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This blog post arose out of a conversation between myself, Eduard Willms, Tobias Luthe, and Daniel Christian Wahl, as part of the Designing Resilient Regenerative Systems teaching platform. Drawings by Marcus Neustetter. It accompanies a little video I made together with artist Marcus Neustetter, which explains the difference between living and non-living systems: 1. What are living systems, and how do they differ from non-living systems? Life emerges from the realm of the non-living as a new kind of organization of matter. Life is not distinguished by what it is made of, but by how it is put together, and how it behaves. Living systems are self-manufacturing physical systems. By “system,” we mean a bounded pattern in space and time, a patterned process, whose activity (as a whole) is in some way coherent and recognizable. Self-manufacturing systems exhibit autopoiesis, which is the ability to invest physical work to (re)generate and maintain themselves. To be autopoietic, a living system must not only constantly produce all its components, but it must also be able to assemble them in a way that ensures its own continued existence. This is called organizational closure. Living systems are bounded and limited beings: they are born and they die, and they are embedded in an environment that is much larger than themselves, an environment not (entirely) under their control. They adapt to this environment either short-term, by changing their physiology or behavior, or longer-term, through evolution. Because of their ability to self-manufacture and adapt to their environment, living systems have some degree of autonomy and self-determination. They do not merely react passively to the environment, but are anticipatory agents, initiating growth and/or behavior directed towards some goal from within their own organization. This applies to all life: from bacteria, to protists, fungi, plants, and animals (including humans). All living agents are also able to experience the world: all of them have some kind of sensorimotor capabilities, and an interiority (a basic kind of subjectivity, even if they do not have a nervous system to think with). They are therefore situated in an experienced environment, called the arena. This environment is full of meaning, full of obstacles and opportunities, full of encounters that are laden with value (either good or bad for you). This leads to an adapted agent-arena relationship: we are at home in our world ― embodied and embedded in our surroundings. In contrast, non-living systems (including human-built machines and computer algorithms) persist through passive stability (without effort), do not manufacture themselves, and do not have the capability to act, anticipate, or make sense of their environment. 2. What are the key features or characteristics that define a living system? Nonlinearity, feedback, being open and far from thermodynamic equilibrium, antifragility, self-organization, information-processing, hierarchical organization, and heterogeneity of parts and their interactions are all necessary but not sufficient to define a living system. There are many non-living systems that possess at least some of these attributes too. True hallmark criteria for life are: autopoiesis, embodiment, and existing in a large world. Not strictly required for life per se (but present in all life on earth) are the ability to evolve, heredity, and variation between individuals. 3. Examples of living systems at different scales:
 Things get more complicated when we think about multicellular life. Myxozoa, the smallest known animals, are about 20 µm across. In such creatures, the question arises: what is the autopoietic system here? The individual cell, or the whole body of the multicellular orga- nism? It can get complicated. Plants and animals, for example, differ greatly in how tightly they are organized at the higher level. Do we count the microflora in your gut as part of you, or not? Or think about cancer: it is a disease of cells becoming too autonomous for the good of the body they are part of. On the flipside, cells can commit “suicide” (apoptosis) during the development of a multicellular organism. It’s all a multilayered tangled mess!  Individual organisms can also form larger organizations, such as superorganisms (e.g. ant or termite colonies) or symbioses, such as lichens which are two species a fungus and an algae) peacefully living together, intimately sharing their self-manufacturing processes. This is called sympoiesis. Not everyone always fends for themselves in ecological communities! Quite the contrary. And the boundaries of living systems are fluid and ever-changing. Nothing ever remains still. The largest known organisms are not the blue whale, or the sequoia tree, but aspen groves (connected via their roots) and fungi called mycorrhiza, which can intertwine the cells and metabolisms of different host species across miles and miles of natural landscape forming a vast metabolic-ecological web of life! Why Study Living Systems? 