 At the atomic and subatomic level, there are no isolated parts. There is a network of relationships and the properties of any part of the network are determined by how they are connected to the other parts. So it's really this shift from objects to relationships, to patterns, to context, which other people later on call systems thinking or systemic thinking, and which is what I mainly write about these days. Dr. Fritjolf Kappra is my guest on this episode of Inside Ideas, brought to you by 1.5 Media and Innovators Magazine. Fritjolf is a scientist, educator, activist, and author of many international bestsellers that connect conceptual changes in science and broader changes in worldview and values in society. A Vienna-born physicist and systems theorist, Kappra first became popular known for his book, The Tau of Physics. And I have a newer edition of it right here with me, but there's an interesting story. The first time I found out about Fritjolf is really through The Tau of Physics. My father had an old, tattered, smaller version of The Tau of Physics on his bookshelf, and he had notes written all in it. And I really remember looking through that when I was younger. And Fritjolf will probably tell you some of the stories that he hears from other students and people over the years about The Tau of Physics and how they say that's the first book where they really connect with him. This book explored the ways in which modern physics was changing our worldview from a mechanistic to a holistic and ecological one. It was published in 1975 and it's still in print in more than 40 editions worldwide and is referenced with the statue of Shiva in the courtyard of one of the world's largest and most respected centers for scientific research, CERN, the Center for Research in Particular Physics in Geneva. Over the past 50 years, Fritjolf has been engaged in a systematic exploration of how other sciences and society are ushering in a similar shift in worldview or paradigms leading to a new vision of reality and a new understanding of the social implications of this cultural transformation. His most recent book, and I hope he'll hold that up for me, Patterns of Connection, Essential Essays from Five Decades, is from the University of New Mexico Press just barely came out. It's hot off the press, probably steaming in his hands right there because it is fresh. I didn't get a good copy here in Germany because it just hasn't made it across the water yet or been printed. So I read the Kindle edition and it's just as good on Kindle. So I know some people prefer that. Capra is a founding director of the Berkeley Bay Center for Ecoliteracy, which is dedicated to advancing ecology and systems thinking in primary and secondary education and serves on the Council of the Earth Charter Initiative. He is the author of numerous books and we're only gonna talk about one on the podcast today and maybe tickle on a few comments about the others and how they evolved and came about. And then we wanna really get into the systems view of life, the Capra courses, courses that he teaches of which I'm an alumni, I went to the spring 2018, I went back and looked at the date when it was, which I think now you're going five or six years, how many years on the Capra courses? We've had six years. Unbelievable, absolutely unbelievable. Some of the other well-known books that you might know, The Turning Point, The Web of Life, The Hidden Connections, The Science of Leonardo and Learning from Leonardo. And he co-authored Green Politics, which was really meant to be kind of a German book for German politics, the Green Party, but it's very successful all around the world, belonging to the universe and eco-management and many, many others. I have a copy of the Systems View of Life book. This is kind of the course manual and a wonderful book and read its biblical proportions, but well worth it. And then the other one is the Web of Life. And so as all my listeners know, I love to hold up books and kind of engage. Welcome to the show. I'm so glad you're here. Thank you, Mark, for this very kind and very extensive introduction. And let me say that regarding my new book, Patterns of Connection, this is a collection of essays with a narrative that interweaves the essays and gives the historical and philosophical context. And it is really the story about how my thinking evolved over five decades. So in this narrative, I talk about all my books. So when you read this one, you get all the references because it's really an account of my journey. Yeah, and that's one of the reasons why I really loved it because you can see that Web of Life almost through the entire book and it really touches out. And the review that I give you on the book, which is good, of course, is so nice because it connects that Web to not only historical learning, but other science and other books and other things that were pivotal also in your journey, but you also have the very great fortune, I would say, that on this journey that you made, you met incredible people and if I would, in the show links and then in the description, I will put a link to this to your website, but you have on your website, the Frithold Capra colleagues and mentors that you've met over the years. And it's kind of this Web with pictures and what they do and you can scroll over them. And I would recommend looking at that, the amazing people that you've come across and the learnings and the connections that you've made. And so I will definitely put a link to it. It's connected to patterns of connection because when I wrote the book, I reviewed my entire career. And of course, I didn't exactly remember when I met home and when certain conversations took place. So I had to do quite a bit of research in my notes and old calendars and things. And so I thought it would be good to put a conceptual map together of about 50 people who have really influenced my thinking. And that's what I published, I posted on my website. I absolutely love it. And I think that's a tool. And that's one thing about all your works is you really provide the tools and the references and how some things come about with all this. I would say in the beginning of your book, and I don't wanna give it away, I want you to really tell us and take us on this journey in some respects, but also only tease it because I do want people to go out and get the book and read it for themselves. But just enough of an understanding of kind of the journey. And one of them is a book that I'm gonna hold up now. That's probably not the addition that you have Physics and Philosophy by Werner Heisenberger. And I'm sure you have many books. You always have them behind you. Let me just