Thriving
The following is an excerpt from Thriving, by Wayne Visser, available March 8, 2022 from Fast Company Press.
Praise for Thriving
“Thriving is a brilliant and comprehensive overview of the burgeoning movement to regenerate our land, products, forests, cities, and society. Wayne’s infectious optimism is borne from the possibilities that are emerging when people fully embrace the ecological and social crises we face and human imagination aligns with the life of the planet.”
— Paul Hawken, author of Regeneration: Ending the Climate Crisis in One Generation
“A key insight of the theory of living systems is the realization that life, at all levels, is inherently regenerative. In this book the author explores the social, economic, and political implications of this insight, which are critical to overcoming our multifaceted crisis. He skillfully lays out a coherent framework for regeneration, illustrated with countless examples of innovative solutions, at the levels of eco- systems, societies, economies, and organizations. An inspiring and tremendously hopeful book!”
— Fritjof Capra, author of The Hidden Connections and The Systems View of Life
CHAPTER 1
Thriving
When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe. One fancies a heart like our own must be beating in every crystal and cell.
— John Muir, My First Summer in the Sierra
A Dream Come True
As I looked out of the window of the small nine-seater, twin-propeller plane, what I saw filled me with an indescribable sense of joy. Stretching from horizon to horizon, for as far as my eyes could see, were vast swaths of uninterrupted tropical rain forest. This was a dream come true. I was flying over the Amazon region of Ecuador from the town of Macas to Tzapapentza, a community of 300 indigenous Achuar people, living in a remote part of the jungle near the border with Peru. We were visiting the area in 2014 as part of a sustainable development program organized by my friend and colleague, Roberto Salazar. Our day trip to Tzapapentza was at the generous invitation of the Achuar president, Jaime Vargas, who was also subsequently elected as president of the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador.
As we touched down on a rudimentary landing strip, we found the community already assembled under a large open-air pergola. Without delay, President Vargas and the leader of the community took their seats on chairs opposite each other in the middle of the assembled group. Both looked impressive in their regalia of face paint and brightly colored feathered headdresses. The community leader also had a symbolic rifle lying across his lap, a symbol of his role as protector. They entered into a melodic call-and-response greeting, passing on news and asking and granting permission to enter the community, all while drinking chicha, a sour fermented brew, from patterned bowls made from clay. In a gesture of hospitality, bowls of chicha were also passed around to each of us guests.
This is a community that understands thriving. They are living in harmony with nature and its cycles, surrounded by the forest and living almost entirely from what it produces for their shelter, food, and well-being. At the time, they were also engaged in a protracted battle to protect the forest from mining interests. For them, digging for metals or drilling for oil is sacrilegious, because the forest is a living being, a physical manifestation of the spirit Arutam.
I do not want to romanticize the situation. As idyllic as this sounds, the Achuar are not stuck in time or disconnected from the wider world. Our visit was not a performance for tourists or a public relations exercise. The president was there to listen to the needs of his people.
Their most immediate request was to have a road built, which would allow them to get forest produce, such as the delicious star apple fruit, to the national and international market. It still takes as many as 12 days by foot and boat to reach the nearest road. The Achuar live in traditional housing made from timber and have some basic facilities already, including electricity from solar panels and a small information center, which connects them to the internet. They wear Western clothes and have a school and dusty sports field, where they play football and Ecuavoley, a national variant of volleyball. But they want to continue developing.
I tell this story of the Achuar people of Tzapapentza because it is a microcosm of the struggle for thriving. The Achuar are fighting to preserve the regenerative capacity of nature, knowing that they depend on the environment for their physical and spiritual well-being. They remain unimpressed by the rags-to-riches promises of extractive companies, but at the same time, the community is income poor and lacks access to basic health services. There are no clinics or medical professionals in their village, and any emergency cases have to call on the flying doctor. We can learn a great deal from the Achuar about natural thriving and social thriving practices, such as inclusion and equality. But they still need economic regeneration and are missing some elements of social regeneration, such as community health. The challenge is to pursue these without sacrificing nature and eroding the solidarity that is at the heart of their beautiful culture.
Seeing the Forest for the Trees
Choosing life and living over death and decay is the essence of thriving. Thriving is about working with, rather than against, the complex living systems of which we are a part. Thriving means taking the time and making the effort to understand the many interconnections between the parts, and always asking who—or what part of the system—is benefiting or suffering as a result of our actions. Thriving is allowing nature, society, and the economy to all flourish together, rather than trading one off against the other. And ultimately, thriving is about making sure that life on earth, in all its glorious diversity, not only survives but also fulfills its vast potential.
In some ways, thriving is the new sustainability. Sustainable development will not disappear, not least because the Sustainable Development Goals run until 2030. But sustainability as an idea—just surviving and enduring—has always been rather uninspiring. Besides, it is frequently misused by business and government. (Sustainable economic growth is a favorite mantra.) In contrast, thriving is a much more exciting idea. And it’s not new. Thought leaders such as Paul Hawken, Michael Braungart, Bill McDonough, and John Elkington, among others, have been vocal advocates of thriving for years. Hawken also has a new book called Regeneration that I highly recommend. The difference now is that we’re starting to see science-based applications emerging, such as regenerative agriculture and restorative design.
To understand thriving, we need only look to nature. Take forests, for example. Without trees, there are no forests. Yet forests are so much more than trees. Forests are complex living systems, but they also serve as a good metaphor for systems thinking. When we say we “can’t see the forest for the trees,” what we mean is that we are too zoomed-in and focused on the parts (the individual trees) to appreciate the larger whole (the forest). In fact, as humans, we are often spectacularly bad at seeing or understanding the bigger picture. We lack the necessary perspective, which requires zooming out and noticing how everything is connected to everything else, not only in space but also in time. The forest is not just a collection of trees; it is a web of relationships between trees and countless other organisms and natural forces.
