxes are high enough to have significantly reduced long-distance transportation, the discussion is often around how to create the highest levels of self-sufficiency or local exchange, often using local currencies.

Communities, the next level of government, look at broader issues. While there is a presupposition that families, neighbourhoods and convivialities should make decisions for themselves, there are times when communities need to imagine and support common patterns. Communities have developed various rules for resolving inevitable conflicts but there is almost unanimous agreement that messiness cannot be avoided. The old tradition of clear-cut lines of authority is dying — though the process of death is slow and painful in many areas.

The next level of government is the bioregion, linked by shared ecological realities. Much of the early thinking on bioregions assumed that they would have clear boundaries like the political structures they replaced. As understanding has grown, we have discovered that bioregions overlap. Bioregional interests are typically represented by councils which recognize that they will flourish as they respect natural limits and suffer if they ignore them.

There have been, of course, dramatic changes in governance. Decision-making has devolved largely to the community level. Nation states have lost much power, as have their various sub-units, described as states, provinces, countries in various parts of the world.

National sovereignty was based on the ability to control the economy and to protect one’s borders. Technological developments have made it impossible to maintain these powers. Today’s structures depend less on coercion and more on shared agreement. Agreement is achieved locally through face-to-face discussions and globally through networking.

One of the most fascinating shifts in the last 15 years has been the changes in the way that national identity is understood. For example, in Great Britain, national power has largely devolved back to England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. The sense of shared history, without political coercion, has led to closer relationships at the personal and cultural level than ever existed in the past both within these units and between them.

Canada has rediscovered that, despite its immense size and relatively sparse population, it is joined by a common sense understanding of the public good. Once it was recognized that industrial-era versions of sovereignty were essentially meaningless, many of the issues which had caused so much tension in the late twentieth century turned out to be relatively unimportant.

Community-based Government

The inevitable result of the movement toward community decision-making is much greater variation in the situations within communities. Some have developed strong commitments to all the people within them as the poorer members of the society have realized their need for education and involvement. Some areas are distressingly unjust. It has been realized, with considerable pain and grief, that there is no substitute for local effort and that if people are not prepared to look after their own destiny, it cannot be taken care of by big government.

Nevertheless, there is still a possibility of appealing to larger levels of political organization. If the power structure in a neighbourhood or a community is clearly refusing to permit citizens to be involved in decision-making, then there is a process to bring in outside support. It can be triggered if 60 percent of those in an area petition for outside intervention.

One reason the community-based approach normally works is that most funds for those who need help are now generated locally. There has been a dramatic decrease in national, state, and provincial tax rates associated with a decrease in their responsibilities. This has freed up resources which are now used more effectively locally. Military expenditures have also declined dramatically.

The question of the appropriate level of transfers between richer and poorer people, richer and poorer areas of countries, and between rich and poor countries worldwide is still, of course, not resolved. The pathologies of aid are today far more fully understood. On the other hand, the challenge of supporting those who cannot develop resources for themselves is far more completely recognized. The transfers that take place are now almost always locally controlled and far more emphasis is placed on small or micro loans and grants.

Those countries, and companies, which deny , or ignore, shared cultural and ecological commitments find that penalties are heavy. This distresses some people who still feel that companies and countries should be able to do whatever they wish. But there is more and more general agreement that we should not countenance behaviour that damages ecological systems or fails to support basic human rights.

This result could have been foreseen in the mid-1990s. Companies, and countries, were already discovering that their well-funded public relations mechanisms could be overwhelmed by public outrage. Today the successors to the Internet make it possible for public opinion to be organized rapidly. Those who have felt the weight of anger which can develop so rapidly have become far more cautious in their decision-making.

Work, Jobs, and Income

At this point I want to look specifically at the subjects I used as an entry-point in my Massey Lectures some fifteen years ago: The questions of work, purpose, jobs, resources, prestige and the relationships between them.

Computers and robots have taken over a great deal of the menial, unappealing, unattractive and dangerous toil. Given that nearly everybody in the rich world has basic economic security, although the methods chosen to achieve this goal vary widely, people can largely choose what they want to do.

Today we understand that most people want to work at tasks which make sense of their lives. They do not do this work because it earns them money but because they enjoy it. The norm is now for people to work on what matters to them rather than struggling with a job they may detest just to pay the bills.

There was massive opposition to tampering with the job system. Many feared that people would cease to work if they were not forced to do so by the need to earn their living. Others felt that the unpleasant work would not get done at all. While there are, as expected, some difficulties with both these issues, they have proven to be minor.

The emphasis on parenting, increasingly seen as important work, has continued to develop. If one parent wishes to stay home and raise children, both communities and firms are developing ways to make this possible without significant financial sacrifice. It is increasingly understood that the skills gained in parenting are directly relevant to the needed work of 2011. Parents inevitably have to know how to think for themselves and that’s the most important criterion for a good worker in 2011. Parenting is being “automatically” combined with access to the public world through electronic networking.

The establishment of sabbaticals for growing numbers of workers has been one of the strongest trends in recent years. There are many ways workers can earn the right to take several months off from work in order to concentrate on learning. Sabbaticals are, of course, part of much broader changes in the life-cycle including the effective abandonment of the concepts of adolescence and retirement.

Everybody is expected during their teen-age years to give two years of community service. There are multiple benefits. The activities provide heavy physical activity at a time when young people need it. It puts people in touch with those from other religious and ethnic groups and classes which they otherwise might not meet. It provides a labour force for activities that people choose not to do later in life.

Tax policy has altered. Upper and lower limits have been set on retained wealth on a worldwide scale. A few areas are still failing to enact this legislation, but the trend is irreversible and the loopholes for millionaires and billionaires are becoming narrower and narrower. Taxes are designed to decrease consumption: Investment is increasingly used to reduce waste and the use of non-renewable resources.

I suppose that the main shift that somebody jumping over the 15 years since 1996 would notice is that our pace of life is far more relaxed. It is true that those engaged in certain types of activity do have to work extraordinarily hard, but we recognize that such intensive activities should be limited in time. Tired people necessarily narrow their thinking and this is unacceptable in a rapidly changing world.

Poor Country Issues

I cannot end this scenario without mentioning the poor countries. This is a subject which would take its own set of talks to handle adequately. In summary, I can say that the decision of the rich countries to abandon maximum growth models has opened up the potential for the redefinition of desirable developmental strategies which concentrate on the quality of life rather than the quality of products.

Poverty in 2011 is still a massive problem in many parts of the world. But as birth rates drop dramatically as a result of the wider education of women and the availability of contraceptives — the Catholic Church abandoned its opposition with the new Pope –there are signs that the corner is being turned.

The experience of Kerala, one of the Indian provinces, is increasingly cited as a model. Despite its relatively low per-capita income, it has extraordinarily high standards of health and education. Its life expectancies are similar to those of the rich countries. Kerala provides clear-cut evidence that social justice and social cohesion are possible without high levels of consumption.

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Read more about Robert Theobald,  Reworking Success

The first draft of the specifications for a GIFTegrity is available at My World of “Ought to Be”.

 The Beginning of World Change

John L. Petersen

As the setting sun leads us across the North Atlantic toward the nation’s capital, the captain’s voice is in my ear, talking to the controllers on channel nine. We’re still at flight level 350. The sunset reflects off of the leading edge of the left wing and I’m thinking about . . . changing the world.

This is the last leg of an unusual trip. I’ve spent a week in a little Swiss ski town attending the World Economic Forum, that annual January gathering of the high and mighty. Bill Gates was there this time as were the prime minister of Japan, the presidents of who knows how many countries, and corporate chairmen, presidents, and CEO’s were, well, a dime a dozen. Not little companies either — big, multinationals dominated. Had lunch with the chairman of a major automobile manufacturer who was interested in how computer chips would grow in capability, dinner with the CEO of a global agribusiness company who was the point man for the global controversy swirling around genetic engineering of crops, and almost put together a meeting with a head of state.

In between, I discussed the problems of knowing what is true in an Internet age with the editor of probably the most influential international newspaper in the world, traded ideas with famous scientists about what intuition is, and contributed to a conversation about what community on the Web of the future might be with a famous technologist.

Not your average convention, you might say.

Why was a futurist who specializes in studying big long-range global possibilities invited to this august business and political conclave? Seems there’s a growing interest by the big-hitters of the planet (the humans, at least) in putting together a “global agenda” — some organized way of looking out at the future of the world and trying to figure out what is the best way to produce a future that works well for everyone, everywhere . . . even the poorest, lesser developed countries.

Surprised? Well, I was. I’ve heard about “Davos” for a long time and had this image of a bunch of fat cats getting together in a classy resort by themselves trying to, well, carve up the world – the environment and poor people be damned. If you were into conspiracies you could have added this outfit to the Trilateral Commission and those other secretive groups who are supposed to really run it all. Well, I didn’t get invited into any smoke-filled rooms where they were carving up things, but from the perspective of a plain old participant it really wasn’t that at all.

To begin with, I don’t remember seeing a significantly overweight person in six days. This was a pretty sleek crowd. But seriously, there was a serious concern that threaded its way through all of the sessions I attended about what the implications of all of the accelerating change going on in the world might mean for humanity. Somehow, concern about the lesser developed world, both directly from folks who raised questions, and indirectly threaded within the presentations of the speakers, was everywhere. It was addressed in one way or another from almost every direction and perspective that you can imagine: religion, technology, politics, science, and of course, economics.

Now don’t get me wrong, there was a lot of hustling going on. Only the most naÔve observer would think of Davos as a great meeting of the most enlightened people in the world. It is an economic forum, after all. The evenings, for example, were wall-to-wall parties. Seemed like every hotel had three or four going every evening. In fact, if you went to the official evening dinner program sessions (which were really quite provocative), you tended to miss out on some of the great cocktail the parties thrown by the big corporations. This was a target-rich environment if you were into networking and doing deals, a point not missed by many of the people in that little village this past last week.

But, for a lot of reasons, not the least of which are the legitimate issues that have been raised around the extraordinary implications of the globalization of the economy, organizations like the World Economic Forum are taking serious notice. I heard “Seattle” and the WTO mentioned as major influences driving these emerging interests on a number occasions. But these guys were not running scared. I think they were beginning to see the world in a new way – and I know professionally and from experience that mental images are the beginning of behavior change. “The Forum,” for example has stood up a Centre for a Global Agenda, headed up by the former president of Costa Rica that is dedicated to bringing together some of the best thinking available around the biggest issues confronting the planet’s future. And, I presume they’re going to try to engage their membership (the most powerful, influential, and wealthy organizations in the world) in an active initiative to implement that agenda.

If you’re wondering about the “rest of the world”, I can only tell you that non-governmental organizations and their unique effectiveness in delivering positive change to the developing world was not a foreign subject in the many discussions that I was a part of. People talked about partnerships.

Know what I think? I think I was witness to the beginning of some really big change – global change. I heard the CEOs of the largest oil companies in the world talking about their obligation to the environment and equity among humans, to say nothing about the admonitions from multiple heads of state on the same subjects. This kind of change has a very ragged leading edge and certainly not everyone is there yet, but I think something is happening. Davos for me was a leading indicator of big change.

Personally, I’m of the opinion that we humans need to rapidly evolve if we are going to be able to deal with the magnitude and character of the global problems that are with us, rapidly moving our way, and idling on the horizon. With the planet’s environmental and population trends, and the proliferation of extraordinary weapons comprising only the tip of a rapidly emerging iceberg of global “security” problems it is clear that the tools and experience that we brought with us are not equal to the magnitude of the problems. At Davos, for example, I read an article that promised that we would be cloning humans within the next year. Do you know what that means? I hope so, because I sure don’t – and I think about this stuff all the time. There are more and more of these kinds of potential future events that are global in scope, potentially very disruptive, and essentially “out of control”, that will not respond to the traditional and historical means of solution. We need a fundamental change in the way we do business – and everything else.

One could make the case that almost in Darwinian terms humanity must rapidly evolve in what our perspectives, values, and tools are. I like George Soros’ and others arguments that we must rapidly begin to balance cooperation with our historical focus on competition. To that I’d add the need to be able to see things in interconnected, systems terms. In one way or another, essentially everything is connected to everything else and the sooner we see the world in interdependent terms, the sooner the solutions to big problems will become obvious. And then there is the need to develop new tools that allow us all to view and understand these complicated issues in new, comprehensive ways. There are some new analytical information technology tools (some of which are now coming out of the intelligence community) that are beginning to make that possible. At my “think tank” we try to apply these approaches and tools to taking a long look at what might be in our collective future path.

At the end of the day, what we all really need is a new vision for the world and humanity – a common objective that anyone – whoever and wherever she or he is — could aim for and aspire to. A vision for humanity. A vision for the planet. Perhaps you could call it a “global agenda”.

So here in 13A as I look out of the window at the end of a four-hour sunset I’m wondering if this might be the beginning of something important. After all, all significant change begins with developing mental images of possible futures – normative scenarios they’re called in my business – which then inform and influence our behavior to help us reach our goals or visions.

I can tell by looking over the seat of the guy in the next row who has the navigation map running on his video screen that we’re now off the southern coast of Greenland. Not much on the radio here but position reports so I change to channel ten on the audio – the soul and blues channel. Curtis Mayfield is singing that you should “change your mind for the human race,” and that we could have a “new world born on a brand new day.” The futurist in me perks up. Sounds like a trend.

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John L. Petersen is the founder and president of The Arlington Institute a Washington, DC-area “think tank” that specializes in thinking about global futures and developing pictures of what might happen for their clients: humanity, corporations, and government agencies.

Dr. David Reed is an independent entrepreneur, advisor and consultant. His career includes four years at Interval Research Corporation, exploring portable and consumer media technology. Seven years as vice president and chief scientist for Lotus Development Corporation, where he led the design and implementation of key products, including 1-2-3, and technical business strategy. Prior to joining Lotus, Dr. Reed was vice president of research and development and chief scientist at Software Arts, the creator of VisiCalc, the first electronic spreadsheet.

Early in his career, Dr. Reed served as a professor of computer science and engineering at the  MIT-Laboratory for Computer Science, where he helped to shape the early design of LANs and communication protocols.

Leveraging Community with the Internet

David P. Reed

Conventional wisdom is that a remarkably powerful effect known as Metcalfe’s Law is driving the growth of the Internet. The law says that the value of a network grows in proportion to the square of the number of users, which means that, once a network achieves a certain size, it becomes almost irresistibly attractive. But Metcalfe’s Law actually understates the potential value of the Internet, and by a huge margin.

I’d like to suggest a new way of looking at the economics of the Internet. I think my approach can explain why forecasters have so consistently underestimated its growth. (And, believe me, they have: In 1995, estimates for on-line commerce in 1998 were $2 billion to $3 billion, while the real number turned out to be more like $13 billion.) My approach not only should add to the urgency that businesses feel about moving on-line but also helps identify which on-line strategies will work and which will fail.

It helps to first understand the two laws of networks that have been around for some time. First is what might be called Sarnoff’s Law, after the pioneer of the broadcast industry. This law says that the value of a network grows in proportion to the number of viewers.

Second is the law named after Bob Metcalfe, the inventor of the Ethernet computer-networking technology. He reasoned that 1,000 people on a network can have roughly one million different conversations, so he said the value of a network grows in proportion to the square of the number of users. The n≤ value explains the growth behavior of networks, such as phone systems or electronic-mail systems, that are mainly used for one-on-one communication. The n≤ effect says that, given the choice of joining a large existing network with many users or an incompatible new one with few users, new users will almost always decide that the bigger one is far more valuable. The result is often explosive, accelerating growth once a network establishes dominance. This behavior explains why there is now one global e-mail system, while just a few years ago there were thousands.

There’s an additional law at play with the Internet because it facilitates the formation of groups, in a way that Sarnoff and Metcalfe networks do not. The number of groups that can be formed over the Internet isn’t the Sarnoff n or Metcalfe n≤. It’s 2n by the time you add up all the possible two-person groups, three-person groups, etc. So, the value of the Internet grows in proportion to 2n. Let’s call this effect the Group-Forming Law.

This law is so powerful because 2n gets impossibly large very fast. There’s the old story about the king who rewarded a wise minister by offering him anything he wanted. The minister said all he wished for was two copper coins on the first square of a chess board, four on the second, eight on the third, and so on—a progression based on 2n. The king protested that the minister should ask for gold or pearls, not copper. But, by the time the 8,192 coins were placed on the 13th square, the king realized he’d been had—264; is more than 18 quintillion, which, if memory serves, is more grains of sand than exist in the world. (The story has it that the king had the minister beheaded for being a wiseguy.)

All three laws, in fact, apply to the Internet. Services such as news sites that are aimed at individuals benefit from additional users in a linear, Sarnoff way. Services aimed at facilitating transactions, such as many commercial sites, benefit in an n≤ Metcalfe way. Services aimed at building communities, such as AOL, benefit in a 2n, Group-Forming way. What’s important is that the dominant value in a typical network tends to shift from Sarnoff to Metcalfe to Group-Forming as the scale of the network increases. So, as the Internet continues to expand, investments in Group-Forming networks are likely to produce the biggest returns.

As the scale increases, what’s important also shifts. When Sarnoff’s Law dominates, content such as TV programs is king. When Metcalfe’s Law kicks in, transactions are king. When the Group-Forming Law takes hold, communities are king. The value in a Group-Forming network is constructed jointly, whether through discussion groups, through joint plans to buy something in bulk at low prices, or through some other means.

But the theory is less important than the practice, at least if you’re trying to profit from the Internet, so I’ll make some predictions based on the likely effects of the Group-Forming Law:

The obvious conclusion is that whoever forms the biggest, most robust communities will win. But the Group-Forming idea can be used to look well beyond the obvious and discriminate among strategies that are all billed as building communities. For instance, Internet auction pioneer Onsale, which buys closeout products and auctions them on its Web site, will see its value rise only in proportion to the number of users. On-line classifieds, which connect buyers to sellers on a peer-to-peer basis, should see a stronger, Metcalfe effect. Ebay, which began as one person’s attempt to establish a market for Pez candy dispensers, should get an even more powerful Group-Forming effect because it helps members act in groups as they auction off and bid for products on-line. (Other economics work in favor of Ebay, too. Because the Group-Forming effect will give it enormous volumes of business, it can charge a lower commission on sales. The low fees will attract more users and produce a virtuous circle. Also, because it’s Ebay’s customers who do the selling, Ebay doesn’t face any inventory or product-development issues.)

The demand for Group-Forming capabilities will change the winners and losers in technology. IBM subsidiary Lotus, the pioneer of enterprise groupware, has a hard time supporting ad hoc groups that span multiple companies. So, Lotus will achieve little Group-Forming value. By facilitating easy ad hoc creation of “teamrooms” by any group of Internet users, Instinctive’s eRoom and Excite’s Excite Communities, among others, seem likely to overwhelm Notes and capture big chunks of the groupware market.