go behind and show you. This is the actual book I read as a student in Vienna. It's a German paperback called Physics and Philosophy. So Physics and Philosophy is a now classic book by Werner Heisenberger, one of the founders of Quantum Theory. And in this book, Heisenberger gives a very vivid account of the challenges a handful of European physicists were facing at the beginning of the 20th century during the first three decades. When they were able for the first time to do experiments involving atoms and subatomic particles, electrons, protons, neutrons and so on. And what they found was totally shocking to them because they could not use the classical concepts, the concepts of classical physics like energy, momentum, position and so on to describe the phenomena they were observing. So they were deeply challenged and they had to change their whole language, their concepts, their entire worldview. And basically what the change was was just to sort of come to the punchline. The change was that at the atomic and subatomic level there are no isolated parts. There is a network of relationships and the properties of any part of the network are determined by how they are connected to the other parts. So it's really this shift from objects to relationships to patterns to context which other people later on called systems thinking or systemic thinking and which is what I mainly write about these days. But this is what happened in quantum physics and it was absolutely shocking to them and they overcame this shock and were rewarded with deep insights into the nature of matter. And I read this book in the late 50s as a young student and in part it's quite technical. So I understood only about half of it but this book accompanied me through my career and I went back to it again and again and looking back now on these five decades I can say that Heisenberg's book really determined my entire career as a scientist and writer because Heisenberg what he said in the book at one particular passage is that the mechanistic worldview is deeply ingrained in our minds and in our educational system and it will take us a long time to overcome it and have a really different view about reality. And that sentence became sort of programmatic for my life. That's what I have done all my life. Investigate the change of paradigms from the mechanistic to the systemic holistic or ecological paradigm, the philosophical consequences, the social and political consequences and so on. So Heisenberg was one of the key people and I was fortunate to meet him. I met him twice once when I just began to write the Tao of Physics in the early 70s and once when the manuscript was finished just before I published the book when I showed him the whole manuscript and those were very inspiring meetings. Yeah, I heard he gave you some nice feedback and also you later found some actual quotes, not the right word, but that he'd also documentation about certain things, which is amazing. In 1972, Heisenberg told me that he was actually well aware of the connections between the views of modern physics and the views of Eastern philosophy. And he was aware of that because he had been to India and he had been the guest of one of the greatest Indian sages Rabindranath Tagore, poet, philosopher and mystic of India. And so he had long discussions with Tagore about modern physics and Eastern philosophy. And he said that that helped him a lot because I remember him saying, he said, what I was doing in quantum physics all of a sudden didn't seem all that crazy because those physicists were out on a limb alone and going into really new territory. And so Heisenberg found a kind of confirmation. And then in the second meeting which was probably 1974, something like that or 75, just before the book came out, I went through the whole manuscript with him, chapter by chapter and summarize the whole manuscript. And he just looked at me at the end and said, basically I completely agree with you. And to me, a young writer starting out as a career that was of course fantastic. That was absolutely fantastic. I can imagine almost feel how you feel. In many respects, I have that awe and that nervousness when I'm around you as well, because I see you as a mentor. And I wanna tell you in a couple of ways, not only am I alumni of your CAPR course which set me off on a whole different path and journey on what I do in climate activism and environmental ecological economics and in the direction of how I speak and see the world and try to influence it as an activist in many ways. But you're also a very strong influence who also brought to light the knowledge of Lynn Margolis for me. And I'm an avid student of her books and her readings. So I have some that I've put here as well. And so I really wanna thank you for that as well. I wanna back up. She is one of my big science heroes, you know, Lynn Margolis. I met her several times. I had long discussions with her and her book that she wrote with her son, Dorian Sagan, microcosmos. Right there, microcosmos. My thinking, you know, it's really what I now call the systems view of evolution, symbiotic planet and also acquiring genomes. And I don't know, Mark, whether you know that there's a beautiful documentary film about her. I have it. It's a symbiotic earth. Yep, I have it, symbiotic earth. That's fabulous. You're in it. It's called symbiotic earth. And I'm in it in the film, together with many other scientists, but it's beautifully made. It's absolutely, it's made from bullfrog films and I have, I actually have two copies here. I was already living in Germany at the time and so I had them sent. And I tell you, it was the longest wait to get them. And when I did, I watched them and I also share them because they're on DVD. Let me mention one thing that is typical of Lynn Margolis. When you talk about the nature of biological life and the difference between a living organism and a non-living system, like what's the essential difference between a plant and a rock or an animal and a rock? And you know, scientists debate and they go into DNA, RNA, protein cells and so on. And Lynn Margolis sort of cut through this by focusing on metabolism. Metabolism is that flow of energy and matter, the flow of food, essentially, that we all need to stay alive. And it's a constant flow of energy and matter through a network of chemical processes that allows a living organism to maintain itself, to evolve, to develop and so on. So this is well known. Metabolism is a well-known phenomenon. So Lynn Margolis says, if it metabolizes, it's alive. If it doesn't, it's not. I mean, this is so clear, you know? Yes. And of course, to really understand it, to go into the details and