Book Reviews

The Web Of Life

by Fritjof Capra
Harper Collins, 1996, £20 (hardback)
Review by Jay Griffiths

Squall 15, Summer 1997, pg. 53.

The Web of Life opens with a quotation from Chief Seattle, “This we know, all things are connected like the blood which unites one family... Whatever befalls the earth, befalls the sons and daughters of the earth. Man did not weave the web of life; he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself”. What Fritjof Capra, highly trained theoretical physicist, does in this book, is to come back from that dark and complicated world of modern physics and tell us “Chief Seattle was right”.

Capra is the author of bestseller ‘The Tao of Physics’. Many people remember that Eureka moment on first reading ‘The Tao’, they know where they were and what they were doing like when John Lennon was shot.

‘The Web’ is a much more complicated book to read, but its message is vitally important. It is a retelling and combining of the most recent scientific discoveries - including the theory of complexity, Gaia theory and chaos theory. It is compendium of systems thinking which sets out to illustrate the insufficiency of the mechanistic model of physics - or indeed of society - and the necessity for conceptual models which are systems-based, holistic and inter-connective.

Back to basics; you and the tree are inseparable. Your mind is indivisible from the system in which it exists, and that includes the tree. Connection is not Identity, and to say “only connect” is not to say “only merge”. In conceptual terms, to say that you and the tree are intrinsically related is not the evaporation of difference but the exuberance of difference, because you are not only connected to the tree, but also to the parrot, the tide, the turnip, the blackberry and the hour. This is Liberation Physics, opening your mind to unimagined freedoms. The practical applications for environmentalism are as important as the psychological implications.

“Care flows naturally if the ‘self’ is widened and deepened so that protection of free Nature is felt and conceived as protection of ourselves.” (Italics added.) If you and the tree are connected, to cut it down is to hurt yourself. Seattle knew it. Now science does too.