Sep 24, 2017
Regenerative cultures are rooted in cooperation
We are beginning to learn from the way resource, information and energy flows are organized in ecosystems. We are learning to apply ecological insights to creating whole-systems design solutions that pay close attention to systemic interconnections and the potential for systemic synergies (or win-win-win solutions). Biomimicry at the ecosystem level, in the form of integrated whole-systems design based on ecological understanding, is the most complex and most promising way of applying nature’s insights to creating regenerative cultures.
In mature ecosystems the health of the whole system is optimized by creating symbiotic relationships between the diversity of species in the system. Cascades and cycles of nutrients, information and energy create a diversity of interconnections throughout the system, in such a way that one organism’s waste products become another organism’s food, and feedback loops regulate temporary stability within a constantly transforming and evolving context.
The community of organisms in an ecosystem — with its diverse roles, multiple redundancies and quick feedback loops — is interwoven into networks within networks to optimize the health, resilience and adaptability of the system as a whole. We have a lot to learn from this pattern of organization. It is the pattern that defines regenerative systems capable of self-organization.
The transition towards a regenerative culture requires the redesign of our communities, businesses, systems of governance, and how we meet everybody’s basic needs in ways that learn from these patterns of organization of ecosystems. In doing so, we have to be careful to scrutinize the ways in which we apply our biological and ecological knowledge. While we urgently need to apply biologically inspired design and innovation, we must first examine the extent to which the ‘story of separation’ (scarcity and competition) has also coloured our perspective on life, biology and ecology.
The neo-Darwinian perspective, which still dominates the popular understanding of biology, isolates individual organisms or genes from the context of the living matrix that sustains them. Scarcity, competition and individual success are seen as the main drivers of evolution. This is an outdated perspective, based on outdated metaphors like Richard Dawkins’s ‘Selfish Gene’ (1976).
The reductionist focus on genes and isolated individuals does not sufficiently reflect our current scientific understanding of how ecosystems and the biosphere maintain health and resilience. A more systemic and long-term understanding of how life creates conditions conducive to life has led scientists to recognize the vital importance of symbiosis, collaboration and systemic optimization in living systems. The maximization of efficiency of limited aspects of the system or the (temporary) success of certain individuals or species, on which so much of our biological (and economic) story-telling has focused, are of secondary importance for long-term survival. Collaboration and systemic optimization are more effective survival strategies.
Ecosystems are resilient because they have requisite variety (diversity) and multiple redundancies at different scales. The complex networks of relationships that create healthy ecosystems cannot be explained effectively by focusing only on the success or failure of individuals within them. The interconnections and symbiotic exchanges that create health and resilience as emergent properties of complex dynamic systems support the vitality of all participants and contribute to the survival of the system as a whole. Such health and vitality are emergent properties of the continuously transforming networks of information and resource flow across whole systems.
Think of the health and resilience of your own body (as a complex system). Our individual health is to a large part maintained by an ecosystem of bacteria and fungi inhabiting our intestines, our mouth and our skin. We are walking ecosystems! We carry ten times more non-human cells within us (and on us) than we have human cells in our bodies (Wenner, 2007). The diversity of life permeates us. Modern biology confirms that to be is to interbe!
The emerging, more holistic paradigm of biological regulation and identity now holds that the identity of biological subjects is often not that of one species alone: the majority of organisms must be viewed as ‘metabiomes’ consisting of thousands of symbiotic, mostly bacterial species, according to recent research.
Andreas Weber (2013: 29)
The American biologist, Craig Holdrege, offers a process-oriented understanding of biological organisms in his insightful article ‘Where do organisms end?’. He suggests a shift “from a traditional notion of separate biological organism to the conception of ecological organisms, of which the biological organisms are part”. In this perspective “the organism is interaction with other organisms within the context of a habitat. The single organism (or species) that is supposed to compete with others does not exist [original italics]. It is far more appropriate to view organisms as members of a differentiable whole that has never dissolved into discrete entities” (Holdrege, 2000: 16).
