By
Elisabet Sahtouris, PhD
Adapted for the Club of Amsterdam Journal from a chapter in A
New Renaissance:Transforming Science, Spirit & Society,
Floris Books, London, 2010
Three major crises
- in energy,economy and climate - are now confronting us simultaneously,
globally, adding up to the greatest challenge in all human history.
They are so great, so serious, that nothing short of a fundamental
review, revisioning and revising of our entire way of life on
planet Earth is required to face this mega-challenge successfully.
This situation, unprecedented
in human history, actually makes this an amazing time of opportunity
to create the world we all deeply want!
Is that an idle dream,
an airy-fairy 'create your own reality' pitch?
Consider: We humans
created the reality we have now. It was not imposed on us by fate
or any other outside agency. While some may still claim we had
nothing to do with global warming, few would deny we have ravaged
our planet's ecosystems and loaded our air with pollutants. How
many would claim we had no choice in how to produce our energy,
or insist that Mother Nature inflicted our money system on us?
We humans dreamed up and then realized our economic systems, including
our technological path via the exploitation of nature and our
focus on consumerism and our extremes of human wealth and poverty.
We are an extremely creative species. But something has gone very
wrong; something we did not foresee, and we are having very serious
trouble understanding and facing that.
If we really look
at Nature, we see on the whole that She does not fix what isn't
broken. She is profoundly conservative when things are working
well, and radically creative when they don't. We would do well
to forget our partisan politics and mimic this approach to life's
vagaries. Recall that in Arnold Toynbee's classic study of civilizations
that failed (1946), the two critical factors proved to be the
extreme concentration of wealth and the failure to change when
change was called for (Toynbee 1946). These are the current conditions
of our global economy in a nutshell, and bigtime Change is now
called for.
There were human
cultural systems that we created such that they remained sustainable
over thousands of years, so why is our most advanced, industrial,
hi-tech super-economy, now reaching around the entire globe, proving
to be unsustainable in only a few hundred years? To see how this
could happen, we must first look at the whole issue of economics.
Economic basics
What is an economy?
I will venture to define the essence of an economy as the relationships
involved in the acquisition of raw materials, their transformation
into useful products, their distribution and use or consumption,
and the disposal and/or recycling of what is not consumed. This
definition - and this is very important to understand - is as
applicable to our human economy as to nature's ecosystemic economies,
as well as to the astonishingly complex economies operating within
our own bodies.
Earth has four billion
years of experience in economics and may well have something to
teach us. Just for starters, nature recycles everything not
consumed, which is why it has managed to create endless diversity
and resilience, with ever greater complexity, using the same set
of finite raw materials for all that time. Furthermore, with us
or without us, she is likely to continue doing so for as long
as the benevolent sun shines upon her, despite - or perhaps because
- she suffers periodic crises that drive her creativity. Let's
look at how Earth faces these crises.
As we do, note that
Earth's economy is a truly global economy, composed of many and
diverse interconnected local ecosystemic economies woven together
by global systems of air, water, climate/weather, tectonics, migrations
and, not least important, a single gene pool.
Crisis as opportunity
in nature
We are facing an
onrushing Hot Age. Around fifty-five million years ago, Earth
had its last Hot Age. In between, since the advent of humanity,
our species faced and survived at least a dozen Ice Ages. Only
since the last Ice Age have we enjoyed the long - from a human
perspective - benign, stable climate in which known human civilizations
evolved. It was possible because the last Hot Age plus an Earth-rocking
meteor, extinguished the massive reptiles and kicked off a creative
wave of mammalian evolution. Crisis for some was opportunity for
others in nature's resourceful ways.
In the much older
520-million-year-old Cambrian era Burgess Shale, found between
two peaks in the Canadian Rockies near Banff, Canada, lies fossil
testimony to one of the greatest 'opportunity' responses to crisis
in all Earth's history. Interesting that it, too, happened during
a time of warm seas and no polar ice - such as we ourselves may
be facing - occurring relatively shortly after a 'snowball Earth'
climate. In this Cambrian period before land plants and animals
appeared, marine invertebrate life reached a fully modern range
of basic anatomical variety that more than 500 million years of
subsequent evolution has not enlarged. The fossil record of this
'Cambrian Explosion' shows a radiation of animals to fill in vacant
niches, left empty as an extinction had cleared out the pre-existing
fauna. Once again, crisis for some; opportunity for others.