understand metabolism, you know, it's a lot of work and it involves a lot of concepts. But she just said, if it metabolizes, it's alive. If not, it's not alive. Since we're on the topic, I want to ask you and see if you have anything else you would like to share from kind of from your learnings from Lynn. She was, Rebel's not the right word, but she kind of put the whole sign. It's a good word, I think. Yeah. Okay. She had a rebellious nature. And for instance, she said that, you know, evolution was one of her big subjects. She was a microbiologist and the role of bacteria and other microorganisms in evolution was her big subject. And she said that most biologists and evolutionary theorists get the phenomenon of evolution wrong because they are zoologists. All they talk about is these animals. They don't know anything about microorganisms. Now that's a little exaggerate, but she was very strong on that and said, if you don't understand the contribution of microorganisms to life, which is how it started of course, because the first two billion years there was nothing else, there were only microorganisms. So that's what she calls the microcosmos. So that's one of her great contributions. And it's also, I mean, she really put the entire scientific community on its head in some respects. I also think there was something that I noticed and I don't know how well I understood it is that she also said, you know, it's not natural selection survival of the fittest, only the strong survive. She said, everything in our world works in symbiosis and symbiogenesis and that it's a collaboration and cooperation, one organism to another, one animal to another, one species to another. Absolutely. She said, independence is not a scientific term, it's a political term. Yeah. For her, the universe was always interconnected. And she is not the author, but the main developer and promoter of the theory of symbiogenesis, which means that symbiosis is a well understood phenomenon where two organisms live in close connection and mutual dependence. And what happened in evolution in the past was that larger microorganisms often feed on smaller ones, like the large microorganisms would ingest small bacteria and of course these small bacteria would then be digested and would die, but sometimes they didn't die. Sometimes they continue to live inside the larger organisms and develop a mutually beneficial relationship, thus creating a new species. And that's what she called symbiogenesis, the creation of a new species via symbiosis. And so today, and that's also her summary, whereas the neo-Darvinist theory of evolution knows only about random mutations, chance genetic changes and subsequent natural selection. Now we know about three avenues of evolution. Genetic change is still one, but then bacteria continually ingest DNA from other bacteria, spit it out, spit out genetic materials and ingest it. And again, to quote Lynn, one of her characteristic statements, she says, it is if you jumped into a swimming pool with brown eyes and came out with blue eyes. Because in the water you have ingested the genetic material. So that's the second avenue, which is called horizontal gene transfer, technically. So the trading of genes, that's how she calls it gene trading. And the second is her own theory of symbiogenesis, evolution through symbiosis. And what I emphasize when I talk about evolution is that even though these processes contain random elements, a lot of random elements, the overall process is complex and very ordered because in this creation of genetic novelty through these three avenues, not all results are viable and the results need to be always integrated into the larger genetic and cellular environment. And I spent hours with Lynn where she explained to me the technicalities of how this integration takes place, very complex processes and only a few solutions remain. That's how natural selection works. And that is a highly ordered process. So evolution, the overall process of evolution is highly ordered. Yeah, the last thing that I'll say about Lynn too that I've observed is she wasn't always behind the microscope or behind the book or the lectern. She was actually out in nature and with the microorganisms and jumping in the swamps and in the lakes and in the places and doing a lot of connection to nature. And in the film, this is beautifully pictured. John had a photo of her, you know, where she reaches into the muck and pulls out some tissues and gets all excited and says, look here what we have. This is copper and this is this and this is this. And she goes very excited. Amazing. Yeah, yeah, I'm sad we lost her so early. There's so much we could talk about her, but that's really just one facet of your big journey. And I wanna back up just a little bit. So for the listeners who don't know, you spent 12 years of your life in Vienna, Austria, then moved with your mother and father and your brother to Innsbruck, Austria and ended up getting your PhD in physics. You could say the first 12 years I spent on the farm, I grew up on a farm. That was a very, very formative period, my early childhood. Because of the connection to nature. You know, intimate connection to nature, yes. Yeah, and then you moved to Innsbruck and that's why the German, that's why the German books for those. But you've had a pretty big journey. Now you're in Berkeley, California and the United States. I'm in Humber, Germany. And so to back it up and to kind of ease people into the patterns of your book, patterns of connection. I want, one, it's 50 years of essays and work and research that you've done and writing that you've done. But this past almost two years has kind of been a crazy time. Not only did we do the pandemic, we did Black Lives Matters, Asian racism, a crazy inauguration. We've had a lot of crazy things. I wanna know, does all your teachings, does all these lessons, all these connections, did they help you kind of weather this crazy time a little bit better and how have you been and how did you get to Berkeley from Germany and take us on that trip and then to the book? Well, I got my PhD in Vienna and fell in love with a French woman and moved to Paris. And spent two years in Paris at the University of Paris. That was my first postdoctoral work and it happened to be in 67 and 68. And in 68 was this big student revolution, student revolt in Paris, which is still known in Europe as May 68, simply. And I was in the very midst of it and that influenced my thinking in terms of social change and activists, the movements and so on. So then I moved to California. I moved to California because I met an American physicist in Paris, Michael Maudenberg, who was doing