Fritjof Capra, philosopher-physicist turned environmentalist, is the author of several groundbreaking books, The Tao of Physics, The Turning Point, The Web of Life, and most recently, The Hidden Connections. A major theme that runs through Fritjof's often brilliant writing is systems theory, a multidisciplinary approach which fosters emergent solutions to seemingly intractable problems, a technique that is proving to be extremely useful in environmental science. Applying systems theory, The Hidden Connections is probably the finest book to date to delineate the philosophy, science, and politics of sustainability. I believe that it is one of the most important books on environmentalism ever written.

We delayed publication of this interview for over a year, in part, because it seemed that the public's attention was being held captive by issues of war and terrorism, much to the exclusion of subtler themes such as environmental sustainability. Now, with Earth Day 2004 upon us and a presidential election drawing near, the time is right to proceed.
We owe Fritjof a debt of gratitude for graciously sharing his insights into the nature of living systems and his prescriptions for building a future that works. Finally, a special thanks to Professor Maggie Morse for providing tea and snacks, and a lovely, woodsy environment conducive to deep conversation.

—Bart Brodsky
Publisher, OPEN EXCHANGE MAGAZINE

Bart Brodsky: Congratulations on writing The Hidden Connections. Your stated goal was "to create a unified, systemic approach to issues of sustainability," and you've done so admirably! It's an intellectual tour de force, and there are enough ideas in it for ten books. In it you move persuasively from philosophy, life science, social science, and politics, developing a multidisciplinary consensus for a sustainable culture, based on respect for the interrelationships of living systems. What audience did you have in mind when you were writing?

Fritjof Capra: I generally don't write with an audience in mind. I write what I feel I have to say, and I don't plan the shape of the book when I start. I collect material and try to understand things myself. I try to synthesize things from different fields to put together ideas that were not originally together, to get some clarity. All this is the systems approach to illuminate relationships. And this is why the book is called The Hidden Connections, to illuminate connections, to illuminate patterns. I don't think, "Now I'm going to write a book for this or that audience." Of course, I'm well aware that I have an audience already, because I've written a number of books that have sold many copies, and so I have a readership. And when I write I always try out ideas with people in lectures and seminars, in discussions, so I get constant feedback. So, if you wish, there is a constant dialog between the audience of the book, or parts of the audience of the book and the book as it grows. It's a very organized process, actually.

BB: Did you think you might lose some readers by going heavily conceptual?

Fritjof Capra: I write what I feel I have to say. I think of my readers in the sense that I want to keep my language fairly non-technical, as much as possible. I want to explain things as much as possible. One rule I have, when I talk about science, is no mathematics, although in The Web of Life I had a chapter on complexity theory which needed some very basic equations. But generally, I stay away from mathematics, because that turns people off and complicates things. I do feel a responsibility vis-à-vis the scientific community, of which I'm a part. I feel that I write also for scientists, not just for the lay public. And since what I write transcends disciplines, even for the scientists I have to write in a non-technical language. Because the physicist will not understand the sociologist or a molecular biologist or some other scientist, paleontologist, if they speak technical language. So I try to situate myself at a level which is scientifically rigorous, and yet as non-technical as possible, which is a tightrope walk, always.

BB: Do you do that consciously? You're naturally a very good writer, a very crisp writer.

FC: No, I'm not naturally a crisp writer. It comes with hard struggle. I write very slowly. I write everything by hand. I don't type into the computer. And I write every sentence three or four times. This is why I take long to write books. [The Hidden Connections] took me four years to write, and that's sort of average, four, five, or six years.

BB: When I read a Fritjof Capra book, I always feel that I understand where you're taking me. When I read [physicist] Stephen Hawking I don't always understand the point he's trying to make. He doesn't translate his expertise nearly as well, as brilliant as he is. But I'm never in doubt reading your work.

FC: There's a difference in the way that Stephen Hawking works and the way I work, because his main work is technical research, whereas I don't do technical research. My main work is to synthesize things, to bring disciplines together. I do have a lot of discussions with scientists, but I don't work in any particular scientific field on a technical research project.

BB: You did at one time, however.

FC: Oh, for many years, yes. I was a working physicist in high energy physics.

BB: With your latest book, do you see yourself reaching out to new communities, say, in business, in addition to the people who already know of your work and believe in ecology?

FC: Yes, very much so. And if you remember my first book, The Tao of Physics, was about the new physics and its connections with Eastern mysticism. That became a sort of central book for the new age movement in the 1970's, and that audience is still partly around. But after writing The Turning Point, which was still a little bit in that language, I moved back to be more scientific. The Web of Life, really, is a book about science. It's a book about ecology, about living networks, and less about social change. And now, in The Hidden Connections, I moved again into the social and political arenas, and I do address myself to managers, to businesspeople, to politicians, to educators, to a number of professions.

BB: In The Tao of Physics you explored the congruence between Eastern religion and scientific theory. In The Hidden Connections you seem to play down metaphysics and take, for lack of a better word, almost a "naturalist" approach. For example, you say, "Recent studies in the new field of cognitive linguistics indicate strongly that human reason does not transcend the body, as much as Western philosophy has held, but is shaped critically by our physical nature and our bodily experience." And you go on, "The very structure of reason arises from our bodies and our brains." Later in discussing the spiritual dimension of life you say, "Our spiritual moments are those moments when we feel most intensely alive. Spirituality, then, is always embodied." Am I taking these quotes out of context, or has your position actually shifted?