Let's continue deeper
yet into the past. By the Cambrian era, Earthlife had already
been through well over half its evolutionary trajectory in years.
In fact, for the first half of Earth's biological evolution -
for roughly two billion years - archaea (archebacteria) had the
whole world to themselves. They evolved amazing lifestyle diversity
in their massive proliferation from the depths of the oceans to
the highest mountain peaks and even the highest life ever reached
in the air, dramatically changing whole landscapes and shallow
seafloors as well as the chemical composition of the atmosphere.
Their impact is yet to be truly understood outside the halls of
science, although they pioneered economic situations and technologies
such as harnessing solar energy, building electric motors and
developing the first World Wide Web of information exchange we
claim as human firsts, as I will describe. (Note our unconscious
biomimicry!) My point here is that archebacteria, at the beginning
of Earthlife's evolution, were first to make extraordinary responses
to global crises - crises of their own making, we should
note, unlike the later great extinctions.
The first major such
response was to a global food shortage that occurred because the
first archebacteria, after spreading all over Earth, were eating
up all the free food - the sugars and acids chemically produced
via solar UV radiation. Their amazing response was to draw on
their own gene pool to change their metabolic pathways such that
they could harness solar energy to produce food in the process
well known to us as photosynthesis. If we could copy it at a human
scale, according to Daniel Nocera at M.I.T., it could fill all
our energy needs as long as Earth and we ourselves live. (Note
our need for biomimicry in this!)
Before photosynthesis,
bacteria had to dwell in seawater or underground, away from burning
sunlight. To function in sunlight, the new photosynthesizers were
driven to invent enzymes functioning as sunscreens to protect
themselves as they lived off the sun's rays and the plentiful
minerals and water available to them. Unfortunately, while they
did extremely well, they inadvertently created the next big global
crisis of atmospheric pollution, leading to the next notable example
of taking crisis as opportunity.
Like today's plants
that inherited their lifestyle, the photosynthesizing archebacteria
gave off oxygen as their waste gas. There were, as yet, no oxygen-needy
creatures, so the highly corrosive oxygen, after as much of it
as possible was absorbed by seas and rocks and soil reddened by
its rusting effects, piled up in the atmosphere in highly significant
and dangerous quantities. Along with its direct dangers of killing
corrosion, this pollution created the ozone layer which caused
further diminution of the old sugar and acid food supply requiring
the free passage of UV through the atmosphere.
Once again, life
responded with a stunning new lifestyle invention - a whole new
way of living using oxygen itself to smash food molecules in the
most hi-tech biological lifestyle thus far invented - the one
we ourselves inherited from them and call 'breathing'. Bacteria
that breathed in oxygen gave off the carbon dioxide needed by
the photosynthesizers, thereby completing a give and take exchange
in which their plant and animal heirs, including us, still engage.
Life has a dynamic
way of oscillating between problems and solutions, which seems
to keep evolution happening. The 'breathers' needed food molecules
to smash while food was becoming scarcer. Solution: they invented
electric motors built into their cell membranes, vastly more efficient
than human-designed motors up to the present, attaching flagella
to them as propellers. These hi-tech breathers drilled their way
into big sluggish fermenting bacteria, which I have called 'bubblers'.
(Sahtouris 2000). This initiated the era of bacterial colonialism
in which the breathers invaded the bubblers for their 'raw material'
molecules. Reproducing by division within the bubblers, they literally
occupied them as they exploited and drained away their resources,
leaving them weakened or dead. (Is human colonialism biomimicry?)
In this primeval
Earth world, we can imagine the many conflicts over scarce food
and overcrowding that wreaked havoc, yet simultaneously drove
innovation. Eventually, in their encounters with each other, archebacteria
somehow discovered the advantages of cooperation over competition:
that feeding your enemy is more energy efficient (read: less costly)
than killing them off.