physics here at the University of California. I started working with him and he got me the job in Santa Cruz, California at the University. Then I spent two years there, very much involved in the whole hippie culture, the counterculture. This is where I studied Eastern philosophy. I experimented with psychedelics. I practiced meditation. I did all of that, the full sixties. And in addition to being a physicist in my day job, so I had a sort of rather schizophrenic life at the time, I then moved back to Europe, spent four years in London and that's when I wrote the Dow physics. And then when the book was finished, I moved back to California. And again, this was a physicist who became a strong mentor, Jeffrey Chu at Berkeley. And I spent 10 years working with him very closely from about 75 to 85. And at that time, after the tremendous success of the Dow physics, I got invited to a lot of lectures and seminars and I met people from all walks of life who told me that a similar change of paradigms than the one I had described in physics in the book the Dow physics was happening in other fields. So I became interested in other areas in biology, in medicine, in psychology, in economics and so on. And I wrote a book eventually about these changes. The book is called The Turning Point was published in 1982. And during that period, two things happened. One was that I slowly transitioned from being a working physicist to a science writer. And two, that I recognized that the various issues I was now becoming interested in like health, the environment, social justice, the management of organizations and so on that these all had to do with life, with individual organisms, social systems and ecosystems. And so physics has nothing to say about living systems. And so my interest shifted from physics to the life sciences to ecology, theory of living systems, later on complexity theory. And in the mid-80s, I gave up physics altogether and worked in the life sciences and wrote books about this emerging new understanding of life, which I call the systems view of life. And I spent 30 years developing a synthesis of this systems view of life. And it's really a complete work that goes through from beginning to end out of all the different sciences. And I absolutely love the course. It's the book that we're talking about is really also a journey. And you talk about it just now that you go from a physicist to a science writer, but there's this strong environmentalist or activist as well within you. And a lot of your work is that. Can you tell us a little bit how that developed? Yeah, I should tell you that the one of the great formative periods in my life were the 1960s. And in the 1960s, the members of this counterculture as it was later called, experienced two kinds of expansion of consciousness. One into the spiritual realm, the religious spiritual or what psychologists later called the transpersonal dimension of consciousness. And the other one was an expansion of social consciousness. So there, the main characteristic was a radical questioning of authority. So you had the civil rights movement in America, the protest against the Soviet regime in Prague. You had psychologists questioning the authority of therapists over patients. Or doctors, you had students in the various students movements questioning the authority of the university professors when it comes to political questions. You had women questioning the authority of men of patriarchal society. So it was this broad questioning of authority. And in fact, I should tell you that one of the first essays in patterns of connection is an essay about the 60s where I go into great detail. So this was my formative period. And in my work after the 1960s, beginning in the 1970s, I first went into the spiritual direction and explored Eastern spiritual traditions and wrote the Tao of physics. But the other side was always the spiritual direction with me. And I remember that when I was in the process of writing the Tao of physics, I remember exactly when it was in London, I was traveling on the London underground and I was reading a review of Schumacher's famous book, Smallest Beautiful in the Guardian newspaper. And the review was titled, Buddhist Economics. And so I thought, well, this is something I ought to get interested in, but I put it aside because I was in the middle of writing the Tao of physics. But I came back to the social issues afterwards. And the turning point is a book not only about a scientific paradigm shift but also about social change. And from that time on, all my books have been about the paradigm shift in science and in society, intellectual change, conceptual change and social change. A lot of your personal work as well is helping people with the big buzzword right now as regeneration, regenerative, even Paul Hawkin just came out with a new book called Regeneration. And you've been in a couple of his books, he's been talking about you since natural capitalism and ecology books as well, which I have the ecology of a commerce and that. And he speaks about you quite a bit, but- Yeah, and the other way around too. You know, I write him in my work, Paul Hawkin is an excellent writer. He understands things from a systemic point of view. He's a major activist and his style of writing is excellent. I think the ecology of commerce is still one of his best books. I do too, I really like them a lot. And I've recently reread all of them in preparation for his new book, Regeneration as well. And I just, so not only have you been around and doing this for a long time, but there is also this journey, this kind of the social, the activist part besides your very scientific connections and the community of those thought leaders and the scientists who you kind of also brought together and had dialogues with. And in these 11 chapters of your book, you kind of not only talk about the activities over these five decades, how much happened that you realized in your life, but you kind of, you know, you went through the feminist movement, the green movement, the apartheid and there's these different sections and it's this nice journey that shows that. Again, back to my question, I think I know the answer, but have those learnings, that journey and your writings proven to really be a better model for life, whether you call it a regenerative lifestyle or a different model for life or a different way of looking, not just the systems field of life, but you also structure those you surround yourself with and the way you live a little bit different. Well, let me first tell you that since I have never been a pure theorist, but always combined theory and conceptual insights with activism and the desire