FC: No, it hasn't shifted. I think I—you know, in the beginning, when I got interested in Eastern mysticism, I was just fascinated by everything. I was fascinated by Hinduism. I was fascinated by Taoism, by Buddhism, by Jainism—you know, the various religions—and over the years I began to make personal choices. A significant event was actually my first trip to India, which occurred after I wrote The Tao of Physics, around 1980. I experienced Hinduism, the whole sensuous quality, the rituals, the architecture, the esthetics. And again, I was totally fascinated by it, but I saw immediately that this could never be a tradition that I would follow. I could never be a Hindu because it was too much culturally specific. It was not my culture. [By contrast], Buddhism has transcended cultures as it moved from India to China to Japan to California.... So, I found the Buddhist connection the strongest. And the quote you just read, I think, fairly describes the Buddhist position, that spirituality is embodied, that in order to access it you practice meditation, which is not something in a detached mental realm, but is something where you have insights through the body, where you explore the inner word through the body and through the bodily senses. So, I see this very much as a Buddhist type of spirituality.

BB: In The Hidden Connections you also write, "Indeed, creating sustainable communities is the great challenge of our time." When I read that I wrote "Yes!" in the margins. I was excited by your strong emphasis. Would you please explain now your concept of sustainability?

FC: I've very glad that you are asking this question, because it is amazing to me that after at least 20 years that this concept of sustainability has been around—it was introduced by Lester Brown in the early 1980's, then picked up by the Brundtland Report in the concept of sustainable development. So after about 20 years there's still a lot of confusion about the concept of sustainability, even in the environmental movement. Now, originally, Lester Brown, the founder of the World Watch Institute, defined a sustainable society or community as one that is able to satisfy its needs without diminishing the chances of future generations. That widespread definition that was taken up by the U.N. Report, the so-called Brundtland Report in the early 80's, with the concept of sustainable development. And this is a very important moral exhortation. It urges us to leave a world behind with at least as many opportunities for our children and grandchildren as we had when we inherited the world. However, the problem with this definition is that it doesn't tell us anything about how to go about creating a sustainable community. See, it places sustainability at a very high and moral level, but it is not operational. It doesn't tell you what to do about that. I believe we need an operational definition, and in the book I give an operational definition of sustainability starting from the well-known fact that nature has sustained life in the history of evolution for over three billion years. It's the outstanding characteristic of the biosphere—or Gaia if you wish—that it has sustained life for such a long time. So, if we want to build a sustainable community, we need to do it in such a way that we do not interfere with this outstanding ability of nature to sustain life. And this is an operational definition, because we can immediately say, if we're really serious about this, the first thing we need to do is to understand how nature does it. How does nature sustain life over billions of years? In other words, how do ecosystems work? What are the relationships? What are the processes? What are the patterns of ecosystems, because ecosystems are communities. When we're talking about a sustainable community, we do not need to design it from scratch, but we can model it after the existing communities of animals, plants, and microorganisms in ecosystems. So this is what I call ecological literacy: to know how nature sustains life, and then to redesign our communities accordingly.

BB: You have an operational definition. Many people, I think, have an intuitive definition of an environmental ethos, if you will. But I've often wondered how intelligent opinions can differ so widely on this matter. Your own political agenda is very straightforward. You say, "Prohibiting the patenting of life forms, rejecting GM foods, and promoting sustainable agriculture, for example, are important for reformulating the rules of globalization." But in contrast Dr. Bill Wattenburg, a well-known KGO radio personality and physicist who also considers himself an environmentalist, is pro-nuclear. He discounts global warming. He supports genetic engineering. And he has described alternative energy as "impractical." Is this a case of reasonable people disagreeing? Why is it so hard to build an environmental consensus?

FC: I don't know this person, but to me it sounds like somebody who is ecologically illiterate. Somebody who says that alternatives to nuclear and petroleum are impractical is just ecologically illiterate. There is abundant evidence now that solar energy, hydrogen as a liquid fuel, and wind energy work! Not only is there theoretical evidence, but those are the energy forms that grow economically. The capacity for wind energy has grown 23% per year during the decade of the 90s. In 2001 it grew by over 30%, and it's going to continue to grow like this, because we can see the plans of many countries introducing more wind energy.

BB: And yet, the United States rejected the Kyoto Protocol, and The Seattle Conference in 2002 [which highlighted environmentalism and trade issues] was marginalized by the major media. What's going on here?

FC: Before we get into this, I should say something. Ecoliteracy, as I call it in the book, is the first step towards a sustainable society. The second step, as important, is an ecodesign. That's what we're talking about now. It's to redesign our technologies and social institutions so as to not interfere with nature's ability to sustain life. This is where all the alternative energy forms come in. I have a long chapter in the book about these ecodesign practices. There has been a long upsurge in ecodesign practices and concepts over the last 10 years. The problems now are no longer technological or conceptual. The problems are political. The problems are of values and of political will. If we come back for a moment to energy, it is not at all surprising that alternative energy forms are not pushed by the White House, and that the Kyoto Protocol is not signed. Maybe that's a little more surprising. But in fact it's not that surprising because our current administration is essentially a petroleum administration. The leading people are all people who have and have had links to the petroleum industry. And not just tenuous links, but substantial links—former CEO's of petroleum companies and petroleum related companies. And so, they just have blinders. They have invested their money in petroleum and they do not see what a lot of other people outside see: that we're now nearing the end of the petroleum age. That's one of the big transitions that we're now going through.

