Rob: And to me, what I took from that was almost a kind of a mantra that I've talked about and repeated for decades. And that is that out of higher levels of chaos can also come higher levels of order.
FC: Yes and in fact, one of his books has the title Order Out of Chaos and that's precisely the emergence of new forms of order that happen at those bifurcation points.
Rob: So, where does this tie in to economics and our world today? And the third part of your book?
FC: Well, it ties in because complexity theory has shown us that there is a certain dynamic of this phenomena of emergence and Prigogine built a whole theory about it; which is that there's a disturbance of the system and a small disturbance can go around feedback loops and can be amplified as it cycles around the system. And it can be amplified to such an extent that the entire system becomes unstable and then breaks through to a new form of order. That's the basic process. And that can happen also in the social realm, for example in a human organization, people may have discussions of how they work together and somebody says something and it's a new idea, but the person doesn't even consider it as very important, just an idea, but it disturbs the system and it disturbs the system in such a way that the other people in the discussion you know, throw it around back and forth in their network and it cycles around the organization and it gets amplified because everybody contributes something, a new interpretation, a new comment, and it may get it amplified to such an extent that people realize that if this is really true what they have developed and agreed upon, they can't go on working like they did and they have to do something new and to have a new form of organization, a new order, new behavior. So that's the phenomenon of emergence. And in economics it can happen that - or in society at large, that the small group, say a small NGO, nongovernment organization comes up with a different way of viewing things and it spreads and it changes the system.
Rob: I like to say that small actions can make huge changes.
FC: Yes.
Rob: You talk in the book about the butterfly effect.
FC: Yes and that is a characteristic of nonlinear systems. In the linear world, which you know, classical science dealt with and promoted. In the linear world, small causes have small effects and if you want a large effect you have to add up a lot of small causes to get a large effect. But in the nonlinear world, a small cause can have a huge effect because it gets cycled around the feedback loops of the system, that's the nonlinearity of the system, and it gets amplified.
Rob: Okay -
FC: Alright.
Rob: Now, alright I know I'm taking you way past where you said.
FC: Yeah.
Rob: But let me kind of rap - let's get into the third section of the book and talk about that. Why don't I hand this over to you and talk about how all this applies to making our world change. I'll throw some of the words that I thought we could have conversations about. Ecoliteracy, agroecology, sustainability generative versus extractive, the needs for a unit five framework for material in social worlds, decentralized energy generation, ownership versus rental, service and flow economy, ecological democracy, biomimcry and there you go, I hand those ower to you.
FC: Well I won't be able to talk about all that because -
Rob: I know, I know.
FC: - that's two hundred pages of the book, but let me begin with sustainability. The great challenge of our time is to build and nurture sustainable communities and in order to understand that and it's often misunderstood, I think we need to ask what is sustained in a sustainable community? What is sustained is not economic growth or competitive advantage or things that corporate economies like to talk about. What is sustained is the entire web of life on which our long term survival depends. So a sustainable community must be designed in such a way that its ways of life, businesses, economy, physical structures, and technologies do not interfere with nature's inherent ability to sustain life. One of the big discoveries of ecologists over the last hundred years has been that the biosphere has sustained life for billions and billions of years, you know about three point six billion years to be more precise. So there's an inherent ability of nature to sustain life. In order to understand that, we need to move from biology to ecology because sustained life is a property of ecosystems and so we need to understand how ecosystems organize themselves and we need to understand in other words, the basic principles of organization of ecosystems, for example, the principle that one species waste is another species food. So that matter cycles continually through the web of life. That the energy driving those ecological cycles flows from the sun. That diversity assures resilience and that life from its beginning, more than three billion years ago did not take over the planet by combat but by networking. So this understanding of the basic principles of ecology is what I have called ecological literacy or ecoliteracy. And this is in my view, the most important part in education today, to become ecologically literate. And then the next step is to apply this ecological knowledge to the fundamental redesign of our technologies and social institutions so that the current gap between human design and the ecological and sustainable systems of nature is breached. And so, to practice design in such a way requires a fundamental shift in our attitude toward nature and this is expressed in the book Biomimicry by Janine Benyus who says that the shift is a shift from finding out what we can extract from nature to finding out what we can learn from her. And so the good news that I'm ending with in the book is that there has been a dramatic rise in ecologically oriented design practices and projects over recent years. And so in the book I review those practices and projects in some detail and in particular, I discuss three different, but mutually compatible strategies for designing an economy without any fossil fuels and for achieving this goal by two thousand and fifty. And I can just name the strategies, I can't go into any detail but they are also the type of the corresponding books by these authors. The first one I mentioned in our previous program is the book Plan B by Lester Brown, the second one is called Reinventing Fire by Amory Lovins and his colleagues at the Rocky Mountain Institute. And the third one is called The Third Industrial Revolution by Jeremy Rifkin. So these are three roadmaps for going beyond fossil fuels and they all involve systemic or eco design solutions which means, as I mentioned before that they solve not only the urgent problem of climate change, but also many of our other global problems: degradation of the environment, food insecurity, poverty, unemployment, and others.
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