Like many other people, I think I can date the start of my journey beyond reductionism to the day I read a book by Fritjof Capra over 20 years ago. Not long after, Eve attended a course by Capra at Schumacher College in the UK and the following year was invited back by him to help facilitate the next course. This time I went along, thus consolidating my understanding of his work, but also creating a hunger for a much deeper understanding of complexity. Grounding complexity thinking within our own context became the challenge that we faced when writing Just Transitions. It was therefore a moment of great celebration when we received the letter below from Fritjof Capra who had just finished reading Just Transitions.
Dear Mark and Eve,
I finally got around to reading your new book. It took a while for it to get to me from Schumacher College, and I am now just completing a long European lecture tour. But I did find the time to read most of it on the road. Congratulations! This is a masterful work with abundant documentation, resulting in a clear and coherent synthesis. I can well imagine how many years of hard work you must have put into this project. It will be a valuable source of reference for me, especially because of your unique African and sociological perspective.
In the meantime, I have been working on something similar: a multidisciplinary textbook, to be published by Cambridge University Press and titled “The Systems View of Life: A Unifying Vision.” It will be an updated summary of all my books, enriched by many contributions from my coauthor, Pier Luigi Luisi, professor of biology in Rome. We have worked on this book for over two years and are now in the home stretch.
Please let me know when your travels take you to Europe again. I am there every year, either in Spring or Autumn. It would be great to see you both again after all these years.
With warm regards,
Fritjof