Fritjof Capra
Center for Ecoliteracy, California

Sustainability, Food and Life

A physicist and system theorist, Fritjof Capra is on the Faculty of Schumacher College in the UK and is the author of several international bestsellers. He is a founding director of the Center of Ecoliteracy in Berkeley, dedicated to promoting ecology and system thinking in primary and secondary education.

Over the past ten years, my colleagues and I at the Center for Ecoliteracy have developed a special pedagogy that we call “education for sustainable living.” The motivation behind our work is the realization that one of the critical challenges of our time — perhaps even the critical challenge — is to build and nurture sustainable communities. Our starting point is the recognition that we don’t need to invent sustainable human communities from zero but can learn valuable lessons from the study of ecosystems, which are sustainable communities of plants, animals, and microorganisms. The outstanding characteristic of our planet, our biosphere, is that it has sustained life for over three billion years. To create sustainable human communities, therefore, means first of all to understand this inherent ability of nature to sustain life, and then to redesign our physical structures, technologies and social institutions accordingly. This understanding is what we mean by “ecological literacy,” or “ecoliteracy.” So, the quest for ecological sustainability naturally leads to questions: How does nature sustain life? How do ecosystems work? How do they organize themselves to sustain their life processes over time? And when we study ecosystems, we soon find out that these lead to a more general question. How do living systems — organisms, ecosystems, and social systems — organize themselves? And in turn we arrive at an age-old enquiry: What is the nature of life?  

metabolism

Within the context of science, this question can be rephrased as “What are the essential characteristics of living systems?” What is the difference between a rock and a plant, or a rock and an animal, or a microorganism? To understand the nature of life, it is not enough to understand DNA, proteins and the other molecular structures that are the building blocks of living organisms, because these structures also exist in lifeless organisms like a dead piece of wood or bone.
The difference between a living organism and a dead organism lies in the basic process of life — in what sages and poets throughout the ages have called the “breath of life.” In modern scientific language, this process of life is called metabolism. It is the ceaseless flow of energy and matter through a network of chemical reactions, enabling a living organism to continually generate, repair and perpetuate itself. In other words, metabolism involves the intake, digestion, and transformation of food.
Since metabolism is the central characteristic of biological life, understanding the production, preparation, and consumption of food connects us directly with the very essence of life. Let me show with a few examples how closely food is connected to life at all levels. The broadest biological category of living organisms is that of a kingdom. There are five kingdoms of life: bacteria (microorganisms without cell nuclei), protists (microorganisms with nucleated cells), plants, fungi and animals.
The microorganisms consist of single cells (or of a few cells), and in those cells, the cell membrane controls the organism’s intake of nutrients and excretion of waste. By keeping certain substances out and letting others in, the membrane regulates the cell’s molecular composition and thus preserves its identity. Thus cellular identity is shaped and sustained by the intake of food.
Multicellular organisms — plants, fungi and animals — are classified according to their methods of acquiring nutrients. Plants take in food through photosynthesis — that marvelous process in which solar energy is converted into chemical energy, carbon dioxide is bound in organic substances and oxygen is released into the air, to be taken up by other plants and by animals in the process of respiration.
Fungi are plant-like and yet so different from plants that they are classified as a separate kingdom displaying a variety of fascinating properties. They lack the chlorophyll for photosynthesis, and they do not digest their food internally. Instead, they secrete enzymes outside their bodies and then absorb the externally digested nutrients. Animals ingest their food and then digest it.
In each case, the means of taking in food defines a multicellular organism as a member of one of the three kingdoms — plants, fungi or animals.
What about human beings? Biologically we are animals, but human life also includes other dimensions, in particular the cultural dimension. The same is true for the way we acquire our food. It too has an important cultural dimension. In fact, in its original meaning, the word culture referred to the cultivation of crops and the breeding of animals.
From there, it was extended metaphorically to the cultivation of the human mind before acquiring its meaning as the distinctive way of life of a people. And the original biological meaning of culture as cultivation is still present in our term agriculture.
The etymological connections between agriculture, a cultured person and the culture of a community open up a fascinating perspective on the very essence of human nature. About four million years ago, an extraordinary nexus occurred in the evolution of life when the first upright walking apes developed the skills of precise hand movements and the capacity to make tools, which may have led to the rapid brain growth and the evolution of language, reflective consciousness and organized social relations that mark the emergence of the human species.
With human evolution, food acquired its cultural dimension in both senses of the term culture. It began to be cultivated and prepared with the help of various technologies, and it was shared among human beings in cultural rituals and ceremonies. So while the biological processes of food intake allow us to distinguish plants from fungi and animals, the cultural dimensions of producing, preparing and consuming food are distinctive human characteristics.