4. How do living systems illustrate the concept of interconnectedness, and why is this crucial for our understanding of ecosystem health and the evolution of the biosphere? Interconnectedness is one of the basic principles of life. Transience is another. They both go together to form a multileveled dynamic web of connections between living processes. What results is an emergent and persistent higher-level order from constantly changing lower-level interactions. The singers change, but the song remains the same. It starts at the level of cells that talk to each other via chemical signals and extracellular vesicles called exosomes, or couple their cytoplasms together through gap junctions and other intercellular connections. At the level of tissues and organs, there are longer-distance means of communication and coordination, such as hormones transported through our vasculature or, of course, our nervous system. Organisms form a wide range of associations (see symbiosis above) and ecological communities. One of the most complex of these is the human eco-social-technological network of connections between us and a wide range of biospheric processes across many levels of organization. It is testament to how embedded we are in our environment. Such multilevel dynamic interconnections are essential for the persistence and resilience of biological organization, and its adaptation to changing circumstances. Individuals can only survive in a suitable context. Biological communication is therefore full of meaning: information is, according to Gregory Bateson, a difference that makes a difference. Life is where matter turns into mattering. Dynamic and adaptable interconnection increases coherence and robustness at all levels. Rigidity and disconnection is noxious to life. Living systems are anticipatory. Agents have internal models (forward projections) of what is likely to happen next in their arena. This enables them to choose actions with beneficial expected outcomes in many situations, to build strategies towards achieving their goals. Non-living systems are purely reactive, their behavior determined by their environment. Evolution, at the ecological level, can now be seen as a co-constructive dynamic between three processes (not unlike the triad underlying autopoiesis in the cell): (1) selecting goals to pursue, (2) picking appropriate actions from one’s repertoire, and (3) leveraging affordances (grasping opportunities or avoiding obstacles) in the arena.  Life tends to create conditions conducive to life. This is the outcome of the intertwined processes of autopoiesis, anticipation, and adaptation. When this process is working as it should, we call it planetary salutogenesis. In the pathological case, where our behavior and disconnection undermine the stability of our ecosystem, we are harming ourselves. We become like cancer to ecological health. Our aim must be to attain the kind of freedom that a living agent can only get by working to preserve a coherent systemic context. 5. What can living systems teach us about resilience & adaptation in the face of environmental changes? Can non-human living systems transform deliberately, by intention? There are three distinct ways in which a system can react to perturbations (stress, shocks, noise, volatility, faults, attacks, or failures): it can be 1. fragile, unable to withstand even small perturbations, 2. robust, keeping its structure intact even under large perturbations, or 3. antifragile, improving its behavior under (certain kinds/amounts of) perturbation. The term resilience is used either for (2) or (3). We will stick to (3) below to avoid ambiguity. The kind of systems that humans have engineered so far are moderately robust (2) at best, but often they remain quite fragile (1). Think of the space shuttle, made out of 2.5 million moving parts, which was both the most sophisticated and one of the most dangerous means of transportation at the same time. Two out of six shuttles were lost: the Challenger in 1986, the Columbia in 2003. Space shuttles were complicated, yet fragile. Robust engineered systems also exist. Those rovers that survived the high-risk) landing on Mars all remained operational far beyond their planned expiration dates in an extremely remote and hostile environment. These machines were complicated and robust. What we can learn from living systems is that they are qualitatively different from both (1) and (2). They can not only resist perturbations but grab such challenges as opportunities to improve themselves. Living organisms are truly complex and antifragile (3) in a way our technological systems are not. This is Darwinian evolution in a nutshell: adaptation through natural selection in populations of individuals across many generations. But this is not the only way organisms can improve through challenges: they can also adapt their physiology, growth, or behavior to their arena (environment) as individuals within a single life span because they are autonomous agents. As the famous evolutionary biologist Richard Lewontin put it: “the organism is both the subject and the object of evolution.” This implies that organisms can and do transform themselves in ways which are both goal- oriented and adaptive (as described for question 4). We can call this deliberative change, but let’s be careful using the term “intention,” which is probably best reserved for organisms with complex nervous systems. Most creatures (e.g., bacteria or plants) act in goal-oriented ways without the ability to contemplate their actions. This distinction is important. Understanding the organization of living beings, which is both the precondition and outcome of evolution, is critical for us if we are to design and build antifragile self-improving systems. 