The value of merged networks, through deals such as the Yahoo takeover of GeoCities, may be much greater than it might seem. Say the networks each have five users. The value of their merger isn’t just the number of users in each network added together (10) as Sarnoff’s Law would imply, or even a function of the number of users multiplied by each other (25), as Metcalfe’s Law would imply. The value instead follows a 2n Group-Forming effect, so it equals 25+5;, or 1,024.

As digital networking brings scale and global reach to all aspects of our lives and activities, many established business patterns will be threatened. For example, health-care networks may move from treatment transactions to collaborations around disease management.

The community idea applies to every company, because every company can establish powerful communities by sharing information among its suppliers, distributors, and customers and can figure out ways to collaborate with them on new products and services. This last may be the most important because it shows how everyone can translate my general observation into the only economics that matter: the bottom line.

The Power of Community Building 

Bob Metcalfe, inventor of the Ethernet, is known for pointing out that the total value of a communications network grows with the square of the number of devices or people it connects. This scaling law, along with Moore’s Law, is widely credited as the stimulus that has driven the stunning growth of Internet connectivity. Because Metcalfe’s law implies value grows faster than does the (linear) number of a network’s access points, merely interconnecting two independent networks creates value that substantially exceeds the original value of the unconnected networks. Thus the growth of Internet connectivity, and the openness of the Internet, are driven by an inexorable economic logic, just as the interconnection of the telephone network was forced by AT&T’s long distance strategy. This strategy created huge and increasing value to AT&T customers, based on the same (then unnamed) law of increasing returns to scale at the beginning of the 20th century. In the same way, the global interconnection of networks we call the Internet has created huge and increasing value to all its participants.

But many kinds of value are created within networks. While many kinds of value grow proportionally to network size and some grow proportionally to the square of network size, I’ve discovered that some network structures create total value that can scale even faster than that. Networks that support the construction of communicating groups create value that scales exponentially with network size, i.e. much more rapidly than Metcalfe’s square law. I will call such networks Group-Forming Networks, or GFNs.

Even if it’s not your business to supply communications services, your business participates in many networks—perhaps the most important are supply networks that allows access to and bidding among suppliers and distribution networks that allows access to and competition among customers. The structure of these networks or market spaces, especially the value of the connectivity and relationships produced in these networks, can play a crucial role in defining the value of your business. If you can manage or influence the networks that connect you to suppliers and customers to create more value for all concerned, that extra value can be used as a competitive weapon. So paying attention to network value is a crucial strategic issue, especially as businesses move their customer and supplier relationships into the ‘net.

What kind of value are we talking about, when we say the value of a network scales as some function of size? The answer is the value of potential connectivity for transactions. That is, for any particular access point (user), what is the number of different access points (users) that can be connected or reached for a transaction when the need arises. As a simple illustration, consider a phone that can call only 911. A customer for such a phone buys it because of a low probability future need to call for emergency help; in fact, the customer probably takes other steps never to need to use the phone. But the existence of a lucrative market for such phones indicates that customers can value potential connectivity to a single point, even though the connection is never used. Potential connectivity to many points should have value proportionally larger, since it is not necessary to use the connection to find value in its availability.

The value of potential connectivity is the value of the set of optional transactions that are afforded by the system or network. Economically, the value of each optional transaction is like a financial option (e.g., the value of an option to buy a share of stock at a particular price). To simplify the model and focus on scaling, I’ll assume that the value of any particular optional transaction in a network comes from a distribution that does not depend strongly on the number of participants in the network.

Metcalfe’s law, simply derived, says that if you build a network so that any customer can choose to transact with any other customer, the number of potential connections each of the N customers can make is (N-1), giving a total number of potential connections as N(N-1) or N≤-N. Assuming each potential connection is worth as much as any other, the value to each user depends on the total size of the network, and the total value of potential connectivity scales much faster than the size of the network, proportional to N≤.

At this point a skeptic once said to me, that’s too simplistic, that’s not the most important source of value in the network like the phone network. For example, there’s a weather service that everyone calls once a day, and the 911 service, and a couple of other services like that. And each user typically has a fixed, small set of friends and family that they call all of the time. Since the value of these services to a particular user does not depend on the number of other users of the network, the total value of these services grows more slowly—proportional to N, not N≤.

The skeptic was right that some important services scale only linearly, but in drawing his conclusion missed a crucial, very important point about scale and growth. To illustrate this, let’s assume that we can lump all of the kinds of value that grow proportional to N in one term, which we can write by the formula aN, where a is a constant that represents the value per customer. We can also represent the value of potential connectivity by bN≤, where b is the constant value of a potential connection between a pair of customers. Let’s assume that b is much smaller than a, so that for a modest size network, the total network value aN + bN≤ is for all intents and purposes the same as aN. But still, if we allow N to get large enough, the total network value will get closer and closer to bN≤. Thus, the “square” value of potential connectivity dominates all linear sources of value once N gets sufficiently large. See figure 1, which shows how, when N is small, the total value is approximately linear, but as N gets larger, the total value begins to follow bN≤.

This dominance of peer connection value suggests that it is foolish for phone companies to lust after the video rental business in an attempt to compete with cable. As networks get larger, the value of peer connectivity is likely to dominate the combined capability of phone and cable networks. Only when the potential consumers of peer connectivity have been saturated does it seem sensible to go after businesses where value grows linearly with customer base. Of course, the same scaling dominance suggests that cable TV networks ought to do whatever is necessary to enable their systems to support telephony and other transactional services if possible!

But there’s an additional, new wrinkle to network scaling. I recently discovered a new value-creation effect that dominates even the remarkable effects of Metcalfe’s Law, when a network supports it.

In networks like the Internet, Group Forming Networks (GFNs) are an important additional kind of network capability. A GFN has functionality that directly enables and supports affiliations (such as interest groups, clubs, meetings, communities) among subsets of its customers. Group tools and technologies (also called community tools) such as user-defined mailing lists, chat rooms, discussion groups, buddy lists, team rooms, trading rooms, user groups, market makers, and auction hosts, all have a common theme—they allow small or large groups of network users to coalesce and to organize their communications around a common interest, issue, or goal. Sadly, the traditional telephone and broadcast/cable network frameworks provide no support for groups.

What I found that’s surprising and important is that GFNs create a new kind of connectivity value that scales exponentially with N. Briefly, the number of non-trivial subsets that can be formed from a set of N members is 2N-N-1, which grows as 2N. Thus, a network that supports easy group communication has a potential number of groups that can form that grows exponentially with N.

The exponential, 2N, is a sneaky function. Though it may be very small initially, it grows much faster than N≤, N≥ or any other power law. So if there is any portion of the total network value that grows exponentially, scale effects will eventually bring that value to the fore, where it will dominate any other source of value. (To put it simply, if a network’s value consists of components that scale proportional to N, N≤, and 2N, we can write the total value as aN + bN≤ + c2N where a, b, and c are constants. As long as a, b, and c are positive, there will be some M such that the total value is dominated by the term c2N for all N>M. Even if c is quite small, the exponential will eventually dominate.) See figure 2.

Law:	Sarnoff	Metcalfe	GFN (Reed)
Optional Transactions	Tune In Broadcast	Connect Peers	Join/Create Groups
Examples	OnSale, Remote Access	Yahoo! Classifieds, EMail	eBay, Chat Rooms
Value of N member net	N	N2	2N
Combined Value of N, M member nets	N + M	N2 + M2 + 2NM	2N x 2M

This exponential law of GFNs, like Metcalfe’s Law, creates increasing returns as scale increases, which has surprising economic results.

Both laws give a powerful bonus to interconnection; mergers and partnerships of networked companies should be able to extract a premium resulting from these laws. When we combine two networks together so that users of one network can connect seamlessly to users of the other, Metcalfe’s Law tells us already that substantial new value is created: (M+N)≤ = M≤ +N≤+2MN. This bonus term, 2MN, is substantial-up to 100% of the value in the original unconnected networks. Thus there is an enormous incentive to find ways to interconnect networks, since the members of each network can access a much larger set of potential transaction partners. With the GFN law, interconnection is even more powerful, creating many new potential groups that span the two networks: 2M+N = 2M2N. The GFN interconnection bonus percentage itself grows exponentially with the size of the smaller network.

What we see, then, is that there are really at least three categories of value that networks can provide: the linear value of services that are aimed at individual users, the “square” value from facilitating transactions, and exponential value from facilitating group affiliations. What’s important is that the dominant value in a typical network tends to shift from one category to another as the scale of the network increases. Whether the growth is by incremental customer additions, or by transparent interconnection, scale growth tends to support new categories of killer apps, and thus new competitive games. See figure 3.

We can see this scale-driven value shift in the history of the Internet. The earliest usage of the Internet was dominated by its role as a terminal network, allowing many terminals to selectively access a small number of costly timesharing hosts. As the Internet grew, much more of the usage and value of the Internet became focused on pairwise exchanges of email messages, files, etc. following Metcalfe’s Law. And as the Internet started to take off in the early ‘ 90′s, traffic started to be dominated by “newsgroups” (Internet discussion groups), user created mailing lists, special interest websites, etc., following the exponential GFN law. Though the previously dominant functions did not lose value or decline as the scale of the Internet grew, the value and usage of services that scaled by newly dominant scaling laws grew faster. Thus many kinds of transactions and collaboration that had been conducted outside the Internet became absorbed into the growth of the Internet’s functions, and these become the new competitive playing field.

What’s important in a network changes as the network scale shifts. In a network dominated by linear connectivity value growth, “content is king.” That is, in such networks, there is a small number of sources (publishers or makers) of content that every user selects from. The sources compete for users based on the value of their content (published stories, published images, standardized consumer goods). Where Metcalfe’s Law dominates, transactions become central. The stuff that is traded in transactions (be it email or voice mail, money, securities, contracted services, or whatnot) are king. And where the GFN law dominates, the central role is filled by jointly constructed value (such as specialized newsgroups, joint responses to RFPs, gossip, etc.).

In “real” networks, it is important to note that although the total value of optional transactions that involve pairs and groups grows faster than linearly, the total price that can be paid cannot grow that fast. Typically, the consumers of the value have money and attention resources that scale linearly with N. So the law of supply and demand will kick in, lowering prices until the available resources (dollars and attention) are saturated. What’s interesting is that this saturation process affects all types of optional transactions-so GFN value, peer transaction value, and broadcast content value all compete for the same resources. Once N grows sufficiently large, GFN transactions create more value per unit of network investment than peer transactions, and peer transactions create more value per unit of network investment than do broadcast transactions. So what tends to happen is that as networks grow, peer transactions out-compete broadcast content in the arena of attention and return on investment. And remarkably, once N gets sufficiently large, GFN transactions will out-compete both of the other categories.

The chart in Figure 4 is based on a simple model of saturation and competition for dollars and attention. As N grows, first peer transactions start to gain “market share” at the cost of broadcast, and the GFN transactions gain share.

Scale driven value shifts will powerfully shape electronic commerce. The Internet auction pioneer, OnSale, is based on a business model that scales linearly, proportionally to the reach of its network. OnSale buys closeout products and auctions them to anyone who can access its website to present a bid. In return, OnSale gets margin on every sale. Online classifieds, which connect buyers to sellers on a peer-to-peer basis, would seem to create a market space whose value follows Metcalfe’s Law. We’d expect to see a shift of dominance from OnSale to online classifieds once the network tools for safe peer transactions can be made to work. But the newly public company eBay seems destined to capture a scale shift to the exponential logic of GFNs in creating value for its members. EBay’s concept is to help its members to set up specialized auction communities on its website as buyers and sellers of many kinds of collectibles, art, and other easily traded special interest goods. Though eBay’s share of the transactions it facilitates is much smaller than OnSale’s share, eBay’s returns can increase much more rapidly with scale. This growth in returns will be driven by an exponential growth in value of the eBay GFN as its membership increases (and new kinds of jointly constructed value become important-e.g. eBay’s origins in creating a market for Pez candy dispenser collectors).

Scale driven value shifts have already caused IBM subsidiary Lotus, the pioneer of enterprise groupware, to incorporate features into Notes/Domino to interconnect in a limited way with the faster-growing Internet. But Notes’ enterprise focus makes it difficult to support ad hoc groups that live outside large enterprise boundaries or span multiple enterprises. Though the email capabilities of Notes can easily interconnect with other Internet email systems across boundaries to capture a fair share of Metcalfe’s Law value as the Internet grows, Lotus has chosen an enterprise-oriented model for sales and an enterprise focused security model. That choice effectively limits GFN reach to a few islands scattered throughout a vast Internet. Thus scale driven value seems likely to shift dominance to new groupware products and business models that can capture exponential value growth by enabling all Internet users to affiliate flexibly. By facilitating easy ad hoc creation of “teamrooms”, Instinctive’s eRoom and Excite’s Excite Communities, among others, seem likely to capture big shares of a scale driven value shift from email to ad hoc project team collaboration.

As digital networking brings scale and global reach to all aspects of our lives and activities, there will be many more ways that we’ll see scale driven value shifts that threaten established business networking patterns. For example, health care networks may move from treatment transactions to collaborations around disease management. Risk management in the financial services sector may move to group-forming structures that facilitate management of “micro-risks”. How will it impact your business and your industry?

I’d like to close with a speculative thought. As Francis Fukuyama argues in his book Trust, there is a strong correlation between the prosperity of national economies and social capital, which he defines culturally as the ease with which people in a particular culture can form new associations. There is a clear synergy between the sociability that Fukuyama discusses and the technology and tools that support GFNs-both are structural supports for association. As the scale of interaction grows more global via the Internet, isn’t it possible that a combination of social capital and GFN capital will drive prosperity to those who recognize the value of network structures that support free and responsible association for common purposes?

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More about Group Forming Networks

David Reed’s Website

“There is an assumption in economics that the market system handles resource allocation in an efficient manner unless proven otherwise.”   —ENERGY PLANNING AND POLICY, Thomas H. Tietenberg

“All this was inspired by the principle—which is quite true in itself—that in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility.”  —MEIN KAMPF, Adolf Hitler

ECONOMIC EFFICIENCY: Social Darwinism

Jay Hanson

DEFINITION

When an engineer uses the word “efficiently”, it means ”efficient use” — a physical concept — i.e., getting the most output for the least input. [1] But when an economist uses the word ” efficiently “, it means “efficient distribution” — a political concept — i.e., Social Darwinism.

Economic efficiency means that the “correct people” (those who can afford it) will get the “correct goods and services” (whatever they want).  Economic efficiency allocates resources to people who are the most successful at gaining social power.   In the economist’s ideal world, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.

INEVITABLE OUTCOME

If one can think like an engineer (social scientists will have difficulty doing this), one can deduce from first principles, history, and observation that a society based on “economic efficiency” will crash and dieoff. Here’s how:

            1). Visit the astronomy department at your local university and verify that Earth is indeed spherical. All spheres are finite, thus Earth is finite. Therefore, you can deduce that Earth’s energy resources are finite too — finite “energy stocks” (e.g., oil) and finite “energy flows” (e.g., wind).

            2). Visit the physics department and verify that:

Energy is the capacity to do work (no energy = no work). Thus, the global economy is 100 percent dependent on energy — it always has been, and it always will be. There are NO exceptions to the laws of thermodynamics.

The First Law of thermodynamics tells us that neither capital nor labor nor technology can “create” energy. Instead, available energy must be spent to transform existing energy stocks, or to divert an existing energy flow into more available energy.

The Second Law of thermodynamics tells us that energy is wasted at every step in the economic process. The engines that actually do the work in our economy (so-called “heat engines”, such as diesel engines) waste more than 50 percent of the energy contained in their fuel.

Energy resources must produce more energy than they consume, otherwise they are called “sinks” (this is known as the “net energy” principle). About 735 joules of energy are required to lift 15 kg of oil 5 meters out of the ground just to overcome gravity — and the higher the lift, the greater the energy requirements. The most concentrated and most accessible oil is produced first; thereafter, more and more energy is required to find and produce oil. At some point, more energy is spent finding and producing oil than the energy recovered — and the “resource” has become a “sink”.

            3). Visit the ecology (or population biology) department and verify that “overshoot”, “crash”, and “dieoff” are common in nature. Dieoff occurs when animals run out of energy stocks (food). H. Sapiens is running out of energy stocks (fossil fuel first, and then food).

Now that you have deduced the dieoff scenario from the science, turn on your TV set and observe that “dieoff” is already underway in Russia and Africa.

The only remaining question is when will “dieoff” come to a location near you? Many industry experts expect it in less than ten years. Some say it is here already.

THE POLITICS OF ECONOMIC EFFICIENCY

“Economic efficiency” means “economic anarchy” (no government regulations). Economists are literally advocating “Social Darwinism” — survival of the economically fittest — the rest can suffer and die. In the words of Economic Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman: “Pinochet has supported a fully free-market economy as a matter of principle. Chile is an economic miracle.” [2]

Although the first advocate of Friedman’s Social Darwinism was the Dominican Friar St. Thomas Aquinas (1224-1274), [3] the British economist Thomas Malthus (1766-1834) was the first to really understand and record the real-world implications of Thomistic Philosophy:

“A man who is born into a world already possessed, if he cannot get subsistence from his parents on whom he has a just demand, and if the society do not want his labor, has no claim of right to the smallest portion of food, and, in fact, has no business to be where he is. At nature’s mighty feast there is no vacant cover for him. She tells him to be gone, and will quickly execute her own orders, if he does not work upon the compassion of some of her guests. If these guests get up and make room for him, other intruders immediately appear demanding the same favor. The report of a provision for all that come, fills the hall with numerous claimants. The order and harmony of the feast is disturbed, the plenty that before reigned is changed into scarcity; and the happiness of the guests is destroyed by the spectacle of misery and dependence in every part of the hall, and by the clamorous importunity of those, who are justly enraged at not finding the provision which they had been taught to expect. The guests learn too late their error, in counter-acting those strict orders to all intruders, issued by the great mistress of the feast, who, wishing that all guests should have plenty, and knowing she could not provide for unlimited numbers, humanely refused to admit fresh comers when her table was already full.” [4]

Here is a recent example of Malthus’ Thomistic Philosophy (Social Darwinism) by the notorious former World Bank Chief economist and US Treasury Secretary Lawrence H. Summers:

“I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable… because foregone earnings from increased morbidity” are low. He adds that “the underpopulated countries in Africa are vastly underpolluted; their air quality is probably vastly inefficiently low compared to Los Angeles…. ” [5]

By using everyday words in idiosyncratic ways, economists hijack normative “feel good” terms for their heinous “feel bad” political agenda: Social Darwinism. Economists are able to use both definitions simultaneously in order to “feel good” about their politics while deceiving others — which is a splendid example of lying to oneself in order to tell more convincing lies to others. Economists provide the best examples of how the animal evolved as the apex “social predator” rather than the apex “engineer” (economists don’t know anything about the real world — and they don’t care).

“POLITICAL EFFICIENCY”

The reality of the economist’s political agenda is a curious mixture of politics and efficiency: “political efficiency”. Economists are trained to believe that “money” has nothing to do with politics and is simply a medium of exchange. But even the casual observer can see that money is social power because it “empowers” people to buy and do the things they want — including buying and doing other people: politics.