Whether we see isolated individuals in competition or interconnected communities in collaboration depends on our perspective. Both perspectives are useful and valid ways of approaching the individual-whole paradox of existing — subjectively and individually — in relationship and indivisible from the whole. In allowing both perspectives to inform our scientific investigations and our view of natural process, we overcome the perceptual blind-spot created by the dominant focus on competitive individual interactions.
Once we do this, we will find that the regenerative whole-system dynamics that create conditions conducive to life are predominantly collaborative in nature. Long-term survival (sustainability and regeneration) depends on these collaborative interactions, while the competitive interactions we have mainly focused on play a subordinate role of fine-tuning system dynamics in the short term.
The biologist and philosopher Andreas Weber argues that the leading edge of our scientific understanding of life is asking us to reintegrate the subjective experience of being alive as co-creative participants of evolution into our cultural narrative. He calls for an “enlivenment”, a second enlightenment, which recognizes that our human meaning- making is in itself an expression of living process.
If we are to co-create regenerative cultures everywhere, we have to come alive to the fact that we are as life capable of participating appropriately in living process. Our actions and how we create meaning are capable of creating conditions conducive to life.
The new biology, just like the new physics over one hundred years ago, is beginning to understand that we — and life as a whole — are far more interconnected and interdependent than our narrow focus on individual competition and scarcity has allowed us to see. The emerging understanding of life reflects the paradox of existing simultaneously as individual participants in — and as subjective reflections of — the whole.
We are — as individuals — indivisible from the ecosystem and the biosphere we co- create with all of life. Paradoxically, both collaboration and competition contribute to how life creates conditions conducive to life.
“The biosphere is not cooperative in a simple, straight-forward way, but paradoxically cooperative. Symbiotic relationships emerge out of antagonistic, incompatible processes.”
— Andreas Weber, 2013: 32
We have to keep these new biological insights and the paradoxical relationship of individual/whole and competition/collaboration in mind when we aim to create regenerative human systems that emulate the dynamics and patterns of ecosystems. Andreas Weber points out:
[Darwinian] evolutionary biology is a more accurate reflection of pre- Victorian social practices than of natural reality. In the wake of this metaphorical takeover, such concepts as ‘struggle for existence’, ‘competition’, and ‘fitness’ — which were central justifications of the political status quo in (pre) Victorian England — tacitly became centrepieces of our own self- understanding as embodied and social beings. And they still are. […] Biological, technological, and social progress, so the argument goes, is brought forth by the sum of individual egos striving to out-compete each other. In perennial rivalry, fit species (powerful corporations) exploit niches (markets) and multiply their survival rate (profit margins), whereas weaker (less efficient) ones go extinct (bankrupt). This metaphysics of economics and nature, however, is far more revealing about our society’s opinion about itself than it is an objective account of the biological world.
Andreas Weber (2013: 24)
Before we can explore how to redesign our industries, agriculture, the economy and the way we do business based on the regenerative dynamics that create ecosystems and planetary health, we have to raise awareness of how our understanding of biology and economics has for a long time been based on a series of blinkered assumptions and limiting metaphors. Many of the key concepts that helped Charles Darwin to construct the central argument of his theory of evolution by natural selection were influenced by the economic theories of his time, for example the work of Adam Smith and the political economist Robert Malthus’s obsession with “the idea of scarcity as a driving force of social change” (Weber, 2013: 24).
The limited narrative of separation, with its exclusively competition- and scarcity- focused understanding of life, is supported by outdated biological and economic theories. Weber calls this an “economic ideology of nature” and suggests that an ideologically biased perspective “reigns supreme over our understanding of human culture and world. It defines our embodied dimension (Homo sapiens as a gene-governed survival machine) as well as our social identity (Homo economicus as an egoistic maximizer of utility). The idea of universal competition unifies the two realms, the natural and the socio-economic. It validates the notion of rivalry and predatory self-interest as inexorable facts of life” (pp.25–26).