Read that last sentence
again, because it is the most important discovery any maturing
species can make and is very much on our human agenda right now!
All along, in evolving
different lifestyles, the archaea had been able to freely trade
DNA genes with each other across all the different types in a
great World Wide Web of information exchange in which any bacterium
had access to the DNA information of any other. Thus they refined
a myriad particular cell shapes and lifestyles or roles, such
as fixing nitrogen or moving by whiplash propulsion or living
in mats of millions.
The crowning glory
of all their achievements was the evolution of gigantic collectives
with highly sophisticated divisions of labour that became the
only other type of cell ever to grace the evolutionary scene:
the nucleated cells of which we ourselves are composed. This may
have begun, as microbiologist Lynn Margulis and others worked
it out, when invading breathers felt their bubbler host weakening
and took on some 'bluegreens' (photosynthesizers) to make food
for the entire colony. The breathers' motors provided transportation
by working in unison on the bubbler's cell membrane to drive the
colony into sunlight where the bluegreens could work as needed
(Margulis 1998).
In such cooperatives,
apparently each specialized bacterium donated the DNA it did not
need to fulfil its special function into a common gene library
that became the new cell's nucleus. To this day our cells and
those of plants, animals and fungi, contain the descendants of
these archebacteria in the form of mitochondria (breathers) and
chloroplasts (bluegreens).
Nucleated cells went
through another billion years repeating the cycle of youthful
competition and creativity to mature cooperation in the form of
multi-celled creatures. That was the last great leap in evolution
- around one billion years ago, bringing us closer to that Cambrian
era, when this evolutionary model really took off as described
earlier. Ever since, multi-celled creature have been competing
when youthful and cooperating when mature.
Maturation through
crisis
In my view as an
evolution biologist, then, the essential pattern in evolution
for all species from time immemorial is this very maturation curve
from competitive, expansive, youthful economies to cooperative,
stable, mature economies. One can see this in what ecologists
classify as Type I Pioneer ecosystems and Type III Climax ecosystems
today, as well as in looking back over Earth's four billion year
history of species' econoomies.
Some species never
make it to maturity. Much of humanity did-but only at the tribal
level to which countless human groups matured in cooperation internally
and with neighboring tribes, sometimes developing complex economies
with large towns and many artifacts, as found at Catal Huyuk in
Turkey and many other locations in Africa, Asia, North and South
America. Mature cooperation, with other humans as well as with
large animals no doubt played a large role in surviving a dozen
Ice Ages as humanity did.
In the past 6,000
years or so, we built civilizations-relatively huge socio-economic
political systems with complex infrastructures that were mostly
internally cooperative despite occasional insurrections. But these
mature cooperatives, like the nucleated cell and like the multi-celled
creature before them, were new cooperative entities at yet another
size scale, and therefore proceeded naturally in the youthful
mode of expansionism in competition. Lo, the Age of Empires that
shifted over time into national and then corporate empires, had
begun!
And so human empires
mimic rather well the expansive, competitive phase of juvenile
species in nature from the original archaea (bacteria) to the
grasses that evolved along with humans and are also still in that
juvenile take-over, make-over whatever you can to stay in the
game mode Darwin described so well. Interesting that humans and
those youthful grasses - in the version humans call 'grain' or
'corn' - have come to depend on each other.
Yes, Darwinian evolution
describes the juvenile phase, and that is precisely why the entrepreneurs
of our Industrial Age loved that theory as much as the Soviet
Union loved Kropotkin's version of evolution, titled Mutual
Aid, all about the cooperative phases of species evolution,
which rationalized collectivism. In the first, community was sacrificed
to the individual's interest; in the latter the individual's interest
was acrificed to that of the collective. Two half theories that
make a whole when put together and make the connections between
the ecologists' different types of ecosystems. The learning curve
of maturation ties it all together in an elegant whole.
The recognition that
our current way of life is unsustainable (literally implying we
must live differently) is a new and vital insight, without which
we could not see any need to change the way we live on what seemed
like a limitlessly provident planet, now so obviously ravaged
by our youthful empire building to a critical point, if not already
beyond it.