6. What is the meaning of resilience and antifragility for the organism? 1. Self-manufacture must be resilient/antifragile for the living agent to persist. 2. Living agents which persist can come to know their world: they survive and thrive. 3. This leads to adaptation at the physiological, behavioral, and evolutionary scale. 4. Therefore, you need to be a resilient/antifragile agent to be evolvable. 5. The open-ended evolution of antifragile agents generates complexity and diversity. 7. Sustainability and regeneration: In what ways do living systems offer insights into sustainable living and regeneration? So far, we have neglected the relationship between agent and arena. Organisms never thrive in isolation. They are deeply embedded in populations, communities, ecosystems, and the biosphere. To come to know the world means to experience it first hand. Through embodied and embedded experience, the organism creates its own world of meaning ― from matter to mattering. There is coevolution of agent and arena. They mutually generate each other. Ecosystems arise through meaningful interactions between communities that consist of various kinds of agents and their respective arenas. These different arenas will not always overlap or harmonize necessarily. Sustainability implies coherent dynamics and adaptation across many levels of organization. Out of an ever-changing tangle of synergies and ten- sions, cooperation and conflict, higher-level order can arise. In the case of parasitism (the virus), symbiosis (the lichen), and the superorganism (the ant), such multilevel coherence is an urgent necessity, an essential part of the self-manufacture of the organism itself. Less tight interweavings are also possible. In fact, most communities and ecosystems show some antifragility, but are not straightforwardly self-manufacturing above the individual level. They lack the closure of an organism, being more open and fluid, their components more exchangeable and less intimately interlinked than those of the individual agent. The typical dynamic organization of such a multilevel system is that of the panarchy (or holarchy): a nested, dynamic, interlocked hierarchy of adaptive cycles that occur across multiple spatial and temporal scales. Each of these cycles consist of four phases: 1. growth, 2. persistence, 3. release, and 4. reorganization. They can occur at many levels, from the life cycle of an individual organism, to the dynamics of an entire bioregion. Cycles at higher levels of organization tend to proceed more slowly than those at lower levels. This gives the multilevel system its resilience. Rapid low-level turnover enables innovation for adaptation (flexibility), while longer-term dynamics at the higher levels provide the capacity for innovations to accumulate (stability) before more global change occurs. Thus, in fact: the singers change but the song remains recognizable while slowly changing. Sustainable living and regeneration can only be understood in this wider context. Not only is the persistence of an individual rooted in its own constant regeneration, but the entire eco- system depends on the antifragile absorption and adaptation that results from the constant and rapid turnover of its components. Life is never standing still: like the Red Queen in Lewis Carroll’s “Through the Looking Glass” it must always run to stay the same. This is why the often-used term “homeostasis” can be misleading. It gives us the impression of a balanced stasis (a quiescent equilibrium) in nature, reaching some point of perfection that we must also strive to attain. Yet, such perfection means nothing but death to living systems. The natural world is messy, constantly changing, constantly cycling between birth, growth, and decay. Biological stability must be seen as repetitive and regenerative instability. To persist we must change. Regeneration means to act towards sustainability. Deliberative coevolution: to actively participate in our world with all the foresight and care we can muster. Living Systems and Societal Challenges 8. How can principles learned from living systems inform our approach to solving contemporary societal crises, such as climate change, biodiversity loss, and lack of sustainability? Two aspects are central to our move from dominion to stewardship: 1. We must pay close attention to the rates of change in our social-ecological system. 