Towards a Biomimicry Culture of Cooperation
By Elisabet Sahtouris, PhD
Series: Following the crises up-stream: The Role of Worldviews & Values Systems in the Great Transition
ABOUT THIS SERIES
The physicist Fritjof Capra suggested that if we follow the current ecological, social and economic crises upstream we begin to realise that they all stem from a deeper crises of consciousness. The stories we tell about who we are and why we are here no longer serve humanity. Our currently culturally dominant worldview and value systems are drivers of our unsustainable behaviours. In trying to Design for Sustainability we have to pay more attention to these worldviews and value systems and how they affect what we see, shape our real and perceived needs and inform our intentions, as well as the way we design solutions.
Gaia Education´s online course in Design for Sustainability offers you an opportunity to learn how to make a difference in your community and region. The Worldview dimension of the course starts on 21 May 2018 and there are still a limited amount of places left for this year, so sign up now!
This series of excerpts from the Worldview Key, a collection of articles collated in the book ‘The Song of the Earth — A Synthesis of the Scientific and Spiritual Worldviews’, offer background material to the curriculum of the Worldview dimension of both Gaia Education’s face-to-face EDE and our online GEDS programmes. This series highlights some classic articles from that compendium. Enjoy!
Back to Article…
Three major crises — in energy, economy and climate — are now confronting us simultaneously, globally, adding up to the greatest challenge in all human history. They are so great, so serious, that nothing short of a fundamental review, revisioning and revising of our entire way of life on planet Earth is required to face this mega-challenge successfully.
This situation, unprecedented in human history, actually makes this an amazing time of opportunity to create the world we all deeply want!
Is that an idle dream, an airy-fairy ‘create your own reality’ pitch?
Consider: 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 and our extremes of human wealth and poverty. We are an extremely creative species. But something has gone very wrong; something we did not foresee, and we are having very serious trouble understanding and facing that.
If we really look at Nature, we see on the whole that She does not fix what isn’t broken. She is profoundly conservative when things are working well, and radically creative when they don’t. We would do well to forget our partisan politics and mimic this approach to life’s vagaries. Recall that in Arnold Toynbee’s classic study of civilizations that failed (1946), the two critical factors proved to be the extreme concentration of wealth and the failure to change when change was called for (Toynbee 1946). These are the current conditions of our global economy in a nutshell, and bigtime Change is now called for.
There were human cultural systems that we created such that they remained sustainable over thousands of years, so why is our most advanced, industrial, hi-tech super-economy, now reaching around the entire globe, proving to be unsustainable in only a few hundred years? To see how this could happen, we must first look at the whole issue of economics.
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.
As we do, note 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 gene pool.
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 have we enjoyed 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 — archaea (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. (Note our unconscious biomimicry!) 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. (Note our need for biomimicry in this!)
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’. (Sahtouris 2000). 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. (Is human colonialism biomimicry?)
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.
Read that last sentence again, because it is the most important discovery any maturing species can make and is very much on our human agenda right now!
All along, in evolving different lifestyles, the archaea 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 cell 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 labour 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 (Margulis 1998).
In such cooperatives, apparently each specialized bacterium donated the DNA it did not need to fulfil 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. That was 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. Ever since, multi-celled creature have been competing when youthful and cooperating when mature.
Maturation through crisis
In my view as an evolution biologist, then, the essential pattern in evolution for all species from time immemorial is this very maturation curve from competitive, expansive, youthful economies to cooperative, stable, mature economies. One can see this in what ecologists classify as Type I Pioneer ecosystems and Type III Climax ecosystems today, as well as in looking back over Earth’s four billion year history of species’ econoomies.
Some species never make it to maturity. Much of humanity did-but only at the tribal level to which countless human groups matured in cooperation internally and with neighbouring tribes, sometimes developing complex economies with large towns and many artefacts, as found at Catal Huyuk in Turkey and many other locations in Africa, Asia, North and South America. Mature cooperation, with other humans as well as with large animals no doubt played a large role in surviving a dozen Ice Ages as humanity did.
