Repairing the whole
Nature is able to create living structure by smooth sequences of recursively applied structure-preserving transformations, applied again and again and again to the wholeness which exists on the surface of the Earth.
The laws of physics, and chemistry, and hydrodynamics, and the laws of complex evolution — now called non-linear dynamics or complexity theory — all of them at their core suggest the same process: The wholeness which exists gives way, incessantly, to a next wholeness, which preserves the structure of the previous one. This happens even in the process of destruction, in the process of simplification, death, pruning. It happens, too, in the more complex two-level process we call genetic evolution.
The key is biology. In this book I have proposed a process, able to propagate life in our built and natural environment, which is very similar to the way that biological processes propagate plant and animal life on Earth. A key and vitally important point is this: The pressure towards life in the local system is congruent with a pressure towards life in the whole. There is no conflict between the life of the parts and the life of the whole. Every living process seeks, at every single moment, to increase the life of the parts and the life of the whole, together.
In principle, living processes of this class might then also be user to create everything else. They might, for instance, one day even be used as the processes for building human institutions, family discussions, for choices, for decisions of value, even politics. But that is, perhaps, looking a very long way into the future.
By inventing and re-inventing versions of the fundamental process in appropriate social forms, and applying these forms of process to all acts of making and building and preparing, this worldwide operation then contains within itself, the seeds or core of the biological unfolding process that occurs in nature, now applied to human society. Throughout human society, human beings who use it will be capable of healing and remaking the ravaged Earth.
#book/The Nature of Order/2 The process of creating life/Conclusion#