By Josie Warden RSA
Today, our path has reached a cliff edge. As a species we are disrupting the balance of our Earth and undermining the systems that make our home liveable. At the same time, we are extracting from and exploiting one another. Despite the wealth and technology available in the world today, millions of people remain in poverty, and shocks like the pandemic and climate change reinforce and exaggerate existing racial, gender and wealth inequalities.
To a minority, the only answer seems to be to doggedly stick to the route we are on. But we have another choice. We can remember the other paths around us that we have separated from and choose also to explore those.
A living systems perspective
There are other ways of understanding our world: perspectives that see the Earth as made up of complex living and evolving systems, which acknowledge the relationships between things, and value multiple ways of knowing. These ideas are at the heart of regenerative thinking and are seen in fields from computing to physics to ecology, where theories of living systems are increasingly reflecting a more accurate view of the workings of our planet. Biomimicry expert, biologist and self-proclaimed ‘nature nerd’ Janine Benyus has said that we need to take a place in nature’s class “not to learn about nature that we might circumvent or control her, but to learn from nature so that we might fit in at last and for good, on the Earth from which we sprang”.
To help us to structure our thinking, what mental models might support us to move towards recognising and understanding living systems?
First, living systems are nested. This ‘nested’ characteristic, or holarchy, describes how living systems sit within one another to form larger and more complex systems. Consider your heart, which is a whole system on its own with parts that interact with one another and have complementary functions. But it also forms part of your circulatory system, which sits within your body, you within your family and so on. The layers of nested systems are whole, in and of themselves, but to understand their function you must see them as part of the wider systems they form. Like our hearts, their function is only fulfilled when it is within the wider system.
The British economist Kate Raworth is not alone in arguing that an economy can only fulfil its function once we recognise that it is ‘nested’ within society and that human society is nested within the wider natural world. Disease in your heart affects the overall health of the individual. In a social setting, poor ‘health’ of a neighbourhood, say through lack of work opportunities, poverty or inequality, can have knock-on negative effects for the socio-economic and environmental flourishing of the broader region.
Second, living systems move and change. This sets them apart from mechanical systems, like the engine of a car, where the parts and relationships are static and stay the same over time.
Regenerative development practitioner Jenny Andersson describes this movement as a flow between convergence, divergence and emergence. Resilience is found in the relationship between these dynamics. Too much convergence and a system may become rigid, too much divergence and it becomes chaotic. Living systems will often be operating and finding balance between these two states in order to maintain integrity in the long term. Ongoing adaptation provides greater resilience than rigidity – earthquake-proof buildings, for example, are designed to absorb energy and move in response to seismic events rather than resist them.
Third, living systems are emergent. Because they are made up of nested and interacting parts, living systems have properties that emerge from the interconnections between parts – properties that would not emerge from those parts in isolation. This emergence happens in a non-linear and unpredictable way. In hindsight, it is possible to identify cause and effect, but the multiple possible avenues open at any one time mean that predicting exactly what will happen in advance is almost impossible.
These emergent properties have enabled biological evolution; likewise, arts, language and culture are all emergent properties of human interaction. Jazz music could not have been predicted, but in hindsight its influences can be clearly traced.
Emergent properties mean that, rather than acting and analysing after the fact (by which time the overall conditions are going to have changed), we need to probe, sense and then respond to what we find.
Fourth, living systems favour diversity. Reductionism seeks efficiency, rationalisation and homogeneity. According to the reductionist way of thinking, if we can cut the number of actions or people or costs and still have the same or a better outcome, then we should do things this way.
However, living systems do not follow this rationale. So, for example, rainforests, perhaps the most mature systems on our planet, are not rationalised and efficient, with one type of tree repeated neatly. They are abundant, with a diversity of flora and fauna, some existing within impossibly small niches, others proliferating. For an animal, constant and ongoing competition is an unproductive route; much better to find key differences that allow you to live alongside others. In a world of constant change, putting all your eggs in one basket, even if it looks to be perfectly formed, is a foolish endeavour.
Fifth, living systems build mutuality and reciprocity. They are founded on relationships and interactions that create mutual net benefit. We often think of this in direct, two-way interactions between parties, such as the relationship between peas and other leguminous plants, and the nitrogen-fixing bacteria found in their roots, where the plant receives nitrogen from the bacteria and the bacteria receive sugars from the plant. But mutuality and reciprocity in nature extends beyond bidirectional transactions; we see abundance and generosity, as one species provides nutrients or helps create the conditions for others to thrive as well. Take for example the acorns of an oak tree: some will grow into saplings and others will provide food for nearby animals.
A powerful clip contribution from Josie Warden -the lead on Regentive Futures at the RSA
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