2. We must shift our paradigm from control/prediction to participation. One of the major lessons we learn from the unique complexity of life is the following: the only thing we can always expect when manipulating the living world is that there will be unexpected consequences. By definition, those consequences are rarely aligned with the initial goal of our intervention. Climate change, biodiversity loss, and our current lack of sustainability are all consequences of this kind. Nobody really intended them to happen. One of our reflexes in this situation may be to focus on conservation. In times of widespread breakdown and decay, it is natural to want to suppress change. But this misunderstands the panarchic nature of natural multilevel systems ― their constant adaptive cycles of birth, growth, death, and regeneration. Robustness through stasis is not an adequate solution. The trick is not to avoid or attempt to control change, but to fully appreciate the quality and rate of the change that is always happening. Our ability to predict and control is limited. This recognition is fundamental. Instead, we must go with the flow. We must engage in serious play with ideas whose consequences cannot be foreseen. We must foster diversity and innovation of a kind (and at a rate) that does not overwhelm the higher-level stability of our social-ecological system. We must heed both the flexibility and the stability of the panarchy. Sustainable participatory change means slowing down, cautiously moving forward while constantly monitoring outcomes and adapting to the unexpected. Sustainable participatory change also means fostering the right kind of diversity to increase adaptive capacity. In an unpredictable environment, a large repertoire of strategies is key. As Fritjof Capra says: a machine can be controlled, a living system can only be disturbed. At best, we will find ways of carefully nudging a living system. According to Donella Meadows, we must find its leverage points, those pivots that allow us to influence system behavior. Most importantly: after each cautious inter- vention, we must patiently observe and listen.  To achieve this, design must move away from optimization, which is the enemy of diversity and the hallmark of machine thinking. To aim for optimization means to treat the world as a mechanism. It leads us into a vicious race to the bottom, a headless competitive rush, with our eyes wide shut, into an uncertain future. We are accelerating towards the abyss. We urgently need to move away from this kind of thinking. Regenerative systems design requires us to trade off optimality and speed for resilience. We have to finally learn that you cannot have your cake and eat it. 9. Lessons for human societies: what lessons or strategies from living systems could be particularly useful for designing resilient and adaptable human societies? An excellent example of how machine thinking impedes progress concerns the way we currently organize and fund basic scientific research. The key idea is to increase the productivity of discovery by putting increased pressure on individual scientists to publish and to obtain funding from competitive sources. This idea fundamentally misunderstands the creative nature of the process of scientific investigation. First of all, it is important to realize and remember that the societal function of basic research is not primarily to produce technological innovation, or to solve practical problems. Instead, basic science is useful to a resilient and adaptable human society because it provides deeper and broader insight into the world we live in: it allows us to better understand what is going on around us, and to explain these goings-on in a way that is robust and relevant to the problems our society is facing. This is fundamental to our ability to choose the right action in a given situation. We must aim for wisdom, not just knowledge. Yet, modern science is not organized in a way conducive to these aims. Instead, it strives for control and prediction, rather than understanding. It maximizes output, quantity over quality, rather than rendering the process of investigation resilient and reproducible. It emphasizes competition, when cooperation and openness are needed because there is so much more to discover than all scientists on this planet together could ever hope to cope with. It fosters an intellectual monoculture, when diversified perspectives are needed for innovation and adaptation to unexpected situations. It promotes risk-averse opportunists and careerists, when we should encourage explorers who dare to take on the monumental challenges of our time. In summary: the way we organize science these days is tuned towards short-sighted optimization and efficiency, rather than a sustainable and participatory way forward. In evolution, when too much selective pressure is applied to a population, the process of adaptation gets stuck on a local maximum of fitness, unable to explore and discover better solutions nearby. Diversity is reduced, deviation is harshly punished. This is exactly what happens in basic research today: too much pressure impedes the adaptive evolution of scientific knowledge, preventing it from effectively exploring its space of possibilities for better solutions. The machine view and its focus on optimization kills sustainable progress for all by sacrificing it for a fragmented measure of short-term productivity. This is why we need a new ecological vision for science. Once again, slowing down and fostering diversity are central