Fritjof Capra, on “What Makes Humans Worth Saving?”
An ongoing collaboration between Kosmos Journal and Voices of the ReGeneration Rising, a series of conversations about regenerative practice, catalyzed by Daniel Christian Wahl.
Daniel Christian Wahl: “Before we can ask or answer appropriately the what we need to do to create a sustainable human presence, or how we might go about doing it, we need to ask ourselves a more complicated question, a much more difficult question. What is it about human beings that makes us worth sustaining?
Fritjof Capra: I think I would give you an answer from the perspective of evolution: the life forms that are worth sustaining are actually the ones that are sustained in evolution. And they are the ones that best contribute to the continual regeneration and unfolding of life. So, to the extent that we contribute to that, we are worth sustaining and we will be sustained by nature if we do that. To the extent that we are not contributing, which is much more at present than our contributions, we will not be sustained.
If you look at the history of evolution, you can see that the average lifespan of a species from its emergence to extinction is about 5 million years…Now, homo sapiens has lived for about 30,000 years, so we are newcomers still on the planet, we have lived less than 1% of the average lifespan of a species. So, it is much too early to tell whether we are worth sustaining or not, but at present it doesn’t look very good, so this is a dire question.
And I would say that my sense of hope for sustainability and the continuation of humanity on the planet has been inspired very much by Vaclav Havel, the great Czech play write and former president of the Czech Republic. And let me read to you what he writes about hope. He writes,
“Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense regardless of how it turns out.”
So this has inspired me tremendously for the last many years in the tide, trying to live my life.
Daniel Christian Wahl: I would second that. We’re already in the middle of catastrophic climate change, but we have an opportunity, and the window of opportunity is closing, to avoid cataclysmic climate change, where we get to a point where basically higher life forms such as ours will not be on this planet for a while. And facing almost like a species-level rite of passage, facing the real possibility of death at this early point, or this jump to the next stage of being a more mature species, a more mature member in the community of life .
There is some grandeur, there is some beauty in us. We have proven, particularly our indigenous brothers and sisters have proven in many places around the world, that we can also be gardeners, that we can have a healing influence on ecosystems.
[Thank you to Kosmos Journal for creating this short extracted video from the longer interview, and for sharing it through your online and offline publication.]
Links to the longer interview transcripts of the conversation between Fritjof Capra and Daniel Wahl (the links to the long videos are in the articles):
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Daniel Christian Wahl — Catalyzing transformative innovation in the face of converging crises, advising on regenerative whole systems design, regenerative leadership, and education for regenerative development and bioregional regeneration.
Author of the internationally acclaimed book Designing Regenerative Cultures