All our technology
has come through biomimicry-from spinning like silkworms and weaving
like spiders, building like termites and tunneling like moles,
flying like birds and computing like brains, to using radar like
bats and sonar like dolphins, and so on and on. But now it is
time for the biggest and evolutionarily greatest biomimicry feat
of all: copying those of our ancestors who made it to mature sustainability,
pulling back on our economic expansion just as our bodies did
when reaching mature size and shifting to maintaining stable sustainability.
Looking at our recent
history, we see many experiments in cooperation pushing us to
our truly global cooperative maturity: from the United States
of America to the European Union, from NATO and SEATO and other
alliances to World Parliaments of Religion, a World Court and
International Space Stations, from VISA cards crossing cultures
and currencies to International Air Traffic Control, and so on
and on.
The Internet is the
largest self-organizing living system created by humanity and
is changing everything. The top-down hierarchies that worked to
maintain and expand empires are giving way to democratic and even
more mature living systems ways of organizing and governing ourselves;
even the gifting economies arising all over it, as well as in
local communities, biomimic mature species economics.
If there is one biological
system that can give us the clues in an up close and personal
model available to us all, it is our own bodies. There is no more
amazing or mature economy to mimic as we design our own future
than the bodies in which each and every one of us, regardless
of political persuasion, is walking around-bodies in which no
organ either exploits the rest for its own benefit or interferes
with diversity by trying to make the others more like itself.
Each of your up to
one hundred trillion cells has some thirty thousand recycling
centres in it just to keep all those proteins you are made of
healthy. Each of those is as sophisticated as a chipper machine
would be if you could stick a dead or damaged tree into one and
get a healthy live tree out the other end instead of a pike of
chips! And they exist along with a thousand mitochondrial banks
in each cell, giving out free ATP stored-value debit cards 24/7
with no interest, not even pay-back of what you spent-a currency
system we could well biomimic as soon as possible in place of
our wealth-concentrating debt money.
It has become clear
to me that the mature cooperative phase of species is often driven
into existence by crises and I am happy to note how the vast majority
of humans becomes highly cooperative in times of disaster, surviving
predations of the very few to create wellbeing for the many. It
is in our genes, our blood and bones, to cooperate. We have been
through this before, just never before at a global size level.
Species that become
sustainable - that survive a really long time - get to their mature
collaborative phase while others, stuck in adolescent behaviours
that no longer serve them, die out. Humanity now stands on the
brink of maturity in the midst of disasters of our own making.
Let us take heart from our most ancient Earth ancestors, the archea-
the only other creatures of the living Earth to create global
disasters through their own behaviour and solve them. Let us see
if we can do as well as they did! Let a mature and cooperative
global economy be our goal and let us make it as successful, as
efficient and resilient, as our own highly evolved bodies.
The global economy
we built as a resource-rapacious, competitive monopoly game based
on debt money and powered by fossil fuels was a necessary youthful
phase. We are ready now to leap into maturity. We the people can
declare our solidarity with each other around the globe, stop
making war on each other, roll up our sleeves, and do the positive
work needed to develop clean energy sources, move coastal cities
uphill, reinvent money, green deserts, and cooperate in all our
cultural and religious diversity to build a world that works for
all, whether or not our governments follow our lead.
As Rumi asked: Why
do you stay in prison when the door is so wide open?
Elisabet Sahtouris
PhD (www.sahtouris.com)
is an internationally known evolution biologist, futurist, author
and speaker living in Spain. With a post-doctoral degree at the
American Museum of Natural History, she taught at MIT and the
University of Massachusetts, contributed to the NOVA-Horizon TV
series, is a fellow of the World Business Academy, and a member
of the World Wisdom Council. Her venues include the World Bank,
UN, Boeing, Siemens, Hewlett-Packard, South African Rand Bank,
Caux Round Table, Tokyo International Forum, the governments of
Australia, New Zealand and the Netherlands, Sao Paulo business
schools and State of the World Forums. Author of EarthDance:
Living Systems in Evolution; A Walk Through Time: From Stardust
to Us; and Biology Revisioned with Willis Harman