Even when we look at the whole forest, we are missing much of what makes it work as a living system. For instance, when you dig into the world of mycorrhizae—fine, hairlike filaments of fungus that attach themselves to the roots of plants and trees—a whole other world exists. These mushroom fibers reach out hundreds or thousands of times the length of each tree root, sourcing water and essential nutrients for the plant. They also form a vast underground communications network—which has been called the Wood Wide Web—that allows trees to alert one another to threats and provide intensive care to ailing trees or vulnerable offspring, much like an intravenous drip supplying nutrients.
Everything That Surrounds and Connects Us
When we think in systems, our perspective changes. Imagine a tree in an orchard. How do we ensure a bountiful crop of sumptuous fruits? The secret is to create an environment that enables the tree to flourish: fertile soil, regular water, protection from diseases, shelter from the elements, and enough sunshine. Similarly, when it comes to nature, society, and the economy, thinking in systems encourages us to create enabling environments for all life to flourish.
The environment comprises nested living systems, including people and all other organisms, as well as their complex and dynamic relationships: the incredible web of life. The notion of living systems being nested is a bit like a Russian doll, where inside each doll is another smaller doll. Similarly, each system exists within another system. In fact, all of life is characterized by nested webs: Cells join together to form organs and other biological systems, which make up our human bodies; we group together into social systems, such as families, communities, organizations, cities, countries, and societies; and we are all part of the earth’s dynamic, self-regulating ecological systems.
At a macro level, we can see that the economy is nested within society, which itself exists within and is entirely dependent on nature. Seeing the whole system means recognizing the earth itself as a living, self-regulating organism, which is what NASA scientist James Lovelock proposed in 1979, calling it the Gaia hypothesis, after the Greek goddess of the earth. At first glance, this is an audacious idea. But the science of complex living systems has continued to develop, and the evidence is increasingly compelling. In the same way that microorganisms contribute to our body’s health—and sometimes its demise—we, too, must decide whether we are a species that is good for the earth’s health or more like a deadly parasite or an infectious virus.
Understanding thriving, rooted in systems thinking, is deceptively easy and fiendishly difficult at the same time. When I first encountered systems science, it wasn’t called that, and I didn’t yet know how it could be applied in practice, but I knew I had discovered something potentially world changing. It came to me by way of Jan Smuts, a South African statesman and naturalist philosopher, who wrote a book in 1926 called Holism and Evolution, in which he claimed to have found nothing less than “the ultimate synthetic, ordering, organising, regulative activity in the universe, which accounts for all the structural groupings and syntheses in it.”
Smuts began by critiquing the prevailing view of science, the legacy of Isaac Newton’s clockwork universe, which held that a system can be understood by reducing it to its component parts. Smuts saw this reductionistic view of reality, which he called mechanism, as a fixed dogma in which “there could be no more in the effect than there was in the cause; hence creativity and real progress became impossible.” By reducing nature to an aggregation of dead parts, science was missing the living wholes that make up the complex web of life.
A Theory of Living Systems
Smuts’s theory of holism suggests that every organism, every plant or animal, is a whole, with a certain internal organization and measure of self-direction and an individual specific character of its own. This is true of the lowest microorganism no less than the most highly developed and complex human personality or society. Smuts also saw holism as the driving force behind evolution, which creatively enables the development of ever more complex and significant wholes.
As an aside, Smuts was involved in drafting the original charter of the League of Nations, which later became the United Nations. He also crossed political swords a number of times with Mahatma Gandhi, when Gandhi was a young lawyer in South Africa advocating for the rights of Indians. Before leaving South Africa in 1914, Gandhi sent Smuts a pair of sandals as a gift, which Smuts returned on Gandhi’s 70th birthday, remarking that “I have worn these sandals for many a summer . . . even though I may feel that I am not worthy to stand in the shoes of so great a man. It was my fate to be the antagonist of a man for whom even then I had the highest respect.”
Smuts was not the first systems scientist. That title probably belongs to the genius Leonardo da Vinci, whose studies of nature and society showed a remarkable appreciation for their dynamic processes, whether it was the swirling vortices of water and air currents that he drew or his metabolic designs for cities as living organisms, where people, goods, food, water, and waste need to flow unimpeded. As modern-day systems scientist Fritjof Capra noted, reflecting on the theme of his book The Science of Leonardo, “His science was radically different from the mechanistic science that would emerge 200 years later. It was a science of organic forms, of qualities, of processes of transformation.”
Capra, an Austrian-born American physicist, has done more than most to help articulate, synthesize, and popularize systems science, recounting its fascinating history and teasing out its fundamental principles in his book The Systems View of Life: A Unifying Vision, coauthored with Italian chemist Pier Luigi Luisi. Besides paying tribute to Leonardo da Vinci, Capra traces the roots of systems thinking to various pioneers, movements, and concepts, such as organismic biology, cybernetics, tektology, general systems theory, synergetics, complexity theory, chaos theory, fractal geometry, autopoiesis, and social systems theory.
In the pages that follow, I weave in many of the ideas behind these rich bodies of work. Together they add layers of understanding to what living systems are and how they function. Systems may be living or nonliving, but I focus on the living systems that make up nature, society, and the economy. This provides a solid scientific foundation for thriving. To make this clearer, I have distilled these fundamentals into characteristics against which to test our thinking and practices. The six keys to thriving are complexity, circularity, creativity, coherence, convergence, and continuity (Figure 1.1).
