Books

I am very happy to announce the publication of the Screenplay of Mindwalk, the film based on my book The Turning Point, created and directed by my brother Bernt Capra. In addition to the Screenplay (co-written by Floyd Byars and myself), the book contains Director’s Notes by Bernt and a Scientific Commentary in which I explore the film’s scientific ideas in some depth.

We are publishing this book to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the film’s premiere at the Sundance Film festival. Since its release in 1991, Mindwalk has become a cult classic, shown not only in theaters but in countless college courses and business seminars.

Essential Essays from Five Decades

I am delighted to announce that a collection of my essays, Patterns of Connection, will be published by University of New Mexico Press in October 2021. The essays in this book reflect the evolution of my thinking during the last five decades. Many contain materials that never made it into any of my books, and quite a few have never even appeared in print.

These essays combine and interrelate the two sides of my professional life as a scientist and science writer, on the one hand, and as an environmental educator and activist on the other. Hence, they reflect not only the trajectory of my career but also the history of several movements for social change — from the counterculture of the 1960s to the New Age movement of the 1970s, the emergence of Green politics in the 1980s, and the rise of the global civil society from the 1990s to the present.

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.