Elisabet Sahtouris
“A pioneer ecosystem is made of species that are feisty and competitive and bumping each other off, and a climax ecosystem is made up of species that are tightly interwoven and all feeding each other, like mature rain forests and coral reefs and prairies, with many, many species interdependent in a dance of love and interchange of all kinds.”
Elisabet Sahtouris M.S., Ph.D, is a Greek-American evolution biologist, futurist, author, professor, speaker and consultant on Living Systems Design. Known for her articulate and encouraging approach, she proposes solutions to humankind’s economic, political, social and spiritual problems through her understanding of the Earth’s naturally evolving living systems and of indigenous cultures’ science and spirituality. She consults with corporations and government organizations in Australia, Brazil and the United States, and lectures and appears on radio and television across the world.
Dr. Sahtouris studied at Syracuse University, Indiana University and Dalhousie University in Canada. She received a post-doctoral research grant at the American Museum of Natural History in New York and another at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. She taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and at the University of Massachusetts. She teaches in the Bainbridge Graduate Institutes’s MBA program on sustainable business.
Sahtouris lived extensively in Greece and the Peruvian Andes where she perceived solutions to our global problems in Earth’s ecosystems and indigenous sciences. Through observing that all healthy living systems self-organize and maintain themselves by principles which include the empowered participation of all parts and negotiated self-interest among all levels, she has demonstrated the relevance of biological systems to organizational design in business, government and globalisation.
Dr. Sahtouris has written about integral cosmologies and was a science writer for BBC London and for WGBH Boston’s television series, Nova. Her books include A Walk Through TIme: from Stardust to Us; Biology Revisioned, co-authored with Willis Harman; and EarthDance: Living Systems in Evolution. She participanted in the Synthesis Dialogues with the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala and was featured in the documentary Dalai Lama Renaissance. She also appears in documentary films exploring consciousness and evolution, I Am and Thrive. (She and nine others including Deepak Chopra, Amy Goodman, and Vandana Shiva have disassociated themselves from Thrive due to unclear content representation.)
Dr. Sahtouris has been a UN consultant on indigenous peoples and is a co-founder of the Worldwide Indigenous Science Network. She is a Fellow of the World Business Academy and an advisor to EthicalMarkets.com and to the Masters in Business program at Schumacher College.
Elisabet Sahtouris believes that “once you tell people a really positive story, that they are part of a huge global change on this planet, and that there are so many ways it is happening that we won’t even recognize this world in a relatively near future, their eyes really light up.” She passionately advocates that it is imperative and more effective for us to focus on creating new ways rather than fighting or criticizing old ones, which will fade on their own. “Be the change you want to see. Develop the alternative media, develop the alternative law, the alternative education, the alternative food. That’s our job here!”
Visit her website:
http://www.sahtouris.com/
“After Darwin” (4 min)
“How can Self, Spirit and Society Thrive in a Context of Collapse?” (7 min)
“Celebrating Crisis” (TEDx Hamburg 2011, 19 min)