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A network, once established, might be called an individual.

David George Haskell • The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature's Great Connectors

The small reflects the large, and the health of the whole system requires the flourishing of each part. When this principle of natural ecology is applied to human society, we see it as individual dignity and self-determination.

Jeremy Lent • What Does An Ecological Civilization Look Like?

Defining life in terms of ‘parts and wholes’ quickly slips into thinking in terms of arrangement and mechanistic function.

Nora Bateson • Small Arcs of Larger Circles: Framing through other patterns

we are now deep into an era in which the unintended consequences — the so-called externalities — of all the world-changing human creations that have resulted from our focus on the discrete, have become so pervasive and encompassing that it’s fair to wonder whether this historical focus on the discrete might be fundamentally problematic, inherently ... See more

Medium • The Ecosystem Hypothesis

at a deeper level, there is a connection, one that transcends the details of any particular mechanism. That connection is mathematics. All the examples are variations on the same mathematical theme: self-organization, the spontaneous emergence of order out of chaos.

Steven H. Strogatz • Sync: How Order Emerges from Chaos In the Universe, Nature, and Daily Life

Mathematicians call this phenomenon the emergence of a giant component, one that includes a large fraction of all nodes. Physicists call it percolation and will tell you that we just witnessed a phase transition, similar to the moment in which water freezes. Sociologists would tell you that your subjects had just formed a community. Though

Jennifer Frangos • Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means for Business, Science, and Everyday Life

The Great Work: Our Way into the Future

Thomas Berry

amazon.com

Cover of The Great Work: Our Way into the Future

The teeming hordes of living things on Earth, not only in space but in time, are actually all one massive, single organism just as certainly as each one of us (in our own minds) seems to be a distinct human being throughout our limited lifetime... Each of us is, equally, an independent living human and also just one utterly minute, utterly brief un... See more

Maria Popova • Notes on Complexity: A Buddhist Scientist on the Murmuration of Being

These approaches emerge from two different ways of seeing an organization: the prescriptive approach is based on the view that an organization can be designed and engineered like a machine, while the generative approach is based on the view that an organization is composed of living workers whose behavior necessarily emerges from their own values a