For ages humans put significant resources and knowledge behind proposals that are meant to make things better for humanity — new economic arrangements, governance reforms, community ownership models, etc... Many of these proposals were/are thoughtfully designed, legally sound, and well-intentioned. And most of them still fail, not because the people behind them were wrong about their goals, but because the structural mechanisms they relied on did not hold up under pressure, or were quietly captured by interests that were supposed to be constrained, or simply collapsed when the conditions they were designed for no longer existed.

With all the problems we humans are facing today it is quite a sobering realisation that all these same problems needed to be solved and were solved remarkably successful - some billions of years ago - by unicellular organisms! Is there a way to learn from the solutions evolution has devised to help us navigate and assess our proposals and projects?

Actually once you realise that we humans are indivisible part of Nature and are - what physics calls CAS, complex adaptive systems - a kind of tamed chaos balanced in dynamic equilibrium - the similarity between humans and other organisms becomes vivid. It follows that the economy is a CAS and simply a subsystem of the biosphere. Full stop. This is not a statement about environmental policy. It is a physical reality. Economics uses biospheric materials and energy and waste returns to it. The flows are not separate and interacting — they are the same flows in the same space. Any project that treats the economy and the environment as two separate systems that need to be balanced is operating on a false and deadly model of reality.

You can not manage CAS. You can only influence it. In order to understand CAS it is not enough to understand its constituents, but you need to understand inner relationships and its initial conditions.

Instead of devising more rules and strict guidelines, we need to think about economic and social systems as landscapes. We need to shape them in a way that agents in a systems will respond to the landscape and other agents and not orders. Landscape where some directions are easy and others are hard, some patterns are stable and some are fragile, some outcomes attract the system over time and some repel it.

Some translations from Nature: