Celebrating Crisis

kristyEarth Systems Science, Beyond GDP

‘CELEBRATING CRISIS’ by evolution biologist Dr. Elisabet Sahtouris, is the clearest vision yet for our common human future.”
We at Ethical Markets Media are honored by her service on our Advisory Board . Hazel Henderson, Editor

Elisabet Sahtouris, Ph.D.

(for book in press: Manifesto for Change: Crisis as Opportunity)

Dr. Elisabet Sahtouris is an internationally known evolution biologist, futurist, author and speaker living in Spain. With a post-doc 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, S. African Rand Bank, Caux Round Table, Tokyo International Forum, Australian, New Zealand and Netherlands Govts, 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” w. Willis Harman. www.sahtouris.com

We could be celebrating at least three major crises—in energy, economy and climate—now confronting us simultaneously, globally, adding up to the greatest challenge in all human history. That challenge itself is what I believe we should celebrate. Why? Because nothing short of a fundamental review, revisioning and revising of our entire way of life on planet Earth is required to face these three interrelated challenges successfully. That makes this an amazing time of opportunity to create the world we all deeply want!
Is this an idle dream, an airy-fairy „create your own reality? pitch?
Guess what? 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.
Some human systems were created such that they remained sustainable over thousands of years, while our currently dominant one has proven unsustainable in only a few hundred years. The recognition that our current way of life is unsustainable is a new and vital insight, without which we could not see any need to change the way we live on our astonishingly provident planet, now ravaged to a critical point. So I celebrate our recognition of our unsustainability together with the enormous creativity of our species, which has already proven itself resourceful again and again in its relatively brief evolutionary/historic trajectory. In that regard, we follow in the footsteps of many a biological ancestor species, as we will see, and as I hope, will give us inspiration and guidance on the road ahead of us.
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.
Before we do, let me point out 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 biological gene pool. While most of the history of biology and biological evolution has been about „rabbits in habitats,? we are finally coming to understand „rhabitats?—the holistic economies of nature embedded within each other all the way up to its global economy.
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 has there been 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—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. 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.
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?. (see Sahtouris, Elisabet (2000) EarthDance: Living Systems in Evolution. iUniversity Press; also at www.sahtouris.com). 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.
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. All along, in evolving different lifestyles, they 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 body 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 labor 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. (see Margulis, Lynne (1998) Symbiotic Planet: A New Look At Evolution. Basic Books, NY)
In such cooperatives, apparently each specialized bacterium donated the DNA it did not need to fulfill 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—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.
The brink of maturity
If indeed the universe evolves within a field of consciousness as I, among increasingly many other scientists, have come to believe, then the most likely single operating principle of such a self-organizing living universe is: anything that can happen will happen. In such a wide open creative universe, what is of greatest interest to me is what is sustainable—what lasts—especially under disruptive conditions. Taking this as a thought experiment, I concluded that the sustainability of any entity depends on its coming into harmony with whatever surrounds it in a mutual give and take that makes it more or less indispensible to the whole in which it is embedded.
Thus it has become clear to me that the very essence of Earth?s biological evolution lies in the cycles of maturation from competition to cooperation I have so often described, the mature cooperative phases often driven into existence by crises. Consider how the majority of humans tend to become highly cooperative in times of disaster, surviving predations of the few to create wellbeing for the many.
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 archebacteria—the only other creatures of the living Earth to create global disasters through their own behaviour and solve them—and 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 nucleated cells.
In Type I „pioneer? ecosystems, young species duke it out in hostile competition for territory and resources. Type III „climax? ecosystems, such as old coral reefs and old growth forests or prairies, on the contrary, are composed of a rich assortment of species each of which cooperatively contributes something valuable to the whole as it consumes its fair share of
resources in the efficient energy exchange of the whole system. Mature cooperative efficiency, however, is not enough to make a species or an ecosystem sustainable. Energy efficiency must be balanced by elasticity—resilience to disturbances from within or from without. Ecologists long concerned only with the efficiency now recognize this vital balancing act. (see Korhonen, Jouni and Seager, Thomas P. (2008) Editorial: Beyond eco-efficiency: a resilience perspective. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment)
Most ecologists assume that Type I and Type III ecosystems are composed of different types of species, with Type II?s being a mix of the I?s and III?s types. Because their basic assumptions about nature include that evolution only happens via genetic accidents and selective adaptation, they cannot entertain notions of intelligent systemic learning or even maturation in nature, however obvious it may appear.
Eshel Ben Jacob, a conservative scientist studying bacterial colonies responding to stress in his Tel-aviv University laboratory for many years now, concluded that bacterial colonies function like group minds able to respond intelligently to stress (see “Learning from Bacteria about Natural Information Processing” at http://star.tau.ac.il/~eshel/ ). Before he reached this conclusion, he tried every possible explanation in terms of mindless chemical signaling, „machine intelligence,? etc., finding them inadequate to describe the creative problem-solving of his bacterial colonies. If even bacteria can demonstrate such intelligent creativity, surely later species evolved from them should as well.
Nature, on the whole, does not fix what isn?t broken. It is profoundly conservative when things are working well, and radically creative when they don?t. Recall that in Arnold Toynbee?s classic study of civilizations that failed, the two critical factors proved to be the extreme concentration of wealth and the failure to change when change was called for. (see Toynbee, Arnold (1946) A Study of History. Oxford University Press)
Resilience permits positive responses to crises, trying out all possible solutions to see what works. Thus life dances between chaos and perfect order without ever losing itself in chaos or getting stuck in rigid order. The dance is improvisational, endlessly weaving old steps into new configurations, new moves or sequences appearing as the dance evolves. It remains to be seen whether our human species will dance its way creatively to true maturity as global family.
Your body economy
Before I move from these lessons of evolution biology into our human way of playing out our own evolution, let me try to inspire awe in you for your own wondrous cells. Consider that the DNA that codes for the proteins of which you are largely made is stuffed into the nucleus of each of your invisibly small cells in a two-meter length, along with some protein and water. As you contain some fifty trillion or more cells, putting these two-meter lengths end to end, your DNA would reach so far into space that a jet pilot flying day and night would be flying well over ten thousand years to reach the end of your personal DNA string.
When the human genome project results came out, the scientists expressed surprise at how few genes we actually had, how much “biological activity” goes on in our genomes, and at ancient bacterial genomes incorporated into ours. Protein-coding genes, including duplicates, account for less than five percent of our genome. Much of the genome is devoted to TEs—transposable elements known since Nobel laureate Barbara McClintock?s pioneering work half a century ago that showed TEs not only moving about but doing so in response to stress from outside the organism. Her results have been supported by many later researchers. (see Keller, Evelyn Fox (1983) A Feeling for the Organism: The Life and Work of Barbara McClintock. Henry Holt and Company, NY)
Genes contain stored crystalline information or blueprints that must be read, copied and put to use, as they can no more do anything on their own than can the books on library shelves. The vital job of putting genes to use is performed by your proteins, which include countless catalysing enzymes as well as building block materials. Further, your own feelings, thoughts and mental habits can affect the whole process. (see Lipton, Bruce (2005) The Biology of Belief. Hay House, Inc.)
The weight of a half century of evidence indicates that evolution does not proceed on the basis of selected random mutations. Rather, proteins associated with genomes have the capacity—and no doubt the imperative—to detect and repair such accidental mutations, while making appropriate genes from the well-organized gene banks available as needed to respond to stressful as well as normal rquirements and challenges. It seems reasonable to suppose that our human genomic system of DNA and associated proteins is behaving as an intelligent hive of activity, part of the vaster hive of activity that is the whole cell including its superbly complex membrane—its interface with its world. This intricate system may even have access to genes or other DNA sequences from external sources such as bacteria, viruses, plasmids, etc. that get by our blood leucocytes and lymph nodes.
Whatever happens in our cells—consider that each is as complex as a large human city, so plenty is happening 24/7—is not determined by genes, but primarily by signals from the cells? environments that activate proteins to do things, which may or may not involve drawing on and copying genetic information (see Bhaerman, Steve and Lipton, Bruce (2009) Spontaneous Evolution. Hay House, Inc.)
Each of your cells, along with that DNA library nucleus, has some thirty thousand recycling centers 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! And they exist along with a thousand mitochondrial banks giving out free stored-value ATP debit cards 24/7 with no interest, not even pay-back of what was spent.
There is no more amazing economy to learn from 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 be like itself.
Human Freedom: the human dilemma
We humans have vast freedom of choice compared with other animals. Fish, birds and mammals all have to find mates, establish territories to gain adequate resources and have space to raise their young, but their ways of going about these necessary acquisitions and protecting them show what biologists call „fixed action patterns?—patterns built into them that do not have to be learned. They include, for example, ritual courtship and ritual fights that stop short of killing. We humans alone must choose how to get mates, how to govern ourselves, how to negotiate with each other, how to run our economies. We paid for all that freedom of choice by losing the built-in knowledge of those who evolved before us. Whether we use that free choice well remains to be seen.
We also have the great gift of our perceived time, the hindsight and foresight to help us make choices. We can know where we came from, what we have tried in the past; we can project where we will go if we keep doing what we are doing, as well as try out possible scenarios of change in imagination before we commit any of them to practice.
In short, we have the great gift of foresight to help us forestall crises of our own making—and yet, we rarely use it. We have been warned by scientists for decades that our pollution is reaching devastating proportions and that we are using far too many of Earth?s resources for her to keep up in replenishing them. Now, we can no longer stop global warming, are running out of oil, and face the predicted disasters brought on by debt money coupled with greed.
We could not be faced with more serious evidence that for all our brash young species? spectacular achievements, our current globalized human culture has gone woefully and dramatically astray. It is all very scary…until we notice that new doors are opening to us with fresh, new choices available, grand new opportunities to build the world of our dreams, even on a hotter planet, even without oil, even with a broken financial economy. We can rouse the proverbial Phoenix from the very ashes of all that no longer works.