If employers have the freedom to pay workers less “political power”, then they will retain more political power for themselves. Money is, in a word, “coercion”, and “economic efficiency” is correctly seen as a political concept designed to conserve social power for those who have it — to make the politically powerful, even more powerful, and the politically weak, even weaker.

Economists have adopted normative terms and idiosyncratic definitions to make them better liars. Indeed, to the economist, lying is effortless and automatic. It’s a way of life:

“Economists have become a plague as dangerous as rabbits, prickly pear or cane toads. Economists have become the cultural cane toads of Canberra, oozing over the landscape and endangering myriad indigenous species. Not only the economy but also mental health would be greatly improved if we could lift the fog of obfuscation on things economic. The first step is to take economists from their pedestal and to see them as the curiosities they are. The first step to reducing their power is to reduce their legitimacy. How is this to be achieved? First, economists’ outpourings should, as a matter of principle, be met with laughter, derision, benign paternalism. They should cease to be employed as media commentators. In the long term they should cease to be hired. Let them be pensioned off and die out. Extinction is a worthy end for a profession whose brief is rotten to the core.”
– Dr. Evan Jones, Economics Department, University of Sydney

 

REFERENCES

[1] Energy efficiency is the percentage of total energy input that does useful work in an energy conversion system.

[2] Cite in Newsweek, Jan, 1982.

SUMMARY: So what was the record for the entire Pinochet regime? Between 1972 and 1987, the GNP per capita fell 6.4 percent. In constant 1993 dollars, Chile’s per capita GDP was over $3,600 in 1973. Even as late as 1993, however, this had recovered to only $3,170. Only five Latin American countries did worse in per capita GDP during the Pinochet era (1974-1989). And defenders of the Chicago plan call this an “economic miracle.”

Read more about Milton Friedman’s Social Darwinist utopia.

[3] “Particularly important was Aquinas’ brief outline of the mutual benefit each person derives from exchange. As he put it in the Summa: ‘buying and selling seems to have been instituted for the mutual advantage of both parties, since one needs something that belongs to the other, and conversely.’” [ p. 10, ECONOMIC THOUGHT BEFORE ADAM SMITH, by Murray N. Rothbard; Edward Elgar, 1995;]

St. Thomas Aquinas’ free trade politics were finally perfected three hundred years later by the Jesuit Father Luis Molina (1535-1600): “If merchants paying and accepting market prices, made gains, this was all right, and if they suffered losses, this was bad luck or else a penalty for incompetence, so long as gain or loss resulted from the unhampered working of the market mechanism though not if it resulted, for example, from price fixing by public authority or monopolistic concerns.” [pp. 98-99, HISTORY OF ECONOMIC ANALYSIS, Joseph Schumpeter; George Allen, 1954;]

Today, the religious disciples of St. Thomas are the Neoclassical economists: “Adam Smith’s key insight was that both parties to an exchange can benefit and that, so long as cooperation is strictly voluntary, no exchange will take place unless both parties do benefit.” — Nobel Laureate economist Milton Friedman [ p. 2, FREE TO CHOOSE, Milton and Rose Friedman; Harvest, 1980;]

Of course, Friedman is wrong here. Everything Smith wrote derives from the Scholastics and the Physiocrats. Specifically, the ideology of “free trade” comes from St. Thomas. The early industrialists could hardly have sold Catholic religious teaching to Protestants, so they used Smith as a “shill” for Catholic theology. As might be expected from a discipline founded entirely on lies, economic students aren’t even taught the true history of their discipline!

The entire religious program of the neoclassical economists is presented well in REACHING FOR HEAVEN ON EARTH, by Robert Nelson; Rowman & Littlefield, 1993;

[4] AN ESSAY ON THE PRINCIPLE OF POPULATION, 2nd edition, Thomas Malthus

[5] The Memo DATE: December 12, 1991

TO: Distribution

FR: Lawrence H. Summers

Subject: GEP

‘Dirty’ Industries: Just between you and me, shouldn’t the World Bank be encouraging MORE migration of the dirty industries to the LDCs [Less Developed Countries]? I can think of three reasons:

            1) The measurements of the costs of health impairing pollution depends on the foregone earnings from increased morbidity and mortality. From this point of view a given amount of health impairing pollution should be done in the country with the lowest cost, which will be the country with the lowest wages. I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that.

            2) The costs of pollution are likely to be non-linear as the initial increments of pollution probably have very low cost. I’ve always though that under-populated countries in Africa are vastly UNDER-polluted, their air quality is probably vastly inefficiently low compared to Los Angeles or Mexico City. Only the lamentable facts that so much pollution is generated by non-tradable industries (transport, electrical generation) and that the unit transport costs of solid waste are so high prevent world welfare enhancing trade in air pollution and waste.

            3) The demand for a clean environment for aesthetic and health reasons is likely to have very high income elasticity. The concern over an agent that causes a one in a million change in the odds of prostate cancer is obviously going to be much higher in a country where people survive to get prostate cancer than in a country where under 5 mortality is 200 per thousand. Also, much of the concern over industrial atmosphere discharge is about visibility impairing particulates. These discharges may have very little direct health impact. Clearly trade in goods that embody aesthetic pollution concerns could be welfare enhancing. While production is mobile the consumption of pretty air is a non-tradable.

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More from Jay Hanson’s Website DieOff

Elsewhere, I have written: We humans are a form of life. This is a fact of reality paramount to understanding ourselves. And, yet this fact is so pervasive and constant that it rarely enters our consciousness. Our clear and distant superiority to all other forms of life have made it easy for us to neglect our biological basis.

As we have seen ourselves different and superior to all other forms of life, we have missed the point . While we differ from plants and animals, we share their aliveness – we are still forms of life – we are still living organisms –we are still living systems .

When we examine ourselves scientifically, we discover that humans are living systems, and it follows therefore that our powers and our problems will be those of life.

If we are to create a safe and comfortable future for ourselves and our children, we must understand our connection to life. Our life connection is not only relevant, it is the crucial factor in determining a safe passage through the current human crisis. This morning Elisabet Sahtouris completes her story of the EarthDance.

Also see: Sustainable Society—20,  The Indigenous Way—19,  Ecological Ethics—18,  A Matter of Maturation—17,  The Body of Humanity—16,  Less Than Perfect, More Than Machine—15,  Worldviews from Plato to the Present—14,  Worldviews from the Pleistocene to Plato—13, What the Play Is All About—12,  The Big Brain Experiment—11,  From Possums to People—10,  From Polyps to Possums—9,  From Protists to Polyps—8, Evidence of Evolution—7,  A Great Leap—6, The Dance of Life—5, The Problems for Earthlife—4, The Young Earth—3, Cosmic Beginnings—2, and a  Twice Told Tale—1.

Cosmic Continuation—21

Elisabet Sahtouris, Ph.D.

Life, as we have understood it in this book, is the fundamentally self-organizing, or autopoietic, activity of our planet and our universe — the name of the game, we might say. Universal matter evolves into holarchies of living systems, driven by energetic interactions between great and minute events, between the tendencies of matter/energy to differentiate and reintegrate at ever new levels of organization.

In this view of life, to recap, matter/energy arranges itself into bounded but interacting living systems on galactic and super-galactic scales, as well as more locally on the scale of our planet, from its entirety to its microscopic bacterial domains. From our present perspective and limited knowledge, it appears to us that planetary life has evolved the most active and complex systems.

In the older, still very active mechanical worldview, life was understood as an incidental and accidental part of the universe, rather than as its essential tendency. In this view, the lifeless universal mechanism had already been grinding along and running down for more than ten billion years since its Big Bang when some of its non-living matter — on at least one rare planet — was accidentally converted into living matter. This was the only way life scientists could fit their discoveries into established physics models of our universe.

Because modern science was founded by astronomer-physicists, their mechanical mathematical models of the cosmos were accepted as the basis of all science. Physics is still considered the most basic science — the one responsible for explaining non-living matter, the one responsible for explaining how the cosmos is formed. We can scarcely guess how far the organic worldview might have been developed by now if biologists instead of physicists had played the leading role in science — if physicists had had to fit their discoveries into the model of an organic, living universe.

Biologists, who work with living organisms, seeing them reproduce, develop as embryos, care for themselves and make more of themselves, have often found it hard to fit life into the mechanical worldview. But biology simply did not have the status of physics, and so biologists had a hard time challenging the physicists’ models of nature. Only now are physicists really coming to the fore with the implications of consciousness in quantum theory, and with experimental evidence to support that implication. But most of biology still lags behind this new physics, in rather Newtonian models of molecular assembly.

Now that we can see Earthlife as part of a self-creating galaxy, as planetary crust transforming itself into a web of creatures and environments, it is clear that living things are not built up from pieces as is machinery. Life forms are not assembled by accident from molecules here and there on some non-living planets and then in turn assembled into ecological systems. Rather, some whole planets develop the metabolism of living beings, coming ever more alive in the great flow of energy between their stars and themselves, gradually packaging their crustal material into ever more creatures that weave their own changing environments.

As yet we don’t know what role living planets play in their galaxies and within the larger systems of our universe. We are only now discovering the first planets of other star systems, and as yet we know nothing of their life forms. As a matter of fact, we are still discovering new life forms on our own planet.

Our galaxy, we can see, has differentiated itself from a protogalactic cloud into a complex system of nucleus, stars, star systems, clouds, planets, comets, and other parts. Most likely, only a few of many planets — as with the spores, seeds, and eggs of Earth’s life forms — come to develop. But a few of the vast number of planets likely to exist in our universe would still be a vast number.

If planets that do spring to life evolve like the smaller living systems of Earth we have observed, then their individuation — as they are born from supernovas — will also lead to tensions, conflicts, resolutions and cooperation as some great cosmic body or being. Scientific models of our own early Earth are still changing. Was it surrounded by clouds of methane and ammonia? Did it rather have an atmosphere in which carbon dioxide predominates, making early organic compounds more difficult to produce locally? Were living molecules imported by comets, asteroids and meteorites? David Deamer has extracted organic meteoric material that forms cell-like membranes, as well as light absorbing pigments that appear to be precursors of chlorophyll. Christopher Chyba thinks the dust that formed our planet — and continues to bombard it daily — could already have harbored such materials.

There are endless mysteries still to solve. A great variety of organic molecules, for instance, come through interstellar space, apparently from the center of our galaxy. Yet we don’t know how they can be formed there or even what this center is made of, because it is hidden from us by great clouds which our telescopes cannot penetrate. Only now, as we said, do our telescopes begin to reveal planets belonging to stars other than our Sun.

Our present understanding is as though we were mitochondria in our own cells, trying to understand the organ galaxy and universal body we are part of without being able to see or even guess very much of what these larger holons are all about. Our actual mitochondria may understand us and the cosmos better than we, because they are not limited by a reflective brain looking only outward for information. Humans practiced in looking inward, through meditation, have revealed a great deal about the universe, most of which is not accepted in science, because it cannot be subjected to experimental measurement. However, as science progresses, we find more and more confirmation of ancient scientific cosmologies, such as the Vedic.

One of the central elements in Vedic science is that reality, including matter, is created by consciousness, and that matter itself is a created illusion, rather like the matter in our dreams. Now western physicists, as Sally Goerner points out, are also coming to understand matter as an illusion of energy in motion. Physicists have long been talking about fields — traditionally taken to mean all matter, or mass, and energy in a particular region. Einstein’s E = mc² — meaning there is a relationship between mass and energy that is mediated by the speed of light squared — was taken to be a conversion formula for matter into energy or vice versa. But more recently some physicists tell us that the interaction of massless electric charges within an electromagnetic field creates the appearance of mass. In this scenario, Einstein’s formula becomes “a statement about how much energy is required to give the appearance of a certain amount of mass.” (The Sciences, Nov. 1994, p. 26)

Consider a universe of pure energy with the appearance of material reality. To have an appearance, there must be an observer, and as quantum theorists pointed out long ago, in a completely interconnected universe, consciousness anywhere means consciousness everywhere. Now non-locality tells us that anywhere is everywhere! In fact, it would seem that energy itself, like matter, is an `appearance’ of consciousness. This certainly fits with out previous observation that no human — scientist or other — has ever had any experience outside of consciousness or outside of the eternally present moment.

Thinking things through in this way we see how limited our worldviews have been. And yet, for daily existence in our reality, our usual concept of matter is still practical. When physicists told us that chairs were made mostly of empty space, they did not begin to collapse beneath us. Learning that they are illusions of consciousness will also not cause them to collapse, since our consciousness creates ourselves from the same `stuff’ as the chairs. Note that we can sit on chairs very well even in our dreams, causing eastern philosophers to speculate on what is waking experience and what is dream.

Nevertheless, there will be enormous effects of learning that our consciousness creates our reality — that our assumptions, our beliefs as individuals, as societies and as humanity are the basis of the world we produce for ourselves and co-produce together, along with all living systems, from moment to moment. Jane Roberts has given us the most complete description of how our world works in these terms in her Seth books, more and more corroborated by physics. One of Seth’s more challenging questions is, how much we can really learn about the deep nature of the universe by measuring matter with material instruments? If we chase ever smaller material particles with material measurement devices, he says, we create the particles we find from consciousness as we create the rest of reality, and can play the game till we tire of it and learn to study consciousness itself.

Non-Euclidean geometries and the theory of relativity broke through the limits of Euclidean geometry and classical physics. The organic worldview overcomes the limits and lifelessness of the mechanical worldview. A consciousness worldview will give us even greater perspective on our creative universe and our role at its leading edge. It will also give us the freedom and power to recreate our world in ethical integrity, from a place of community and love.

Science does at times reach out boldly into the new, but on the whole it tends to be conservative. It has taken half a century to accept the conscious universe implications of its own quantum theory, and as much time to accept the implications of DNA as intelligent in its own right, capable of altering organisms in response to their changing situations.

Jeremy Narby has calculated some amazing numbers in relation to this intelligent DNA. If the DNA packed into the invisibly small nuclei of each of our cells (along with protein and water) were stretched out, it would be about six inches long. End to end, the DNA of our several trillion cells would extend so far that it would take a jet plane traveling one thousand kilometers per hour over two centuries to reach its end! After this surprising result, Narby calculated that a single handful of living earth contains more DNA than that of our entire bodies — because bacteria are packed far more closely in soil than cellular nuclei are in our bodies.

Consider nature once more in this light — the entire surface of Earth covered and penetrated by intelligently self-organizing and reorganizing DNA in this almost inconceivable quantity. Is it truly the language of life through which cosmic consciousness expresses itself in `material’ worlds? Will we find it to be a common language throughout our co-created universe?

Σ    Σ    Σ

Not long after the mechanical theory of evolution was proposed by scientists, it was opposed by some philosophers, including Henri Bergson, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and Alfred North Whitehead, who worked out organic models or theories in which life is seen as inherent in the universe. Bergson opposed the idea of purpose in nature, but proposed the existence of a mysterious life force that is separate from and struggling with matter in an attempt to organize it. Scientists tended to reject his model because there was no room for a `life force’ in their worldview. Teilhard de Chardin, though he explained life as the natural evolution of self-organizing matter, saw evolution as purposive, leading — by way of mankind — to a “God-Omega point.” His work was also rejected by most scientists. Whitehead was ignored as too obscure for most scientists, but his talk of organics and God would have put them off in any case.

We have seen that at least a few scientists during the mechanical worldview era saw the Earth as alive or close to it. Darwin’s younger Russian contemporary Vernadsky saw it as metabolically active; George Hutchinson of Yale University spread Vernadsky’s ideas in America. James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis acknowledged geologist-physician James Hutton’s concept of a living Earth as a forerunner to the Gaia hypothesis. Erich Jantsch’s self-organizing universe called attention to the interplay of the largest and smallest events of cosmic matter/energy in producing the ever more complex systems of an essentially living universe. None of these scientific models included the notions of purpose or life force or God, as some of the philosophical ones did.

The mystery of life began clearing up as soon as we stopped thinking of the cosmos as a mechanical assembly of atomic, astral, and galactic parts — as soon as we began to see that cosmic `parts’ form themselves from — and are formed within-larger wholes, rather as species form themselves within, and are formed by, ecosystems in evolution. Is it not likely that life `here below’ behaves essentially the same way as things do `above’ in the greater cosmos, as the ancients claimed?

If the universe is created by consciousness — cosmic consciousness differentiating into levels or layers of cosmic holarchy — and if an underlying sacred intelligent geometry is its means to create apparently physical worlds, then we should expect to find that it patterns itself in ways that repeat like fractals.

In Chapter 2 we saw that forms as simple as whirlpools — whether in water or in protogalactic clouds — take in matter, maintain their form in shaping its flow, and give off used matter to their environment — the essential pattern of any living thing’s organization in relation to its surround. These vortex forms are as characteristic of subatomic particles as of galaxies and are found throughout the levels of nature familiar to us, for example in seashells, seed pods, rivers and tornadoes. Consistent with this basic model, all living holons gain their identity and relative autonomy by organizing their own form and function through a continual exchange — or re-creation — of matter while remaining dependent on their environment or larger holon to supply their resources and absorb their wastes. That is the pattern of the fractal cosmic and planetary dance.

Many scientists still unwilling to accept consciousness as the source of creation, rather than its late product, will continue for some time to vacillate between ideas of accident and purpose in attempts to explain how non-life becomes life. It took time to see matter and energy, wave and particle, time and space, as aspects of the same underlying unity; it may be even more difficult to see life and non-life as aspects of the cosmic process or as relative organizational states of cosmic matter. Scientists have no problem seeing the process of life in a puffball bursting to scatter its spores, but they do tend to have difficulty seeing the process of life in a star bursting to scatter its dust, for all that we are made of that dust.

The further development of a conscious, organic model of the universe clearly requires the cooperative efforts of biologists and physicists as well as other scientists, not to mention philosophers and spiritual leaders in a great co-creative process. With so much to learn and co-create as new stories, or worldviews, this is a most exciting and challenging time of discovery and new understanding. Most important in these developing efforts is the promise of seeing ever more clearly just how we humans fit into the great cosmic holarchy of life and how we may learn to cooperate in creating its greatest health and fulfillment.

Σ    Σ    Σ

As we have seen, our historic worldviews — our images of who and what we are in relation to all nature — have been, on the one hand, limited by narrow perspective and, on the other, unbounded in egotism. For thousands of years we considered ourselves God’s favorite creatures; then, when we had no more use for God, we saw ourselves as the pinnacle of natural evolution. In both views nature was ours to command and exploit as we liked. Only when we ourselves began suffering from the damage we had done to our environment did we begin to gain a more realistic view of ourselves as one species among still uncounted others on whom we depend.

In our cosmic worldview, sacred or secular, ours is a middle-sized planet circling an ordinary star at the edge of a common type of galaxy — a planet now in its middle age, about halfway through its expected life. Its oldest living creatures are bacteria, with an origin billions of years ago, but still the basis of its self-regulating systems and of all other life forms evolved since. Its newest living species are mammals that evolved only millions of years ago, though not a single species of early mammals survives today.

