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Data: 26-jan-03
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Palestra sobre Alfabetização Ecológica proferida em Porto Alegre por Fritjof Capra para 1.500 pessoas no Salão de Atos da PUCRS na noite do dia 22 de janeiro de 2003, véspera da abertura do terceiro Fórum Social Mundial.
by Fritjof Capra
It is a great honor and a tremendous pleasure for me to be here, and I want to thank the World Social Forum for inviting me. I have divided my lecture into two parts. In the first part I will speak about ecological sustainability, ecological literacy, and ecological design; and in the second part about education for sustainable living.
As our new century unfolds, one of our greatest challenges is to build and nurture sustainable communities. There has been a lot of confusion around the concept of ecological sustainability; so, I think it is worthwhile to reflect for a moment about what "sustainability" really means.
The concept was introduced in the early 1980s by Lester Brown, founder of the Worldwatch Institute, who defined a sustainable community as one that is able to satisfy its needs without diminishing the chances of future generations. Several years later, the so-called “Brundtland Report,” commissioned by the UN, used the same definition to present the notion of “sustainable development”: Humankind has the ability to achieve sustainable development — to meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.
These definitions of sustainability are important moral exhortations. They remind us of our responsibility to pass on to our children and grandchildren a world with as many opportunities as the ones we inherited. However, they do not tell us anything about how to actually build a sustainable society.
What we need is an operational definition of ecological sustainability. The key to such an operational definition is the realization that we do not need to invent sustainable human communities from zero but can model them after nature’s ecosystems, which are sustainable communities of plants, animals, and microorganisms. Since the outstanding characteristic of the biosphere is its inherent ability to sustain life, a sustainable human community must be designed in such a manner that its ways of life, businesses, economy, physical structures, and technologies do not interfere with nature's inherent ability to sustain life.
This definition of sustainability implies that the first step in our endeavor to build sustainable communities must be to understand the principles of organization that ecosystems have developed to sustain the web of life. This understanding is what I call "ecological literacy." In the coming decades the survival of humanity will depend on our ecological literacy — our ability to understand the basic principles of ecology and to live accordingly. living systems
The most appropriate scientific framework for ecology is the theory of living systems. This theory is only now fully emerging but has its roots in several fields of science that were developed during the first half of the twentieth century — organismic biology, gestalt psychology, general system theory, and cybernetics.
In all these fields scientists explored living systems, which means integrated wholes whose properties cannot be reduced to those of smaller parts. Although we can distinguish parts in any living system, the nature of the whole is always different from the mere sum of its parts.
Systems theory entails a new way of seeing the world and a new way of thinking, known as "systems thinking," or "systemic thinking." It means thinking in terms of relationships, patterns, and context. Systems thinking was raised to a new level during the past twenty years with the development of complexity theory, a new mathematical language and new set of concepts to describe the complexity of living systems.
Examples of these systems abound in nature. Every organism — animal, plant, microorganism, or human being — is an integrated whole, a living system. Parts of organisms — e.g. leaves, or cells — are again living systems. Throughout the living world, we find systems nesting within other systems. And living systems also include communities of organisms. These may be social systems — a family, a school, a village — or ecosystems.
All these living systems are wholes whose specific structures arise from the interactions and interdependence of their parts. Systems theory tells us that all living systems share a set of common properties and principles of organization. This means that systems thinking can be applied to integrate academic disciplines and to discover similarities between different phenomena within the broad range of living systems.
Understanding living systems leads us to understanding relationships. This is a key aspect of systems thinking. It implies a shift of focus from objects to relationships. Understanding relationships is not easy for us, because it is something that goes counter to the traditional scientific enterprise in Western culture. In science, so we have been taught, we measure and weigh things. But relationships cannot be measured and weighed; relationships need to be mapped. You can draw a map of relationships, interconnecting different elements or different members of a community. When you do that, you will discover certain configurations of relationships that appear again and again. This is what we call patterns. The study of relationships leads us to the study of patterns.
