“The new science of ecology enriched the emerging systemic way of thinking by introducing two new concepts: community and network.
By viewing an ecological community as an assemblage of organisms bound into a functional whole by their mutual relationships, ecologists facilitated the change of focus from organisms to communities and back, applying the same kind of concepts to different systems levels”.
Gestalt psychologists led by Max Wertheimer and Wolfgang Köhler, saw the existence of irreductibles wholes as a key aspect of perception. Living organisms, they asserted, perceive things not in terms of isolated elements, but as integrated perceptual patterns, meaningful organized wholes, wich exhibit qualities that are absent in their parts.
Fritjof Capra. The web of life
#SystemsThinking #GestaltPsychology #FritjofCapra #TheWebOfLife
The ideas set forth by organismic biologists during the first half of the [20th] century helped to give birth to a new way of thinking (systems thinking) in terms of connectedness, relatioships, context.
According to the systems view, the essential propierties of an organism, or living system, are propierties of the whole, wich none of the parts have. They arise from the interactions and relationships among the parts.
Fritjof Capra. The web of life.
Ref.: Paul Weiss
#LivingSystems #SystemsThinking #OrganismicBiology #FritjofCapra #TheWebOfLife #PaulWeiss
The biochemist Lawrence Henderson was influential through his early use of the term “system” to denote both living organisms and social systems. From that time on, a system has come to mean an integrated whole whose esential propierties arise from the relationships between its parts, and “systems thinking” the understanding of a phenomenon within the context of a larger whole.
This is, in fact, the root meaning of the word “system”, wich derives from the Greek 'synhistanai' (“to place together”). To understand things systematically literaly means to put them into a context, to establish the nature of their relarionships.
Fritjof Capra. The web of life.
#OrganismicBiology #LivingSystems #SocialSystems #SystemsThinking
“We must think of each part as an organ, that produces the other parts (so that each reciprocally produces the other)... Because of this, [the organism] will be both and organized and self-organizing being”
Kant
“Each creature is but a patterned gradation (schattierung) of one great harmonious whole”.
Goethe.
All living beings are members of ecological communities bound together in a network of interdependencies.
#DeepEcology #EcologicalValues #SystemsThinking #FritjofCapra #TheWebOfLife #Networks
Deep ecological awareness recognizes the fundamental interdependence of all phenomena and the fact that, as individuals and societies, we are all embedded in (and ultimately dependent on) the cyclical processes of nature.
#DeepEcology #Awareness #SystemsThinking #FritjofCapra #TheWebOfLife
A constellation of concepts, values, perceptions, and practices shares by a community, wich forms a particular vision of reality that is the basis of the way the community organizes itself.
“A sustainable society is one that satisfies its needs without disminishing the prospects of future generations”.
Lester Brown (Worldwatch Institute).