DNA is virtually the oldest thing in Earth’s evolution still alive on its surface — propagating itself from the beginning in an unbroken chain, as surface rock transformed into endless creatures, who recycled it in turn into sediments that were subducted back into the magma of origin by great tectonic plates. All the while, DNA’s species came and went, playing their roles and then disappearing, while it continued the dance.

There is little reason to think, from a biological perspective, that humans will change the pattern of species flux and survive for the rest of the life of our planet without further evolving. We haven’t even the patience to wait for natural evolutionary changes, but are impatient to redesign our own DNA. What does this urgency signify? Do we sense that we are on the brink of a huge new leap in evolution? Do we think altering our own biology, rather than exercising our consciousness, is the way to get there?

No doubt we are a bold improvisation in Gaia’s dance — a new kind of creature that may not survive very long at all if it doesn’t learn to play a humbler and healthier role than it has thus far.  We produce and patent new plants and animals and create ever new kinds of artificial ecosystems.

Where are we headed in the arrogance of thinking we understand genetic engineering as well as those humble bacteria that invented, defined and refined it? In fact, we can only do it by enslaving them to carry out our intentions, as we have enslaved them to clean crude oil, to manufacture biodegradable plastics they invented long before us and to make them manufacture other particular substances they know how to make for us. But do we really want to eat plants we get them to insert poisons into every cell of to ward off insect predators, when nature long ago evolved plants healthy enough to keep them at bay in their own ways? Do we really want to clone ourselves to attain immortality, when our cloned sheep Dolly proved to age ten times faster than her peers?

Our rapid progress in biotechnology will likely get us into as much trouble as our nuclear-age mechanical technology if we don’t make equal progress in understanding life systems and their dynamic ecological balance. Only if it is used with understanding of and respect for living systems can biotechnology offer the possibility of working with life for life.

Σ    Σ    Σ

On our planet, at least, we are indeed unique for the range of our conscious free choice of behavior, the range of our technological prowess, and our ability to foresee, plan, and act for the future. But the very evolution of such abilities on our own planet suggests they may well have evolved on many other planets around the universe. The same kind of matter exists everywhere and seems to undergo the same processes all over our cosmos. There is no good reason not to assume that planets come alive and evolve in essentially the same way everywhere. This assumption is fairly widespread among scientists now and underlies our ongoing efforts to reach and communicate with intelligent life in other star systems.

In most of these communications efforts, such as the radio telescope project CETI, scientists assume that intelligent species of other planets will have invented a mechanical technology composed of mathematics, machinery and electronics essentially similar to our own, and that they will not have progressed beyond it. This assumption is made in the belief that intelligence — the gathering and using of information to gain understanding — can grow to human proportions only through our kind of technology, through a similar co-evolution of conscious thought with the productive use of manipulative organs such as our hands. This idea rules out the possibility that creatures such as cetaceans could be as intelligent as humans, and it would be wise to feel less sure of ourselves on this score until we know more about the whales and dolphins.

It is interesting to consider that several of our own technological inventions — including sonar, diving equipment, insulated clothing, and high-speed long-range communications systems — all evolved within cetacean bodies, which function comfortably at widely varying pressures and temperatures as they move freely about the seas covering most of the Earth’s surface. We have no present way of knowing how far such naturally evolved internal biotechnology can go or how it can be used by highly evolved brains — or whether it could contribute to the formation or function of living systems beyond our planetary Gaia.

There is a whole literature about and by people who have had demonstrable telepathic communications with cetaceans. Indigenous humans use telepathy routinely to communicate complex thoughts and concepts with each other, as well as with other species. One such tribe’s use of telepathy is described in detail by Petru Popescu, in his story about National Geographic photographer Loren McIntyre’s experiences with the “cat people” of the Amazon, who had been thought extinct until he stumbled on them while lost. It is of special interest that these so-called primitive people have sophisticated understanding of both practical linear time and a deeper non-linear understanding of radial time as physicists only now begin to comprehend it.

Harvard psychiatrist John Mack, whose credibility was put to severe academic test and passed, has interviewed patients and others around the world about their experiences with extra-terrestrials. His findings show almost universally that ET communication is telepathic and so prolific in `downloading’ that the people involved can only grasp and communicate small parts of it.

Many people with ET contacts believe that galactic and cosmic life systems larger than those confined to single planets already exist, and our very popular science fiction films have reflected that belief for some time. A galactic living system would require communications and space travel, but most likely not of the sort we have imagined — radio telescopes and great space ships supplied for generations of physical life forms.

If live planets are the cells of such galactic systems, their living creatures may not have to come into physical contact with one another, any more than the mitochondria of our liver cells need to meet the mitochondria of our bone cells. A common information-communications system may unite them effectively.

Clearly linear time and physical space as we have understood them, preclude any kind of efficient or reasonable space travel. Even the exchange of messages coming one at a time across light years of space now look like a crude and primitive idea. Does that mean that space travel and communications are impossible, or simply that our concepts of time and space were wrong? Non-locality, radial time, creation by consciousness and other concepts new to western science are rapidly changing our assumptions on how our universe works, and opening doors to our long-dreamed of contacts with other beings of our cosmos. In fact, once we see that these things are possible, as Joe Firmage points out, we will be less reluctant to believe they are happening, and perhaps always have been throughout human history.

Σ    Σ    Σ

Before we consider how we might become part of an interplanetary or intergalactic life system, shouldn’t we consider how we might look to other members of such a system? We have seen the Gaian system and ourselves from various perspectives within or just outside it. Let us now try looking at ourselves from the point of view of some intelligent species from another star system that can observe us.

Learning what we are and what we are up to, would they consider us an intelligent form of life?

Surely it would strike them as most peculiar that we destroy the environment on which we depend. No intelligent species would knowingly pollute its air, water, and soil to the point of endangering itself. It would hardly cram itself into communities of concrete that sealed the species off from natural processes and made its air unbreathable with its own wastes when there was plenty of space on the planet and ways to avoid creating the pollution.

They would surely wonder why we destroy the natural ecosystems of our planet to grow our own food without preserving variety and recycling water and nutrients to prevent the land from turning into deserts. They would note that we deliberately overload our planet’s delicately balanced atmosphere and thus overheat the planet itself with carbon dioxide as we hack down our tropical forests and destroy the coastal areas that might reestablish the balance. They would wonder how we could know that our whole planet’s life system is driven effectively by solar energy and not use this safe energy source extensively ourselves, if we cannot yet tap deeper sources such as zero-point energy.

Could they consider us intelligent after they see that we are quite capable of providing a comfortable life for all humans, yet choose to devote enormous resources to escalating an arms race rather than using them for the wellbeing of our people? Would an intelligent species overproduce food for some of its members while millions of its young die annually of starvation? Would our observers not wonder that the males of our species had long ago declared the female half of the species inferior, largely excluding them from their former positions of authority and management, at the same time often shifting social priorities from life-giving to life-taking?

They would see us systematically exterminating other species and whole ecosystems, even the other large-brained creatures most like ourselves, such as dolphins and whales, elephants, chimpanzees, and gorillas, though they are peaceful and inoffensive to humans. They would see our leaders, many of whom hold their positions by popular consent, maintaining hostilities that threaten nuclear warfare, which would destroy all parties and create a planetary nuclear winter. What would they think of our popular Star Wars weapons cult and of our use of that name for a weapons system?

If extraterrestrial species developed technologies essentially similar to ours, they would sooner or later discover nuclear energy or even more sophisticated means of destruction. If they were warring species at the time of such discoveries, they would have faced crises similar to our own — crises of choice between species suicide or species cooperation. One might think any species that has survived such discoveries would have learned peaceful cooperation or blasted itself out of existence.

This leaves our expectations of alien belligerence less likely, and perhaps even embarrassing, if it comes to a meeting. Are we a cosmic anomaly — a species once mutually consistent with its ecosystem that became rather suddenly, over a period of a few thousand years, hostile and destructive to itself and its living planet? May we attribute this peculiarity to the temporary condition of youth — to unprecedented freedom during the heady stage of species adolescence? Have our observers reason to hope we shall soon grow up and become wiser?

In the stories of ET encounters Dr. Mack hears from his patients, the ET’s are indeed appalled at the destructiveness of human behavior, and their most common plea to humans is to take care of their planet while they still can. What is the evidence they might see in our favor — that might give them hope we can behave as an intelligent species?

We have begun to understand and be concerned with ecological balance; we are beginning in at least some areas to protect endangered species, reduce our pollution, and give the rest of nature a chance to clean up and restore its balance. Unfortunately these constructive efforts are very far from balancing our continuing destruction. Still, there is hope that we may increase these efforts dramatically when we finally recognize ourselves as a living system — part of a living being whose delicate balance is tailored to our needs, but which may eliminate us if we force it to reorganize itself to cope with our reckless destruction of that balance.

The threat of all-out nuclear war actually lessened dramatically as we took to heart our scientists’ predictions of its dire consequences for all humanity, but genuine disarmament has not happened among the great powers, and renegade nuclear weapons in smaller nations proliferate, ever more difficult to track. This suggests that we do respond to our knowledge by changing our ways, but we need to speed this process.

Our technology is well on the way out of the industrial age of heavy steel and polluting fossil fuels, into the information age of lightweight transistor technology, the Web, and benign energy sources such as sunlight, wind, waves, hydrogen and alcohol, with water fuel cells and zero-point energy on the immediate horizon. If we put our future welfare ahead of immediate profit motives, turning corporations into living systems that make only consumable and recyclable products, this transition could be completed rapidly and effectively, as we said in the last chapter.

Agricultural research, as we also saw, is beginning to look more seriously at older, even ancient, methods of natural pest control and crop rotation and variation, recognizing that monocultures sustained by chemicals are rapidly destroying the land and polluting the waterways. The shift to organic agriculture is already underway.

Our worldwide economic system, our transportation and communications technology, our information revolution, have bound us into a body of humanity that is now being pushed for the sake of its survival to evolve from competition to cooperation among nations and with our environment. We see that the integrative evolutionary forces which produced protists and multicelled creatures are now pushing us to complete our own organizational task. We see that we only prolong and aggravate our biggest problems by resisting this evolution with habitual fears and hostile competition. We can use our gift of freedom to make up for our lack of innate limits to territorial and aggressive behavior by channeling these into constructive negotiation and sharing, as we are practicing on the Web.

We can recognize that the strength and resilience of living systems lies in their diversity, and stop trying to make ourselves all alike. We can analyze and reorganize efforts such as the United Nations, which are as critical to the organization of the body of humanity as were nuclei to eukaryotes and brains to animals.

We can end the sexual inequality that is not merely an injustice to women but a deplorable waste of half our species’ talents for creative management and nurture of the species as a whole. As long as women remain a tiny minority in positions of human leadership, they will be pressed on the whole to conform to the established male model of society based on bureaucracy, top-down command and control organizations, competition, conquest, and profit. Only when women assume equal leadership will they be free to express effectively their abilities in organic organization, networking, cooperation, nurture, and mutual benefit.

Certainly we would be foolish to continue our environmental destruction and our hostilities to the point of possible extinction when we are surrounded by clues to exciting, creative, natural solutions for our greatest problems. If we accept ourselves as an adolescent species in crisis and face the challenge of taking on mature responsibility for our freedom with courage and enthusiasm, we stand an excellent chance of growing up and reaping the benefits of maturity.

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How rewarding it would be if, when we openly communicate with extraterrestrials we could do so having solved our great problems of inequality, hunger, pollution, devastation of ecosystems and nuclear threat. We would then be in a wonderful position to face new challenges with appropriate pride in our species. Perhaps we will be called on to protect Gaia by detecting and diverting massive meteors or planetoids; perhaps if we come to understand and help foster Gaia’s healthy ecosystems, we will be able to bring life to Mars or some Moons of our solar system, thus spreading Gaia’s seed.

Whatever our dreams of such roles, or of cooperating in a larger cosmic life system, our immediate task is still here at home. On the whole, there seems to be good reason to believe our recklessly egotistical and destructive phase is coming to an end with new knowledge that leads us back to ancient wisdom. We are capable of regaining our reverence for life, of replacing the drive to conquer with the will to cooperate, of remaking our engineered institutions, including our corporations, into living systems.

The more we learn about nature, including human nature, the more we can see that our living parent planet and our whole living cosmos are far more beautiful and awesome in the reality of their self-creation than is any myth we made as we struggled to develop our knowledge. At last our scientific and religious quests can merge in the recognition that conscious, sacred, self-creating nature, both Gaian and cosmic, is our physical and spiritual source, the wellspring of our ancient inspiration to love, and the experienced guide we have always sought — the guide we need more than ever now that we stand on the brink of maturity.

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Visit Elisabet Sahtouris’ Website

Reposted from: LifeWeb

A positive future is not possible without sustainability.

From EarthDance. Also see: The Indigenous Way—19,  Ecological Ethics—18,  A Matter of Maturation—17,  The Body of Humanity—16,  Less Than Perfect, More Than Machine—15,  Worldviews from Plato to the Present—14,  Worldviews from the Pleistocene to Plato—13, What the Play Is All About—12,  The Big Brain Experiment—11,  From Possums to People—10,  From Polyps to Possums—9,  From Protists to Polyps—8, Evidence of Evolution—7,  A Great Leap—6, The Dance of Life—5, The Problems for Earthlife—4, The Young Earth—3, Cosmic Beginnings—2, and a  Twice Told Tale—1.

Sustainable Society—20

Elisabet Sahtouris, Ph.D.

Sustainability is now widely discussed, at conferences, in the media, among people in the street. Despite heated debates, many people do not have a clear idea of what it means. This is not surprising, since visions of what sustainability might look like are virtually absent from these discussions except among people such as Bioregionalists and Futurists who are not yet widely represented in the population. On the whole, the debates are based on fragmented worldviews that make it difficult to understand the issues holistically.

People do recognize that the discussion of sustainability has to do with changing the way things are and that it is linked to concern for the environment. Many people are afraid it means ecology at the expense of economy — pitting the survival of endangered species, for example, against jobs and development, as is sometimes phrased “jobs versus spotted owls.” It is natural in our culture to think in this way — that for something or someone to gain, something or someone else must lose. This is because we are accustomed to living in what Hazel Henderson has for decades called a worldwide win/lose economy — the kind of economy we discussed in Chapter 16, where we observed how such an economy would kill a living system. Sustainability, in its essence, is about the necessary shift to a win-win economy that would benefit all humanity as well as the other species on which human life depends.

We have seen that the words ecology and economy are related as design and management of a `household,’ and how, in trying to understand the various aspects of human society as parts of a social mechanism, we lost sight of the fact that one cannot separate how our human household is run from how it is organized.

Let’s look once more to our physical bodies, seeing their ecology as their organization into interrelated systems — skeleto-muscular, circulatory, digestive, brain/nervous, perceptual, and so on. By what principles do they manage their economy of food intake, of cellular maintenance, of endocrine, plasma, etc. production, of materials and product distribution, of recycling and elimination of wastes?

We know the nervous system acts as a service government — a central guidance system collecting information, monitoring the state of affairs everywhere in the body, working closely with endocrine and blood systems to make sure supplies are appropriately distributed, coordinating the tensegrity movements of bone and muscle, the perceptions from eyes, ears, nose, mouth and skin, regulating body temperature and emotions. Its jobs are far too numerous and complex to mention or track them all What we can say is that as long as the body is healthy, there is no conflict between its ecology and its economy. It coordinates a win/win economy/ecology in which all parts contribute what they have to offer and all parts benefit equally from the collective economy. No part of a healthy body gains its health at the expense of other parts; there are no such things as rich and poor organs.

If we accept the notion of the living Earth, and the body of humanity as an integral part of it, then we have no choice but to implement a healthy win/win world that can continue indefinitely, which means a sustainable world. As long as you are healthy and avoid accidents, you are sustainable for a natural lifetime . In the same sense, a healthy world is a sustainable world. This whole book has been about sustainability, yet the current debate on the subject warrants some further discussion.

In Earth in The Balance, Al Gore called for “an environmentally responsible pattern of life.” He expressed optimism about the fact that most people now see themselves as part of a global civilization, and that most of the world has chosen democracy as the preferred form of political organization and modified free markets as the preferred form of economic organization. Yet he recognizes that the single most difficult relationship is the one between wealthy and poor nations, clearly stating that the wealthy nations will have to write off impoverished nations’ debts and assist their sustainable development to make them partners in a balanced, healthy global economy.

This is a clear case of recognition that sustainability implies a balanced economy of equal partners, rather than an economy in which some nations or corporations gain at the expense of others. Gore recognizes that

any such effort will also require the wealthy nations to make a transition themselves that will be in some ways more wrenching than that of the Third World, simply because powerful established patterns will be disrupted…the developed nations must be willing to lead by example; otherwise, the Third World is not likely to consider making the required changes — even in return for substantial assistance.

Gore thus cuts right to the core of our global crisis. Our win/lose world is a top-heavy world in which seven percent of the people own sixty percent of the land and use eighty percent of the available energy. Its dominant economy has been and still is based on growth that simply cannot continue its path of destroying ecosystems and creating ever-expanding masses of impoverished and desperate people.

Resource use, population growth, the gap between rich and poor are all proceeding along exponential curves heading quickly toward infinity — and none of them, of course, can reach it. There is no way to have an infinitely large population, to use an infinite amount of resources, etc. So we know things will change. Something will alter the direction of change. The question is only, what will it be? Extinction? Other disasters, such as economic crashes or massive technological breakdowns? Or a sudden awakening and resolve to implement sustainability?

One problem with appealing to national governments to shift toward a more equitable world economy is that multinational corporations are now often richer than many nations and have the power to control them. Paul Hawken points out that lobbying for corporate interests in Washington DC is a multi-billion dollar industry with which no other interests can compete fairly. He reports that during a single legislative session U.S. congressmen take 3,000 corporate financed holidays, illustrating how the U.S. government, not to mention campaign financing, is kept in service to business rather than the other way around.

Chief Oren Lyons of the Onondaga Nation uses the metaphor of CEOs of businesses and banks as jockeys on multi-national corporation and bank `horses,’ beating them on to a finish line now visible as a stone wall they will run into, yet not even turning around when one of their fellows falls. What this metaphor portrays is that corporate businesses and banks, including international development banks that serve corporate interests, are in a competitive race of unsustainable world economy. Lyons’ stone wall finish line is consistent with our analysis of the death of a living system pursuing win/lose economics. To illustrate our state of denial about our non-sustainable world, Lyons has also used the metaphor of the Titanic, which its owners, crew and passengers all regarded as such a marvel of modern technology it could not possibly go down. Notably, the film Titanic became a great cultural hit.

In this light it is interesting to consider historian Arnold Toynbee’s observation, after studying twenty-one collapsed civilizations, that what they had in common was inflexibility under stress and the concentration of wealth into few hands. We cannot deny the current stress. Will we remain inflexible in maintaining a system that concentrates wealth to the increasing detriment of most humans?