And here we discover a tension that has been characteristic in Western science and philosophy throughout the ages. It is a tension between two approaches to the understanding of nature, the study of matter and the study of form. These are two very different approaches. The study of matter begins with the question, "What is it made of?" This leads to the notions of fundamental elements, building blocks; to measuring and quantifying. The study of form asks, "What is the pattern?" And that leads to the notions of order, organization, relationships. Instead of quantity, it involves quality; instead of measuring, it involves mapping.
So, these are two very different lines of investigation that have been in competition with one another throughout our scientific and philosophical tradition. For most of the time, the study of matter — of quantities and constituents — has dominated. But in recent decades the rise of systems thinking has brought the study of form — of patterns and relationships — to the fore again. The main emphasis of complexity theory is on patterns. The strange attractors of chaos theory, the fractals of fractal geometry — all these are visual patterns. The whole new mathematics of complexity is essentially a mathematics of patterns.
The study of matter is the study of quantities that are measured; the study of form is the study of relationships that are mapped. Understanding patterns requires visualizing and mapping. This is the reason why, every time the study of pattern was in the forefront, artists contributed significantly to the advancement of science. Perhaps the two most famous examples are Leonardo da Vinci, whose whole scientific life was a study of pattern, and the German poet Goethe in the eighteenth century, who made significant contributions to biology through his study of pattern.
For educators, this opens the door for integrating the arts into the school curriculum. There is hardly anything more effective than the arts — whether it's the visual arts, music, or the performing arts — for developing and refining a child's natural ability to recognize and express patterns. Thus, the arts can be a powerful tool for teaching systems thinking, in addition to enhancing the emotional dimension that is increasingly being recognized as an essential component of the learning process.
Now let me return to the challenge of building sustainable communities. The first step on the road to sustainability is ecological literacy — understanding the principles of organization that ecosystems have evolved to sustain the web of life.
When systems thinking is applied to the study of the multiple relationships that interlink the members of the Earth Household, a few basic principles can be recognized. They may be called principles of ecology, principles of sustainability, or you might even call them the basic facts of life. We need a curriculum that teaches our children these fundamental facts of life — that one species' waste is another species' food; that matter cycles continually through the web of life; that the energy driving the ecological cycles flows from the sun; that diversity assures resilience; that life, from its beginning more than three billion years ago, did not take over the planet by combat but by networking.
The second step is to move from ecological literacy to ecological design. We need to apply our ecological knowledge to the fundamental redesign of our technologies and social institutions, so as to bridge the current gap between human design and the ecologically sustainable systems of nature.
Design, in the broadest sense, consists in shaping flows of energy and materials for human purposes. Ecological design is a process in which our human purposes are carefully meshed with the larger patterns and flows of the natural world. Ecological design principles reflect the principles of organization that nature has evolved to sustain the web of life. To practice industrial design in such a context requires a fundamental shift in our attitude toward nature, a shift from finding out what we can extract from nature, to what we can learn from her.
In recent years, there has been a dramatic rise in ecologically oriented design practices and projects, all of which are now well documented. Let me now just concentrate on one important ecodesign area — energy.
In a sustainable society, all human activities and industrial processes must be fueled by solar energy like the processes in nature’s ecosystems. Because of the critical role of carbon in global climate change, it is evident that fossil fuels are unsustainable in the long run. Hence, the shift to a sustainable society centrally includes a shift from fossil fuels to solar power.
Indeed, solar energy is the energy sector that has seen the fastest growth over the past decade. The use of photovoltaic cells increased by about 17 percent a year in the 1990s, and wind power has grown even more spectacularly. It increased by about 24 percent a year during the 1990s, and in 2001 wind generating capacity increased by an astonishing 31%. Since 1995, wind power has increased nearly fivefold, while coal declined by 8%. Wind power offers long-term price stability and energy independence. There is no OPEC for wind, because wind is widely dispersed.
The total generating capacity from wind is now 23,000 megawatts worldwide, enough to meet the residential electricity needs of some 23 million people (1 megawatt per 1,000 people). Over the next decade, Europe alone plans to add about three times that amount. Even with this dramatic growth, the development of wind power is only at the beginning.
Any realistic solar energy program will have to come up with enough liquid fuel to operate our airplanes, buses, cars, and trucks. Until recently, this has been the Achilles heel of all renewable-energy scenarios. During the last few years, however, this problem found a spectacular solution with the development of efficient hydrogen fuel cells that promise to inaugurate a new era in energy production — the “hydrogen economy.”
