The great challenge of our time, as we mentioned in our previous chapter, is to build and nurture sustainable communities and societies, designed in such a way that our activities do not interfere with nature's inherent ability to sustain life. The first step in this endeavor is to understand the principles of organization that nature's ecosystems have evolved to sustain the web of life; we need to become, as it were, ecologically literate.

We also emphasized in the previous chapter that the basic principles of ecology – interdependence, the cyclical nature of ecological processes, flexibility, diversity, etc. – are basic systemic properties of all living systems. This is why the systemic understanding of life not only holds great intellectual fascination but is also tremendously important from a practical point of view. It is the cognitive foundation of our endeavor to move toward a sustainable future.

Interconnectedness of world problems

Once we become ecologically literate, once we understand the processes and patterns of relationships that enable ecosystems to sustain life, we will also understand the many ways in which our human civilization, especially since the Industrial Revolution, has ignored these ecological patterns and processes and has interfered with them. And we will realize that these interferences are the fundamental causes of many of our current world problems.