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While human communities were small and in close touch with their ecosystems or bioregions — as we began to see in the last chapter — many of them were able to function in good ecological and social health, often quite democratically, sometimes for many centuries. They functioned much like bodies, with divisions of labor and all parts contributing to each other’s welfare.

Helena Norberg Hodge has shown how the rural towns of Himalayan Ladakh, sometimes called `Little Tibet’ — with their three-story white-painted houses, beautiful monasteries, irrigated wheat fields and gardens, herds of animals, festivals displaying their music, theater arts, brocades and silver, crops adequate to support their people in good health, with no poverty — functioned sustainably for many centuries. Buddhists and Muslims lived peacefully together in these communities, with their deep spirituality and strong values.

Despite the considerable property described, the barter economies of these communities were discovered to count as nothing when Ladakh was introduced to the concept of GNP. Only when these barter economies were undermined by the influx of the modern commercial world into this tiny remote country and men were persuaded to leave these communities in order to work for a pittance in cities did the GNP go up. Unfortunately, the result was a great deterioration in the lives of these Ladakhis.

How were the men persuaded into leaving the spiritual beauty, communal harmony and physical bounty of their villages for polluted, congested urban living? As in other parts of the world, roads were built, people were encouraged to stop producing their own food and goods through the import of subsidized grain and other cheap imported goods and the opportunity to earn enough to pay for at least the basic ones.

Motorcycles, TV and videos filled with guns, girls and images of no-work affluence in the West came in to seduce the young men, eroding the economy and the values of rural life. People were told they were backward; that modernization would bring great benefits. Because of the initially subsidized grain, fields were abandoned; school children were systematically taught the values of a market economy, the importance of industrial development.

The living systems of the old communities were thus fragmented beyond repair. Hodge, who lived in Ladakh throughout this modernization process, documents how the happiness of the people plummeted and conflicts erupted as they had to live with difficulty on dreams of a better life that did not materialize for them. As Hodge points out, this single decade of change from peaceful, healthy self-sufficiency to conflict-ridden, miserable dependency reflects in a nutshell the colonial process all over the world, everywhere counted as economic improvement.

The colonial process has been and is always essentially the same — the mining or monoculture farming of indigenous lands by outside owners using local labor for a market economy destroys self-sufficient, independent and secure community, whether the lands are seized outright or bought cheaply. Removing the men to provide a work force leaves women and children with more work and a ruptured society ever more dependent on cash. The old community rules and values cannot be sustained, population is no longer controllable. Later, this destruction is compounded by urbanization and industrialization, which makes people totally dependent for their livelihood on paid work and impersonal institutions, such as credit banks, supermarkets, hospitals, etc.

In her interviews with African village women, population expert Perdita Huston found that grandmothers were socially and economically better off in intact tribal societies than were their granddaughters in modern economies. In Ladakh, the downward change has happened in a single generation. In Africa, the process has been going on longer. But in any case, the majority of people of these formerly healthy living systems end up poor or destitute on barren land or in urban slums. They have become part of a world economy in which they serve as cheap labor and market outlets if they are lucky. Increasingly, they are left out of even these slim benefits, desperately poor in huge urban slums, on the edge of starvation throughout their lives, many never reaching adulthood.

According to world futurist Rashmi Mayur and TV documentaries, many millions of children in Bangladesh and India under the age of ten are enslaved up to nineteen hours a day, seven days a week in factories making goods for export to the U.S. Making consumers conscious of these conditions has created a groundswell of protest — exactly what is needed to change them.

A historic1994 Atlantic Monthly cover story by Robert Kaplan — illustrated by a world on fire — documented the devastating reality of desperate poverty imposed on peoples in Africa, Asia and South America. Kaplan points out that to believe things are still well in the world one must ignore three-fourths of it. If we see the situation realistically, we know it is entirely unsustainable, causing enormous and unnecessary human misery.

We are, in fact, in the same desperate situation bacterial colonialism led to a few billion years ago. Yet the nucleated cells they devised as sustainable solutions have survived and flourished some two billion years in a myriad evolved forms. They are so sustainable that no other kind of cell was ever needed to replace or improve on them. The same cooperative communal solutions they found are open to us.

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It is clear, then, that money is driving out world — that money, not the good life Bacon foresaw, has become the whole rationale for our economies. We measure the health of our economies only by the amount of money flowing in them — the GNP. Can we not see there is something wrong with this measure? Terrible oil spills increase the GNP due to the money flowing in to clean them up; increasing expenditures on other human and environmental remediation do the same.

Hazel Henderson has asked us for decades why money should be the measure of our social health, while we ignore the real costs of destroying nature and lives, as well as the real assets of all the creative unpaid labor volunteered to raise and maintain families and communities around the world. Her Quality of Life Indicator scales were pioneering efforts many have followed, though they remain to be seriously applied to national and corporate economies, as they must be to measure our progress toward a sustainable world.

How did the concentration of wealth become so dominant a force in what we call democracies? Since wealth is generally defined in terms of money, let us look further at money. Belgian banker Bernard Lietaer has pointed out that money is simply an agreement on the value of some medium of exchange used to facilitate relations among the producers and consumers of an economy. In an equitable democratic society, representative government would issue or withdraw money from the economy only to balance these relations. Such a government would be guided by the interests of the entire citizenry in determining how to balance the economy. This was the general idea held by the founding fathers of the United States, who warned against implementing a debt-money system, known to be detrimental to all but the lenders since ancient times. For this reason the U.S. Constitution was written to make Congress the only body that could coin money.

Jacques Jaikaran raises the interesting question of why the United States Congress gave its constitutional right to issue money away to a private banking system with the public-sounding name Federal Reserve Bank at its core, forcing the government itself to borrow money at interest. He describes how the debt-money system implemented by these banks functions to funnel money and property from the poor to the rich, thus fostering the process of a win/lose world that is fundamentally unsustainable.

Money is concentrating with unprecedented speed in the hands of a small world elite, as it does in the hands of one player of every game of Monopoly. We are all caught in this giant monopoly game, which cannot go on much longer, by reason of impossible exponential curves. Something, we can be sure, will soon break or shift dramatically.

When it does, will the people of the world effectively demand a different and truly democratic economy that does not destroy the living systems of nature and people within nature? There is at present a trend toward equity money in place of debt money, to keep the system going longer. Equity money means more people in upper classes will share ownership of businesses including banks, but this does not solve the problem of vast numbers of poor people who will be as disenfranchised as ever, if not more so.

More promising is a big groundswell of alternative currencies around the world, from the computer tracked Local Economic Trading Systems (LETS) pioneered in Canada by Michael Linton, the Mexican Tlaloc and U.S. Ithaca Hours trading notes now copied by many U.S. communities, to airline frequent flyer miles and volunteer community services hours in U.S. states as well as in Japan’s elder care trading system. Lietaer calls these the growing Yin economy that is coming to balance our monetary Yang economy. It is instructive to note that local communities across the United States survived the Great Depression beginning with the stock market crash of 1929 with exactly these kinds of local barter currencies — later stopped as `inefficient,’ though legal. Now the world’s people — in the U.S., Australia, Mexico, Europe, Asia and elsewhere are implementing them before disaster strikes. Perhaps we are becoming more intelligent as a species.

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Let us try to understand a few more sustainability issues we hear a lot about. One of them is population. In Chapter 16, overpopulation in poor countries was attributed to poverty and family insecurity. We saw it as the reaction of insecure people whose self-sufficient community has been destroyed, their only remaining security lying in having enough children to hire out in wage slavery and to care for them in old age. In some places, such as Indonesia, missionaries actually encouraged huge population growth to increase the labor force.

Did modern medicine create the problem of overpopulation by saving so many lives? It is true that colonizers brought diseases to which natives had no resistance and which thus decimated whole populations. It is also true that modern medicine has worked to combat such diseases, which may compensate for the lives lost before the medicines existed, but it is not an adequate explanation of overpopulation. Dramatic increases in food supplies when people are used as labor to produce food in quantity for markets has also been cited as cause for overpopulation, yet the very countries producing food for export, as we have also seen, are those with the highest starvation levels. Wherever people die at high rates is where we find them replaced in ever greater numbers.

Certainly urbanization, sanitation, technology and agricultural monoculture did increase the world’s human population. Before these mixed blessings of colonialism, overpopulation was rare. Traditional communities with subsistence lifestyles consciously regulated their population size. Indigenous and traditional peoples survived for many thousands of years without overpopulating because the people of these societies knew their bioregions, understood well how many people their land could support. If populations grew greater or less than optimal, they adjusted social practices, such as how long nursing mothers were off limits to men, how many husbands or wives could be had, how many people remained celibate in spiritual life. Most such societies also had knowledge of herbal birth control and in some cases selected infanticide was practiced.

Overpopulation, like other social problems, occurs when communities in sound ecological balance with their surrounding world are destroyed and that balance is lost.

Population discussions must address the problem of resource overconsumption in rich countries, rather than focusing only on numbers of people. In fact, the reason we worry at all about population size is because the consumption of resources has become unsustainable. This raises the question of whether a bigger population problem arises when many people live on few resources or when few people live on many resources.

The IPAT formula (Impact = Population x Affluence x Technology) of Paul and Ann Ehrlich, showed us that the resource drain of Americans is far greater than that of Bangladeshis. The average American uses somewhere between forty and seventy times the resources of a person in a poor country such as Bangladesh. Multiplying the U.S. population by the conservative figure of forty means the U.S. population pressure is that of over ten billion poor people! This is very important to consider when deciding who is `overpopulating’ the Earth. It is abundantly clear that all the world’s people can never live as Americans do today. Thus the reduction of consumption is more pressing than the reduction of numbers, making the Voluntary Simplicity movement we mentioned in Chapter 18 very important.

Another major sustainability issue is pollution. Looking back again at Gaian evolution, we recall that humans are not the first creatures to threaten their own and others’ extinction by way of resource depletion and pollution. In considerable detail, we followed the ancient bacteria as they survived similar crises by reorganizing themselves and their living systems repeatedly.

We also saw that species living now can exist only because the Earth spent billions of years burying atmospheric carbon in forests and underground. We noted that cutting and burning these forests and fossil fuels reverses the planet’s system for keeping atmospheric conditions and climate conducive to species health. It is not a sustainable way to live. It is the way of an immature species that gobbles up all available resources, like the weeds that take over land along our highways or in abandoned fields, where we have destroyed mature ecosystems.

Technological production is natural to the human species, but must be reevaluated and revised in a goal-setting context of healthy survival. We have discussed the ability of mature ecosystems to clean up considerable human pollution, if they remain healthy. Destruction of forests, seashores, water tables, ozone layer, etc. make it impossible for the Earth to perform that cleanup. But perhaps it would be wise for us to reconsider the whole notion of pollution and cleanup.

Earthlife as described in this book is fundamentally and necessarily based on recycling. Because the need to recycle our human products, lest they choke us out of existence, has become so urgent, a new branch of biological science is finally looking at nature’s recyclers. It has now been estimated that sixty percent of all species are `recyclers.’ While this new science at last vindicates the vultures, worms and microbes we have looked down on for so long, it is actually misleading. The natural world is not divided into producers and recyclers; all species are both to varying degrees.

In a mature, balanced ecosystem, there is no waste or pollution, no special cleanup required. The principle of mutual consistency suggests that a healthy species insures its survival by putting out only quality material. Quality material is something useful to others. It is only our industrial culture — immature from an ecological/evolutionary perspective — that creates polluting wastes and must then clean up. But it is becoming increasingly evident that adding more technology to clean up ever increasing wastes is a losing battle and cannot lead us to sustainability.

Paul Hawken urges us to go back to the drawing boards and redesign all our products so that they are either consumable or recyclable. It is not a matter of saving the environment, he says, but of saving business. Hawken proposes that if companies producing non-consumables were only allowed to lease them, and not to sell them, ultimately being responsible for their disposal at great expense, they would quickly redesign them to be recyclable.

With the considerable knowledge of living systems and their dynamic ecological balance we now have available, it is up to us to work with life for life — eliminating waste as a concept and as a reality. Positive efforts are already reflected the growth of Industrial Ecology as a field. The 3M company is an early pioneer in developing new designs to eliminate waste; some car companies are following suit, especially quickly in Germany. Interface Carpets implemented massive savings through recycling. Green industrial parks where each industry’s wastes feed another industry, as in Kalundborg, Sweden, are becoming important models for the rest of the world.

In Chile, a study showed that more energy could be saved through energy efficiency measures than would be produced by six new dams being built on the Bio Bio River, yet the project continues. Meanwhile, a few oil companies, such as Sunoco and BP-Amoco are taking steps toward the inevitable phase-out of the oil economy, investing in solar energy and other alternatives, requesting pollution taxes for the entire industry, etc.

Eliminating waste is more generally about reducing our impact on the planet — giving up the wasteful consumer lifestyle in which we define ourselves by unnecessary accumulations of goods, rather than by human values. It is also about implementing accountability for restorative behavior and using renewable or permanent energy sources to make what we do need, as Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute effectively demonstrates can be done.

In Davis, California, energy consumption has already been halved by the sound energy/ecology practices of its citizens over the past few decades. Davis boasts as many bicycles as people, streets now ell shaded by the thousands of trees they planted themselves, farmers’ markets year round, various cooperative housing projects. Most important is the recognition that living with energy efficiency and working with nature provides people with a better life. The furniture in the Davis City Hall had to be rearranged to permit greater citizen participation. When people feel needed and are able to make a difference, they become governors by choice, and they learn to govern well.

The city of Curitiba, Brazil — widely known as the world’s first eco-city — has carried the Davis experiment to new heights, as documented by Bill McKibben, who also showed us how much of the Adirondack mountains of the U.S. have been reforested and how the state of Kerala in India has pioneered rural sustainability in a culture now almost one hundred percent literate, with fine health care and education systems while it remains materially very simple.

For all that is not yet being done toward sustainability, we are becoming very aware as a whole world culture that it is the only way to gain a healthy future and we see more and more pioneering efforts in that direction.

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The agricultural industry is also beginning to shift its unsustainable practices. Let’s look at its story.

Hi-tech monocultures, intended to solve world hunger, have been disastrous in many parts of the world — the World Bank admitting its failure in funding the making of deserts where they had intended gardens. While the affluent world can eat whatever they want from anywhere in the world year round, arable land is being destroyed and eroded by unsustainable practices and ever larger non-affluent populations are ever hungrier.

Physicist Vandana Shiva documented the Green Revolution in India, tracing the development of nitrates-dependent agriculture to the need to maintain the production and profits of nitrate explosives factories after the second World War. Nitrate dependent crops were deliberately bred for this much touted Green Revolution. The resulting yields of rice per hectare, for example, were shown to be far greater than those using traditional methods — but the measures were misleading because they ignored the fact that the same hectares were not only producing rice traditionally, but fish, pigs, vegetables, fruit, fertilizer and mulch on soil and in water that remained healthy with no chemical input. None of that was counted in the comparison. In fact, Green Revolution fields over wide areas of India became salt deserts, as the World Bank acknowledged.

Hi-tech agriculture was sold to us with other misleading statistics. We were told, as one success story, that a single U.S. farmer at the turn of the century could feed only four people, while with hi-tech agriculture he could feed seventy or eighty or more people. Such statistics ignored the veritable army of people and resources producing the chemical herbicides, pesticides and fertilizers, the rapidly obsolete heavy machinery, the fuels and irrigation systems, the genetically engineered sterile seed that must be bought annually.

In fact, the natural farmer at the turn of the century produced ten calories of food energy for every one calorie of energy input and kept his soil and water table healthy, while the present-day farmer puts at least ten calories of energy into his farm for every one calorie of food he gets out. Meanwhile his land is increasingly impoverished, thus destroying the very basis of his livelihood. Hi-tech agriculture must be counted enormously inefficient and energy wasteful.

It is also argued that hi-tech agriculture is necessary to produce the sheer volume of food required by today’s populations. The case of India above belies this, as do the production figures of restored traditional techniques. In the Philippines, one of the countries where hi-tech Green Revolution techniques were pioneered, the restoration of traditional organic rice-growing methods proved superior in quantity of production. Bill Mollison’s Permaculture techniques, which can feed many people on very small plots of ground, adapted much indigenous and traditional knowledge, is now taught in over seventy countries and the program cannot train teachers fast enough to meet the demand.

A century ago, a British agricultural expert toured India to see how he could best advise Indian farmers to improve their agricultural practices. His conclusion, reported in The Ecologist magazine, was that the Indian farmers had more to offer English farmers in the way of advice, because they knew so much about soil composition and health, pest control, water management, crop breeding, and all other aspects of agriculture. They were highly knowledgeable and productive, failing only when they lacked access to natural resources.

Oswaldo Rivera and Alan Kolata have reported on the restoration of the ancient (400 to 1,000 A.D.) pre-Inca waru waru or chinampa-type agriculture in the altiplano of Peru and Bolivia. It increased local annual production from the norm of 2.5 tons per hectare to 40 tons in only five years with no chemical fertilizer or pesticides and very little work beyond filling the ditches between soil mounds through sluice gates annually and planting seeds without plowing. In this system nature creates its own fertilizers, the canals becoming a nutrient sump for nitrogen and phosphorus through colonization by fish, birds and water plants. The system’s automatic irrigation is also a form of climate-control that prevents freezing in winter. The usual crops were varieties of potatoes, grains such as maize, quinoa and amaranth, legumes, etc. Now winter wheat, barley, oats, turnips and other vegetables have been added, including even lettuce at 2,300 meters altitude.

Few indigenous peoples of the Americas used plows, which are a major cause of soil erosion. All over North and South America, not to mention other parts of the world, indigenous agricultural peoples without the urban social organization of the Inca were equally sophisticated in smaller scale agricultural practices, as Darrell Posey and others have documented and as mentioned in the previous chapter. Each culture understood, through scientific researches over centuries of time, how to breed and grow food, medicine and building material crops appropriate to their bioregions in sustainable ways.

Poisoning from pesticides and herbicides is normal today in all our bodies. Pathogen contamination (Salmonella, Listeria, E. Coli, etc.) of mass-produced food is a serious problem. Ralph Nader has told us for more than a generation of the pollution in our meat and other food; by now other studies abound. According to the Institute for Science in Society in Washington D.C., every year in the U.S. alone, where food supplies are cleaner than many other parts of the world, millions become ill and thousands die from pathogen contamination of meat, eggs and other foods, and this cause, while medical and productive losses therefrom are counted in the billions of dollars. The most popular fast foods, chicken and ground beef, are among the most dangerous food items.

BBC film team John Seymour and Herbert Girardet asked a California tomato farmer why he grew tomatoes for his family in a special kitchen garden when he had thousands of acres of them. He replied that if they understood what agricultural poisons were built into every cell of every tomato grown in his fields — his kitchen garden was organic — they would neither ask that question nor ever eat another canned tomato in their lives! He then explained how he was trapped in this method of production by deep indebtedness for machinery, chemicals, irrigation and the need to meet contract quotas.