A fuel cell is an electrochemical device that combines hydrogen with oxygen to produce electricity and water — and nothing else! This makes hydrogen the ultimate clean fuel. Several companies around the world are now racing to be the first to commercially produce residential fuel cell systems.
In the meantime, Iceland has launched a multi-million-dollar venture to create the world’s first hydrogen economy. To do so, Iceland will use its vast geothermal and hydroelectric resources to produce hydrogen from sea water, to be used first in buses and then in passenger cars and fishing vessels. The goal set by the government is to complete the transition to hydrogen between 2030 and 2040.
Two months ago, European Union committed itself to spending over 2 billion euros over the next 5 years for research into sustainable energy projects with the central focus on hydrogen fuel cells. The EU has set a goal of obtaining 22% of its electricity from renewable sources by 2010.
At present, natural gas is the most common source of hydrogen, but separation from water with the help of renewable energy sources (especially wind power) will be the most economical and cleanest method in the long run. When that happens, we will have created a truly sustainable system of energy generation, using solar energy to split water into hydrogen and oxygen, producing electricity from hydrogen, and ending up again with water.
Closely connected with the shift to renewable energy sources is the redesign of automobiles, which may be the ecodesign branch with the most far-reaching industrial consequences. It involves design ideas so radical that they will not only change today’s automobile industry beyond recognition but may have equally sweeping effects on the associated oil, steel, and electricity industries.
Physicist Amory Lovins and his colleagues at the Rocky Mountain Institute have synthesized these ideas into a conceptual design they call the “hypercar,” which combines three key elements: It is ultralight, because the standard metal auto body is replaced by a body made of strong carbon fibers embedded in special moldable plastics, which cuts the car’s weight in half. Secondly, the hypercar has high aerodynamic efficiency; and thirdly, it is propelled by a “hybrid-electric” drive, which combines an electric motor with fuel that produces the electricity for the motor on board.
When these three elements are integrated into a single design, they save at least 70-80 percent of the fuel used by standard cars, while also making the car safer and more comfortable.
Hybrid cars can use gasoline or a variety of cleaner options. The cleanest, most efficient, and most elegant way is to use hydrogen in a fuel cell. Such an automobile not only operates silently and without any pollution, but also becomes, in effect, a small power plant on wheels. When the car is not used — in other words, most of the time — the electricity produced by its fuel cell could be sent into the electric grid and the owner could automatically be credited for it.
Toyota and Honda were the first to offer hybrid cars. My Toyota Prius gets about 40 mpg (6l per 100km). Similar cars, achieving fuel efficiencies of about 80 mpg (3l per 100km), have been tested by General Motors, Ford, and Daimler Chrysler, and are now heading for production. In addition, fuel-cell cars are slated for production within the next three years by eight major automakers. the transition to the hydrogen economy
We need to teach our students that we are now at the beginning of a historic transition from the petroleum age to the hydrogen age. I can say this confidently for three reasons:
Taken together, these three aspects of the economics of oil make it clear that oil will eventually become uncompetitive, compared to hydrogen, and thus no longer worth extracting. As the ecodesigners like to point out, the Stone Age did not end because people ran out of stones. Similarly, the Petroleum Age will not end because we will run out of petroleum. It will end because we have developed superior technologies. The technological and political context of the transition to hydrogen is still unclear, but we should realize that evolutionary changes of this magnitude cannot be prevented by short-term political activities.
The transition to the hydrogen economy will have profound social and political consequences, as countries gradually will become independent of imported oil. It will fundamentally change U.S. foreign and military policies, especially in the Middle East, which are currently driven by the perception of oil as a "strategic resource." This change will dramatically increase world security.
The hydrogen economy will be even more important in the developing world where lack of access to energy, especially electricity, is a key factor in perpetuating poverty. Villages around the world will be able to install renewable energy technologies — photovoltaic, wind, or biomass — to produce hydrogen from water and store it for subsequent use in fuel cells. The goal ought to be to provide stationary fuel cells for every neighborhood and village in the developing world. Fulfilling the energy needs of the developing world with renewable resources and hydrogen will be the only way to lift billions of people out of poverty.
