The Emerging Discovery of a Self-Organizing Universe

Brian Swimme and Mary Evelyn Tucker

1.0 Introduction

In the last several decades the scientific community has been engaged in discovering the nature of our interconnected universe. From cosmology to ecology to complexity sciences a remarkable body of literature illustrating the relational qualities of our planet and the universe in which it evolved has emerged.

This annotated bibliography brings this literature together in a comprehensive manner for the first time. The bibliography has arisen in response to the contemporary global environmental crisis that has resulted in massive destruction of species and ecosystems. Such devastation has arisen from the fact that humans have become a planetary power with virtually unrestrained desire for resource consumption. We are now, however, entering a period of rethinking this maladaptive tendency of the human. We are reimagining our role as humans at the species level as participants in the Earth Community.

Critical to this revisioning process is the recognition that we are part of a vast evolutionary process that has brought forth life and continues to sustain life on the planet. The discovery of science—in its various branches of knowledge—is that we are embedded in nested spheres of symbiotic, ecological communities.

Throughout most of the modern era, science provided only a linear approximation of nature’s dynamics and conceived of the universe in mechanical terms. With the emergence of the various sciences of complexity and evolution we can see ourselves in an empirical manner as part of interconnected, nonlinear emergent processes. This is a radical break from the sciences of the nineteenth century.

This bibliography represents a flowering of this new knowledge that can be seen in conjunction with the reorientation of religious traditions to their cosmological components. Together the insights of science, as evident in this bibliography, and the insights of religion, as illustrated in the Harvard Divinity School Center for the Study of World Religions series on World Religions and Ecology, can serve to realign the human within a cosmological context of benefit to both persons and planet.

As the Forum on Religion and Ecology strives for a rapport between religious and scientific perspectives appropriate to a sustainable biosphere, this annotated bibliography proceeds from highlighting self-organizing principles to understanding their embodiment at each stage in the emerging universe from galaxies, stars, planets, and ecosystems.

This bibliography has been compiled by Arthur Fabel who, in collaboration with Mary Evelyn Tucker, Brian Swimme, and John Grim, has painstakingly identified and annotated this remarkable body of literature, most of which has emerged in just the last several years.