BB: Most people seem to know this, but when you ask most people if they're willing to drive a smaller car to save a little gas, they aren't willing to make that trade-off. As many Democrats as Republicans drive SUV's.

FC: Yes, this is an interesting situation, because the trade-off is not really needed. This is portrayed by the petroleum advocates, people who are paid by the petroleum industry and the car industry as the choice, but it's not at all, because the future of energy for cars, quite clearly, is hydrogen. And hydrogen, at this stage of the technology, can be applied more easily if you have large fuel tanks. It takes more space than gasoline. So an SUV is an ideal car to be hydrogen driven. It's much easier to power an SUV by hydrogen than a tiny Fiat, as they have in parts of Europe. So, big car/small car is not the choice. It's energy efficient or energy inefficient.

BB: Beyond that, people in Eco Cities-type projects say that it's important to design or redesign cities so as to minimize the need for transportation.

FC: Absolutely. That is true.

BB: And that creates much more livable cities. There are many psychic benefits, too.

FC: Yes. I emphasize this in the book. When you look at any of the new ecodesign practices, they will always have multiple effects. They would typically clean up the air and reduce pollution and greenhouse gases, and therefore work against climate change, which is a major environmental problem. They would also help us to decouple ourselves from oil and therefore render our country more secure, because a lot of the current insecurity through terrorism and other threats is a consequence of our links to oil, to our addiction, you could almost say, to running our economy with petroleum. So, it would improve the climate conditions, it would make us more secure, it would make us live a healthier live, because the air would be clean, and it would help us to create community, because, typically, these ecodesign practices rely on interactions between community members and bring communities closer together. They also create a lot of jobs, because when you move from a nuclear or petroleum driven energy to a solar energy economy, that creates a lot of jobs. So, all of these are multiple factors to make life livable and create a higher quality of life.

BB: And sustainable based on that three billion years of experience....

FC: Yes, experience by nature....

BB: ...which we can't begin to approach, yet.

FC: Right!

BB: Let's explore more of the concepts in your book before we get into the specifics of an environmental lifestyle. Your definition of life, as "growing inevitably out of increasingly complex molecular relationships"—not molecules, but the relationships themselves—is fascinating!

FC: I think this is really the key theoretical idea. If you ask, "What is the nature of life?" starting from biological life, and you say, "What's the difference between a plant and a rock?" you go into some details with microscopes and scientific instruments and try to figure out the difference between a plant and a rock. First you discover that all living organisms are made of cells. That's a big discovery already made in the 19th century. And then you discover that these cells contain so-called macro-molecules: proteins, amino acids, enzymes, lipids, and especially DNA and RNA, the nucleotides. And you could say life is a chemical system that contains DNA. That's quite a simple definition. All you have to do is take an electron microscope and see, "Is there DNA?" in the object that you're studying. If yes, it's alive; if no, it's not. The problem with this is that when a living organism dies the DNA doesn't disappear. See, these chairs in which we're sitting are made of wood. This wood has DNA in it, exactly the same as when it was alive. DNA is just a molecule; eventually it may deteriorate, but not for a long time. And so, the essence of life is not to be found in the constituents of the cells, but in the processes that interlink those constituents. This is what both poets and philosophers have called "the breath of life" for centuries. And so, this breath of life, this process of life, the patterns of interconnections, that's the very essence of life.

BB: I believe it was Marshall McLuhan who said, "God is a verb."

FC: Yes! I have never heard this. This is very beautiful! So, just to add one more footnote: When you study the interconnections and the processes that operate in living systems, you make another very big discovery. And that is key pattern, one set of relationships that is characteristic of all living systems that appears over and over again, and that is the network. So, all living systems are networks, and the core of my theoretical path is the study of living networks.

BB: Going on with this concept, you note that computers don't seem to understand people, whereas we understand computers. And yet, some futurists project that computers will one day equal and perhaps even supplant humanity. You don't share those concerns, do you?

FC: No, I don't. You know, this has been going on a long time now, because artificial intelligence, this whole field, started with the invention of computers in the 1940s, with cybernetics. But, we need to remember that computers are machines, and they need to be built and programmed. And here I come back to the study of living networks. Once you realize that life is really defined by this network pattern, then you can study living networks and ask yourself, "what's characteristic of living networks." Obviously, a chicken fence is not a living network. It's a network, but it's not alive. And a fishing net is a network, but it's not alive. So, there are living and non-living networks, and the key characteristic of living networks is that they're self-generating. That is, they produce all their constituents themselves. So in a cell, for instance, or any kind of living organism, you have food that comes in through the boundaries, through the cell membranes, and food would be the simple molecules, the sugars, the starches, and so on, and in the cell those are transformed into proteins, into DNA, into the building blocks of the cell membrane, the lipids, and so on. So, the cell creates, generates all its constituents. A computer or any other machine can never do that.

BB: Help me understand here. If you have a self-repairing computer, couldn't you have a silicon-based consciousness or life form?

FC: You could, if you were able to build a computer and then put it out into nature and let the computer gather the molecules from the environment—whether it's a forest or an ocean or a desert or whatever—you can choose the environment. And if the computer could gather molecules from the environment and use them to maintain itself, to develop, to procreate—all this is what living systems do—to adapt to changing circumstances, then I would certainly call it alive.

BB: So, theoretically it's possible, but you just don't see it as [very likely].

FC: Well, it's possible, but it would really amount to synthesizing living organisms. That's a possibility; I don't discount that. But the current machines that we have don't go in this direction.