for social change, this book, Patterns of Connection is not only an account of my intellectual journey, but also an account of the various social movements that I encountered and became part of from the counterculture of the 1960s to the New Age movement of the 1970s, the feminist movement of the 1970s, then the movement of green politics in the 1980s, the new thinking of Mikhail Gorbachev toward the end of the 80s and the great enthusiasm that we all felt around the world. Then in the 1990s, the information technology revolution and the sort of disappointment that the so-called peace dividend that people talked about at the end of the Cold War in the late 80s, that this fizzled out and disappeared and corporate domination became ever stronger. And then to what the end of the 1990s, the emergence of this new global civil society, which actually goes back both in terms of values and in terms of people, leaders goes back to the 60s, to the various networks we had in the 60s and 70s. So I've been part of many of these movements and at the end of the book in the epilogue, I ask exactly the question you're asking me now. What about this change of paradigms that I've been analyzing and promoting for five decades? How much of it has happened? Has there actually been a turning point? And my answer is, and I have realized this already many years ago, that because of the highly non-linear nature of society and of now of the global community, if you wish, these social changes don't occur on a linear chain. So you can say, here's the old paradigm, here it's changing and now we are in the new paradigm. There are sort of what I call the swings of a chaotic pendulum. There are scientific revolutions, there are grassroots revolutions, there are back swings, there are pendulum swings. And so in the epilogue of the book, I go through these pendulum swings that I, and these movements I just mentioned, and then I end up quoting one of the personalities who was at the very center of these radical changes, the Czech former president and playwright, Batslav Havel. And Havel has in one of his essays, he writes about hope. And I am often asked and people like me in the movement often asked, what do you have hope for the future? And so Havel has a brief meditation on the nature of hope. And I want to read this to you and this is what really has inspired me for the last 20 years. And as you say, has helped me to live my life and to continue my work. So Havel writes, the kind of hope that I often think about and the stand above all as a state of mind, not a state of the world. Either we have hope within us or we don't. It is a dimension of the soul and it's not essentially dependent on some particular observation of the world or estimate of the situation. Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense regardless of how it will turn out. So this is, I have used as my guiding spirit and that has helped me enormously. I love that. And because your work makes sense, I think you've probably weathered these storms to answer the question very nicely. I followed you through this whole crazy time and you've continued with the courses, you've continued with the lectures. Your first two books, and I don't know if you want to tell us the story, you took the proceeds from your first two books to start the Elmwood Institute, which later evolved to something else, which has been a blessing for the world because it's something that we all so much need. Can you tell us all a little bit more about that? The story is that when I branched out into all these other fields, biology, psychology, economics, management, I realized very soon that I could not discuss the paradigm shift in those fields without help from others because I was not an expert in medicine. I was not an expert in biology or in psychotherapy or in economics. And I couldn't educate myself by reading books because I wouldn't even know where to start. You have this huge library, picture of the library on your screen. So imagine the young Fridtjof Capra standing in the middle and looking at the economics. What are you gonna do? Yeah. What are you going to do? Where are you going to start? So I developed a technique and this has stayed with me to the present day of engaging people in dialogues. First of all, in seeking them out and recognizing them as sharing the same value system and worldview and systemic thinking with me. And secondly, as being experts in their fields. And so I would met them in lectures and seminars on various occasions. And so by the time I wrote the turning point I had entered into formal relations with several of them like Stan Groff and Margaret Locke and Carl Simonton and Hazel Henderson who became official advisors to my book project. They wrote position papers for me giving the history of economics or the history of biology and so on or psychology. And I would then weave these essays into my book. And as I was seeking out people I found that many of them were disappointed with the academic environment which was too much grounded in the mechanistic worldview which was too fragmented as it still often is today. And they were either dropping out or had half dropped out. And so I had the idea of assembling several of them and founding an ecological think tank which we called the Elmwood Institute after a neighborhood in Berkeley where I lived at the time. And for 10 years we organized seminars, we published books, we had all kinds of projects of promoting a systemic and ecological worldview and value system. And then in 1994, at the end of 1994 we transformed the Elmwood Institute because it became too much and funding was a major issue. We focused on just one part of it which is education and schools. And we called it Center for Ecoliteracy. We had an Ecoliteracy program already in the Elmwood Institute for two years and then focus on teaching the basic principles of ecology to children in public schools. And that Center for Ecoliteracy still exists in Berkeley. Yeah, it's so beautiful. And just recently was going to the website and seeing some of the things that they were doing. They're doing a lot around food and nature for youth and really tying that in. I really love that. There is one thing that I kind of wanna ask you which I didn't understand that ties to one of my passions. So I'm what they call a global food reformist. I really feel that the basic needs and food and nature and agriculture, how we do food is a big solution towards solving human suffering and a lot of the problems that we have. And you mentioned, and I might have misunderstood it, monastic practice around food. And I'm wondering if I understood it correctly and I hope I'm not catching you