Characteristics of Nested Living Systems

Abstract

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...

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