Episode 63: Patterns of Connection, Fritjof Capra with Morag Gamble

Sense-Making in a Changing World

It is my absolute delight to be welcoming to the Sense-Making in a Changing World show, someone I consider to be a leading ecological thinker/activist of our time - international best-selling author, scientist, writer, educator - Fritjof Capra - someone I am honoured to call a mentor, inspiration and very dear friend.
Our conversation in this episode spans a five decade history of ecological and youth movements, being part of a community of elders, the importance of permaculture and agroecololgy, peace, learning communities, ecoliteracy, earth ethics and social change.

About 30 years ago Fritjof Capra and I met at Schumacher College in the UK at a residential course he was leading with a global learning community. This experience transformed my life. I felt a deep sense of coming home in the thinking, ethics, philosophy and way of being, and this firmly grounded my subsequent actions. I can pinpoint this as the catalyst for what I do now.

I was in my early 20s, still at university, when I began devouring Fritjof’s books - The Turning Point, Tao of Physics, Uncommon Wisdom - all of these introduced to me by my father (Thanks Dad!!!!). On semester breaks, I’d head to the Gippsland Lakes to read, walk, and contemplate.
This one particular year, 1991, sitting among a pile of Fritjof’s books, sparks literally began flying - my mind and way of seeing and being in the world was cracking opening. The ecological paradigm he described and advocated made complete sense to me and I felt totally different. Since then, I have been applying systems thinking in my daily life - both personally and professionally - through permaculture, community gardens, ecovillages, and a wide range of education programs.

Fritjof’s 2014 grand synthesis, a text he co-wrote with Pier Luigi Luisi, The Systems View of Life, is the foundation of his online course, the Capra Course - which I now mentor young people through twice a year.

In this episode, we begin our conversation talking about his new book, Patterns of Connection - a collection of 30 essays spanning 50 years - and is an important history of grassroots movements from the counter culture of the 60s to emergence of the global civil society. He was writing about Climate Change in 198

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