Books

I am delighted to announce that Spanish and Russian editions of The Systems View of Life, coauthored with Pier Luigi Luisi and published originally by Cambridge University Press, will soon be available. I am very grateful to Cruz Prado for initiating contacts with the Universidad Tecnica Nacional in Costa Rica, and to Anna Siderova for contacting Editorial URSS in Moscow on my behalf.

Our textbook will be available in the following editions:

• Cambridge University Press, 2014; paperback edition with corrections, 2016
• Aboca, Sansepolcro, 2014 (Italian)
• Cultrix, São Paulo, 2014 (Portuguese)
• Mindspace, Copenhagen, 2016 (Danish)
• Universidad Tecnica Nacional, Quesada, Costa Rica (Spanish, in preparation)
• Editorial URSS, Moscow (Russian, in preparation)

(Foreword to a new book by Ove Jakobsen, Routledge, 2017)

My friend and colleague Prof. Ove Jakobsen, who teaches ecological economics at Nordland University in Bodø, Norway, just published this inspiring book to which I wrote the Foreword posted below. Ove and I also coauthored a paper titled “A Conceptual Framework for Ecological Economics Based on Systemic Principles of Life,” to be published later this year in the International Journal of Social Economics.

When we look at the state of the world today, what is most evident is the fact that the major problems of our time — energy, environment, economy, climate change, social justice — cannot be understood in isolation. They are systemic problems, which means that they are all interconnected and interdependent, and they require corresponding systemic solutions. As Pope Francis puts it in his remarkable encyclical “Laudato Sì”:

Our common home is falling into serious disrepair… [This is] evident in large-scale natural disasters as well as social and even financial crises, for the world’s problems cannot be analyzed or explained in isolation… It cannot be emphasized enough how everything is interconnected. (Paragraphs 61, 138)

The global economy, in particular, is an integral part and, in fact, the main engine of our multi-faceted global crisis. In recent years this fact has been widely recognized, and many eloquent critiques of our current system of global capitalism have been published. However, there have been very few, if any, comprehensive narratives of an alternative economic system. In my view, this is the main achievement of the present book.

I am happy to announce that my article on “Qualitative Growth,” coauthored with Hazel Henderson (see my blog post of September 14, 2009) is now available in Italian from Aboca, Sansepolcro, Italy (see http://www.abocashop.com/en/qualitative-growth).

In addition, Aboca recently published an article on “Agriculture and Climate Change,” which I wrote with Anna Lappé (see http://www.abocashop.com/en/agricoltura-e-cambiamento-climatico-2). In this article we present the multiple links between agriculture and climate change as a typical systemic problem and agroecology as the ideal systemic solution.

Toward a Legal System in Tune with Nature and Community

I am delighted to announce that my new book The Ecology of Law, coauthored with my friend and colleague Ugo Mattei, professor of law at Hastings College of the Law, San Francisco, and at the University of Turin, Italy, will be published by Berrett-Koehler in November 2015.

This book is the result of many years of dialogues between Ugo and myself, and of two joint seminars about “the laws of nature and the nature of law” at Hastings College. It is the first book to present jurisprudence — the theory and philosophy of law — as an intellectual discipline with a history and conceptual structure that shows surprising parallels to those of natural science.

My forthcoming book is the realization of a dream I have had for many years. It is a multidisciplinary textbook, coauthored with my friend and colleague Pier Luigi Luisi, Professor of Biology at the University of Rome, and to be published by Cambridge University Press in April 2014.

In this book, titled The Systems View of Life: A Unifying Vision, we present a coherent systemic framework that integrates four dimensions of life: the biological, the cognitive, the social, and the ecological dimension; and we discuss the philosophical, social, and political implications of this unifying vision.

Decoding the Notebooks of a Genius

My new book, Learning from Leonardo, has now been published by Berrett-Koehler in San Francisco.