to this much needed scientific reform. Time scales and societal levels are of fundamental importance for our assessment of progress: our exclusive focus on individual short-term productivity fosters self-promotion, hype, and fraudulence, which violently conflict with resilient progress of the whole scientific community towards sustainable growth, deeper understanding, and collective wisdom. Similar shifts from optimization to resilience are due in our education and health systems. In all these areas, our focus must lie on nurturing creative innovation, rather than squeezing human activities into the Procrustean bed of short-term efficiency and accountability. Analogies and Applications 10. Are there analogies from living systems that you find especially powerful or illustrative for understanding human-made systems or societal structures? Sustainable regenerative design must not only look to specific natural materials (adhesive pads) or patterns (camouflage) for inspiration, but to more general dynamic principles and relationships between parts and whole which differ from those currently used in machine design.We have already discussed that regenerative systems and societies will be less optimized and controllable than machine-inspired ones. In turn, they will be more diverse and bent towards adaptive exploration. And they will progress in an integrated way at the pertinent spatial and temporal scales. Too slow, or too fast, and you cannot adapt and survive. Coordinated timing and multiscale coherence are everything in regenerative design! A good analogy to highlight this is the machine workshop vs your garden. Machines need constant external maintenance because they fail to be self-manufacturing or sustainable. Living agents, and the higher-level agential systems that contain them as components, do best when maintaining themselves. When nurturing your garden, you only provide the right circumstances that allow the organisms in it to flourish together. The exact same applies to regenerative systems of all kinds: they must be given the freedom and the conditions to flourish by themselves. This means both stewardship and a certain hands-off attitude. As the Daoists teach us: it is important to consider that no action is often the best way forward. Apart from engineering vs. nurture, we need better analogies that ground our higher-level self-organizing systems in the physical world again. Societies and economies, for example, should be seen as forms of energy metabolism: recent human history has occurred in the context of the energy abundance caused by the carbon pulse. As we have exploited and depleted our easily accessible free-energy sources on the planet during the past 400 years, our society has become energy blind. We are taking energy abundance for granted. One peculiar aspect of this energy blindness is the idea of a circular economy. At first sight, this seems like a reasonable analogy to the organizational closure of a self-manufacturing organism. But it is not. We have seen above that stability at the ecosystem level is not due to closure, but rather to its panarchic dynamic structure of nested adaptive cycles. This is why we should be skeptical of the metaphor of society as a “superorganism”). Note that organisms exhibit closure only in the sense that they produce and assemble all the components that are required for their further existence. In contrast, like any other physical system that exists far from equilibrium, they are thermodynamically open to flows of matter and energy. By analogy, an economy that is closed to such flows is therefore an impossibility. At best, our economies can strive to achieve what organisms do best: to recycle and reinvest the waste that accumulates and the heat that is dissipated during the construction of their own organization. While a hurricane burns through its source of free energy at maximum rate, leaving a path of destruction in its wake, human societies should seek to imitate organisms instead, which also burn free energy at maximum rate but reinvest the output of this process into their own self-maintenance. This is the true meaning of circular here. 11. Could you highlight innovations or technologies that have been inspired by living systems? The surprising (and disappointing) fact is that there are very few innovations and technolo- gies that are widely distributed and take the principles underlying living systems to heart. Instead of providing a list of examples, we will therefore consider two alternative ways forward from here. The first is prevalent in traditional complexity science and contemporary biology. There are many researchers whose work on the fundamental principles of living systems still aims to increase our ability to predict and control them for our own purposes. A concrete example are xenobots, mobile clumps of cultured cells extracted from the clawed frog Xenopus laevis. These clumps can be shaped and move in ways that are somewhat predictable by AI algorithms. After a certain amount of growth, they also fall apart and reassemble in a way that roughly resembles reproduction.  