off guard but I wanted to kind of understand a little bit more what you meant by these monastic practices around food and that something that's been around for a lot of way but it's a different way of viewing and dealing with it. Well, this actually came out of a conversation I had with the economist Hazel Henderson or the radical alternative economist and futurist Hazel Henderson. And I had this conversation with her in the late 1970s in the long before the Center for Ecoliteracy. And what we were talking about is there are two kinds of work that we can distinguish that people do. One is work of building something that will last of having a big skyscraper or a company that will last for a long time or having some kind of lasting structure, either material. Almost like a monument or something. A monument, yeah. Could also be an intellectual monument. The other work is what I call cyclical work. Work that is done and has to be redone all the time. So you cook a meal, you eat it, and it's gone and you have to cook again. You wash the dishes and they're dirty again. You harvest food, it grows, it matures and then you plant it, it grows, it matures, you harvest it, it decays, you plant again. And so this cyclical work is work that is very closely connected to life because life is cyclical and is ever-changing. This is why I love just as a sideline, I love the sculptor Andy Goldsworthy so much whose iconic picture is on the textbook, The Systems of Life. His sculptures are all ephemeral because he intuits the dynamic and ever-changing nature of life. Now, when you are really in tune with life, this is a kind of a spiritual connection and you can see this in the monasteries and they come to the monastic activities. Many traditional monasteries like the Benedictines, for instance, they had agricultural enterprises, they had wine cellars, they were cultivating wine, they were growing food and the kind of cyclical work puts us in touch with nature and a deep appreciation of the cyclical nature is ultimately a spiritual experience. And so this is why there's this monastic dimension to the cyclical work. So to come back to the Center for Ecoliteracy, what we did was to develop a pedagogy where children would learn the basic principles of ecology, the basic concepts like networks, cycles, flows, diversity and so on. They would learn them out in the garden, gardening, growing food and then cooking food in the kitchen. So that was the basic approach. Wow, yeah, that's absolutely beautiful. And the system view of life, the book you just held up, you did with Pierre Luigi. Pierre Luigi. And I recently also heard a story and I'd like you to tell it, which somehow ties me to Lynn Margolis again or some of my other feelings or thoughts on primordial soup that Pierre Luigi actually at one point in time recreated this primordial soup. I don't know, experiment's the wrong word, but... No, no, no, it's our experiment. He is a biochemist and he spent 30 years at the Swiss University in Zurich, which is called ETH after the German, you know, Eidgenessische Technische Hochschule. Yeah, exactly. It's Swiss Polytechnic basically. And Louisie, his last name is Louisie and his friends call him Luigi. So it's a little confusing. So Louisie spent 30 years developing chemical systems that are small bubbles which have networks inside, chemical networks that are prototypes for living networks and which have, you know, prototypes of membranes. So they're not alive, but they're sort of the step before life emerges. And so he's one of the world experts on the origin of life and this is one of his main contributions to the book in addition to a lot of biochemistry, genetics, theory of evolution and so on. When I look, so Lynn Margolis, her first husband, her husband before they got divorced was Carl Sagan who also did the cosmos, but he always said, we are all star stuff. And this whole thing that, you know, the earth started with star stuff and basic elements and bacteria and that. And then what I hear about Pierre Louisie, Louise, that really is so interesting this, how this web, this systems view of seeing different experts, scientists, people who are researching and studying how they all come together to kind of formulate this bigger picture of and I always struggle with the words that the true reality of how life really is, you know, and how it's developed and how it works. The story of the origin of life is really fascinating and also very frustrating. Today, there is a widely shared belief among scientists that evolution started long before the emergence of life, that there was a molecular evolution or it's also called prebiotic evolution where molecular structures became ever more complicated. There were protocells, tiny bubbles with chemical structures that put into place, into motion, a kind of Darwinian competition that they were different, they were very diverse and some survived longer and others couldn't survive and eventually the living cell emerged out of those protocells and natural selection operated in such a way that those structures which could not survive in the long run didn't leave any traces, they are gone. And so the most effective, the fittest if you wish to survive are the cells, the bacteria that evolved 3.6 billion years ago and the others are gone. And so, Luisi and his colleagues tried desperately to recreate this pathway of molecular evolution but they had nothing in nature, no traces, no hints about how things might have evolved. So it's a very difficult but at the same time very exciting subject. You have so much wisdom and knowledge in these stories and I'm so glad that you're open and share it with all of us. So we mentioned in the beginning, I'm an alumni of the Systems View of Life Capricourse and it was absolutely fabulous. I've referred probably 16, 17 or more people to it who have all gone through a sense and had been enamored for it. But regardless of how much I talk about systems and Systems View of Life and that some people just, as Germans say, stay auf dem Schlauch, ich verstehe nur Bahnhof. They just don't understand when you say systems or Systems View of Life, they're system like government or computer system can you have the most elegant way kind of describing it and helping us understand it? Mark, you're bringing up two subjects. One is the online course that I've been teaching now for six years. And let me tell you the story of the Capricourse. So the book, The Systems View of Life was published in 2014 and Luigi and I went around in various places in Europe and the United States to promote it as one does with the new book. And I got several invitations to give talks at various universities. The book