In addition to producing electricity, hydrogen fuel cells also produce pure drinking water as a by-product, which will be a significant advantage in village communities around the world where access to clean water is often difficult.
In conclusion of the first part of my lecture, let me say that the ecodesign projects that I have just briefly mentioned here are discussed in detail in my new book. Together they provide compelling evidence that today the transition to a sustainable future is no longer a technical nor a conceptual problem. It is a problem of values and political will.
The implications of this fact for education, obviously, are enormous. I shall turn to these implications in the second part of my lecture.
In the first part of my lecture, I discussed the concepts of sustainability, the basic principles of ecology and of systems thinking, and I gave a brief overview over recent developments in ecodesign. In this second part I shall discuss the implications of these ideas for education. Let me begin with ecological literacy.
In order to be able to build and nurture sustainable communities we need to become ecologically literate. We need to understand the basic principles of ecology, and we need to learn how to embody them in the daily life of human communities.
Teaching this ecological knowledge, which is also ancient wisdom, will be the most important role of education in the twenty-first century. Ecological literacy must become a critical skill for politicians, business leaders, and professionals in all spheres and should be the core of education at all levels — from primary and secondary schools to colleges, universities, and the continuing education and training of professionals.
At the Center for Ecoliteracy in Berkeley, my colleagues and I are developing a system of education for sustainable living, at the primary and secondary school levels. This involves a pedagogy that puts the understanding of life at its very center; an experience of learning in the real world that overcomes our alienation from nature and rekindles a sense of place; and a curriculum that teaches our children the basic principles of ecology. Ecological literacy is now being taught within a growing network of schools in California, and is beginning to spread to other parts of the world. Similar efforts are under way in higher education, pioneered by Second Nature, an educational organization in Boston that collaborates with numerous colleges and universities to make education for sustainability an integral part of campus life.
Let me now review the main components of our program. I shall try to cover as many aspects as possible in this brief overview, and I would also encourage you to check out our website, www.ecoliteracy.org, where you will find plenty of pictures, stories, and additional practical information.
Over the last ten years, we found that growing a school garden and using it as a resource for cooking school meals is an ideal project for experiencing systems thinking and the principles of ecology in action, and for integrating the curriculum. Gardening reconnects children to the fundamentals of food — indeed, to the fundamentals of life — while integrating and enlivening virtually every activity that takes place at a school.
One of the key characteristics of living networks is the fact that all their nutrients are passed along in cycles. In an ecosystem, energy flows through the network, while water, oxygen, carbon, and all other nutrients move in these well-known ecological cycles. Similarly, the blood cycles through our body, and so does the air, the lymph fluid, and so on. Wherever we see life we see networks; and wherever we see living networks, we see cycles. The web of life, the flow of energy, and the cycles of nature are exactly the phenomena that are experienced, explored, and understood by children through gardening.
The understanding of life in terms of networks, flows, and cycles is relatively new in science, but it is an essential part of the wisdom of spiritual traditions, and it is not a coincidence that gardening and preparing food from what grows in the garden have been integral parts of religious practice in many spiritual traditions.
Gardening and cooking are examples of cyclical work — work that has to be done over and over again, work that does not leave any lasting traces. You cook a meal that is immediately eaten. You clean the dishes, but they will soon be dirty again. You plant, tend the garden, harvest, and then plant again. This work is part of monastic practice, because it helps us recognize the natural order of growth and decay, of birth and death, and thus makes us aware of how we are all embedded in those cycles of nature.
In the garden, we learn about food cycles and we integrate the natural food cycles into our cycles of planting, growing, harvesting, composting, and recycling. Through this practice, we also learn that the garden as a whole is embedded in larger systems that are again living networks with their own cycles. The food cycles intersect with these larger cycles — the water cycle, the cycle of the seasons, and so on — all of which are links in the planetary web of life.