If we understand life and evolution as a whole system in transformation, we begin to pay attention to relationships and networks of participants in that system, and suddenly we see collaboration, symbiosis and co-evolution as the prevalent patterns maintaining systemic health. Seeing competitive interactions between individual participants of the whole as the main characteristic defining and governing biological and socio-economic processes is a little bit like looking at the waves (competition) on the surface of an ocean but not seeing the immense body of water (cooperation) below. Life thrives through collaboration.
The optimization of resource-sharing and processing in order to share and generate abundance and systemic health equitably, rather than competition for scarce resources, is the basis of life’s way of doing economics. In attempting to create a life-friendly economy, we need to understand the profound implications that the emerging ‘systems view of life’ has for our undertaking.
Building on the notion of a science of qualities introduced by the biologist and mathematician Brian Goodwin, the physicist and systems thinker Prof. Fritjof Capra and Prof. Pier Luigi Luisi, a chemist working in the biology department of Roma Tre University, argue:
As the twenty-first century unfolds, a new scientific conception is emerging. It is a unified view that integrates, for the first time, life’s biological, cognitive, social, and economic dimensions. At the forefront of contemporary science, the universe is no longer seen as a machine composed of elementary building blocks. We have discovered that the material world, ultimately, is a network of inseparable patterns of relationships; that the planet as a whole is a living, self- regulating system. […] Evolution is no longer seen as a competitive struggle for existence, but rather a cooperative dance in which creativity and constant emergence of novelty are the driving forces. And with the new emphasis on complexity, networks, and patterns of organization, a new science of qualities is slowly emerging.
Fritjof Capra and Pier Luigi Luisi (2014b)
What is being called into question here is not the overall process of biological evolution, but whether competition for scarce resources rather than symbiotic networks in which life creates conditions conducive to life are the main drivers of speciation and evolution of life as an interconnected process. New insights in biology, neuroscience and evolutionary theory are offering a perspective that helps us to retell the story about who we are as biophysical beings.
Truly understanding ourselves individually and collectively as ‘being in and through relationships’ is the conceptual/perceptual meta-design shift that underlies the cultural transformation that is under way. We are transforming a globalized but fragmented humanity based on the narrative of separation and competition into globally cooperative networks of locally adapted cultures sharing a unifying narrative of interbeing.
How can we create a regenerative material culture and industrial system based on collaboration?
How can we co-create a regenerative approach to agriculture that supports food and water security, climate change mitigation, local living economies, healthy local ecosystems and product diversity based on biomaterials?
What would a regenerative economy with predominantly collaborative relationships look like?
Understanding that long-term, collaborative advantage trumps short- term, competitive advantage as the success strategy in healthy systems, how would we redesign the way we do business?
How will we redesign our economic systems to reflect the insight that collaborative participation in life-sustaining relationships is life’s fundamental principle of evolution?
From a scale-linking, systemic and long-term perspective of natural processes we begin to realize that those isolated, competitive interactions we do observe from a short-term perspective are actually embedded in a context of systemic, long-term collaboration. All regenerative systems are fundamentally collaborative. Optimization of the whole based on symbiotic relationships over the long term is the hallmark of regenerative systems.
The systems view of life (Capra & Luisi, 2014a), as a fundamentally collaborative interconnected process, is inviting us to redesign the human presence on Earth based on our new understanding of the way life unlocks abundance through collaboration. The emerging practices of industrial ecology, integrated ecological design and regenerative agriculture, as well as the move towards circular regenerative economies based on locally regenerated biological resources, are part of a fundamental redesign that will lead to the emergence of regenerative cultures. Regenerative systems are primarily collaborative and regenerative cultures are cultures of collaboration.
[This is an excerpt of a subchapter from Designing Regenerative Cultures, published by Triarchy Press, 2016.]
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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
