Elisabet Sahtouris: the world on the way to becoming a butterfly

It was an honour and real pleasure to chat an hour with Elisabet Sahtouris, a renowned evolution biologist and futurist who is exploring the relevance of biological systems to organizational design in business, government and globalisation. She currently holds the Elisabet Sahtouris Chair in Living Economies at the World Business Academy, Santa Barbara, California and is a Professor in Residence at Chaminade University, School of Business & Communication, Honolulu, Hawaii. Her books include “A Walk Through Time: From Stardust to Us”, “Biology Revisioned” (co-authored with Willis Harman), “EarthDance: Living Systems in Evolution”, and “Gaia’s Dance: The Story of Earth & Us”. Elisabet is currently visiting Estonia, speaking at many venues and events (the complete list of the speaking engagements can be found on the Gaia Akadeemia webpage).

“Caterpillars chew their way through ecosystems leaving a path of destruction as they get fatter and fatter. A caterpillar can eat up to three hundred times its own weight in a day, devastating many plants in the process, continuing to eat until it’s so bloated that it hangs itself up and goes to sleep, its skin hardening into a chrysalis. Then, within the chrysalis, within the body of the dormant caterpillar, a new and very different kind of creature, the butterfly, starts to form. These changes occur when the crisis of overeating, fatigue and breakdown opens the door for the caterpillar gradually to begin developing into a butterfly. Such metamorphosis makes a good metaphor for the great changes we are experiencing in the world today. Our bloated old system is rapidly becoming defunct while the vision of a new and very different society is now emerging like a butterfly, seeing our human society not in the metaphors and models of mechanism as well-oiled social machinery, but in those of evolving, self-organising and intelligent living organism.” – Elisabet Sahtouris

Listen and enjoy!