Another reason given in support of hi-tech agriculture is the low price of supermarket food in relation to organically grown food. Yet every year at the annual Bioneers Conference in San Francisco, it is demonstrated that organic food can be grown more cheaply than hi-tech food. We are never told the real cost of supermarket food, most of which is government subsidized, but clearly it is far less expensive to grow labor intensive organic food, which could create much-needed employment.

Many urban dwellers today say they would go back to the farm in preference to living in dilapidated, hi-crime inner cities. Holland and Denmark are eliminating chemical agriculture and the latter bonds professional farm sitters so that farmers can spend time in cities. Communications technology can bring urban advantages to country life. And agriculture itself, even if low-tech and natural, would not be as difficult as it used to be if more indigenous (e.g. no-plow, no-till) methods were used.

Vandana Shiva has also documented the `piracy’ of patenting plants and the dangers of genetic engineering of agricultural and medicinal crops. Seeds developed over thousands of years by indigenous peoples or peasants and traded or gifted in sacred ceremony have been defined, for example, as `primitive cultivar’ until brought into a laboratory, genetically altered and then patented for ownership. Under such an agreement the indigenous peoples or peasants who developed the seeds can be fined for planting them unless they buy the seed from its new owners.

Genetic engineering has become the source of great public controversy around the world, as Richard Heinberg and others have documented and discussed. Our experiences with DDT, originally promoted as good for us all, and with nuclear energy that was supposed to solve our problems but brought us Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, has made us leery of yet another panacea.

Instead, in Europe and America, the increase in public demand for healthy organic food has risen dramatically over the past few decades, creating a very significant shift in agricultural production. Before the turn of the millennium, organic food production in the U.S. had become the only agricultural growth industry, and in California, public schools began to implement organic food lunches for children. Meanwhile, in Europe, the public outcry against genetically engineered foods had caused England to make new labeling laws even for restaurants and the European Common Market to reject them entirely as imports, and test fields for such crops were being burned around the wold in protest.

Perhaps the engineering of poor cloned Dolly the sheep woke us out of the sheep-like apathy Dostoevsky bemoaned, and we are at last taking responsibility for the great freedom Gaian evolution bestowed upon us.

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A sustainable world must be based on visions of what sustainability is, and our experiments with it around the world are helping us create it.

Bioregionalism, as described in Chapter 16, is one such vision. A bioregionally organized world would most likely include various forms of scientifically integrated permaculture derived from indigenous and traditional agriculture along with appropriate technology for other aspects of life, from communications to housing, medical care, etc. Local production would meet as many needs as possible for food and other goods, with imports determined by democratic discussions. Community would naturally become vital again in such settings, and local culture would flourish, while also exchanged with other regions.

Urban areas would still be desirable and necessary for efficient technological production and other activities and institutions, such as research institutes whose knowledge could then be made available electronically to all. Many people are working on sustainable urban designs that integrate gardens and use clean, efficient energy and public transport. Questions are being asked about optimal city size, about which technologies will be appropriate, about design to eliminate waste. Communications technology would link all bioregions, becoming the central nervous system for the body of humanity. And we can make our computers and other equipment without harming either the people making them or the environment.

Bioregionalism is consistent with grassroots democratic movements that are cropping up all over the world, creating new local self-sufficiency systems with their own currencies. From huge housewives cooperatives in Japan to sustainability movements in the hi-tech Silicon Valley world, ordinary people are taking control over their lives into their own hands and practicing local democracy.

Many people wonder how long we have to turn things around. It is really not a question of some critical turning point, but of nurturing more viable systems even as the old ones decay. One metaphor for our changing world is Norie Huddle’s story of a caterpillar’s metamorphosis into a butterfly. After consuming hundreds of times its own weight daily as it munches its way through its ecosystem, the bloated caterpillar forms its chrysalis. Inside its body, new biological entities called imaginal discs arise, at first destroyed by its immune system. But as they grow more in number and begin to link up, they begin to survive. Eventually the caterpillar’s immune system fails, its body goes into meltdown and the imaginal discs become the cells that build the butterfly from the spent materials that had held the blueprint for the butterfly all along. In just this way, a healthy new world, based on the principles of living systems, can emerge through today’s chaotic transformation.

There are as many ways to build a new world of living systems as there are creative people who want to do it! Remember that we have seen all evolution as an improvisational dance. Each person, as an imaginal disc, can contribute to the process of today’s metamorphosis in some unique way. What matters is that we all understand the Earthdance and the healthy features of living systems at their best. From there we need only the will and the love to create a better future for all living beings.

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Before we leave this discussion of sustainability, let’s look at a marvelous reinvention of ancient biotechnology that is changing our world faster than anything else we have discussed: the World Wide Web, or Internet.

Just as bacteria learned to trade information from one to another worldwide, like frenzied traders on a stock exchange floor, as Lynn Margulis has put it, so we humans have suddenly set up our own worldwide information exchange, qualitatively different from our international telephone calls, though using the same lines. It all began when the army sought a way to get messages through phone lines in case parts of their web was knocked out in warfare. Packet switching was invented, a distributed network of nodes permitting snippets of messages — not unlike bacterial genes — to independently seek open paths from A to B along working routes and then be reassembled at their destination. Victor Grey has a wonderfully readable history of the Web, showing clearly why it is different from all previous systems, how it caught on, why all efforts to control it have failed and what it means to our future.

From an evolution biology perspective, what is most exciting about its nature and explosive growth, is the way its multiple designers and users have unwittingly adopted all the organizational design and operating principles of living systems — that is, their ecology and economy as we have defined them. In Chapter 15, we pointed out that machinery is always an extension of humans. Now we can see that Internet players — who come increasingly from all walks of life and all persuasions — have self-organized, hooking their computers to phone lines through modems, a real and apparently viable living system. It grows in size and complexity daily — generating, processing, sorting and distributing almost unthinkably large amounts of material around the clock and around the globe at ever greater speed.

The Web remained a growing conversation by `e-mail’ and chat rooms, backed up with mushrooming websites filled with all manner of information for a surprisingly long time, despite corporate attempts to sell goods on it. Its players were simply too focused on conversations, on hacking at browser designs and developing all manner of new software to create and send each other artistic messages, music and animations to even think of consuming goods. But finally, they had to make a living themselves, and businesses began to sprout up on the Web, with bookstore Amazon.com the first howling success. Within weeks after its launch, the Web was going crazy with new venture capital and businesses, soon throwing Wall Street for a loop with the hottest stocks on the market..

Many of the people who developed Web businesses did so in desperation when they were fired in massive corporate `downsizings.’ As Wall Street Columnist Thomas Petzinger has shown, that tactic backfired, never benefiting the corporations — on the contrary, they suffered a new and stiff competition from their own ousted employees. And the explanation lies in understanding living systems, as Petzinger was astute enough to recognize, writing headlines in the Wall Street Journal on February 26<sup>th</sup>, 1999 over an article excerpted from his book on these `New Pioneers’:

A New Model for the Nature of Business: It’s Alive!

Forget the Mechanical, Today’s Leaders Embrace the Biological

Let’s look at this more closely. The corporate world had been organized under the old mechanical worldview, with top-down command-and-control hierarchies engineered to keep people in their departmental boxes, doing only the jobs prescribed. Management was about keeping them there and keeping them on their toes lest they be fired. The conversation and creativity people were finding on the Web was not permitted. Business consultants went through waves of fads for making business work better — Total Quality Management (TQM), Total Performance Accounting (TPA), and so on — but nothing seemed to improve the situation, and downsizing was a last resort at streamlining.

Those that created businesses on the Web were not seeking a bottom line of profits so much as an enterprise that would succeed because it met human needs — whether for hard to get widgets or used books from second hand bookstores. It worked. There were instant computer connections with suppliers and equally fast connections to buyers — it didn’t matter where they were, things could be ordered and sent into the mails directly to consumers as fast as the buyer made a decision. The new entrepreneurs went after everything from goods sitting in corporate warehouses, left over last year’s models, to unused radio and TV airtime and auctioned them off. By the time this book is in print there will no doubt be a flurry of Internet currencies, and a way to interface them, possibly competing effectively with the dollar economy.

What we are seeing is the discovery of what it is like to function as a creative living system after being kept in the prison of mechanistically engineered schools and workplaces. And the corporate world cannot ignore it. In fact it quickly began hiring savvy young people with Web experience to teach them how to talk to people on the Web, how to market to them in personal ways, how to keep their “eyeballs captive.” In other words, the Web has demonstrated the power to lead the behemoth corporate world into its practically homemade, until recently shoestring budget world.

How can we identify the operating Web principles that made this remarkable feat possible? The answer is to look at the organizational and operating principles of healthy biological living systems — the organizational and operating principles we can abstract from them, be they cells, bodies, communities, ecosystems or our world economy — and observe that the Internet uses them all, while most corporations use almost none of them. The power of the Web is the power of Life!

Organizational and Operational Principles of Healthy Living Systems

1. Self-creation (autopoiesis)
2. Complexity (diversity of parts)
3. Embeddedness in larger holons and dependence on them (holarchy)
4. Self-reflexivity (autognosis-self-knowledge)
5. Self-regulation/maintenance (autonomics)
6. Response ability — to internal and external stress or change
7. Input/output of matter/energy/information from/to other holons
8. Transformation of matter/energy/information
9. Communications among all parts
10. Empowerment — full employment of all component parts
11. Coordination of parts and functions
12. Balance of Interests — negotiated self-interest at all levels of holarchy
13. Reciprocity of parts in mutual contribution and assistance
14. Conservation of what works well
15. Innovation — creative change of what does not work well

A comparison of these principles with those by which corporations operate makes the point more clearly.

MECHANISM (Corporations)	ORGANISM (The Web)
Allopoietic	Autopoietic
Inventor created	Self-created
Hierarchic structure	Holarchic embeddedness
Top-down command	Holarchic dialog/negotiation
System engineered	System negotiated
Repaired by engineers/experts	Repairs itself
Evolution by external redesign	Evolution by internal redesign
Exists for product or profit	Exists for health and survival
Serves owners’ self interest	Serves self/society/ecosystem

The influence of the Web on the corporate world is enormous — so much so that the corporate world will follow suit in coming alive, in reorganizing itself from mechanism to organism, as a few pioneers have already done. After all, life works, and corporations are made of people! Why would they want to continue behaving like machines once it is obvious that life works better.

What will a corporation look like when it makes the change? The new corporate organization’s interests will be compatible with the interests of its own stakeholders, their families, and all society. We can guess that it will:

• Be autopoietic and holarchic
• Create value both internally and externally for all constituencies
• Make “shared destiny” moral contracts with employees and society
• Shift from absentee shareholders to involved stakeholders
• Ensure the recycling of all products not consumed
• Treat other organizations as respected equals (friendly competition)
• Have triple bottom lines: profits, social development, ecosystem health

In this transition lies our greatest hope for becoming a mature species in time, for corporations are the most powerful human institutions on the planet today, the only ones with the resources and ability to make the transition from our acquisitive species adolescence to wise maturity, leading the way for us all.

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Visit Elisabet Sahtouris’ Website

Reposted from: LifeWeb

One of the champions of the indigenous way has been Daniel Quinn. I have recommended his writings and my daughter Reason Wilken has reviewed several of his books on this site.

This morning, Elisabet Sahtouris discusses the indigenous way as she continues her story of the EarthDance. Also see: Ecological Ethics—18,  A Matter of Maturation—17,  The Body of Humanity—16,  Less Than Perfect, More Than Machine—15,  Worldviews from Plato to the Present—14,  Worldviews from the Pleistocene to Plato—13, What the Play Is All About—12,  The Big Brain Experiment—11,  From Possums to People—10,  From Polyps to Possums—9,  From Protists to Polyps—8, Evidence of Evolution—7,  A Great Leap—6, The Dance of Life—5, The Problems for Earthlife—4, The Young Earth—3, Cosmic Beginnings—2, and a  Twice Told Tale—1.

The Indigenous Way—19

Elisabet Sahtouris, Ph.D.

We have repeatedly observed that the dominant western culture of humanity, imposed on much of the world, behaves immaturely from an evolutionary perspective. We also suggested it had something to learn from the organization and evolution of ecosystems, as well as from some of the non-technological indigenous and traditional cultures that have survived the colonial process and the more recent impetus to modernization. In this chapter we will explore the worldviews and knowledge of indigenous peoples to see why cooperation between indigenous and industrial humanity is so important at this critical time in our evolution as the body of humanity.

Indigenous cultures are generally held to be non-industrial cultures with ancient roots in their land, though some have been migratory and others forcibly displaced. Their cultures range from very simple material lifestyles to extensive historical urban/rural systems such as Maya, Inca and Aztec. For all their great diversity, we will see that they do hold some common elements of worldview and values that unite them with each other and distinguish them from modern or post-modern industrial cultures, which are also diverse, yet united by their basic worldview and values.

In today’s world, there are very few even relatively intact indigenous cultures. Yet we do have indigenous people to whom traditional knowledge and ways have been passed on and who live by this knowledge. This knowledge represents a relationship with the rest of our living planet that has been essentially rejected by industrial culture, yet is very relevant to our healthy future.

Let us begin with the historical perspectives of two indigenous cultures that have ancient teachings concerning their relationship with industrial cultures: The Hopi Indians of North America and the Kogi of South America.

The Hopi have an ancient prophecy predicting our present and future, reported, among other places, in Rudolf Kaiser’s book Voice of the Great Spirit. Part of this prophecy tells the history of the Red and White Brothers, sons of the Earth Mother and the Great Spirit who gave them different missions. The Red Brother was to stay at home and keep the land in sacred trust while the White Brother went abroad to record things and make inventions.

One day the White Brother was to return and share his inventions in a spirit of respect for the wisdom his Red Brother had gained. It was told that his inventions would include cobwebs through which people could speak to each other from house to house across mountains, even with all doors and windows closed. There would be carriages crossing the sky on invisible roads, and eventually a gourd of ashes that when dropped would scorch the earth, burning everything, even the fishes in the sea.

If the White Brother’s ego grew so large in making these inventions that he would not listen to the wisdom of the Red Brother, he would bring this world to an end in the Great Purification of nature. Only a few would survive to bring forth the next world in which there would again be abundance and harmony. (It should be mentioned that not all Hopi approve of having any part of this prophecy in print; the author apologizes to anyone who may be offended by this citation of other written sources.)

The Kogi Indians of Colombia have a similar historical scenario in their creation story, told as part of the BBC film made by Alan Ereira, called Message from the Heart of the World: the Elder Brother’s Warning. According to the Kogi, the Great Mother Aluna is the primeval waters and the source of all creation. Even before creating worlds, she lived through all possibilities for all worlds and all times through great mental anguish. For this she is known as Memory and Possibility. The eight worlds she created previous to this one were not peopled, but in this ninth world she put humans, including Elder and Younger Brothers.

From the beginning, Younger Brother caused so much trouble that eventually he was given knowledge of technology and sent far, far away across the waters. Five hundred years ago, the Kogi say, he found his way back across the waters and he has been causing trouble again ever since. If he does not listen to the Kogi, who see themselves as Elder Brother, and stop destroying the Mother, stop digging out her heart with his mining and cutting up her liver with his deforestation, he will bring this world to an end.

From the Hopi and Kogi perspectives, we see that present human existence is dominated by the white or younger brother of their ancient stories. He is industrial man as we have seen him in earlier chapters, creating a technological society founded on a mechanical worldview and scientific discovery. We have seen that his technological way of life, for all its benefits, has brought us to the brink of disaster. In this chapter we will see that his ways stand in sharp contrast to many indigenous and traditional peoples’ worldviews, value systems and lifestyles which are only now beginning to be recognized as valid in their own right and possibly critical for our very survival as a species.

The Hopi, with the help of many friends, made forty-five years of effort trying to tell their prophecy orally in the United Nations, succeeding at last in 1993, at the beginning of the UN Year of Indigenous Peoples. Their prophecy does not suggest we would be better off without industrial society. It does suggest that the wisdom and knowledge of indigenous peoples must provide the context in which we make, use and dispose of industrial goods if we are to survive. This view of things from their perspective is consistent with our own growing understanding of the need for ecologically sustainable development, as discussed in the next chapter.

It is important to understand why the UN resisted Hopi efforts to give their message for so long. Only if indigenous nations were granted sovereignty and recognized as nations could they have UN member status. In the meantime, the UN struggles to define their status and rights, given that they exist within member nations who do not wish to grant them this sovereignty.

Historically, the European colonial “White/Younger Brother” had seized the lands of the Hopi, the Kogi and most other indigenous cultures around the world on grounds dating back to a Papal Bull of 1493 stating that infidels had no land rights, while Christians did. Indigenous peoples were defined as part of the `brute nature’ the Europeans were to conquer and subdue; thus their territories were reduced to reservations within the boundaries of United Nations’ member nations. Since this colonial process began, the Euro-American culture has perpetuated the dogma that indigenous people were backward, ignorant and impoverished before the white man’s benign intervention. Jerry Mander and Chief Oren Lyons have both documented this unfair and brutal historical process with respect to indigenous North Americans.

Technological culture defines itself as progressive and non-technological cultures as backward and ignorant, thus taking the stance: What advice could they possibly give us? Only now, when we begin to understand how essential diversity is to the very survival of living systems, do we open ourselves to respect for different worldviews and the choice of different lifestyles.

The Hopi and the Kogi are only two among many indigenous cultures that have ancient prophecies of man’s destruction of nature as well as present evaluations of our global crisis. These two in particular foretold not only nature’s destruction at this time, but specifically identified, as we saw above, the inventive, technological branch of humanity as responsible because it fails to heed the sacred Earth knowledge and wisdom so vital to indigenous peoples. Yet neither the Hopi nor the Kogi tell us that technology is bad in itself, that we should abandon it and “go back to nature,” living as they did. Both Hopi and Kogi validate technology as an important aspect of humanity, simply warning us that it must be brought into harmony with the sacred natural world.

How did these indigenous peoples know the crisis technology would bring on? Why is it that the science on which our technological world is based — the science which so prides itself on its ability to predict — failed to predict its own consequences while indigenous cultures saw where it would lead?

The failure of industrial society’s scientists to predict the consequences of their technology is directly related to the mechanical/materialist worldview in which that technology was developed — a worldview fundamentally different from the organic worldviews of indigenous peoples. In the worldview shared by indigenous peoples everywhere, despite many differences in its formulation, the universe, nature, is alive and sacred. All beings within it are related and interdependent: the stars, the rocks, the waters, the winds, the creatures, the people, the spirits and so on.

The human role is to hold nature sacred and to live in a balanced way within it, to give back as much as is taken while pursuing social and spiritual development. There is no concept of waste and no waste accumulation. In many cases there is deliberate avoidance of material accumulation of any kind. The Northwest American potlatch ceremonies were designed as giveaways to distribute accumulated goods so that no one would be burdened by owning too many of them.