This has led to claims that we can build useful machines (“bots”) from such cellular systems that have truly agential properties. Others have proposed to engineer systems with artificial autopoiesis, an idea which goes back to 1966 when polymath John von Neumann presented his concept of a universal constructor: a machine that can self-manufacture. So far, these studies remain at the level of computer simulations. This kind of research faces a number of very daunting challenges. (1) We do not have the kind of mathematics that would be required to predict and control such systems. (2) We lack a suitable architecture design for such systems. (3) We do not seem to be able to construct the kind of materials that would allow us to actually build them. Thus, this kind of technology, if possible at all, seems very far off at the moment. A more important question concerns the desirability of such autopoietic agentic constructs. By definition, they would be able to set their own goals and pursue them. This means that we would face a considerable problem of alignment: they will not necessarily do what is in our interest. In addition, we’d face a moral conundrum: would it be ethical to force them to do our bidding? After all, that is not what they want. Agential technology would be a mess. That is why we believe there is a better way forward: the construction and evolution of sustainable regenerative systems that include technology and living agents co-existing in a harmonious and coherent whole. The idea here is not to control and predict, but to evolve and progress together, in a way that not only acknowledges but cherishes and harvests the fundamentally unpredictable but adaptable nature of living systems. This is technology design and development that knows its own limitations, that considers machines and their effects in their embedded natural context. It is participatory design. We have yet to truly see it in the modern Western world. The time for it to (re)emerge is now. Future Directions 12. What are the most promising areas of research or innovation where living systems principles could have a significant impact? Most importantly, we need regenerative design for the great simplification, our coming transition from an age of unbounded exploitation and energy abundance to what hopefully will be an age of resilient sustainability. Living systems principles are needed for us to be good stewards of our social-ecological systems. And we need these principles too for designing the education, research, and health systems of the future. We need them for technological innovation, to generate low-tech solutions to humanity's most essential needs ― especially those that currently depend on abundantly available fossil energy. In short, we need regenerative design for literally everything and everyone right now: we need a completely different business model for sustainable innovation! Regenerative design is not about improving this or that particular technological artifact. It is about redesigning the whole context and the processes through which we generate solutions to our problems. We urgently need to change our philosophy from “move fast and break things” to first ask ourselves: why am I doing this? And: who will benefit? If you do not have very clear answers to both of these questions, don’t do it! Stop racing mindlessly into the unknown. While this mindless and broken race continues, before it hits the inevitable wall of physical limits on a finite planet, we must use living systems principles to make regenerative systems design itself a self-maintaining pattern! This requires building societal niches ― communities and eco-social environments ― in which regenerative design practice thrives and diversifies. Once the metacrisis has finally caught up with everyone, we need to be ready with an arsenal of possible practices and solutions. It is not regenerative design, if it is not resilient itself. 13. How can we incorporate living systems thinking into education and public awareness to foster a more holistic understanding of our relationship with the natural world? The machine view of the world is inoculated into young minds at an early stage, starting (in earnest) during early adolescence, the most transformative phase in a human being’s life. Kids know instinctively that the world is beyond their grasp. There is little they understand, and every day of their lives is full of surprises and unexpected learning opportunities. During adolescence, humans transform from light-hearted players in an infinite game, where the aim is not to win but to bend and change the rules, to serious masters of our own fate. This is the time in our life when we need to hear about living systems principles most, when we need to learn how to become good participants in the infinite game of life. Each child should be allowed to choose their own path through this transformative learning experience. We cannot just talk about living systems principles, we must actively explore and experience the flow of energy through every natural system. We must become part of this flow. Only by instilling this kind of wisdom can we overcome our energy-blindness to inspire and enable ecological agency. This is one of the most crucial endeavors for our time. We can no longer wait with its widespread implementation. 