BB: Your argument isn't the same as the Christian theological view that we are apart from nature, and therefore we are special.

FC: No, no. On the contrary, when you study life from the systems perspective, you see that cognition, the process of knowing, is also characteristic of all life. So, every living organism is engaged in perception, in knowing the environment, in sensing the environment, and that is commission. And as the organism becomes more and more complex in evolution, so does the process of commission, and eventually at some stage then consciousness emerges. But it's all interlinked. We're not separate at all.

BB: Regarding the science of cloning, you write, "The real ethical problem surrounding the current cloning procedure are rooted in the biological development problems it generates." And then you make an outstanding case that cloning technology is imperfect, if not fatally flawed. However, if it could be perfected, would you be against it on moral grounds? Is there any moral outrage against it, or is it only a practical matter for you?

FC: No, it's not only a practical matter. I think the mechanistic approach that is a characteristic of biotechnology reduces life to a mechanical system. The term "genetic engineering" is evocative, although, as I explained in the book, it's not an engineering practice. It's nowhere near the precision of engineering, but it has the mentality of engineering, and with that engineering mentality comes a certain value system. And just to give you an example, take the current debate about embryonic stem cell research. Stem cells are cells that have not yet specialized and that exist in every living organism, and especially in the embryos, but not only in the embryos. The proponents say that if we take stem cells from human embryos, and if we know how to manipulate them, we could then produce pancreatic cells that produce insulin, or we could produce nerve cells and help people with nerve damage, and so on. Se we could just have a laboratory of these unspecialized cells and develop them into various specialized areas. Well, the problem with this, apart from technical problems, is in the attitude of these researchers toward the embryo. They would typically use embryos from fertility clinics that have been discarded, because when you do artificial insemination or other techniques in fertility clinics, you have to use a lot of embryos, a lot of sperm and egg cells, to be successful. So, the ones that are not used are discarded. There's nothing wrong with that, because the motive is noble and the techniques are relatively simple, but you have to have an attitude of reverence. If a couple who cannot have children comes into a clinic, and you as a scientist help them with genetic techniques to have children, you still would treat everything that surrounds that procedure—whether it is the unfertilized egg for the woman, or the sperm from the man, or the fertilized egg or the embryos—you would treat all this with a reverence for life. Now, the people who advocate embryonic stem cell research characteristically call these embryos "garbage embryos" because they're thrown away. It's just a total disrespect of life.

BB: You're saying that they're inadvertently polarizing the situation?

FC: Yes. It comes from the mechanistic thought patterns and attitudes. So there is a moral problem. There are technical problems, but there are many moral problems, too.

BB: Let me interject that your writing about genetic engineering in The Hidden Connections is probably the clearest piece on the topic that anybody has come up with. On the one hand, you avoid the position of people who say "ban genetic engineering," and on other hand you issue a very strong critique of genetic engineering the way it is currently practiced. Taking your systems approach, once again, you come up with—correct me if I'm wrong—a "go slow" approach based on that three billion years of wisdom.

FC: Absolutely. There could be an important role for genetic engineering if—if we change our basic attitude. Now we're saying, "let's try to manipulate nature;" "let's take a gene from a fish and put into a tomato," or "let's take a gene from a cow and put into a human embryo," manipulating crops, crossing these species barriers which entails lots and lots of grave dangers, most of which we don't even know yet. So, if instead of trying to control and manipulate nature, we say, "let's learn from nature," "let's take nature as a mentor," because philosophers for ages have talked about the wisdom of nature, this is completely justified [from a] scientific point of view. The experience nature had over those billions of years of evolution adds up to a certain wisdom. To take just one example, let's look at how a spider produces a thread, which is pound per pound stronger than the strongest steel we can produce. How does the spider do that? The spider does that, unlike our steel plants, at room temperature, in a completely noiseless way, without any byproducts, without any waste. If you go to a steel plant you see the tremendous noise, the great heat that needs to be generated to produce hard steel, and the wastes that are generated—the spider has none of that. And yet, the spider's thread is stronger than the strongest steel we can produce. So, how does the spider do it? Well, in one word, the answer is proteins. Proteins are these macromolecules that exist in living cells, and this is a bioengineering process. The spider does bioengineering, certain engineering techniques using biological components, proteins and biochemical components. If we could copy that, it would be a kind of biotechnology. And people are working on it!

BB: We might finally have some better bumpers on our cars, too!

FC: Yes! And, you know, there are lots of examples like that in the book.

BB: I also found your critique of global capitalism extremely insightful. At one point you write, "The current form of global capitalism is ecologically and socially unsustainable. Resentment is growing in all parts of the world." And also, "The new global capitalism has also created a global criminal economy." You seem to be confident, though, that a systems approach could help build an environmentally friendly capitalism. What do you say to the leftists and Greens who argue that capitalism is simply not compatible with sustainability or human needs?

