Elisabet Sahtouris, PhD, is an evolution biologist, futurist, author, and consultant on Living Systems Design. Dr. Sahtouris speaks and consults internationally, showing the relevance of biological systems to organizational design in businesses, government, and global trade. Her books include EarthDance: Living Systems in Evolution, A Walk Through Time: From Stardust to Us, and Biology Revisioned, coauthored with Willis Harman.

The Wisdom of Living Systems with Elisabet Sahtouris

"The Globalization of humanity is a natural, biological, evolutionary process. Yet we face an enormous crisis because the most central and important aspect of globalization—its economy—is currently being organized in a manner that so gravely violates the fundamental principles by which healthy living systems are organized that it threatens the demise of our whole civilization."



WIE: At this unique time, we're faced with unprecedented change in almost every dimension of human existence—biological, social, political, economic, technological—and all of this, as you have noted in your work, is happening in the context of our historic move toward economic and social globalization. Can you describe, from your perspective as a futurist and evolution biologist, the nature of the global changes we're experiencing and what new opportunities and challenges they present us with at this time?

ELISABET SAHTOURIS: From my perspective as an evolution biologist, what I see happening now in the human species' move to social and economic globalization is, in essence, the same thing that has happened previously on Earth to almost all other species. For example, billions of years ago, ancient bacteria, after millions of years of hostile competition that ultimately threatened them with extinction, began to negotiate with each other to form amazingly cooperative colonies. In their competitive phase, they had developed elaborate technologies such as the electric motor, solar energy plants, and heat-producing nuclear piles, along with infrastructures resembling cities that we can only now see under the newest microscopes. The tiny archaebacteria, with their specialized lifestyles and technologies, then created the most dramatic event to occur in Earth's evolution since their own initial appearance out of the Earth's mineral crust. The nucleated cell—an entirely new life-form about a thousand times larger than an individual bacterium—formed, as the bacteria took on divisions of labor and donated part of their unique genomes to the new cell's nucleus. Thus, the nucleated cell—the only kind of cell other than bacterial ever to evolve on Earth—represents a higher unity than the bacteria achieved after eons of tension and hostilities, as they engaged in successful negotiations and cooperative evolution. This process—whereby tension and hostilities between individuals lead to negotiations and then ultimately to cooperation as a greater unity—is the basic evolutionary process of all life forms on our planet, as I see it.

This same cycle accounts for how competing nucleated cells united into multicelled creatures (like us), and it is happening now for a third time, as we competitive multicelled humans are driven to evolve a new, cooperative global society or "cell," which will function at a higher level of complexity and unity than any species before us could achieve. Like the ancient bacteria, we humans are evolving from a competitive, aggressive, juvenile phase to a cooperative mature phase as we complete the cycle.

WIE: Just to clarify what you said about globalization, are you talking about the emergence of a wholly different organism, as different as the nucleated cell was from bacteria?

ES: Yes. From my perspective, globalization is the biggest thing that's happened since the nucleated cell. Our global economy, and more generally, our global family, will be made up of existing individuals, families, and larger social units, but we will weave ourselves together in unforeseeable new ways. In essence, we are forming a species superorganism that will be able to merge cooperatively into our ecosystems and the living systems of the Earth. So far, in our adolescent empire-building phase (which has lasted for ten thousand years), we have used up huge amounts of Earth's resources to build our societies, nations, and corporations. But now we recognize that this destruction must be ended by forging more cooperative alliances. That's our biological imperative, and our alternative to species suicide.

WIE: What do you think it's going to take for more of us to grasp the seriousness of our situation? How would you describe those conditions that are going to provoke us to really change?

ES: A deteriorating atmosphere, a polluted water supply (we are already beginning to fight water wars rather than oil wars), soils deteriorating from erosion and chemical pollution, the proliferation of nuclear and biological weapons, highly dangerous agricultural toxins, and "engineered" plants and animals. Genetic engineering has already caused terrible disasters in Canada, the United States, and Mexico and is quickly spreading to the rest of the world. In the United States, we can't guarantee soy or corn as organic anymore because pollen from genetically modified (GM) plants is blowing everywhere and contaminating non-GM crops. In Mexico, wild stocks of corn that were carefully protected as insurance against diseases threatening our monocultures [large expanses of single-strain agriculture] are all polluted now by GM corn pollen. This is a major, major disaster, but you're just not seeing it reported. In America, one researcher was fired after demonstrating that the organs of rats, including their brains, were shrinking and becoming leather-like after being fed genetically modified potatoes. In our supermarkets, over sixty percent of the food is GM now, with no labeling requirements and no research on how it affects our children.

Food-supply corporations jumped in with enthusiasm to create and sell these products before we knew how they would affect either people or ecosystems. Most "bioengineers" simply do not understand living systems. All Earth's species trade DNA among themselves, but they know what they're doing. You see, nature is fundamentally very intelligent, but scientists think they can treat genomes like mechanisms, chopping out a gene here and sticking it in somewhere else, like substituting screws in machines. But genomes just don't work that way. If you put the same gene into six different people, it will express in six different ways. The system as a whole is intelligent. Genetic engineering failed thoroughly in early trials because genomes identified implanted genes as inappropriate and edited them out. But now scientists shoot the genes in under force and "Krazy Glue" them into place, so that the organism is forced to accept them. Last summer, I visited a Dutch dairy farm where they were doing very interesting research showing the disruption of entire plants by a single gene implant. It seems that the whole organism tries to protect itself, somewhat in the way flesh hardens and reddens around a splinter.

WIE: So given the critical conditions that you have outlined here, what are the primary capacities that human beings will have to develop in order to respond?

ES: Well, what holds us up is our economic system because its win/lose mindset is appropriate only for a juvenile species. Competitive capitalism is a system designed to concentrate wealth among the few while inevitably depleting the wealth of the vast majority. Such destructive behavior is permitted only because we have not recognized that we, as a species, are a living system, just as are our individual bodies and our families. Notice that families don't starve three children to overfeed the fourth, for example, or beautify one corner of the garden by destroying the other three. We understand living systems up close, but we have not been taught to see the larger systems, such as our global economy, as equally alive and in danger!

We haven't recognized ourselves as a living system because we don't understand living systems. Science has interpreted nature in terms of physics and engineering, seeing it as composed of mechanisms. The biggest innovation we need is a completely new scientific worldview from a living-systems perspective. A biology-based model of a living universe shows self-organized and self-regulated holarchies (self-contained systems which are interdependently embedded in each other, such as a cell, an organism, a family, or an ecosystem). Gravity and radiation, entropy and syntropy, are in cyclic balance, just as are anabolism and catabolism—the buildup and breakdown/recycling of living tissue. It's a beautiful, elegant universe. Yet it's difficult to change a scientific worldview—the old guard can't afford to understand and acknowledge the well-researched information that will turn their whole worldview over. It's like expecting a caterpillar to be enthusiastic about dissolving so that a butterfly can form!

WIE: So you're saying that the primary capacities required would be, first, to recognize how destructive our current worldview is and, second, to be willing to bear the discomfort of letting that worldview go?

ES: Yes. It's hard to create anything new in the living world without some chaos or disruption or dissolution of old systems. We're in a situation now that's very much like the development of a butterfly in a chrysalis. The caterpillar's immune system is still trying to protect itself as a caterpillar—and to me, that's what our insistence on clinging to the oil age is all about. From a biological perspective, it's the job of the old system to protect itself as long as possible. But it's equally the job of the new system to rally its forces until it can overcome the old immune system and build the new.