The Web of Life

The Web of Life, Fritjof Capra (Anchor 1996)

 In a brilliant overview and synthesis of current scientific thinking, Capra, a physicist by training, offers a comprehensive understanding of life as a web of intricate interconnections of everything, living and not.  Life is a pattern of organization of relationships, a network that forms dissipative structures through an active process of cognition.  Living systems are cognitive systems, constantly interacting with their environment in a pattern that is non-linear.  Living organisms are continually remaking themselves (autopoeisis) and their worlds through a process of self-organization.  Autopoesis or self-making the pattern of organization is the defining characteristic of life and separates living from non-living systems.   Three criteria describe a living system: 1) the pattern of organization or the configuration of relationships that determines the system’s essential characteristics.  2) Structure or the physical embodiment of the system’s pattern of organization.  3) Life process or the activity involved in the continual embodiment of the system’s pattern of organization.

Capra’s synthesis is a fundamental challenge to reductionist science, mechanistic thinking and Darwinian ideas of evolution.  Life is a fluid process occurring within many different communities, all interconnected and ever changing and changed by the communication between their members.   The constant circular flow of energy, matter and information provides an open system of adaptation and evolution where perhaps 95% of the DNA is used for integrative functions.    Humans who are aware of their own ability to know do not exist apart from their environs.  The web of life is physical, mental and spiritual.   It overcomes the Cartesian division of mind and matter, providing an integrative basis for health, society and the future of the earth.  “To regain our full humanity, we have to regain our experience of connectedness with the entire web of life.  This reconnecting, religio in Latin, is the very essence of the spiritual grounding of deep ecology”(p. 296).

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