FC: Well, let me first say that I was fascinated by the study of the global economy, and that I relied here very much on the work of Manuel Castells, who is a professor of sociology at [U.C.] Berkeley, and who wrote a magnificent three-volume book on the information age. The first is called The Rise of the Network Society. And I realized, studying this work, that there is a new kind of capitalism that has developed over the last ten years as a consequence of the information technology revolution, and it has several characteristics that make it quite different from previous capitalist forms of economics, previous capitalist economies. One characteristic, as we all know, is that it's global, so that we [now] talk about the global economy, or globalization. Another one is that it is crucially connected to information or knowledge generation. And the third characteristic is that it is largely structured around networks of financial flows and flows of information. So, the power of the computer technology and communications technology—this whole revolution that happened over the last ten years—has allowed us to build global networks, computer networks through which these financial flows happen, so that when you're a financial speculator today, you can put your money into any economy in any part of the world or any kind of project, and within minutes, often within seconds, you can change it, you can put it somewhere else, and you can shift money around. Trillions of dollars are sloshing around the globe in these global networks. What fascinated me about this development, which will have major impact upon the whole future of humanity, is connected with networks [that are] almost living, that have some of the properties of living networks. And I juxtaposed that in my book with ecodesign, which is also connected with networks, with ecological networks, the flows of energy and matter. So, that's the scenario we have now. We can go in two directions: Either we can go further in global capitalism as it is now, which leads us straight into disaster, or we can go and change it and build a sustainable society. So, that was just an introduction. Can I have your question again? Because I do want to answer it.

BB: [laughs] I thought you had answered it quite well! But let me be more specific. There are certainly members of the environmental community, certain leftists and Greens, who argue that capitalism is just not compatible with human needs or sustainability. I would add that a lot of global capital, if not most of it, seems to be going into old-style development, the oil economy and so forth. For example, in the Las Vegas desert they're building malls and suburbs faster than ever. And there's no water, so they're draining water from the Colorado River. This can't be sustained much longer! It has been called an environmental monstrosity!

FC: Yes. I think the question whether capitalism is viable or not is partly a semantic question, because, if you mean by capitalism, an economic system that is organized according to the principle that making money is always better and should always be preferred to anything else, which is the principle of the current global economy, and that's a sort of a quintessential capitalist value, and if that is the only value that defines the system, then it is clearly unsustainable, not viable. If you mean by capitalism in a broader sense, to use market forces, with certain constraints, where you can put in human rights, or health considerations, considerations of sustainability and the environment, and if you call that capitalism—modified capitalism—then it is viable.

BB: Then we're talking about a different kind of "mixed economy." [Political theory has conventionally referred to a "mixed economy" as the blending of corporate capitalism with state socialism.]

FC: Yes. What I say in the book is that the critical issue of our time is to reshape the global economy by introducing values, and actually programming them into the system, that are compatible with human dignity and ecological sustainability. That's the key issue.

BB: Let's get back to a quote you had in the book: "Resentment is growing in all parts of the world for what we do." We're now approaching the first anniversary of 9/11, and many of us are trying to put this into perspective, and I know you've addressed this issue publicly. Dr. Helen Caldicott recently told me that military buildup is making us less secure, not more secure.

FC: I agree completely. By the way, I don't know whether you saw it, but on my website www.fritjofcapra.net I have a 10 page systemic analysis of terrorism. And if you go to the bibliography, click on "recent articles," which I wrote in October, about a month after the event [9/11]. It's an extensive analysis with lots of resources. Please feel free to quote from it.

BB: Could you give us a summary here?

FC: The basic point I make is that in order to understand this new form of international terrorism, and to combat it effectively, we need to understand its roots. And its roots are of many kinds. There are economic roots, political roots, technological roots—it's not a simple case. It's not a simple linear chain of cause and effect. It's a complex system because the world is a complex system. It's very much connected with globalization and with our globally interconnected world. So, we need to think systemically to understand the roots of terrorism. Let me just mention two things: One is that the perception of the United States around the world, among many positive things, where Americans are admired as sports heroes, as entertainers, as inventors of technologies, where people admire our freedom of expression, of where we live—we have created the Constitution and so on—so there are a lot of positive images of the United States in the world. But there are also many negative images, and the negative images come from the fact that we are perceived, and I think rightly, as the leaders of the globalization movement that has wreaked havoc around the world, that has destroyed local communities or threatened local communities, that destroys local ecosystems, and that creates a great disparity of wealth, where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. That is a totally correct perception. And so, the people who get marginalized and who find themselves on a downward spiral into poverty will often get so frustrated and so desperate that they can be easily be recruited by terrorist organizations. So, to counterbalance that, we would have to change the whole system of globalization, which of course I advocate. Now, another aspect is that when you look at American foreign policy around the world, whether it's in the Middle East or in Afghanistan or in Latin America or in Africa, then you will find that most of it is driven by the desire to get cheap resources for our economy, especially energy sources. So, it's again a petroleum-based foreign policy. We look at Shell in Africa with Ken Saro Wiwa* or look at the situation in Venezuela, for instance, where the United States has supported a coup clandestinely, or in Afghanistan, which is the whole anti-Taliban policy, [it is] mostly oil-oriented.

BB: I've read statistics that suggest that if we drove cars that achieved only 40 miles per gallon, which is practical today with off-the-shelf technology, that we'd be a net oil exporter, or at least we wouldn't need to import...

FC: Yes, yes.

BB: ...and that would free up an incredible amount of resources. In effect, we might even de-fund the terrorists. We wouldn't be sending our money [to support our oil addiction and prop up reactionary oil regimes.]

