Living systems are nested and consist of basic materials, cells, organisms, ecosystems, and their environments, continuously interacting in time and space. Life is an integrated process of nested living systems. We synthesise and discuss exergy capturing and accumulation of organisational exergy; the structuring of the system towards maximum entropy production and export of high entropy products; autopoiesis; emergent attractors or optimum operating points; characteristics of nested systems and holarcic levels; and the role of working and latent information. It is concluded that it is only possible to describe the livingness of a system in a continuous way, and that living matter should be defined by the processes of which it is a part. Hence, from the perspective of selforganising and nested living systems it is difficult to draw boundaries between living and non-living as well as human and non-human systems. Implications of this worldview is discussed in relation to environmental management.Key words: self-organisation, autopoiesis, hierarchy, life processes, evolution 2 IntroductionThe global call for sustainable development, the urgent need for ways to approach such a development, and the growing awareness of mankind's dependence on the lifesupporting environment [40] has increased the interest for making explicit use of ecosystem processes and functions for the production and maintenance of valuable goods and services. Ecotechnology or ecological engineering [19,37] represent applications in this direction. These techniques imply the design of a human activity with its natural environment for the benefit of both. They are thus very different from conventional Western-oriented engineering and technologies that try to substitute or conquer the natural environment, a substitution that generally requires large amounts of industrial energies, other natural resources, as well as the often unrecognised but fundamental ecosystem services [11,20,41]. A major argument for using ecologically based technology is that such solutions generally are more cost-efficient than conventional technical measures [3]. However, we are convinced that these technologies are not only less costly, but also more sustainable because they are founded on basic principles of ecosystem functioning. As stated by Costanza [12] "Ecological systems are our best current models of sustainable systems. Better understanding of ecological systems and how they function and maintain themselves can yield insights into designing and managing sustainable economic systems". Our purpose with this article is to contribute to the development of a theoretical foundation for the interdependent systems of humans and nature, which could provide a framework for human actions, in collaboration with the life-supporting environment on which we depend. In the article we synthesise what we believe are fundamental life processes crucial for self-organisation and evolution of all living systems, natural as well as human [10,26,27,40,42,45,52,57,58]. Living system...
Benjamin Franklin, Feb. 1735, Poor Richard's Almanack[20]. I IntroductionThis paper will investigate the phenomenon of discontinuous change in multilevel hierarchical systems, especially interacting ecological-economic systems. In so doing we hope to shed light on both the functioning of hierarchical systems in general and the peculiarities of the interaction between ecological and economic systems in particular. The normal pattern in hierarchies is for higher levels to act as constraints upon lower levels. It is widely argued that this involves higher levels operating on a slower time frequency of oscillation [3,p.30] .' Thus they "slave" the more rapidly oscillating lower levels in the manner described in the synergetics theory of Haken [25,67] But on occasion this normal pattern is upended. A discontinuous change at a lower level triggers a discontinuous change at a higher level. This is the "revolt of the slaved variables"[ 161 and can become the source of a profound systemic transformation throughout the hierarchy. Ecologic-economic systems are widely characterized by multilevel hierarchies in their structure. Levels each have their own time and space scales [43] with the lower tending to be shorter and smaller in space, although there may be exceptions or complications to this.' Gunther and Folke [24] argue that living systems are characterized by a nested embeddedness, as with the organism containing the cell as a constituent part. They call such systems holarchic in order to distinguish them from hierarchies in which lower level elements are not the actual constituents of the higher level ones, as with soldiers and their commanding officer^.^ Each level of a hierarchy can be conceptualized according to its own cyclical dynamical pattern, according to Simon's[57] principle of the "near decomposability of hierarchies." For ecosystems such dynamics may be modeled according to the Holling[28] "4-box" construct. In this model there are successive stages of exploitation, conservation, release, and reorganization. An example is a subsystem of a forest passing through succession, reaching a climax state, collapsing, and being regenerated. Similar cycles occur for the leaves of the forest, but much more rapidly as a lower level of the ecological hierarchy. Although there are some difficulties with the analogy, economic cycles can sometimes be characterized by four stages, the boom, peak, recession, and trough of the classic macroeconomic business cycle.4 Holling [29] has argued that a systemic transformation is most likely to occur within a given level just as reorganization is about to move into exploitation or growth. We suggest here that such a structural break can also occur at the point that the highly conserved system is about to break down in a release. At such junctures disjunctions can occur leading the system to become something else. The former can be thought of as a case of order emerging out of chaos whereas the latter may be just the opposite. In both cases there may be a systemic leap to a new c...
To fulfil the basic goal of delivering food for the tables of the citizens, modern Western agriculture is extremely dependent on supporting material flows, infrastructure, and fossil energy. According to several observers, fossil fuel production is about to peak, i.e., oil extraction is no longer capable of keeping pace with the increasing demand. This situation may trigger an unprecedented increase in fossil energy prices, which may make the current highly energy dependent food production-distribution system highly vulnerable. The paper starts with a survey of this vulnerability. Also, the supply of phosphorus, a key factor in agriculture, may be at stake under such circumstances. The paper analyses this situation and discusses settlement structures integrated with agriculture that might increase food security by reducing energy demands. In the proposed ideal societal structure, agriculture is integrated with settlements and most of the food needed by the population is produced locally, and the nutrients for food production are recycled from households and animals by means of biological processes demanding considerably less mechanical investment and fossil support energy than the conventional type of agriculture. The vulnerability of this structure would be considerably lower, than that of the current system.
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