In the past 6,000 years or so, we built civilizations-relatively huge socio-economic political systems with complex infrastructures that were mostly internally cooperative despite occasional insurrections. But these mature cooperatives, like the nucleated cell and like the multi-celled creature before them, were new cooperative entities at yet another size scale, and therefore proceeded naturally in the youthful mode of expansionism in competition. Lo, the Age of Empires that shifted over time into national and then corporate empires, had begun!
And so human empires mimic rather well the expansive, competitive phase of juvenile species in nature from the original archaea (bacteria) to the grasses that evolved along with humans and are also still in that juvenile take-over, make-over whatever you can to stay in the game mode Darwin described so well. Interesting that humans and those youthful grasses — in the version humans call ‘grain’ or ‘corn’ — have come to depend on each other.
Yes, Darwinian evolution describes the juvenile phase, and that is precisely why the entrepreneurs of our Industrial Age loved that theory as much as the Soviet Union loved Kropotkin’s version of evolution, titled Mutual Aid, all about the cooperative phases of species evolution, which rationalized collectivism. In the first, community was sacrificed to the individual’s interest; in the latter the individual’s interest was acrificed to that of the collective. Two half theories that make a whole when put together and make the connections between the ecologists’ different types of ecosystems. The learning curve of maturation ties it all together in an elegant whole.
The recognition that our current way of life is unsustainable (literally implying we must live differently) is a new and vital insight, without which we could not see any need to change the way we live on what seemed like a limitlessly provident planet, now so obviously ravaged by our youthful empire building to a critical point, if not already beyond it.
All our technology has come through biomimicry-from spinning like silkworms and weaving like spiders, building like termites and tunnelling like moles, flying like birds and computing like brains, to using radar like bats and sonar like dolphins, and so on and on. But now it is time for the biggest and evolutionarily greatest biomimicry feat of all: copying those of our ancestors who made it to mature sustainability, pulling back on our economic expansion just as our bodies did when reaching mature size and shifting to maintaining stable sustainability.
Looking at our recent history, we see many experiments in cooperation pushing us to our truly global cooperative maturity: from the United States of America to the European Union, from NATO and SEATO and other alliances to World Parliaments of Religion, a World Court and International Space Stations, from VISA cards crossing cultures and currencies to International Air Traffic Control, and so on and on.
The Internet is the largest self-organizing living system created by humanity and is changing everything. The top-down hierarchies that worked to maintain and expand empires are giving way to democratic and even more mature living systems ways of organizing and governing ourselves; even the gifting economies arising all over it, as well as in local communities, biomimic mature species economics.
If there is one biological system that can give us the clues in an up close and personal model available to us all, it is our own bodies. There is no more amazing or mature economy to mimic 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 more like itself.
Each of your up to one hundred trillion cells has some thirty thousand recycling centres 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 instead of a pike of chips! And they exist along with a thousand mitochondrial banks in each cell, giving out free ATP stored-value debit cards 24/7 with no interest, not even pay-back of what you spent-a currency system we could well biomimic as soon as possible in place of our wealth-concentrating debt money.
It has become clear to me that the mature cooperative phase of species is often driven into existence by crises and I am happy to note how the vast majority of humans becomes highly cooperative in times of disaster, surviving predations of the very few to create wellbeing for the many. It is in our genes, our blood and bones, to cooperate. We have been through this before, just never before at a global size level.
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 archea- the only other creatures of the living Earth to create global disasters through their own behaviour and solve them. Let us 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 highly evolved bodies.
The global economy we built as a resource-rapacious, competitive monopoly game based on debt money and powered by fossil fuels was a necessary youthful phase. We are ready now to leap into maturity. We the people can declare our solidarity with each other around the globe, stop making war on each other, 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.
As Rumi asked: “Why do you stay in prison when the door is so wide open?”
This article was originally published at www.clubofamsterdam.com.
This article features in The Song of the Earth, the fourth volume of Gaia Education’s ‘Four Keys to Sustainable Communities’ series (officially endorsed by UNESCO). The book is available for purchase here and on Gaia Education’s online shop:
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