2009
Dimensions cm. 14 x 21
Paperback
Cover with flaps
ISBN 978-88-95642-36-9
pp. 236 ill. 5

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Brian Goodwin

DUE TO NATURE
Healing our fragmented culture

Our scientific culture, which gave birth to modern technology, is in desperate need of change. Science has largely meant groups of specialists working in separate disciplines, seeking answers to narrowly defined questions which have little or nothing to do with the living world. The last few years, however, have seen a shift to a more integrated, holistic approach to how we view and understand our world. There is still much work to be done. Most modern people have come to accept a fragmented culture whereby science isolates us from the natural world. As a result, we feel we can govern it and dominate it as we please. Brian Goodwin, acclaimed author of How the Leopard Changed Its Spots, argues for a view of nature as complex, interrelated networks of relationships. He proposes that, in order for us to once again work with nature to achieve true sustainability on our planet, we need to adopt a new science, new art, new design, new economics and new patterns of responsibility. We must be willing to pay nature its due: to recognise what we owe to the natural world and resist exploiting it solely for our own ends.

In this book Brian Goodwin argues that we rethink and broaden our outlook so that science and culture are considered a single, uninterrupted and unified creative process instead of two separate fields in which the peculiarities of man are seen as distinctive traits that keep the two apart. The connections between nature and culture, which are explored throughout the book, show how coherence, entirety and meaning are all terms applicable to both as they describe similar processes of creativity in different spheres. Through science and knowledge Goodwin leads us to the discovery of a holistic vision supported by many examples and founding new models of scientific analysis of biological phenomena.

Brian Goodwin was born in 1931 in Montreal, Canada, where he studied biology at McGill University. He became a Reader at Oxford University and then studied for a PhD in biology and mathematics at the University of Edinburgh with C.H. Waddington. He then taught holistic science at Schumacher College in Devon, Great Britain. He died in July 2009.