FC: Yes. That's my point: to change the energy policies. We have to realize that energy policy is security policy. And it's much, much more effective changing energy policies than building up the military and fighting a lot of wars in distant countries. Let me mention one more thing in this connection, one more piece of statistics that I've come across recently. The theory of globalization, which is known as the New Liberal Theory or the Washington Consensus, as people sometimes call it, has as one of its key rules that poor countries, especially countries in the Third World, should concentrate on producing a single product or crop or service that they're good at producing, should export that into the world, into the global economy, and should import everything that they need from that global economy. Now, in addition to destroying local communities and wreaking havoc in Third World countries, this creates huge supply lines, because it emphasizes trade that is just shipping things around, back and forth, that need not be shipped around, because they can also be produced locally. And these huge supply lines make us vulnerable to terrorist attacks. It's quite clear that if we in our country have several mega-farms which ship the milk and poultry and the various foodstuffs that we need around the whole country, that this can be disrupted much easier than your local farmers' markets.

BB: What's even more insidious is [corporate terrorism]. In South American countries, for example, we take their orange crop, which used to be the native drink, and then we ship them Coca Cola. We get them hooked. And in most cases they prefer Coca Cola because it's associated with American movies and wealth and success. And there are vast profits to be made. Once again, how do you rein in this behavior without just tinkering with capitalism, but by making major changes?

FC: When you say that there are vast profits being made, they are vast profits by private corporations which need to be counterbalanced by tax money for the military, for the police state, for security, changing civil liberties, and so on. To go to the roots of terrorism, to understand and counteract terrorism, is far, far more efficient economically than what we're doing now. Let me just add the statistics that I've read recently. This is from the U.N.D.P., the United Nations Development Programme. They estimated that every poor person on the planet could have clean water, sanitation, basic health nutrition, education, reproductive health, for about 40 billion dollars a year. That's a fraction of the new budget to fight terrorism. It's a fraction of the recent tax cut that President Bush applied. It's something that would be very easily achievable, and it would go a long way toward making the whole world more secure. So, if you ask the proverbial Martians to observe us, they would scratch their heads if they had heads and say, "Why are these humans doing things in such a stupid way?"

BB: [laughs] Let's talk some good news. In your chapter "Doing More With Less," you write about Factor 10, which is a 90% reduction of resource use. Tell us more.

FC: This is based on the work of Amory Lovins at the Rocky Mountain Institute. They have found out that the main technical reason why we use so many resources—there are also ethical and psychological reasons, spiritual reasons, and so on—but the main technical reason is that resource productivity was never a concept when we designed our industrial society. It's only been in the last 10 years that it has emerged as a very important concept.

BB: Again, talking about the spider spinning the web....

FC: Yes. When you study, say, economics, you learn that that productivity is a result of capital, of resources, of labor, of technology, and to increase productivity you would have your workers work more efficiently or you would move your factory to Indonesia, where you would pay less for wages, and that would increase productivity.

BB: And in classical analysis environmental degradation is not even a factor.

FC: No, it's not a factor, because the resources are [presumably] unlimited. So, if you introduce resource productivity into this equation, you can make huge advances. And this is the recent achievement of the ecodesigners, that they have noticed that. And Amory Lovins gives example after example in this book that he co-authored with Hunter Lovins and Paul Hawken, Natural Capitalism, where the main problem is with the design. And you can redesign things in such a way as to reduce resource [consumption]. This started with energy in lighting, creating different kinds of light bulbs. But mostly this is a systemic effect where you design everything together. Let me just tell you one anecdote from the book Natural Capitalism, which I like and will never forget. The Rocky Mountain team was called to some big factory where the owners wanted to save money on plumbing and gas lines, and so on. So they studied the layout and found that in the basement where certain pipes went straight ahead then made a sharp right turn, then made a left turn, then another left turn, then a right turn. So they went around something, tracing out a rectangle, but there was nothing there! There was no reason for doing that! The reason was that 50 years ago there had been a big heater there, or some other big machine, so they had to do it. But the machine has long disappeared, and the pipes had been replaced, first there had been old steel pipes, and now they're new plastic pipes, but they replaced them without thinking! The same design! They just measured everything and replaced all the pipes! It never occurred to them to ask, "Why do we go around like this?" So, the authors ask, "What do we need?" "How do we design this in the most effective way to use the least material, to use the least energy?" You can save an enormous amount of resources. Another example would be the current metal and petroleum car. Amory Lovins has calculated—he's very good at this—if you calculate what percentage of gasoline energy moves the driver, as opposed to moving the car, which is very heavy, you find that to move the driver you use about 1% of the energy in the gasoline. It's a huge amount of waste! So, redesigning cars—this is the hypercar concept—by making them lighter, by making them more aerodynamic, and by installing these new hybrid electric drives, saves huge amounts of energy. And that's just one example of ecodesign.

BB: Many people would argue that we could design an SUV that gets 100 miles per gallon or better, but more radical environmentalists would argue that we should simply abandon the automobile. Fuel is only one of many environmental impacts of transportation; you've also got mining the resources, roadway construction, noise, pollution, etc. Shouldn't we be looking, more fundamentally, toward creating more livable cities that minimize this kind of transportation? Shouldn't that be a first priority?

FC: Well, it's difficult to say what should be the first priority, because we are in a crisis. Just look at the recent, tremendous weather catastrophes, which are, essentially, human-made, which we have brought upon ourselves—although, when you read or see or hear the news reports this is rarely mentioned. They talk about natural catastrophes, flooding in Bangladesh, in Prague, in various areas, but this is climate change, and climate change comes from greenhouse gases and pollution, other kinds of pollution. And this is a very immediate, urgent problem. So we urgently need to reduce the pollution. To redesign our cities is very important, and this is part of ecodesign. And we just need to do both. And we just need to do everything at the same time. As we decrease the emission of greenhouse gasses we should also redesign our cities. And this is being done, especially in Europe. And we should integrate the car into a broader system of transportation, into trains, bicycles—and again, it would have to be something that is planned. For instance, if I go to Los Angeles to visit my brother, and if I want to take my daughter to Disneyland, I would like to have a car there, theoretically, I could drive [an electric] car to the train station, drive it into the coach of the train, go upstairs, read my newspaper, do my work, all while my car was being charged, then I could drive out again. I could also have a bicycle in the car [for short trips]. It could be an integrated system of transportation, of bicycles, cars, trains, and everything else. So I would not advocate eliminating the car right away, because that's unrealistic given our whole history, but to integrate it into our whole transportation system.