is published by University of Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. And one of these universities, there were a group of faculty who met with me about maybe 15 people who had all read the book and the book had just come out. So I was very impressed. There were all these professors who had read the book already. And they told me it would be very difficult for them to use it as a textbook. And so I was sort of, you know, shocked by that, you know, why it was written as a textbook, why can't it be used as a textbook? Well, the reason is that systems thinking and the systems view is inherently multidisciplinary. And so we touch on all these dimensions of life, the biological, the cognitive, the social, the ecological, and we integrate them into a synthesis. And so these professors told me once that, look, I'm a biologist and I cannot teach about the nature of consciousness, you know, I know nothing about that. So then the psychologist said, well, I'm a psychologist, I can talk about the nature of consciousness, but I cannot teach about economics or management. And so it went on. So they suggested to publish a shorter, simpler version that they could use for a course. And we didn't want to do that because we thought we would lose the substance of the book by simplifying it, but I did something else. I created a model course. And so this was the origin of the Capra course, which is a course about the systems view of life. And it is structured in terms of 12 lectures, each about 40 minutes long. One lecture per week. And then the course also features a discussion forum in which I participate every week, you know, posting answers to questions from students and discussing things with them. And this has been, I'm happy to say, very successful. We run the course twice a year in the spring and in the fall. The fall course just starts in the spring. All the fall course just started two weeks ago. They actually, we are going to keep registration open for another week, but we are almost full. We have 225 or so students in the course. And after this, after these six years now, the systems view of life is being taught in universities courses with our book as textbook. So I was successful in presenting a model course that can actually be used in universities and should be used. Absolutely, love it. And a lot of the students, I mean, the students that you have, and you mentioned this in one of your videos and discussions, they're from all over the world, all walks of life, all at different ages. And it's really from the highest academic levels to just the simple person who wants to get this. Absolutely, now we have also study groups that are held by alumni, led by alumni and which are organized in different languages. So we have a German study group in German, one in Italian, one in Spanish, one in Portuguese and so on for Brazil and so on. But I want to come back to your other question when people don't understand systems. And this is a problem because system is a sort of dry word, which is not very attractive. This is why I always talk about living systems or regenerative systems or ecosystems to make it less dry and abstract. But it is the scientific term that is used as a common denominator for living organisms, social networks, ecosystems. So we talk about ecosystems, social systems and individual organisms. There's a lot of discussion as well on patterns. Oh, talking about systems. Yeah, and systems, yeah. Let me tell you a funny anecdote. You mentioned before that people say, well, do you meet the political system? You know, this is a very well-known sense of the word system, the system. And activists and revolutionaries are against the system. And I had to deal with that and with this language problem. But once in San Francisco in the 1990s, I met Mikhail Gorbachev, whom I admired very much. And so I had a chance at the reception to speak five minutes or 10 minutes with him. And I told him that I'm teaching systems thinking and the systems view of the world. And I'm writing about that at that time I hadn't written the textbook with Luigi. And so I have books about like the web of life. I was working on that. It's a book about living systems and I teach systems thinking. And Gorbachev said, well, I don't like systems, but systems thinking is okay, I guess. I love it, yeah. There's a big patterns of connection. There's a, you know, the end section is on Gorbachev as well. Chapter four is one of the most amazing chapters that I really liked a lot in the book. I wanna touch on a couple of other things. So I mentioned it in the beginning that regeneration is kind of the big buzzword. Everybody's using it, regenerative agriculture, regenerative village, eco villages, regeneration this and regeneration that. But it's actually pretty old. I think there's some ties to, and I always say this wrong as well, autopoiesis. Yes. Well, let me tell you that one of the first scientists who recognized the importance of regeneration for understanding life, guess who that was? I'm not even gonna guess. It was Leonardo da Vinci in the Italian Renaissance. I wrote two books about Leonardo and one I have here, which is called Learning from Leonardo. And in this book, I discussed Leonardo's view of the Earth as a living system, which at his time was common and it's close to our modern Gaia theory. But it was the view of the Earth Goddess and the Earth of being alive and Mother Earth was mythical and metaphorical. And Leonardo turned it into a scientific hypothesis. And this is how he argued. He said, look, we see that trees lose their leaves every fall and they renew themselves. That was the word he used for regeneration. They renew themselves every spring. Grasses die in the winter and renew themselves every spring when the season changes. The skin, the hair on animals falls out and renews itself again. So wherever we look in nature, we see this constant regeneration and renewal. And this is why we can say the Earth is a living organism. So that was his argument. And then he compared the oceans to the blood and the rocks to the bones and so on. And some of these comparisons are not very good. And some of them he changed as he went along going into more detail, but he was the first to really recognize regeneration as the essence of life. And then the most advanced theory we have today, as you said, is the theory of auto-boyazis, which means self-making. And it's a theory developed by Umberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, where they say that the defining characteristic of life is that it is a self-organizing network. Every living system is a network. It organizes itself. And the very essence of this self-organization