Education for sustainability: lessons from living systems governance

Pierre Bricage (1)

1 AFSCET - Association Française de Science des Systèmes

To survive that is 'to eat and not to be eaten'. Whatever its spatial and temporal level of organisation, every living system, to survive and 'to itself survive its self', owns 7 invariant capacities: the gauge invariance paradigm (figure 1). Emerging by embedments and juxtapositions of previous systems, every living system-of-systems (figure 2) is both independent and dependent from its new global level of organisation (endophysiotope) and past and present local situations of emergence (ecoexotope). Mass growth governs growth phase duration (figure 3). Local actors, modules of past, present and new modules-of-modules (figure 4) become mutually integrated (percolation process) into a new global Whole (figure 5) through their merging into an ARMSADA (Association for the Reciprocal and Mutual Sharing of Advantages and DisAdvantages). Reversely, systemic constructal law (figure 6), the global Whole is integrating the local parceners. Whatever the level of organisation (figure 7), the living systems obey the same principles of evolution and emergence: the volume of the adult system VA (i.e. space scaling) and its time of generation tg (i.e. duration scaling) are linked through a power law VA2 = C.tg3 (figure 8). The mass controlled duration of acquisition of the reproductive capacity and the volume at the acquisition are always linked by this power law of exponent 3/2 : this dynamic fractal law is invariant, “between and within levels of organisation”, on a 62x62x62x62 dimensions scale (figure 9). As all the sub-systems which live in it, the whole Universe survives into an ecoexotope that it shares with other Universes. Brownian motion is the basic phenomenon of control of growth (figure 10) and flows exchange: matter and energy are exchanged at constant flow rate (figure 11). A Pareto relationship governs limits and limitations interactions (figure 12): 'mutual survival depends on reciprocal limitations', 'for the best and for the worst' (figure 13); to survive that is to transform disadvantages into advantages and to avoid advantages turn to disadvantages (figure 14). [100 references]

Mots clés: ARMSADA; fractal law; gauge invariance; governance; living systems; sustainability; systems thinking

Domaines: Etudes de l'environnement

Pierre Bricage. Education for sustainability: lessons from living systems governance. 3rd IASCYS international meeting "Research Development and Education of Systems Science and Cybernetics", International Academy for Systems and Cybernetic Sciences, Oct 2017, Chengdu, China. ⟨halshs-01705968⟩