In the garden, we learn that a fertile soil is a living soil containing billions of living organisms in every cubic centimeter. These soil bacteria carry out various chemical transformations that are essential to sustain life on Earth. Because of the basic nature of the living soil, we need to preserve the integrity of the great ecological cycles in our practice of gardening and agriculture. This principle is embodied in traditional farming methods, which are based on a profound respect for life. Farmers used to plant different crops every year, rotating them so that the balance in the soil was preserved. No pesticides were needed, since insects attracted to one crop would disappear with the next. Instead of using chemical fertilizers, farmers would enrich their fields with manure, thus returning organic matter to the soil to reenter the ecological cycle.
About four decades ago, this age-old practice of organic farming changed drastically with the massive introduction of chemical fertilizers and pesticides. Chemical farming has seriously disrupted the balance of our soil, and this has had a severe impact on human health, because any imbalance in the soil affects the food that grows in it and thus the health of the people who eat the food. Fortunately, a growing number of farmers have now become aware of the hazards of chemical farming and are turning back to organic, ecological methods. The school garden is the ideal place to teach the merits of organic farming to our children.
Through gardening, we also become aware how we ourselves are part of the web of life, and over time the experience of ecology in nature gives us a sense of place. We become aware of how we are embedded in an ecosystem; in a landscape with a particular flora and fauna; in a particular social system and culture.
For children, being in the garden is something magical. As one of our teachers put it, "one of the most exciting things about the garden is that we are creating a magical childhood place for children who would not have such a place otherwise, who would not be in touch with the Earth and the things that grow. You can teach all you want, but being out there, growing and cooking and eating, that's an ecology that touches their heart and will make it important to them."
In the garden, we observe the life cycle of an organism — the cycle of birth, growth, maturation, decline, death, and new growth of the next generation. Through gardening, we experience growth and development on a daily basis. Indeed, the understanding of growth and development is essential, not only for gardening, but also for education. While the children learn that their work in the school garden changes with the development and maturing of the plants, the teachers' methods of instruction and the entire discourse in the classroom changes with the development and maturing of the students.
Since the pioneering work of Jean Piaget, Maria Montessori, and Rudolf Steiner, a broad consensus has emerged among scientists and educators about the unfolding of cognitive functions in the growing child. Part of that consensus is the recognition that a rich, multi-sensory learning environment — the shapes and textures, the colors, smells, and sounds of the real world — is essential for the full cognitive and emotional development of the child. Learning in the school garden is learning in the real world at its very best. It is beneficial for the development of the individual student and the school community, and it is one of the best ways for children to become ecologically literate and thus able to contribute to building a sustainable future.
Because of its intellectual grounding in systems thinking, ecoliteracy is much more than environmental education. It offers a powerful framework for the systemic approach to school reform that is now widely discussed among educators. This approach is based, essentially, on two insights: a new understanding of the process of learning and a new understanding of leadership.
Recent research in neuroscience and cognitive development has resulted in a new systemic understanding of the process of learning, based on the view of the brain as a complex, highly adaptive, self-organizing system. Because of the fundamental interconnectedness of the brain, everything that happens to a child has both direct and indirect consequences. Body and mind, or brain and mind, deeply interact. For example, stress can weaken the immune system, while relaxation and laughter can strengthen it. Playing the piano, or singing in a choir, improves spatial reasoning. Reading enhances a student's ability to think abstractly, and so on. All learning is complex, and in every encounter teachers are dealing with the whole system, the whole child.
Like all living systems, the brain grows and develops. It is now well understood that in the growing child, brain growth is accompanied by a corresponding development of cognitive functions. In the developing cerebral cortex, brain growth does not mean growth of new nerve cells, but growth of a complex network of neural connections.
As the child matures, infinite possibilities for interconnections exist in this growing and developing neural network. Which connections actually form and which pathways and functions become stable depends very much on the child's environment. The neural network displays the important ability to alter its connectivity in response to the environment.
The sensitivity of the brain to environmental influences is especially strong in early childhood, when most of the neural network is forming. Since research in this area began in the late 1950s, there has been a broad consensus among child psychologists that early exposure to an environment rich in sensory experiences and cognitive challenges — the colors, sounds, smells, tastes, and textures of the real world — will have lasting beneficial effects, while early deprivations will inhibit future neural development. At the Center for Ecoliteracy, we believe that learning in the school garden, in the kitchen, on the farm, or in the creek, is learning in the real world at its very best.