is a self-generation. The network continually generates and regenerates itself. So in the cell, for example, all the structures you see, the proteins, enzymes, the membranes, the RNA, the DNA, all these molecular structures are continually created, maintained, transformed and replaced by the cellular network. So there's continual regeneration. And that is the important thing. The systems through your flyer, it puts regeneration at the very outset of biological life. The very definition of biological life is regeneration. Auto-boyazis is a complex Greek term that Maturana and Varela invented. Because in science, when you want to make a mark, the best thing to do is to invent a term. And then it's very important to do that. And then it's always your term. So I called it auto-boyazis or self-making, but regeneration is simpler and I think much more evocative term. Except maybe for Greeks, auto-boyazis is also evocative. But for us, it's our term. But so that's why regeneration is so important. And it all ties to not only the book that we've been talking about, but the systems view of life, the course, the way that the direction that we're moving in to solve some of our civilization frameworks, the way that we live, the way we see our world, the kind of the new operating systems or models that we use for success for the future. I say a lot in discussions that I have that there's been more than 20 civilization frameworks in our world before that have all collapsed that don't exist anymore. Early antiquity, Incas, Aztecs, Mayas, on and on. And the majority of them collapsed because of ecological or environmental collapse, a lot to do with food and things like that. But what we're learning are, well, Lisa, what I've learned and I wanna get your viewpoints and feelings on this is that not only did they collapse because of this lack of environmental, ecological regeneration, a framework to keep the whole system, the whole thing moving, even though they were advanced civilizations, they had infrastructure, they had all sorts of things that could keep them going that they failed, but that we're seeing also in those civilization collapse that there are patterns or networks that were all very hierarchical. And Hannah Arndt, I don't know if you've read any of her works, Hannah Arndt, The Eichmann Trials or Hannah Arndt's The Human Condition, she kind of touches on that and talks about it, that sometimes the way our systems, our organization is set up as very neo-Darwinism, it's a very neo-liberalism, the people at the bottom of these hierarchies are peasants and slaves and laborers and farmers. And even today in our political systems and models, is it because we're not grasping that there's some better frameworks or better models out there like auto-poasis or regenerative frameworks or the systems frameworks that are, we're just repeating the same mistakes over and over again? Well, it's interesting with the systems of life that is so-called uneducated people have a much better grasp of the systems of life because they're closer to nature and they have not been spoiled or brainwashed by the mechanistic science that we have developed, which has been very successful, but then we went too far and became too mechanistic to fragment it. And so you often see that indigenous cultures have worldviews that are very close to the systems view of life. There's this famous Native American saying where they speak about nature as all my relations. Well, that's a systemic statement, systems view, all my relations. And of course, the living beings in our environment are literally our relations genetically. That's what Darwinism is all about. That's what evolution is all about. So, people without academic education are often much closer to the systems view of life. And the other thing I would say, and this is also something that Hannah Arendt writes about, the reason why civilizations often decline is that we are not playing with our full deck of cards because most of our social institutions are led by men and occupied by men and women have played a secondary role. Now, of course, this is changing now. And many governments, especially in Europe, have parliaments and governments that are 50 or almost 50% women and it's going to continue to change. But the influence of patriarchy has been tremendous and we're just overcoming it now. We're almost out of time. But I have four questions, if we can do them quickly, I'd like to go through them. The main one is, and you've given us a wonderful more than a teaser of the book and of the systems view of life and of the course and kind of some thoughts and many of the other things we speak about. But I always ask my guests this one question and I formulated it in two different ways and I want to ask it to you. It's really what does a world that works for everyone look like for you? What does a world that works for everyone look like for you? Well, a world that works for everyone would be a world designed according to ecological principles because it is the very nature of ecosystems that everybody participates, everybody is involved, everybody cooperates, everybody networks. So this wisdom of nature is millions and billions of years old and the best we can do to create a truly sustainable world that works for everyone and works in the long run is to follow this wisdom of nature and to design our social structures and technologies and physical structures according to the principles of ecology that nature has evolved. The last question I have are really for my listeners and they're ones that would kind of give them something of inspiration or help. If there was one message that you could depart to my listeners as a sustainable takeaway that really had the power to change their life or give them that paradigm, what would it be your message? Okay, well, following on what I just said now to design and redesign our world according to ecological principles, when you study these principles in detail like the cycles of nature, diversity, networking and so on, solar energy is the energy source. When you study them in detail, you will find that you can summarize these principles by saying nature sustains life by creating and nurturing communities. That's what it all amounts to. And so the community of life is the essential image. And if we want to live sustainably the best thing what we can do is to create and nurture communities. Love that. All right, well thank you much Mark that was very inspiring and very enjoyable. Thank you, we could talk for hours and I really appreciate you letting us inside of your ideas and I wish you all the best and thank you so much for your time. Okay, thank you. Take care, bye bye.