The scientific worldview of the conquering industrializing cultures held that the universe is fundamentally lifeless, with life happening by accident on the surface of this planet. In this view, which we have deeply explored, the role of science is to study nature objectively — as though from outside — and reduce its machinery to basic parts in order to understand it. One of the basic laws of nature in this view is the law of entropy discussed in Chapter 14, a law stating that everything in nature is running down, a law of unsustainability. The purpose of science is to gain control over nature by exploiting it for human purposes — converting it to food production and the manufacture of goods to improve life. Development is thus focused on material production.

The indigenous worldview, of nature as fundamentally alive and sacred, often represented it by the symbol of a circle: the unbroken sacred hoop of life. In many indigenous cultures the basic laws of nature were formulated in accordance with what we now call sustainability: laws of balance, harmony, mutual sustenance, of returning in equal measure for whatever you take.

Understanding the world as a single, interconnected and interdependent living system, the Hopi and Kogi knew that the consequences of the White or Younger Brother’s destructive ways would necessarily be disastrous. He took from nature, often leaving scars upon it, produced things and threw away wastes. He did not notice the circularity of nature: that the wastes actually closed a loop, becoming part of his environment, poisoning it if the wastes were poisonous. In the `sacred hoop’ view, there was no concept of waste and whatever was put back into the environment was useful to other species — an excellent life insurance policy for any species, as we pointed out earlier — one followed by the species of mature ecosystems.

No wonder indigenous people noticed the White Brother’s failure to restore what he destroyed, and were able to predict the consequences thereof. He mowed down great forests, plowed up the earth to grow food, made gaping holes in it to mine minerals, and dumped wastes onto land and into clean rivers. The Kogi, in particular, could see the mining and cutting of forests below the mountain on which they lived. The more devastation below, the fewer the clouds which used to rise from the forests bringing rain to their lands, which literally dried out before their eyes, forcing them ever higher and closer to the water’s source in the dwindling snows.

Indigenous peoples were humble about their place in nature, while industrial society was founded on the conviction that European man was master of all nature and would bring about a Golden Age by conquering, subduing and transforming nature to his own ends. Its founding philosopher John Locke clearly stated, “The negation of nature is the road to happiness,” and indigenous people were negated along with the rest of nature.

Only now, when we are in critical danger do we look back to understand the history of the White/Younger Brother’s destruction of indigenous cultures, as well as of whole ecosystems, to build his technological world — a world in which nature has been seen only as a supply base and a dumping ground, a polluted world which testifies to the White Brother’s failure to respect the Red Brother’s sacred Earth wisdom. A world we now recognize as unsustainable.

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“How, how can we explain to the Younger Brother so that he will understand?” a Kogi elder laments in Ereira’s film. Will he listen in time?

The image of indigenous peoples as backward and ignorant stands in the way. Their philosophies are still largely ignored, their lands are still under seige as dumping grounds for toxic wastes, in both Canada and the U.S., or for mining. . Elders who deserved to be treated as national treasures die in poverty. As of this writing, almost all traditional Hopi elders have died; Roberta Blackgoat, a Dineh (Navajo) grandmother in her advanced eighties, good friend of the Hopi, suffers the theft and deliberate injury of her animals decade after decade in efforts to force her from her home. When the Rockefeller Family reevaluated the basis of their philanthropy some years ago, the president of its well-known foundation repeatedly cited indigenous philosophy for its guiding principles to a better world. Yet indigenous people remain among the poorest in the U.S. and still suffer evictions from their own lands in the name of profits.

Unfortunately, indigenous histories are generally known not through their peoples’ own telling, but by anthropological reports. It has been widely assumed that non-technological peoples, many of whom have no written language, do not know their own histories and were not smart enough to develop technologies.

A case in point is that even the urbanized Mayans, Aztecs and Incas with their sophisticated cultures and high arts were seen as backward on the grounds that they did not even invent the wheel. The Incas at least did understand the possibilities of wheels, using them on children’s toys, though never for transport. Perhaps burdened slaves were seen as more appropriate to the task of transport. Perhaps the sacred hoop of life was forbidden as a mundane technology. It is instructive to recall that ancient Greeks, even when inventing technology under duress, as in the case of Archimedes’ war machines, did not write down the plans. Technology, based as it is on geometry, was considered to be God’s sacred art and was forbidden to man, though the Greeks obviously exempted the wheel. The Incas apparently did not.

It is difficult for people born into technological culture to imagine anyone preferring a simple, non-technologically developed lifestyle in a natural setting, with few possessions. Yet, most indigenous people of the Stone Age, as Marshall Sahlins points out, worked very few hours to make a good living. To prefer the leisure time granted by choosing not to be a consumption-oriented society is seen by our own consumer society as laziness; to do without material wealth is seen as deprivation.

Sarah James, a Gwich’in Indian from the northernmost inhabited village of Alaska made the arduous trip to Rio de Janeiro for the Earth Summit of 1992. She described her caribou culture before contact with the white man as rich — rich with family, warm homes and clothing, plentiful food, much time for ceremony, music, dance and story telling, much reason for celebration.

When the white man came to them, he saw only people living in forty degrees below zero weather, with nothing but caribou to provide food, clothing, implements and skin huts. He called them savages and brought them canned goods, junk food, alcohol and real poverty. Sarah beat her caribou skin drum, sang her welcoming skin hut dance song, and smiled broadly as she shouted “Let’s keep Alaska savage!”

Her traditional lifestyle had been truly rewarding — its natural simplicity an integral part of a spiritually rich culture. Her people honored the caribou as their brothers and kept the herds healthy in turn for their gifts. Like hers, most remaining indigenous communities have lost their old values and communal lifestyles, the allure of modern culture pulling strongly, especially to the young. The conflicts within indigenous communities over this issue are heated as efforts to revive traditional lifestyles compete with the trend to assimilation and modernization. One can only hope the traditional values will be incorporated into whatever lifestyles result.

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After colonialism disrupted and often destroyed the indigenous cultures of Africa, the Americas, Australia, Asia and the Arctic, their remnants were judged as though they represented the original cultures. This has led to much misunderstanding. When communities are broken up and/or dislocated, their social integrity, traditions, ecological practices and health are disrupted as well.

One popular belief we hold about native peoples is that they all had short lifespans due to their backward existence. Indigenous people’s lifespans `B.C.’ — a native term meaning Before Contact — as reported by these cultures, were ignored. Instead, statistics on life expectancy were taken after respiratory and other diseases brought in by colonists decimated infants and children, and often older people. The average life span of Tewa Indians in the U.S. Southwest, for example, was given by the Spanish settlers after contact as 40. Along with this Spanish missionary statistic, it was reported that half the children died of respiratory diseases before the age of four. That leaves the average life span of the survivors of imported disease as 78!

The Kogi bury people who have not reached the age of 96 with strings coming out of their graves so the spirits can leave when their allotted lives are complete. Hopi elders are expected to reach one hundred years and more, and they still do. Shuar Indians say 120 is a normal death age. People from northern white cultures now travel to the Amazon to learn the secrets of longevity.

Unfortunately they are going late, as indigenous cultures are disappearing faster than ever. Many indigenous groups today are fighting or acquiescing to their own extinction. At this writing the Guarani Kaiowa of Jaguapire, in Brazil’s Mato Grosso del Sul threaten collective suicide as other Guarani have already done in the face of forced eviction from legally held tribal lands and the murder of leaders. In Ecuador multinational oil companies scramble to take over other tribal lands, of the Huarani, Shuar, and others, extracting oil messily in a country without environmental safeguards. The last pristine headwaters of the Amazon are in these territories, being covered one by one in oil slicks as the natives die from disease and destruction. North American volunteers, shocked by the situations of indigenous people in South America, have tried to help them. Some, like indigenous people opposing these processes themselves, have been murdered for their activities.

Linguists estimate that half the languages of the world are already extinct, and that in one more generation half of those left will be gone. Human diversity is crashing even faster than bioregions are destroyed. The Hopi, the Kogi, the last free-living Aborigines all tell us that they can no longer keep the world in balance through their prayers and ceremonies. The White/Younger brother is too powerful and must now come to his senses or complete the destruction.

In North America, as in other parts of the world, the indigenous survivors of colonial policies forced onto reservations were deprived of their natural economic bases. In Canada, some Indians could get title to their lands only if they `improved’ them by stripping them of trees. In the United States, bulldozers ripped out the pinion trees that provided the sustenance of the Shoshone and the animals of Dine’h (Navajo) shepherds are destroyed even today in efforts at forced relocation of people in order to mine their lands.

Native peoples’ religious practices were outlawed until 1978 in a country founded on religious freedom; their traditional governments dismantled, outlawed and replaced by Tribal Councils designed by the U.S. government. Consequently, many native nations are divided by conflicts between such councils and traditional, if `illegitimate’ leadership.

1992, the Quincentennial Celebration year of Columbus’ first voyage to the Americas and the year of the Rio Earth Summit with its worldwide meeting of indigenous peoples — in addition to the world’s governments and non-governmental organizations — brought indigenous issues into the public eye as never before.

The systematic destruction of native people and cultures is at least now well documented, though still not widely known. Precisely because it is not common knowledge, confusion still exists about what real indigenous cultures were. It is as inappropriate to judge indigenous cultures by the worst behavior we find among their abused and impoverished survivors as it is to glamorize them, to sell their ceremonies, their portraits and their art for profit, with few exceptions giving little or no return to their creators. The point is not to romanticize indigenous people, who have been and are as human as all others, but to acknowledge and learn from their traditional best — from their deeply spiritual respect for and scientific knowledge of nature.

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To be respected by the dominant culture of the White Brother, knowledge must be scientific. For this reason it is important to show that indigenous people indeed have scientific knowledge.

Science is defined by Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (10th edition, 1993) as “the state of knowing” or “a department of systematized knowledge as an object of study.” This definition certainly includes indigenous knowledge. The American Heritage Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language (3rd edition, 1992) defines science as “the observation, identification, description, experimental investigation and theoretical explanation of phenomena.” This is a bit more precise, yet a good description of what indigenous people do that is appropriately dignified with the label `science.’

As defined by the Oxford English Dictionary, science is “the state of knowing”, or “knowledge as opposed to belief or opinion,” knowledge, that is, “acquired by study.” The OED continues explaining that science is “in a more restricted sense: a branch of study which is concerned either with a connected body of demonstrated truths or with observed facts systematically classified and more or less colligated by being brought under general laws, and which include trustworthy methods for the discovery of new truth within its own domain.” Detailed as this definition is, there is nothing in it to exclude indigenous science.

While native scientists do not do science in laboratories, they do systematically acquire scientific knowledge through observation, experiment and theoretical explanation in a framework of natural law. Dr. Greg Cajete, a Tewa Indian educator and author from the Santa Clara Pueblo observes that the white man does science in a “low-context environment,” isolating phenomena to study them outside their natural context, in a laboratory, while the red man does science in a “high-context environment,” studying phenomena within their natural context.

He explains that the reason for this difference has to do with the purpose of science in the two cultures. While both do science in pursuit of knowledge based on real observation and experiment, the white man removes phenomena from their natural context to study them in laboratories because he seeks knowledge enabling him to control nature for his own purposes, while the red man leaves what he studies in place because he seeks knowledge that will permit him to integrate himself harmoniously into nature. Indigenous scientists have always known the participatory universe, while the industrial culture’s scientists only recently discovered it, now understanding that the pure objectivity considered so fundamental to doing good science was illusory.

Indigenous science is thus participatory — fostering dialogue between humans and the rest of nature. It is taught to all people, not as something learned in limited years of schooling, but as a lifelong task, though its specialists — such as medicine people who are both researchers and practitioners — spend many years in formal and rigorous training.

Industrial era science consciously and carefully divorced itself from religion for reasons of historical conflict with the church. Efforts to resolve this conflict are being made by scientific theologians such as Thomas Berry and Matthew Fox, who integrate the modern scientific story of cosmology and planetary evolution into religion, by physicists such as Brian Swimme and Stephen Hawking, who comfortably talk about God, by philosophers such as Ken Wilber.

It is noteworthy that on both sides — religion and science — these efforts are seen as integrating the separate concepts of God and Nature. In most indigenous belief systems, God as Creator and Nature were never separated, as Creator was the very essence of Nature, just as we discover today. Many indigenous people are puzzled by industrial culture’s separative tendencies, with their arguments, for instance, about whether God exists outside or inside the natural world. They ponder our strange separations — our divisions of our lifestyles into separate categories of science, religion, economics, politics, ecology, arts, etc.

One Meshika grandmother, Xilonem Garcia, has said “Anyone who knows how to run a household knows how to run a world.” She understands fractal biology — that patterns repeat at different levels, and that a healthy living system must run by the same principles no matter what size and scope it has. Consider the definitions given earlier of ecology and economy as `organization of the household’ and `operating rules of the household.’ This native elder understands that they cannot be separated.

The point of this discussion is not to show one science or cultural pattern superior to another, but to recognize that there can no more be one true science than one true religion. In Chapter 12 we discussed the impossibility of any single true worldview. Science itself is a mapping activity — its theories are testable maps to the underlying reality filtered into our minds through our limited senses. We make many different kinds of actual maps, all valid. We do not expect a pilot to fly by a road map, a driver to drive by a weather map, or a weather forecaster to predict weather from a topographical map. We make our maps for different purposes, just as indigenous and industrial scientists make their scientific descriptions of the world for different purposes.

What matters is which sciences we consider when we want to achieve these varied purposes. Indigenous science may offer little to the design of a radio telescope or new computer operating system, but it may be extremely useful if we want to know how to survive as a healthy part of nature. In Chapter 20 we will see that sustainable agriculture, for example, may better be based on indigenous and traditional techniques than on costly and destructive hi-tech farming.

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By the fields recognized in western science, indigenous sciences include biology, geology, astronomy, navigation, meteorology, botany, medicine/pharmacology, psychology, agricultural engineering, plant genetics, ecology, social and political sciences, all based on as much as thousands of years of observations and experiments. Such sciences have contributed enormously to modern knowledge. Jack Weatherford has documented many examples of the very widespread fruits of indigenous science in our modern civilization, from aspirin and freeze-dried potatoes to the political science of our own constitutional democracy.

The political science of the Haudenosaunee contributed much to the democratic Constitution of the United States, as the September 1987 National Geographic Magazine and the later work of scholars such as Oren Lyons, Vine Deloria, Jerry Mander and Jack Weatherford, have documented. The founders of the U.S. were refugees from European tyrannies. It was among the Indians of the Haudenosaunee League, whom they called Iroquois, that they — especially Benjamin Franklin — found democratic principles and practices at work. The Haudenosaunee League was a peaceful and democratic federation of tribes that had been historically at odds with each other. Unfortunately, while adopting these Indians’ democratic forms — there were no democratic government role models in Europe — the founding fathers left out the equal role of women in governance, as well as the role of children and the sacred contract with nature.

Among the Haudenosaunee, chiefs were selected by grandmothers, who had watched them grow up and knew who would serve their people well. It was also the power of the grandmothers to remove chiefs from their positions if they did not govern and keep ceremony as they should. More generally, women participated equally in all decisions. The Haudenosaunee, like indigenous peoples everywhere, used the sacredness of nature as their guidepost to what should or should not be done by humans. To be sacred is to be inviolable, to be treated with utmost respect. To have a sacred contract with nature is to care for it, protect it, give back for what you take.

Indigenous and traditional communities were necessarily aware of the ecosystems in which they lived. Current anthropological/archeological interest in demonstrating the demise of cultures such as the Maya through their own environmental devastation is inconsistent with their sophisticated level of agricultural knowledge. Droughts not controllable by humans are another matter, and a drought phase lasting hundreds of years is far more likely to have caused the demise of the Mayans.

Some native techniques, such as burning small forest areas, farming them a few years, then moving on, were considered destructive until recently, when our own scientists recognized the value of controlled burning to forest health. The Amazon Kayapo and many other rainforest peoples in other parts of the world carefully included in their gardens plants and trees that would insure the rapid regrowth of forest on each such plot.

Hunting buffalo by driving herds over cliffs is another example used to demonstrate ecological malpractice among Indians. This was indeed a real, though difficult and dangerous practice among a few tribes. Vastly fewer buffalo were killed this way than by the colonists’ practice of shooting them by the thousands from trains. All dead animals were fully used by Indians rather than being left to rot as in the latter case. It is true that some young Indians today hunt recklessly when allowed. They fear their hunting privileges may be taken away again at any time. As Haida elder and former leader of the Haida Nation Lavina White (Tthow-Gwelth) said in a speech at a 1990 University of Calgary conference:

To my people, all creation is sacred and our religion is to live in harmony with nature. But… we’ve had no control over anything, not even our own lives, for a long time. We’ve been held captive in a reserve system that has no economic base, and we have been unable to live as we should be able to. Before contact — before interference from white men — there was order, and we assumed such order existed throughout the world. … Some people are worried about how we are going to treat wildlife if we ever get control of our lives again, worried that there would be a lot of abuse. That’s untrue historically and…I would like to assure you that our philosophies wouldn’t permit us to carry on in that way. Even if there were some people wanting to do that, they wouldn’t be able to for very long. If we got our systems back, we could deal with those sorts of things.

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Because we are accustomed to equating science and technology with mechanical instruments, machinery and all the material products of our culture, it is difficult for us to grasp the enormous scientific and technological prowess of peoples who consciously and deliberately kept their material goods to a minimum in order to live in ecologically sound ways. An Amazon Indian child may learn to distinguish literally hundreds of species of bees by their appearance and behavior. A trained medicine person would have as detailed knowledge of psychology, traumas, illnesses and medicines as any technological society doctor, though this knowledge is orally and experientially acquired and its practice does not depend on hospitals with their technological support systems.

Manuel Cordoba, a Brazilian rubber tapper kidnapped as a boy early this century, learned the medicine he practiced all his life from Amazon Indians, as documented by Bruce Lamb. In Cordoba’s advanced age, he was called in when doctors failed to cure the chairman of the Medical School at the University of Lima of a terminal illness. Cordoba succeeded, using only indigenous knowledge and medicines. He was offered a professorship at the university, but declined. Today drug companies buy up rights to exploit the Amazon for medicines, patenting them on discovery.

‘Invisible’ technology appears magical to those not trained to use it, especially in the realm of healing. Many Amazon medicine men use the hallucinogen known as ayahuasca, made from several varieties of Banisteriopsis vine, to diagnose in detail the physiological problems of their patients, as Cordoba was taught to do. In the hands of trained practitioners, it can be used to unite minds and bodies such that detailed knowledge can be transferred directly among people and other species. Cordoba was even able to telepathically transmit specific physiological information to his wife, who had not taken the ayahuasca. These abilities have now been researched by Fred Alan Wolf and other western scientists.