BB: We live in Berkeley [California], a lovely town with good public transportation and a plethora of exotic nearby restaurants. I've lived here for many years before owning a car and I didn't feel like I'd missed anything. But most new development consists of malls and suburbs, as I mentioned before. What's it going to take to turn that around?

FC: This is the small-scale development of the same system of globalization that I just described on a large scale. It is creating specialized industries in special places and transporting everything around. In this case, you have to drive to the mall to buy a pair of blue jeans because you can't have it anywhere in your neighborhood. So you pollute the air and use the natural resources. And of course the people who make the blue jeans do the same. They ship them there, and so on. So what does it take? It takes a change of values, it takes a change of perception, first of all. This is where I come in with my educational work. We should realize that the alternatives are all being developed. There is a movement of eco-villages, of eco-cities. So there are designers who work on this. For example, if you go up to Portland, Oregon, you have great pedestrian zones, public transportation that works far better than in Berkeley. I love Berkeley, too. Being European I love its sort of European subculture, you know, with the restaurants and cappuccinos and everything. But I get so frustrated that we don't have a pedestrian zone. I think it's a scandal! Every European country has a large city center that's completely car free. Why can't we do it in Berkeley?

BB: We've tried several times to make Telegraph Avenue [adjacent to U.C. Berkeley campus] that way.

FC: Or Shattuck Avenue. They're trying to revitalize downtown, but they should ban the cars completely.

BB: They've done it in Boulder, Colorado.

FC: There are many cities [where they've succeeded]: Seattle, Portland, Vancouver....

BB: Just for a moment, let's talk about malls. It's a very strange, antiseptic culture. You go inside, and it's like an adult Disneyland with its carefully controlled consumption. There are no street musicians, no community newspapers like OPEN EXCHANGE. The only things you can do are pre-programmed by the large corporations that run it. All the foods are processed foods. You don't have street vendors. You don't have pamphleteers. The experience is prepackaged.

FC: And you don't know where you are, because you could be in Illinois or in North Dakota or in Atlanta or anywhere.

BB. Yes. If you were blindfolded and placed in a mall, you wouldn't know where you were. And yet, malls are extremely attractive to many people, including many of our kids, who are raised not to know anything better. So, my question to you is: What's it going to take to change? Is it going to be bottom up? Are people going to realize what they're missing [and insist on reform]? Or is it going to need to be from the top down, a decision that government imposes?

FC: No, I don't think we can rely on government, because government is totally in the pockets of business and industry. The changes are not going to come from government. Here is one thing we haven't yet talked about: During the last 10 years, again in the information technology revolution, various grassroots organizations, the so-called NGOs [nongovernmental organizations], have not only grown dramatically, but have interlinked and formed a very powerful network. And people talk about a new global civil society of the big NGO's like Oxfam, Greenpeace, Rainforest Action Network, International Forum on Globalization, and so on. These big organizations and hundreds of thousands of smaller organizations all network and have websites that are interlinked. Politics is being made by governments, by business and industry, but the new factor is this new civil society. So there is this sort of triangular relationship. And the civil society is as powerful now as business and government, and this is where the change will come from. We cannot expect much from government, but in parallel there is a world grassroots summit of NGO's. [As] this happens more and more, as the civil society gets together and makes policies and operates directly at the global level by influencing public opinion, this is the way for the future.

BB: Fritjof, you have an uncanny ability to answer the question I'm about to ask! [Both laugh.] You end The Hidden Connections with several hopeful quotes from colleagues, including Amory Lovins, Lester Brown, Vedana Shiva, but in 1999 when I asked your colleague, Ernest (Chick) Callenbach, "What is the state of ecology today?" he answered, "I would say very mixed. Nobody likes breathing terrible air, and we've had some success here. Air pollution in certain lakes and rivers is a little better. But the thing you have to remember here is that the press is owned, is a corporate press, and it is unlikely to make serious proposals for things that would inflict monetary pain on the corporate community." Even you admit, from your last chapter, "If we extrapolate the current environmental trends into the future the outlook is alarming." Perhaps you've already answered this, but to repeat: How do you justify your optimism?

FC: The mass media is no longer the most important organ of communication. The electronic communication over the internet by the new civil society, by the new NGO's, is as important as the corporate-owned media. So, it is true what Chick said that the media are owned by the same corporations who are the problem and not the solution. It is also true that the coalition of NGO's has known how to circumvent these media and address themselves directly to the public.

BB: Have you ever seen Ben Bagdikian's book, The Media Monopoly? It's a brilliant analysis of the consolidation of corporate media. What you're saying is that if the internet is kept free it may trump that media monopoly.

FC: Yes. That's already happening.

BB: How do you encourage "systems thinking" at the Center for Ecoliteracy?

