by Elisabet Sahtouris

This article is adapted from Elisabet Sahtouris's plenary talk, "Understanding Globalization as an Evolutionary Leap" at IONS' Conference, "Spirit Rising: Taking the Next Step," in Palm Springs, California.
 

I'm going to take you on a whirlwind tour of how a spiritual universe embodies itself—not only in you and me, but in planet Earth and all its inhabitants.

I will talk about three important matters: One, we are part of a living planet, in a living universe; two, the patterns of Earth's evolution actually help us understand the current human process of globalization; and three, we're in a process of species maturation. We are moving now from competition to cooperation, from fear-based economies to love-based economies.

Another Side of Life

Advances in physics, biology, and complexity theory, in recent decades, have shifted science toward a worldview where nature is understood to be composed of self-organizing energy or information.

Biologists call this autopoiesis which is a Greek word meaning literally "self-creation," which is now becoming a new definition of life: Anything that continually creates itself is a living entity. Notice that machinery doesn't do that. It's now obvious from many perspectives in science that the universe is not a giant clockwork. Also notice that that term autopoiesis doesn't say anything about reproduction or size—so if you never have any children, it's okay, you're still alive. I know they told us in seventh-grade biology that all living systems must reproduce, but with this new definition of life, we can now look at the whole universe and say: "It's alive!"

We now know that life is not a thing, it's a process—and a living entity that continually creates and maintains itself is engaged in a process known in physiology as metabolism. It's a two-phase cycle that involves anabolism, building things up, and catabolism, breaking things down. A similar process is occurring at the cosmic level—though hardly yet recognized by science. Whereas the biological sciences acknowledge the two-way process of building up and breaking down, in the physical sciences the universe at large is assumed to be dominated by a one-way process of breaking down into ever-increasing disorder. It's called "entropy"—often referred to as the "heat death of the universe"—where everything that exists will eventually decay into thermodynamical mush.

But perhaps entropy is only the catabolism side of a universal cycle. The other side of entropy is syntropy: the build-up of order and life, a kind of cosmic anabolism. Newer cosmology theories show that besides black holes that consume matter, there are also white holes in space that spew out newly created matter and energy. With the full cycle of entropy and syntropy we can now meaningfully talk about a living universe. The Hubble telescope is giving us wonderful images of star-births and star-deaths—bearing witness to the grand cosmic recycling of energy and information, of universal anabolism and catabolism.

That's how our solar system came into being: A great supernova explosion, somewhere around five billion years ago, gave birth to a new star-system, one that included our Earth, formed out of the heavier elements that came from that ancient star's great forge. Remember, neither size nor reproduction contribute any longer to the definition of life, so we can now begin to see the Earth as an autopoietic entity, itself organizing stardust with metabolic cycles.

On an intermediate scale, we can see that our planet also is involved in metabolic recycling. One of Earth's great cycles is what I call "geo-metabolism"—where the planet continually turns itself inside-out. Hot magma, for example, rises to the surface from deep within the Earth through rifts in the seafloor, and through volcanoes, forming new crusts. There's almost no original rock remaining on the surface of our planet.

Another kind of geo-metabolism is climate and weather. In great hemispheric systems around the equator—in Indonesia, Africa, South America—rainforests are taking moist air and pumping it high into the atmosphere, sending it to the poles where it comes down as snow, driving the ocean currents, the wind currents, and keeping our climate healthy and in balance.

Yet another kind of very rapid geo-metabolism, noted by Russian geologist Vladimir Vernadsky, occurs in locust plagues. Sometimes, cubic miles of animal matter are suddenly created out of plant matter, itself created out of soil and seeds. Then, just as quickly, the locust plague collapses as the swarm runs out of food, and what was once living animal matter turns back into living earth. It's a wonderful and dramatic symbol of life itself: Always, over time, all life recycles itself through geology. Since we know that life comes from and returns to "dust," perhaps we should not be surprised to realize that the line between biology and geology is very fine. Life on Earth comes from the earth, and then recycles itself back into the living tissue of the mother planet.

The First World Wide Web

Now I want to turn to the characteristics of a cycle of evolution that occurs all over, across time and space, at the tiniest levels of biology, and in the largest cosmic processes. It always begins with unity that then individuates—as in the ancient Vedic creation story in which a little wavelet forms in a smooth sea, and forever after is torn between loving its own individuality and wanting to merge back into the One. This universal tension between part and whole, and among parts, drives evolution. Individuation always leads to a kind of tension and conflict. And if the parts don't kill each other, they start negotiating. Negotiations can lead to resolutions of some of the tensions, moving from conflict to cooperation, and then to some new level of unity.

One way this has played itself out is that young species are found to have highly competitive characteristics: They take all the resources they can, they hog territory, they multiply wildly. Sound familiar? But a lot of species have managed to grow up, to share things and territory, to cooperate. It's what keeps them alive. In ecological, symbiotic relationships, what one species can give to another becomes a kind of life insurance policy. It's evolution in cooperative mode, and it was operating right there at the beginning of life.