Amazon hunters also use ayahuasca visions to locate and communicate with animals prior to hunting them. In Canada, some Indian hunters dream the hunt before going on it, without the aid of hallucinogens. Such a hunter sees the animal willing to sacrifice its life and makes a sacred contract with it in the dream, to give its life. He tells the other hunters how and where to find it, making the actual hunt efficient. He teaches tracking and the making of weapons as well as how to dream. In industrial cultures our great men sometimes say they got information through dreams, as with the scientist Kekule’s carbon ring, or some of Einstein’s theories. But we write these off as quirks of genius, and show interest only in the formulas that can be written. We do not ask them to teach students to dream.

Polynesian navigators of the Pacific Ocean have traversed its waters for thousands of years without benefit of compass. These navigators knew astronomy for navigation by stars, had sophisticated knowledge of both deep and surface currents, cloud and weather patterns and fish and bird migrations to guide their swift, elegant outrigger canoes over vast stretches of ocean. They were also trained to detect magnetic fields directly in their bodies to give them the compass directions migrating animals have. They could sense their proximity to land, or, as one such navigator said, “stand tall in your canoe, until you see where the land is.” Nowadays that is called remote viewing and has been much researched by the U.S. military. Thirty indigenous Pacific nations have recreated their traditional sea-going vessels in recent years in order to retrace ancient voyages using the same techniques.

Much indigenous science is based on centuries and even millennia of observation passed on through time, generating laws of relationship. Hopi observations in geology and meteorology, for example, led to the understanding that underground copper deposits in the Southwest act as lightning rods, drawing down lightning and bringing life-giving rains to the desert. They know that mining can change weather patterns as surely as the Kogi know that deforestation and mining are drying the climate around them so their mountains no longer have adequate snow to feed the rivers on which their crops and lives depend. Both cultures have observed the destruction while the white man saw only the copper and the gold that would bring him wealth.

Australian aboriginal tribes have also observed changes in their outback desert habitat over time — an ongoing trend of decreased rain, increased heat, the reduction of plant and animal reproduction. Of all indigenous peoples, these Aborigines may play the most conscious roles of all in the co-creation of their environments. Many people have by now seen their beautiful dot paintings, but few have understood their significance, which can be learned only by deep relationship with these cultures.

Like Tibetan or Dineh (Navajo) sand paintings, the Aborigines’ paintings are traditionally made not on canvases, but on the ground, to be blown away or dissolved back into their place. Each painter is responsible all his or her life to a particular species or element of the land, painting it, in its context, again and again. The painting process itself is a ceremony that takes weeks, and includes ritual song and dance. Its purpose in an Aborigine community is to consciously connect it with all the elements of a particular ecosystem, from sand and rock to microbes, plants and animals, and help bring it into being from source consciousness — sometimes called Dream Time — moment by moment.

Such understanding of creation has been completely foreign and apparently superstitious to Euro-Americans. Only now, with the latest discoveries of physics, does it begin to make sense and demonstrate the advanced knowledge we were incapable of comprehending. Deep dialogue between the remaining traditional Aborigine elders and western theoretical physicists and biologists could lead to new breakthroughs.

This book takes the optimistic position that it is not too late to learn from the ways of nature and the scientific knowledge of indigenous peoples, with their deep ecological wisdom. Cooperation between indigenous and industrial society, based on mutual respect, can help us identify destructive technologies and make useful technologies ecologically sound. It can even lead to advances in our knowledge of how the universe and our own planet create themselves and function, as we have just seen. The White Brother’s inventive genius is enormous and capable of solving the greatest problems we face, if it is augmented by the Red Brother’s deep knowledge and wisdom.

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Visit Elisabet Sahtouris’ Website

Reposted from: LifeWeb

John Stevenson’s essay titled OneLife from yesterday is so important that I am leaving it up as the lead article for another day. I have made a few annotations to make it more consistent with synergic science.

What does it mean to be human? What is our true identity? Human actions are so leveraged by the power of the concepts our minds believe that the answer to those questions may determine our very future. Today, most humans believe themselves to be separate from the Earth—separate from Life. This morning John Stevenson challenges those beliefs.

OneLife

John Stevenson

What is the basic mechanism of life? What is the relationship between man and all other life? Can science provide a basis for a philosophy for the human? The answers to these questions are in the basic elements of the foundation of all life.

Introduction

This section contains material that is common scientific belief. Early life left no fossil evidence. Some details are in dispute. It is given here only as background information and was not considered in the conclusions drawn.

In primeval times the earth was a primitive place. It was sterile, as devoid of life as the moon. Many thousands of cubic miles of various mixtures of chemicals were in the oceans. Above the earth millions of cubic miles of atmosphere became enriched with carbon-dioxide and other chemicals spewing from volcanos and from windstorms over the lifeless continents. Rains washed the pollutants out of the air and into the oceans. Rains also eroded the continents and formed rivers to wash the silt into the oceans. The oceans became enriched with chemicals. Billions of chemical reactions were taking place simultaneously all over the globe in this huge pot of soup. Even with that gargantuan exposure, it took billions of years before the right set of chemicals and the right physical conditions came together and allowed the creation and survival of the first tiny string of pre-cellular desoxyribonucleic acid (DNA). Life was precarious for this new living creature for many millions of years. It was tiny and tender, alone in the oceans, only capable of reproducing itself, depending on chance to supply it with its needs. In its struggle to live in this dangerous environment, it gradually evolved until it finally developed into a single cell. Now it had a protective container to provide shelter for itself and the nutrients it required for survival. During this long period of evolution, the coded string of genetic material that developed into the description of this primitive original cell had increased in length greatly. It started with only the description that would reproduce its basic self. That small coded strip, perhaps only a few thousand code elements long, is the essence of life. The essential coding for life was compressed into it. That same essential coding exists somewhere in all DNA today. By the time the first cell was developed, much additional coding had been added. This additional coding provided for the formation of the cell wall and the production of its own nutrients and tools from raw materials. It added features that enhanced the survival of the life described in that first initial reproducing string.

The Mechanics

This section is repeated from Evolution for continuity of thought within this topic. It contains material that may be directly measured or verified in the laboratory.

About 100 billion copies of our DNA are distributed throughout our body. Each copy is alive (it can reproduce itself) and is identical to every other copy. DNA has many functions within the life-form. Without DNA, we could not be born. We could not live. We could not grow. Nothing in our body would function. We could not reproduce. In fact, our body could not form. It controls our growth and development from conception. It determines our appearance (size, weight, color of eyes, skin texture, etc.). Indirectly it controls all of our bodily and mental functions (since it details the physical and operating characteristics of all of our components). It even to some extent controls our length of life. DNA functions in all life-forms in the same way.

No other tissue in our body is alive. None can reproduce without DNA. All tissue other than DNA is built in response to action taken by DNA and its only purpose is to serve the needs of the DNA. DNA performs functions necessary for its own survival. It performs functions necessary for our survival. It reproduces itself. It performs functions that allow us to reproduce. Even in our own reproduction, it is our DNA that is reproducing. DNA works in the same way in all other life-forms. Of the entire body of any life-form, whether plant or animal, the parts of its body that bring life to its existence are the DNA in each cell in its body. Life is distributed throughout the body of every living thing.

Timothy Wilken–> As a physician and synergic scientist, I would say that Stevenson is over simplifying here. His statement that: “No other tissue in our body is alive. ” misses the synergic connection. DNA is not a tissue it is a molecule. However, it is a living molecule and life begins at the molecular level. DNA is a component of all living cells.

Living molecules work together to form cells. Remember, the term for “working together” is synergy. So living molecules synergize to form cells. And those cells synergise form tissues. Then, tissues synergize to form organs. And organs synergise to form systems of organs. And then systems of organs synergize to form the whole organism or the body of a plant, animal or human.

Every level of the organism is alive. So we have  different levels of organization here: DNA which is molecular life –> cells –> tissues –> organs –> systems –> ORGANISM. To say that cells, tissues, organs, systems of organs, and the organism itself are not alive is a reductionistic error.  This is not a personal criticism of Stevenson. Richard Dawkins’ makes the same mistake in The Selfish Gene. For more on synergic evolution see: Humanity in Universe (1) (2). 

However, I agree with Stevenson that DNA is a component of all living cells and therefore “Life is distributed throughout the body of every living thing.” 

DNA has a code that is quite similar in construction to that used in modern digital computers. The code used in computers is called binary and consists of two numbers: 0 and 1. These numbers are then combined to specify entities needed by humans: 0001 becomes the binary equivalent of our number 1, 1111 is the binary equivalent of our number 15, and 01010001 is the binary equivalent of the capital letter Q. Although the computer works in binary, its output to us is then converted to our language so that we can understand it. DNA encodes with a slightly more complex system. Unlike the computer that uses 0 and 1, and unlike humans that use a decimal system 0 through 9, DNA uses a system of four conditions. This system could be symbolized as 0, 1, 2, and 3, but is not normally done so. Instead, DNA may be visualized as a code made up of four conditions: A, T, C, and G. These are called bases and they may appear along the length of the DNA in any order. These bases are complex organic molecules that provide the fundamental genetic building blocks for the description of the overall organism that the DNA will construct and maintain.

is a molecule of adenine.	is a molecule of cytosine.
is a molecule of guanine.	is a molecule of thymine.

The upper and lower red lines indicate the sugar-phosphate “glue” that holds the sequence of bases together. Between these two “rails” are shown four bases in schematic form. The two vertical base combinations are called base pairs and are joined with hydrogen bonds. Note that the base pairs are not joined with adjacent pairs except through the common rails. In physical form, DNA consists of two strings of bases in the form of a ladder with base pairs forming each rung. The ladder is then twisted to form a helix. Each rung of the ladder is constructed of only four possible combinations of base pairs. Two of these are shown. The other two are obtained by inverting those shown. A will only pair with T and C will only pair with G. The four possible conditions for any rung on the DNA ladder are AT, TA, CG, and GC.

To describe an organism, these bases are coded into a long string of DNA. This DNA coded string must be quite long. The human description is about 3 billion base pairs long and consists of 24 DNA strings, called chromosomes. The overall genetic material that describes any organism is called its genome. The genetic material in each human consists of 2 sets of 23 chromosomes in each of about 10 billion cells in the body.

The top row in the figure below provides a code for making the substances used in the organism. The lower row of the pair contains the same genetic information, but its code is the reciprocal of the code in the upper row. Wherever a T appears in the top row, its reciprocal A appears in the lower. AT, CG and GC are the other possibilities.

DNA strand prior to replication:

2 DNA strands after replication:

DNA reproduces by division. The top two rows show a fragment of DNA before it starts to reproduce. When the DNA replicates, it is immersed in a soup of bases from which it will select the “food” that it needs as it grows. Other “helper” chemicals are also present. The DNA unzips on one end. The zipper moves down the strand at a steady pace. Behind the zipper, the two strands are separated. Unattached bases are floating on all sides. One by one, the proper complementary base is selected and attached to the free-floating half-strand. When the zipper has completely separated the two halves of the original strand of DNA and the two halves have completely filled their new complementary halves, the process is complete. The two separate but identical DNA strands result.

DNA coding resembles computer binary coding in another way. Early personal computers used a series of binary numbers that were eight positions long, such as 11001110 or 00011101. This was termed an eight bit wide word. An eight bit word can encode all of the letters of the alphabet, for use in a word processor, for example, or it can provide numbers from 0 to 255 for use in computation. Modern personal computers are much more versatile, using word lengths of 32 or even 64 bits in length. Another common coding system is used in our written language. It uses 26 possible conditions (a…z) and variable word lengths to provide a written symbol (code) for every spoken word. DNA uses a much simpler system, which is only three positions wide, called codons. ATC, TCG, and TTT would be examples of individual codons. Since a word length has three possible positions and four possible conditions in each position, sixty-four possible combinations are possible. Not all these combinations (codons) provide unique functions. DNA codons specify the construction of 20 possible amino acids. These amino acids may be further combined to form more than 100,000 substances to be used in cell construction and maintenance (in turn building and maintaining the host organism).

Direct Conclusions

This section contains conclusions derived from the mechanical DNA replication process:

Observations

Tradition is very strong in human thinking. A lifetime of learning that life consists of being born, having offspring and then dying produces a mind set. Relationships within families such as sister, mother, father, etc. are fundamental in our thinking. A human, we believe, is an individual, another human is a separate life. Conclusion 5 presents an entirely different story. It says that all life in all living things is the same life. This violates all previous teachings about life. One must understand that the life forms produced by life are conceptual and that it is life itself which permeates all living things, and all life is one and the same. DNA does not bear young, it grows into multiple copies. DNA is not born (created), it comes directly from the DNA before. DNA does not die unless something in its environment kills it. It is immortal except for accidental death. The living characteristics of life (DNA) are different from those of the organisms that it specifies.

Timothy Wilken–> We humans are not separate from life. We are not separate from the animals. We are not separate from the plants. We are all the same. Stevenson is speaking to the fundamental question here. What is our identity?

Our identity is LIFE. Only our form is human. This knowledge ends the illusion of separateness.

This does not eliminate the very human need to separate and categorize when such is required for performing a task. Categorization is often necessary. The human consists of the male and female. The species consists of three races. The dog is one species, the cat another. What it does say is that life (DNA, the life force) is universal in all living things and that the essence of life, that which gives all things life, is the same life in all living things.

Survival then becomes a matter of the survival of life, not necessarily a particular species which by accident it formed as the result of its mindless interaction with the environment.

This then is fact: the human is a variation in life form produced by life (DNA).

Fact does not produce philosophy. It can only guide. Still, surely, a philosophy based on fact is more apt to be useful than one based on opinion, conjecture and fantasy

This text advances one thought, life is extremely close knit (so close in fact that it is one). Any philosophy we express must now be based on that.

No evidence is found (so far) that life has been endowed by the universe with any special purpose or value. It is merely a fact, a mechanical thing that follows the same rules as the rock. Life developed as the result of ways that compounds may be constructed, and how they fit together. If life has purpose or value, it must be assigned after the fact.

Timothy Wilken–> Perhaps, the purpose or value does not have to be assigned after the fact. Perhaps purpose or value must evolve.

We are here, now what? If we wish to do so, we can look at this whole charade as nonsense, a cruel and stupid joke. If we adopt that attitude as the basis for our cultural philosophy, we will not be around long. If no one cares, the ending will be swift, and we would have wasted four billion years of pain and suffering.

Or we can look at it another way. We can define our own value and purpose, then seek to fulfill them. We can adopt the universe as our domain and set idealistic goals for ourselves, then strive to grow into our expectations. No one else sets our destiny for us. It is our responsibility. We write our own story. And we can make it as long and as pretty as we wish. Or end it quickly.

Philosophical Implications

A description of the detail of a culture is a statement of the individual behaviors of the members in a group. It includes all that they do, both moral and immoral. The details of a culture may be ascertained by observation, a matter for sociology and psychology. But what forms a culture? Why do they differ so significantly? It develops from a group concept.

The human’s concept of the human, and its position in the universe, is basic to all cultural thought.

The direction of a culture, its goals and aspirations, are established by its philosophy. The judgement of the culture, and of each behavioral element within that culture, then, is a matter of and for philosophy. A proper philosophy, therefore, is basic and necessary for the determination of a proper culture for the human. There are inherent restrictions on the form of that philosophy. A reasonable philosophy must fit the species. It can’t be formed without full functional knowledge of that species. None of the ancients had access to that knowledge Modern philosophers ignore it. That knowledge must become a part of the philosophy.

Human philosophies have always been based on a particular concept of the human. Each philosopher defines the human then forms a philosophy for the human that fits with that definition. That definition has always been formed by considering the basic unit of human life as being the whole human. Therein lies the error. The facts of the human are far more complex. It is a philosophy of all life, which is needed, not of the human alone. That philosophy of life would then contain the required philosophy for the human and inherently provide the proper relationship between the human and all other life.

It is not that the human needs to take care of all other life as a moral obligation, though that is certainly true, it is that the human is a small part of life, but one which possesses a characteristic (intelligence) which is valuable to the survival and well being of all life. It was life which developed that intelligence, not the human, therefore its service is for all life, not merely the human. The human is, in that sense, a servant to life, a caretaker in the service of life, the good shepherd for all of life.

Watson and Crick announced the double helix construction of DNA in 1953. It changed the study of living organisms in an irrevocable manner. Biologists were the first hit. Their viewpoint was considerably altered. Until that announcement, organisms were studied on the basis of the organisms themselves. After that announcement, all life became studied on a molecular basis. This is causing (or should be causing) a restructuring of thought in every life science.

The genome project started the molecular study of the human. A torrent of information has resulted, yet it is only a hint of things to come. The eventual redesign of the human by the human is inevitable. And that will not end the progression. The evolution of the human will not end when the human controls evolution. A progression of entirely new species, one after the other, is ensured. Stephen Hawkings recently created a stir among the righteous academic elite when he made the statement that the human (its DNA) needed some competent engineering, which it would surely get someday in the future. One need look only at his physical condition to see that such engineering is a requirement, and that objections to such a course are hardly righteous. Once the survival of the human is insured, then attention can be turned to the problems and frailties of all other life. A garden of Eden is possible, if our philosophy sets that as a goal.

In the same manner that life was studied on the basis of organisms, human study and the philosophy of that study has been on the basis of the human. The error is the same. A problem can’t be solved from its middle. A philosophy, likewise, must begin with the beginning, and that is the dividing line between the animate and the inanimate, some four billion years before the beginning of man. A philosophy of life must be in perfect harmony with life – from the beginning of life. Philosophy, as with all of the other studies of the human species, must start at the molecular level. And it must be a dynamic philosophy, one which can evolve as the human evolves.

More from John Stevenson’s Website One Life

Readers of this site know I believe in building a 4-win world—win-win-win-win. This is a world where I win, Others win, Life wins, and the Earth wins.

Wednesday, Elisabet Sahtouris wrote:  … We are potentially as creative as the whole Gaian system we belong to. If we find ourselves in an adolescent crisis of our own making, that is no reason for us to give up in despair. It should, instead, urge us to face ourselves, swallow our foolish pride, adopt a little humility, a wider perspective, and gain mature humanity in the best sense of this word we have coined for ourselves. … The wider perspective many humans are waking to now is the perspective that we are not humans capable of having spiritual experiences, but spirits having human experiences. This perspective was until recently found only among religious people, but with new discoveries in physics we talked about earlier — such as evidence of cosmic consciousness and intelligence, and the non-locality of a completely interwoven universe in which everything affects everything else at any `distance’ — scientists and other lay people are joining their ranks. This worldview connects especially easily with Gaian science and philosophy in Buddhism, which is enjoying great outreach in the West.

This morning, Elisabet Sahtouris continues her story of the EarthDance. Also see: A Matter of Maturation—17,  The Body of Humanity—16,  Less Than Perfect, More Than Machine—15,  Worldviews from Plato to the Present—14,  Worldviews from the Pleistocene to Plato—13, What the Play Is All About—12,  The Big Brain Experiment—11,  From Possums to People—10,  From Polyps to Possums—9,  From Protists to Polyps—8, Evidence of Evolution—7,  A Great Leap—6, The Dance of Life—5, The Problems for Earthlife—4, The Young Earth—3, Cosmic Beginnings—2, and a  Twice Told Tale—1.