FC: We work with schools to promote ecological literacy and systems thinking in elementary schools and high schools, and even in kindergarten. We train teachers and we promote ecologically oriented projects. We are a foundation and we give money to schools to have school gardens, to get engaged in creek restorations. We promote the experience of nature, a hands-on approach to ecology where kids learn in the school garden, by cooking meals, by going to visit organic farms, by restoring creeks, and so on.

BB: Is there a way that the general public can get involved?

FC: The general public can get very involved, because the "general public" usually has kids who are in schools! The website is www.ecoliteracy.org. And if you look at the website there are tons of stories about everything we do. And since it's a foundation we give grants. So I would encourage everyone to go to their schools, apply for grants, and get started on similar projects.

BB: Final thoughts—Is there anything you'd like to add that I've missed, or is there any message for our readers?

FC: I would reiterate that we now have the technologies and the ideas to make it possible to shift to a sustainable society. The problems are not technological or conceptual. The problems are of political will and political leadership.

BB: Any chance you'll be running for political office?

FC: No, no way!

BB: [laughs] Thank you very much for you time today!

FC: I enjoyed this!

We would very much appreciate your comments and feedback, and we will publish articulate replies, be they bouquets or brickbats. Write: OPEN EXCHANGE MAGAZINE, POB 7880, Berkeley, CA 94707. Email: openexchange@earthlink.net.



*War Profiteers, in Africa, as Well as Iraq
By Dena Montague

As Bush creates a corporate protectorate in Iraq, many companies who stand to benefit from reconstruction and oil exploration there are familiar to Africans. Shell, Bechtel and Fluor Corporation are all associated with massacres and crimes against humanity in Africa. Oil giant Shell Corporation had a hand in the death of Ken Saro Wiwa and the massacre of hundreds of Ogoni in the Niger Delta of Nigeria. Bechtel has profited from and exacerbated the ongoing war in the DRC. And Flour Corporation had tight relationships with the Apartheid regime of South Africa.

Shell in Nigeria
One of the latest announcements concerning executive positions in post-war Iraq was that Philip Carroll, former chief executive of Shell Oil Company, is a "a leading contender to oversee Iraqi oil production," according to the New York Times. Mr. Carroll, who headed Shell through the 1990, oversaw the company's Nigeria operations during the dictatorship of Sani Abacha, a time of massive political upheaval.

Shell was, and continues to be, the largest oil producer in Nigeria.

During the 1990s a powerful people's movement emerged in the Niger Delta, Nigeria's main oil producing area, to hold the company accountable for massive environmental damage caused over decades by its operations there. The movement began with the Ogoni people, a small community of half a million people living on land which contains some of the sweetest crude oil in the world. Shell's operations on Ogoniland devastated the people's farming and fishing areas, which were central to their survival.
Internationally renowned political activist, author and Nobel Peace Prize nominee Ken

Saro-Wiwa led the Movement for the Survival of Ogoni People (MOSOP) based on principles of non-violence. The movement was met with violent retaliation from the Nigerian military, supported and paid for in part by Shell Oil Corporation. In reaction to Ogoni protests, the Nigerian military under Abacha detained and abused thousands of Ogoni and summarily executed hundreds, including Ken Saro-Wiwa.

Carroll was CEO of Shell Oil throughout this period and his company regularly collaborated with the Nigerian military during the uprising, according to Human Rights Watch. Shell admitted to having made direct payments to Nigerian security forces and importing arms used by the Nigerian police. In fact, the company continues to have its own police force known by people in the region as the "Shell Police," and that force continues to be linked to civilian deaths in the area.

The Bush Administration claims it wants to ensure that the sale of Iraqi oil benefits the Iraqi people. If this is true, the man tapped to lead the revival of Iraqi oil industry is not the right person for the job. Carroll led a corporation that collaborated with the brutal Nigerian military under Abacha and did nothing to ensure that the population benefited from the company's presence. To this day, Shell has failed to successfully clean up the damage left behind on Ogoniland from production operations abandoned in 1993. The Nigerian population as a whole suffers tremendous poverty in a country that lacks a functioning infrastructure, despite having in the world's sixth largest oil producing capacity.

Is this the legacy the Bush Administration plans on leaving in Iraq?

It is the legacy left by Shell Oil Company under Carroll.

This footnote was excerpted from an article originally posted on April 22, 2003 at www.CommonDreams.org. Dena Montague is a Senior Research Associate at the World Policy Institute.


**The Global Civil Society
By Fritjof Capra

At the turn of this century, an impressive global coalition of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), many of them led by men and women with deep personal roots in the sixties, formed around the core values of human dignity and ecological sustainability. In 1999, hundreds of these grassroots organizations interlinked electronically for several months to prepare for joint protest actions at the meeting of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in Seattle. The "Seattle Coalition," as it is now called, was extremely successful in derailing the WTO meeting and in making its views known to the world. Its concerted actions have permanently changed the political climate around the issue of economic globalization.

Since that time, the Seattle Coalition, or "global justice movement," has not only organized further protests but has also held several World Social Forum meetings in Porto Alegre, Brazil. At the second of these meetings, the NGOs proposed a whole set of alternative trade policies, including concrete and radical proposals for restructuring global financial institutions, which would profoundly change the nature of globalization.

Excerpted from "Where Have All The Flowers Gone: Reflections on the Spirit and Legacy of the Sixties" which is posted at www.fritjofcapra.com.

RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THIS ARTICLE:
www.ecoliteracy.org
www.fritjofcapra.net
www.ngo.org
www.commondreams.org
www.openexchange.org