Now, since the neural network alters its connectivity continually in response to the child's environment, this means that different children will develop different nervous systems — different pathways, a different mix of cognitive functions, and so on. In other words, every brain is uniquely organized, and therefore children display a great diversity of learning styles, involving multiple intelligences.
Another important implication of the view of the brain as an integrated whole, embedded in larger wholes, is the insight that learning involves not only the brain and the nervous system, but the body's entire physiology. In particular, it turns out that the emotions are critical.
In education, emotions have long been treated as important, but as basically separate from thinking. Recent scientific discoveries have forced us to change this view dramatically. Scientists have come to realize that emotion and cognition interact continually, energizing and shaping each other. What we learn is not only influenced, but is even organized by emotions. All this means that an emotionally safe learning environment is crucial to learning.
From the integration of cognition and emotion, let me now move to the recognition that an individual human organism is always embedded in a social system, a community. This means that all learning is fundamentally social. Part of our identity depends on establishing community and finding ways to belong. And much of our learning depends on the communities of which we are part. Hence, building healthy and intelligent communities is not only necessary for ecological sustainability, but will also facilitate learning.
So, the main conditions that facilitate learning are a rich sensory environment, emotional safety, and a supportive community. Now let me turn to the learning process itself. It is well known that children do not come to school as empty vessels, to be filled with information, but actively construct their knowledge by relating all new information to past experience in a constant search for meaning. From an evolutionary perspective, the search for meaning is survival-oriented and basic to human nature. We are innately motivated to make sense of our experience, to search for meaning. The brain resists having isolated pieces of information imposed on it.
Now, let us ask: how does the brain search for meaning? Brain research tells us that the search for meaning occurs through "patterning," as neuroscientists put it. This patterning is inherent in the physiology of the brain. It is a process where groups of brain cells combine to form cell assemblies and neural networks that fire in synchrony. New experiences and understandings reconfigure these automatic patterns.
In their detailed analysis of patterning, neuroscientists have discovered that emotions are critical to this process. When there is a lack of emotional security, when the system is flooded with stress hormones, the perception of patterns is one of the first things that is lost. Perception narrows down to concrete objects; there is fragmentation; a shift from the whole to the parts. This shows us that emotional security is critical for the very essence of the learning process — the search for patterns and meaning.
The new understanding of the learning process suggests corresponding instructional strategies. In particular, it suggests designing an integrated curriculum, emphasizing contextual knowledge, in which the various subject areas are perceived as resources in service of a central focus. An ideal way to achieve such an integration is the approach called "project-based learning," which consists in facilitating learning experiences that engage students in complex, real-world projects through which they develop and apply skills and knowledge. In our schools, we practice project-based learning with a school garden or a creek restoration project as the central focus.
It is obvious that integrating the curriculum through gardening, or any other ecologically oriented project, is possible only if the school becomes a true learning community. The conceptual relationships among the various disciplines can be made explicit only if there are corresponding human relationships among the teachers and administrators.
In such a learning community, teachers, students, administrators, and parents are all interlinked in a network of relationships, working together to facilitate learning. The teaching does not flow from the top down, but there is a cyclical exchange of information. The focus is on learning and everyone in the system is both a teacher and a learner. Feedback loops are intrinsic to the learning process, and feedback becomes the key purpose of assessment. Systems thinking is crucial to understand the functioning of learning communities. Indeed, the principles of ecology can also be interpreted as principles of community.
This brings me to the conclusion of my talk. I have tried to show you how systems thinking forms the intellectual core of ecological literacy, the conceptual framework that allows us to integrate its various components. Let me summarize these components:
As our new century unfolds, the survival of humanity will depend on our ability to understand the principles of ecology and live accordingly. This is an enterprise that transcends all our differences of race, culture, or class. The Earth is our common home, and creating a sustainable world for our children and for future generations is our common task.
Fritjof Capra, Ph.D., physicist and systems theorist, is a founding director of the Center for Ecoliteracy in Berkeley (www.ecoliteracy.org). He is the author of several international bestsellers, including The Tao of Physics and The Web of Life. This lecture is based on his most recent book The Hidden Connections. www.fritjofcapra.net