As long as science and technology were more narrowly engaged in questions of acceleration and location, Newton’s mechanistic laws served well. Phenomena that could be isolated, timed and measured, and made subject to rigorous quantification passed muster. By the twentieth century, however, the reductionist and mechanistic idea was too limited a concept to capture the embeddedness of nature. It became more apparent to scientists that understanding society or nature required understanding the myriad relationships between phenomena and not just the properties of the component parts.
Social scientists began to ask, How do we know a man except in relationship to the world around him? Taking the measure of a man—knowing his place of birth, age, height, weight, physical and emotional characteristics, etc.—tells us little of value about who he really is. It is only by understanding his relationship to the larger environment in which he is embedded and the many relationships he shares that we get a sense of him. In the old scheme, man was the sum total of his individual properties. In the new scheme, he is a snapshot of the pattern of activities in which he is engaged.
If each human being is a pattern of interactivity, why wouldn’t all of nature be so as well? Science, in the twentieth century, began to re-examine many of its most basic operating assumptions, only to see them overthrown. The old idea that phenomena could be known by analyzing the individual parts gave way to the opposite conception—that the individual parts can be understood only by first knowing something about their relationships to the whole within which they are embedded. In a word, nothing exists in isolation, as an autonomous object. Rather, everything exists in relation to “the other.” The new science was called “systems theory,” and it put in doubt the older thinking about the nature of nature. Systems theory also cast a shadow on the rest of the Enlightenment project, including, most important, the idea of the autonomous being functioning in a detached, self-optimizing world, populated by other autonomous beings, each maximizing his or her own individual utility.
Systems theory holds that the nature of the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. That’s because it is the relationship between the parts—the organizing principles that animate the whole—that creates something qualitatively different at the level of the whole. For example, we know from personal experience that a living being is qualitatively different from a corpse. At the moment of death, all of the relationships that made that living being a whole disappear, leaving just a body of inert matter. The great twentieth-century physicist Werner Heisenberg once remarked that “the world thus appears as a complicated tissue of events, in which connections of different kinds alternate or overlap or combine and thereby determine the texture of the whole.”
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The new systems thinking owes much to the emerging field of ecology. Ecology comes from the Greek word
oikos,
which means “household.” The German biologist Ernst Haeckel was the first to define the new branch of biology as “the science of relations between the organism and the surrounding outer world.”
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Ecology challenged the Darwinian model, with its emphasis on the competitive struggle between individual creatures for scarce resources. In the newer ecological model, nature is made up of a multitude of symbiotic and synergistic relationships, where each organism’s fate is determined as much by the patterns of mutual relationships as by any competitive advantage. Where Darwin’s biology concentrated more on the individual organism and species and relegated the environment to a backdrop of resources, ecology views the environment as all the relationships that make it up.
The early ecologists concentrated their efforts on local ecosystems. In 1911, however, a Russian scientist, Vladimir Vernadsky, published a paper that would expand the notion of ecological relationships to include the entire planet. He described what he called “the biosphere,” which he defined “as the area of the earth’s crust occupied by transformers that convert cosmic radiation into effective terrestrial energy—electrical, chemical, mechanical, thermal, etc.”
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In a follow-up book, published in 1926, which he entitled
Biospheria,
Vernadsky broke with the scientific orthodoxy of the day, arguing that geochemical and biological processes on Earth evolved together, each aiding the other. His radical idea was at odds with orthodox Darwinian theory, which hypothesized that geochemical processes evolved separately, creating the atmospheric environment in which living organisms emerged, adapted, and evolved—to wit, the environment as a storehouse of resources. Vernadsky suggested that the cycling of inert chemicals on Earth is influenced by the quality and quantity of living matter, and the living matter, in turn, influences the quality and quantity of inert chemicals being cycled through the planet. Today, scientists define the biosphere as
an integrated living and life-supporting system comprising the peripheral envelope of Planet Earth together with its surrounding atmosphere, so far down, and up, as any form of life exists naturally.
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The biosphere is very thin, extending only from the ocean depths, where the most primitive forms of life exist, to the upper stratosphere. The entire length of the biosphere envelope is less than forty miles from ocean floor to outer space. Within this narrow band, living creatures, and the Earth’s geochemical processes, interact to sustain each other.
In the 1970s, an English scientist, James Lovelock, and an American biologist, Lynn Margulis, expanded on Vernadsky’s theory with the publication of the Gaia hypothesis. They argued that the Earth functions like a self-regulating living organism. The flora and fauna and the geochemical composition of the atmosphere work in a synergistic relationship to maintain the Earth’s climate in a relatively steady state that is conducive to life.
Lovelock and Margulis use the example of the regulation of oxygen and methane to demonstrate how the cybernetic process between life and the geochemical cycle works to maintain a homeostatic climate regime. They remind us that oxygen levels on the planet must be confined within a very narrow range or the entire planet could erupt into flames, destroying all living matter, at least on the land surface. The two scientists believe that when the oxygen in the atmosphere rises above a tolerable level, a warning signal of some kind triggers an increase in methane production by microscopic bacteria. The increased methane migrates into the atmosphere, dampening the oxygen content until a steady state is reached again. (Methane acts as a regulator, both adding and taking away oxygen from the air.)