According to our scientific origins-story, Earth's crust first diversified into bacteria. Ever inventive, the bacteria diversified into many, many lifestyles and technologies. They even invented electric motors, atomic piles, and polyester, would you believe? (It is biodegradable, of course, in their case.) And their most important invention was the first "World Wide Web."

For billions of years, bacteria have been trading DNA information among themselves, and still do so today. (Picture a global network of different strains of bacteria, all exchanging DNA messages without any centralized control, and you've got a kind of biological Internet.) Of course, the bacteria had to work through a great many tensions and negotiations before the big single cells with nuclei, the kind we're made of, evolved. The bacteria moved through their competitive phase, eventually to create this cooperative phase, of which we are beneficiaries.

Multicelled creatures only evolved in the last quarter of Earth's evolution. The great biologist Lewis Thomas quipped that we were probably taxis that the bacteria invented to get around in safely. Perhaps he had it just a little bit wrong: I think we're conference centers—on legs! The Human Genome Project shows this clearly. When biologists wonder, "How come ancient bacteria are trapped in our genome?" I'm tempted to say it's because those scientists haven't yet, apparently, heard about the ancient "World Wide Web."

Lessons in Globalization

Evolution happens when there's some kind of stress on organisms, and the DNA inside the organism literally responds to that stress by rearranging itself. Barbara McClintock was a great pioneer of research into this phenomenon. The evidence for adaptive, or intelligent, responses by DNA has been around, from many sources, for more than half a century. But it's still not widely accepted. The idea of submicroscopic intelligence at work in evolution is dismissed by the majority of scientists.

But I believe that life is just too intelligent to proceed by accident—and that makes me a post-Darwinian evolution biologist. I created a cartoon that shows animals saying, "Our DNA knows what it's doing: Do your genetic engineers?"

Although evolutionary theory is shifting, there are not many of us post-Darwinians around just yet, but this kind of thinking is coming in. We're moving from the idea of accidental assembly and evolution by random accident to a theory of evolution in which all of life is intelligent self-organization responding to crisis and stress. Knowing this, we can ask: "We as a species have created some major crises and stresses in our environment. Can we evolve in response to the stress we've created?"

Life is always embedded within other living systems—in a holarchy, as Arthur Koestler called it, where a holon is any living entity. For example, a cell that lives within a multi-celled creature that lives within a local ecosystem that exists within a larger ecosystem is a holarchy. So is a storm: it lives within a planet, and the planet lives within a galaxy.

Now let's look at the cycle of evolution playing itself out because of the dynamics between self-interest and cooperation. At every level of a holarchy, self-interest is driving cycles of negotiation, compromise, and cooperation all the time. (it's happening throughout your own body at this very moment.) Self-interest is not bad unless it's uncontained by community interest. In order to grasp that we live in a cooperative world, we need to look at holarchies, and see that people are embedded within families, communities, nations, the world.

If only our human populations could learn some of the age-old negotiation tricks practiced by bacteria for eons. The great biologist Lewis Thomas pointed out that our planet is more like a cell than anything else. Single cells, grouped together in all kinds of relationships, are really the basis of life on our planet. It's time for us to come together in a similar cooperative venture.

I believe that globalization is a natural evolutionary process, and that cooperative biological and ecological ventures are possible. Global cooperation is already happening in many ways: in the arts, in travel and transportation, in our communications, in our international exchange of money, in space exploration, in our United Nations, in science, and in spirituality. These are all ways that humanity has already demonstrated an ability to cooperate globally.

But there's a problem with our economics: Suppose our bodies' northern industrial organs could exploit the bone marrow all over the body for its raw-material blood cells. They are then swept up into the heart-lung system where the blood is purified, and oxygen is added. Suppose, now, that the heart distribution center demands a price for blood, and some organs cannot afford it. Could our bodies stay healthy in such a system?

Similarly, our world has to learn the lessons of cooperation that our bodies know so well. We need negotiated self-interest at all levels, including the level of international commerce. For example, the World Trade Organization (WTO) will succeed only when it realizes that it has to empower local economies. The demonstrations against the WTO are the struggle of local economies and people trying to make their self-interest known. It's a very healthy response.

"Glocalization": A New Awareness

An indigenous elder once said to me, "Anyone who knows how to run a household knows how to run a world." That's because she thinks holarchically—she understands the connection and negotiation between levels. A similar understanding is needed within corporate culture. To reach our mature humanity as a species, it's important to get our economics right. We have to start thinking of business in terms of holarchy, accountable to a quadruple bottom line: not just to profits, but to planet, people, and psyches.

Remember, all species co-evolve, no species can evolve on its own. Knowing this, we can ask ourselves, "What's our commitment to all our fellow life forms that made us possible?" Are we ready to become a mature species? Are we going to develop the light-footprint technologies of "natural capitalism," as Paul Hawken and Amory and Hunter Lovins proposed in their wonderful book by that name? Are we going to learn to recycle everything, the way the rest of nature does? Will we learn to share Earth's resources fairly with all the other species, and to ensure natural capital for our own future generations? We have a choice: We can continue on the road of competition and greed, or we can we create an equitable, participatory, healthy, happy, loving glocalized humanity. Let's change the word to "glocalization," as a reminder to us all of our global interconnectedness while rooted in our local communities.