Way to go and why we can get there
In creating our global economy as a resource-rapacious, competitive monopoly game based on debt money and powered by fossil fuels, we not only created an unprecedented wealth/poverty divide in the misleading name of democracy, but pushed Earth herself to a tipping point where it becomes clear that we had better begin respecting and more humbly learning from our Big Mama, rather than seeing ourselves as her ever-so-clever masters.
Our choice now is whether to mourn the demise of easy credit, fast food, year-round Christmas glitter shopping malls, and promises of happy retirements, or whether to recognize how our world neighbors paid the price of our conveniences while we ignored the real responsibilities of democracy, letting our wealth be misused, while health care, education and real security eroded under our noses.
If we opt for the latter, we will declare our solidarity with each other around the globe, 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. In the past two years alone over one trillion dollars have been invested in green businesses (see: www.ethicalmarkets.com )
It took little more than a human lifespan or two to get ourselves into the deep trouble we are in. If we truly search out what went wrong, and take advantage of what went right, in another such lifespan we can undo the damage and create a happier lifestyle for all humans and all other surviving species.
While many people find the confluence of current crises so overwhelming that they see little hope for humanity, I continue to be optimistic and excited about the wonderful opportunities at hand for building a thriving future for a number of reasons.
The universe we thought to be non-living, meaningless material running down relentlessly by entropy—comforting ourselves by creating a consumer culture on cutthroat competition as it ran down—turns out to be a very different universe. The good news comes from information that science itself has produced. Theoretical physics suggests that ancient consciousness-based Eastern cosmologies are more accurately descriptive of our universe than the Western science story we learned—that the universe is not meaningless matter but rooted in living consciousness, not running down but recreating itself instant by instant. Best of all, we are co-creators in this scheme, not victims of blind and fateful forces.
As I have shown, we can now see that Earth?s species can and do learn how inefficient and expensive mutually destructive hostile competition is compared with the rewards of collaboration that is mutually beneficial, as clearly seen in mature ecosystems. Every crisis on our planet created the stress that became an opportunity for further evolution, with Nature on our side in a grand learning process. Our own bodies brilliantly model win-win living economies, as do mature ecosystems such as rainforests and prairies that create endless abundance through sharing and recycling. We have the information, insight, and power required to create a human world every bit as cooperative as these.
The Internet is one of the largest self-organizing living systems on the planet, composed of living people using computers as tools for connection in distributed networks without central control. Thus it provides the practical possibility of its use for global cooperation, information sharing and distributed network governance, even for circulating non-debt currencies.
The King of Bhutan decreed that his economy would be measured in the happiness of his people, rather than in the usual measure of cash flow. It seemed a shockingly radical, if not laughable, idea, yet for nearly half a century, pioneers such as Hazel Henderson have crusaded for quality of life indicators as far more sensible measures of an economy’s health than GDP/GNP money measures. (see Henderson, Hazel (2000) Calvert-Henderson Quality of Life Indicators. Calvert Group, Ltd.)
Even the greatest threat looming over humanity right now is a positive opportunity. Facing the onrushing Hot Age adaptively is far more important than arguing about its precise causes. A positive feedback loop is well underway: the warmer it gets, the more ice melts; the more ice melts, the warmer it gets. „Proactive, proactive, proactive? must be our call. Think hurricane Katrina, the Asian tsunami and more recent disasters, natural and man-made, where proactive solutions would have been far cheaper than repairing damage and would have saved so many lives. And remember that some human cultures from ancient times on have lived well and comfortably in deserts.
During the devastating mid-eighties drought in the Ansokia Valley of Ethiopia, John McMillin helped people develop vegetable gardens surrounding fish ponds that produced high protein diets at very low cost in extreme desert conditions. He has since demonstrated this seemingly miraculous desert food production in more than twenty other desert locations (see www.globalregen.org ).
When Shell Oil discovered that all their future scenarios led to collapse, and realized that they all lacked the possibility of human transformation, they suddenly developed interest in the latter and began consulting people such as Lynne Twist, founder of the PachaMama Alliance, which has trained thousands of people around the world to Change the Dream of modern civilization by „Awakening the Dreamers? initiatives. The latest is their FourYears.Go initiative, which may be the best example to date of how only ordinary people can coordinate efforts in changing the world for the better. (see www.fouryearsgo.org )

I have gained and sustained my optimism as a humble student of our living universe, our living Earth, which clearly shows us the way out of our adolescent crisis into a mature global future. The sooner we create our vision of all we desire for living lifestyles of 100% recyclable and non-toxic elegant simplicity, set our intention to implement it together, and put our individual capacities into collective action, the greater our chances of success. Poverty can be erased in this process, as new win-win economics are implemented and we all thrive.
In short, we humans have all the intelligence and knowledge we need to create clean, sustainable economies that work for everyone, even on a hotter Earth. Now for the confidence, determination and grit to get the job done, and to the discovery that it can even be the most rewarding and enjoyable task we ever took on!