Living networks

The full understanding of metabolism includes two basic aspects. One is the continuous flow of energy and matter. All living systems need energy and food to sustain themselves and all living systems produce waste. But life has evolved in such a way that organisms form communities, known as ecosystems, in which the waste of one species is food for the next, and matter is in a continuous cycle. The second aspect of metabolism is the network of chemical reactions that processes the food and forms the biochemical basis of all biological structures, functions and behavior. The emphasis here is on network.
One of the most important insights of the new scientific understanding of life that is now emerging is the recognition that networks are the basic pattern of organization of all living systems. Ecosystems are understood in terms of food webs (i.e., networks of organisms); organisms are networks of cells, organs and organ systems; and cells are networks of molecules. The network is a pattern common to all life. Wherever we see life, we see networks. It is important to realize that these living networks are not material structures, like a fishing net or a spider’s web. They are functional networks, networks of relationships between various processes. In a cell, for example, these processes are chemical reactions between the cell’s molecules. In a food web, the processes are of feeding, of organisms eating one another. In both cases the network is a nonmaterial pattern of relationships.
Closer examination of these living networks has shown that their key characteristic is that they are self-generating. In a cell, for example, all the biological structures — the proteins, enzymes, DNA, cell membrane, etc. — are continually produced, repaired and regenerated by the cellular network. Similarly, at the level of a multicellular organism, the bodily cells are continually regenerated and recycled by the organism’s metabolic network.
Living networks continually create or recreate themselves by transforming or replacing their components. In this way they undergo continual structural changes while preserving their web-like patterns of organization.
Part of this characteristic is the fact that in the metabolic flows through a living network, all the 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, blood cycles through our body, and so does air, lymph fluid and so on. Wherever we see life, we see networks; and wherever we see living networks, we observe cyclical flows.

The school garden

When we teach sustainable living, children learn about all the connections between food and life by gardening and preparing simple dishes. We have found that cultivating a school garden and using it as a resource for preparing school meals is an ideal project for experiencing the principles of ecology in action. Gardening reconnects children to the fundamentals of food, and thus to the fundamentals of life, while integrating and enlivening virtually every activity that takes place in school.
The understanding of life in terms of networks, flows and cycles is central to the systemic conception of life now emerging in science. And 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.
This understanding is also 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 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 natural food cycles and we integrate them 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 which 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.

Organic farming

In the garden, we learn that fertile soil is alive, containing billions of living organisms in every cubic inch. It is a complex ecosystem in which the substances that are essential to life move in cycles from plants to animals, to manure, to soil bacteria and back to plants. Solar energy is the natural fuel that drives these ecological cycles, and living organisms of all sizes are necessary to sustain the whole system and keep it in balance. Soil bacteria carry out various chemical transformations, such as the process of nitrogen fixation which makes atmospheric nitrogen accessible to plants. Deep-rooted weeds bring minerals to the soil surface where crops can make use of them. Earthworms break up the soil and loosen its texture. All these activities are interdependent, combining to provide the nourishment that sustains 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 gardening and agriculture practices. This principle is embodied in traditional farming methods, which are based on a profound respect for life.
When farmers grow crops organically, they use technologies based on ecological knowledge to increase yields, control pests and build soil fertility. They plant a variety of crops, rotating them so that insects attracted to one crop will disappear with the next.
They know it is unwise to eradicate pests completely, because this would also eliminate the natural predators that keep pests in balance in a healthy ecosystem. Instead of chemical fertilizers, these farmers enrich their fields with manure and tilled-in crop residue, thus returning organic matter to the soil to reenter the biological cycle.
Organic farming preserves and sustains the great ecological cycles, integrating their biological processes into the processes of food production. When soil is cultivated organically, its carbon content increases and contributes to reducing global warming. In fact it has been estimated that increasing the carbon content of the world’s depleted soils at reasonable rates would absorb about as much carbon as all human activity emits.
About four decades ago, the 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.

Learning in the real world

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 and Maria Montessori, a broad consensus has emerged among scientists and educators about the unfolding of cognitive functions in a 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 children’s full cognitive and emotional development. 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.

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