Ideas in permaculture…
Talking with Fritjoff…
Systems thinking and understanding networks are key attributes to understanding the world and how it works, according to Fritjof Capra. They are also key concepts underlying the structure and application of permaculture.
Australian permaculture educator, Morag Gamble’s online Permaculture Festival of Ideas that ran for a week of May this year was a feast of inspirational information. One of the highlights for me was the appearance of Austrian-born physicist, Ftitjof Capra.
It must have been in the 1970s that I came across Fritjof through his 1975 book, The Tao of Physics. He studied theoretical physics at the University of Vienna after which he became known for his work in systems theory and its applications to biology, ecology and social organisations. Considered a pioneer in the field of systems and ecological thinking, he is said to have influenced the deep ecology movement.
People were ready
The 1970s were a time of social and intellectual ferment when Western nations embarked on the computerisation of their economies and when there was much experimentation with lifestyles. It was also a time when Eastern spiritual philosophies found foothold in the West, a process whose popularisation started late in the previous decade when The Beatles spent time in India with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, who had studied physics at Allahabad University and whose Transcendental Meditation was gaining adherents in Western countries (members of American band, The Beach Boys, also practiced Transcendental Meditation). This set the scene for the interest that Fritjof’s Tao of Physics generated.
For people brought up in Western societies where the notion of progress coming from the application of science and technology had been embedded through their childhood, but whom were now questioning society’s pursuit of materialism and were looking elsewhere to imbue their lives with meaning and to bring alternative values to society, The Tao of Physics had much appeal. It bridged the gap between the scientific and spiritual worldviews and promoted a systemic, holistic approach to understanding the world.
A different worldview
For Capra, the worldview emerging from modern physics was similar to that expressed in various Eastern spiritual traditions. Both traditions emphasise the interconnectedness and interdependence of all phenomena, the dynamic nature of reality and the limits of rational, linear thinking. The book challenged the prevailing Western scientific worldview that was rooted in materialism and reductionism. It recognised the fundamental role of the observer in shaping our understanding of reality and in doing this helped break down the illusion of the objective, detached scientist studying the world. The idea is now recognised in quantum physics as the oberver inadvertently influencing the outcome of processes being observed.
The book was influential in bringing Eastern philosophy to a Western audience, many of whom had been predisposed to it through participation in alternative social movements of the time and by the writing of American Zen practitioners, Alan Watts and Gary Snyder. Snyder was the inspiration for the Japhy Ryder character in Jack Kerouac’s 1958 novel, The Dharma Bums and was a writer and a noted poet associated with The Beats subculture who spent time in Japan studying Zen Buddhism. Against this background The Tao of Physics went some way to bridging the perceived gap between science and a spiritual appreciation of existence.
Fritjof went on to write further influential, science-based books such as The Web of Life and The Hidden Connections. These developed his core threads of systems theory and network theory as fundamental patterns in nature that underlie reality. Moving deeper into his systems view of life ranging from cells to social systems, Capra explored the interconnections that manifest through feedback loops and emergent properties (properties or behaviours that the parts of a system do not have on their own but that emerge from the interaction of the parts within the whole system). His web of life concept investigated the interconnection and interdependence of natural and human-generated phenomena and how the principles of ecology apply to human communities as components of the larger living systems of the planet.
Networks are basic structures in life, patterns applied at scale from tiny to global, Capra insisted. Their dynamics shape the world, all the way from living systems to social organisations. Although reductionist science and thinking brings benefits, it has limits and is best seen as one pole of a continuum, the other pole of which is a holistic, systems approach to understanding the world. Capra offered insights on how the systems view can be applied to transforming organisations, institutions and social structures to align them with ecological principles.
Capra at the Festival
Life organises itself in networks… wherever we see life we see networks… Fritjof Capra.
Changing our thinking changes how we see and act in the world. There is nothing new in that but it was something reinforced when watching Morag Gamble interview Fritjof during the Permaculture Festival of Ideas.
Mentioning the seasons and how they bring new growth as example, Fritjof said that life exhibits the property of self-organisation. “It is inherently regenerative. Continuous regeneration is seen at all levels of life. Regeneration is the meaning, the purpose of life.” He went on to say that “Life organises itself in networks… wherever we see life we see networks”.”
Life is also intelligent in that it changes upon interaction with its environment, Fritjof explained. This is a different intelligence to what we usually understand by the term, however it demonstrates that intelligence is not limited to the human realm and is about surviving in the world. It brings to mind Bill Mollison’s principle of permaculture about how life influences its environment which he stated as “everything gardens” — that is, life changes its environment to ensure its survival and reproduction.
civil society or community organisations are society’s corrective feedback loop…
How do Fritjof’s ideas relate to societies? Through civil society social movements, Fritjof said, where they have life as their core focus. These are regenerative movements that American environmentalist, author and economist Paul Hawken likened to society’s immune system acting to heal its ailments and dysfunction such as “economic disease”. In other words, civil society or community organisations are society’s corrective feedback loops.
In organisational form, Fritjof advocated our moving from hierarchies to networks and blending indigenous and modern science in a cohesive hybrid. Hearing that reminded me of how Bill Mollison, himself a systems thinker, said that he formulated permaculture as a hybrid — a synthesis — of the sciences and traditional knowledge.
Our lives in systems
Fritjof Capra is more likely to be known to permaculture people who came into the design system in its formative years. I wonder how many of those who have come in over more recent times know of him?
One of the takeaways of Fritjof’s books and his interview with Morag Gamble is understanding how we live embedded in systems, in subsystems of larger systems the idea of which scientist James Lovelock codeveloped with microbiologist Lynn Margulis in the 1970s — she was married for a few years to noted populariser of astronomy and cosmology, Carl Sagan — and which postulated that organic life interacts with its inorganic environment in a synergistic and self-regulating way to produce a complex system that perpetuates the conditions for life on the planet. In saying that Earth functions as a single self-regulating system, Lovelock and Margulis called their theory the Gaia Hypothesis, an early formulation of systems theory.
When I read The Tao of Physics I was captivated by the parallels between science and Eastern spiritual tradition it drew rather than systems theory, which at the time was in its early formative years. That attracted my attention later, through the work of the Santa Fe Institute which studied the structural and operating principles of complex adaptive systems such as physical, biological and social systems as well as chaos theory and network theory. Watching Fritjof in Morag’s Permaculture Festival of Ideas reminded me of how I see the permaculture design system as applied systems thinking.