14. What challenges do we face in applying living systems principles more broadly, and what opportunities do you see for the future? We are stuck in a game-theoretic trap ― a global race to the bottom. Our societies are driven by the irrational dogma that unbridled competition leads to continued progress. The grip of this dogma on us is pretty comprehensive: it is visible at all levels, from our hyper- individualism and personal disconnection to our nations being locked into an deluded spiral of accelerating growth. This kind of rivalrous dynamic inevitably results in a self-terminating civilization, with exponential technological innovation opening a catastrophic gap between itself and our limited ability for inner growth and societal maturation. It is extremely challenging to implement sustainable regenerative solutions in such a chaotic and ever-accelerating dynamic environment. How can we slow down without being immediately left in the dust of unstoppable progress? How can we foster diversity in a system based on relentless and single-minded optimization? How can we be heard over the deafening din of a cultish and toxic technological utopianism? How do we move beyond the self-reinforcing politics of deliberate denial? Is it possible to throw ourselves in front of this 1000-ton bolide heading for a cliff without getting run over and mauled to death? Buckminster Fuller famously stated: “[y]ou never change something by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” We’d better heed his timeless advice. The existing model is on an exponential trajectory of making itself obsolete. Collapse at a massive, probably global, scale is bound to happen in the very near future. The secret is to be ready with workable solutions once the world comes crumbling down. The challenge we face is to build the required societal niches in which to develop and sustain a diversity of such solutions. They won’t be very competitive in the current system, but they’ll outlive it for sure. To quote what is perhaps an unlikely source in this context, the economist Milton Friedman: “Only a crisis ― actual or perceived ― produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable.” If we learn one thing from neoliberalism, the ideology that got us into this mess in the first place, it should be this: be ready when it’s your time to change the world! 15. What is the role of living systems labs, places and spaces with open system boundaries to experiment with enacting social-ecological systems and their emergence? These are the niches that provide a home for experiments with a diverse range of proposed regenerative systems designs. In an unpredictable world, such diversity is a necessity. And we need to get out of the classroom while teaching! Workable solutions require embodied and embedded practice. Part of this practice is to make people comfortable with the uncertainty inherent in the process. We must play! But this is serious play. Infinite play. We don’t aim to win. Instead, we aim to change the rules so we can continue playing. Final Thoughts 16. What advice would we give to practitioners, policymakers, or the general public interested in applying living systems principles to address environmental and societal challenges? Sustainable practice includes the practitioner: pace yourself accordingly. Process thinking includes the thinker: anchor yourself in the moment and go with the flow. Embedded practice includes the practitioners: work on your network of relations. Seek out like-minded people. This is not something you can do alone. Expect the unexpected. Nobody knows where all of this is headed. Be ready to release your own preconceived notions. Long-term planning is overrated (and impossible in these times). Ask yourself not: where am I going? But: am I going someplace? Make sure you're properly adapting to circumstances as you go along. Don’t lose your grip on reality. And never forget: things will get better after they get worse. This has all been said a thousand times before… still, it’s surprisingly hard to really live it. 17. How do you envision the role of living systems thinking evolving in the next decade, particularly in relation to global sustainability efforts? It’ll be huge, simply because it is the only approach that will actually work in this world of ever-increasing complexity. But we’ll also see a lot of reactionary backlash in the next few decades, people deliberately ignoring the actual world as long as they can, trying to escape into a simpler, more controllable, machine reality. Brace yourself. None of this will work. The world is what it is, and it is not getting any simpler. Don’t waste too much time trying to convince people with words. Show them that you have better solutions. Regenerative solutions for a more sustainable world.
1 Comment
andres lopez astudillo
8/7/2024 01:00:32
congratulations for the common thread that leads to a challenging ending to be able to assume the role of systems thinker who guides this capacity to create sustainable living systems for a better world Leave a Reply. |
Johannes Jäger
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