The constant interaction and feedback between living creatures and the geochemical content and cycles act as a unified system, maintaining the Earth’s climate and environment and preserving life. The planet, then, is more like a living creature, a self-regulating entity that maintains itself in a steady state conducive to the continuance of life. According to the Gaian way of thinking, the adaptation and evolution of individual creatures become part of the larger process: the adaptation and evolution of the planet itself. It is the continuous symbiotic relationships between every living creature and between living creatures and the geochemical processes that ensure the survival of both the planetary organism and the individual species that live within its biospheric envelope.
Many other scientists have since weighed in on the Gaia thesis, moderating, qualifying, and expanding on Lovelock and Margulis’s work. For more than two decades, the idea that the Earth functions as a living organism has become a critical avenue of exploration for rethinking the relationship between biology, chemistry, and geology.
If, in fact, the Earth does function as a living organism, then human activity that disrupts the biochemistry of that organism can lead to grave consequences, both for human life and the biosphere as a whole. The massive burning of fossil-fuel energy is the first example of human activity, on a global scale, that now threatens a radical shift in the climate of the Earth and the undermining of the biosphere that sustains all living creatures.
Our dawning awareness that the Earth functions as an indivisible living organism requires us to rethink our notions of global risks, vulnerability, and security. If every human life, the species as a whole, and all our fellow creatures are entwined with one another and with the geochemistry of the planet in a rich and complex choreography that sustains life itself, then we are, each and all, dependent on and responsible for the health of the whole organism. Carrying out that responsibility means living out our individual lives in our neighborhoods and communities in ways that promote the general well-being of the larger biosphere within which we dwell.
This is precisely the mission that the European Union has set for its twenty-five member states. The precautionary principle represents a deep acknowledgment that human beings’ first obligation is to the biosphere that sustains life, even if it means waylaying a commercial development or suspending a particular economic activity. No economic activity, regardless of how lucrative or beneficial it might be, can be allowed to compromise the integrity of the life-support systems that make up the indivisible biosphere in which we all dwell, and from which we draw our sustenance. In those instances where there is reasonable, but not conclusive, evidence that a specific scientific experiment, technological application, or product introduction could do great harm to any part of the biosphere, the precautionary principle serves as a watch guard, ensuring that society will not act precipitously but will instead act conservatively, by forbidding or halting potentially adverse activity, until either the body of scientific evidence suggests that it is all right to proceed or alternatives are found to advance the same ends.
The precautionary principle is more than just a gatekeeper. It is also a more sophisticated methodology for assessing risks than the old linear models still in force in the United States. Its guiding principles and operating assumptions are based squarely on systems thinking. It takes a holistic approach to evaluating risks, asking how a said activity might affect the totality of relationships within the biospheric envelope. It requires an interdisciplinary approach to risk assessment and evaluation that examines all the possible impacts to the Earth as a whole of an intended activity.
I suspect that for Europeans, systems thinking is not so much of a stretch as it is for us in America. Here, the very idea of being part of a system seems a bit constraining. We don’t easily take to the idea that we are not only a part of but also completely dependent on a larger community of relationships.
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the new science, with its emphasis on relationships and feedback, is how closely it mirrors the network way of thinking that is beginning to permeate the commercial realm and governance. The science of ecology and the notion of a self-regulating biosphere are all about relationships and networks. Ecologist Bernard Patten has observed that “ecology
is
networks. . . . To understand ecosystems ultimately will be to understand networks.”
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Physicist and philosopher Fritjof Capra points out:
As the network concept became more and more prominent in ecology, systemic thinkers began to use network models at all systems levels, viewing organisms as networks of cells, organs, and organ systems, just as ecosystems are understood as networks of individual organisms.
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In other words, every organism is made up of smaller networks of organs and cells while it is also part of larger networks that comprise biotic communities, whole ecosystems, and the biosphere itself. Each network is nested in networks above it while also made up of networks below it, in a complex choreography—what Capra calls “the web of life.” Over aeons of evolutionary history, says Capra, “many species have formed such tightly knit communities that the whole system resembles a large, multicreatured organism.”
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If this description of the web of life seems remarkably similar to the emerging “network Europe” with its layers of embedded networks—the localities, the regions, the civil society organizations, the cultural diasporas, transnational companies, the member states, the European Union, and global institutions—the analogy is apt.
A new science is emerging—a second Enlightenment—whose operating principles and assumptions are more compatible with network ways of thinking. While the old science is characterized by detachment, expropriation, dissection, and reduction, the new science is characterized by engagement, replenishment, integration, and holism. The old science views nature as objects, the new science views nature as relationships. The old science is committed to making nature productive, the new science to making nature sustainable. The old science seeks power over nature, the new science seeks partnership with nature. The old science puts a premium on autonomy from nature, the new science on reparticipation with nature.
The new science takes us from a colonial vision of nature as an enemy to pillage and enslave, to a new vision of nature as a community to nurture. The right to exploit, harness, and own nature in the form of property is tempered by the obligation to steward nature and treat it with dignity and respect. The utility value of nature is slowly giving way to the intrinsic value of nature.
The second scientific Enlightenment has been in the making for nearly a century. The new fields of thermodynamics and organismic biology at the turn of the nineteenth century and the introduction of the uncertainty principle, quantum mechanics, process philosophy, and ecology in the early twentieth century; the birth of cybernetics and systems thinking along with information theory after World War II, and more recently the emergence of complexity theory; and the theories of dissipative structures and self-organization have all contributed to the deconstruction and fall of the scientific orthodoxy of traditional Enlightenment science, while helping to chart a fundamental new path for science in the coming century.