“Today corrective challenges to some of the most destructive dynamics of “progress” are coming from entirely unexpected directions, the very areas that were marginalized by the modern age: the knowing body, the creative cosmos, and the complex sense of place.  … Our understanding of nature is now radically shifting, however, because of recent discoveries in the new sciences. Studies known as “complexity science” have revealed that properties emerge creatively within systems, while chaos theory has shown that nature moves in and out of patterns of self-organization. Nature at large – -from the turbulence of streams in an ecosystem to the self-organizing abilities of galaxies throughout the universe — is now understood to function much more like a creative unfolding than a mechanistic play of stimulus and response.”

Charlene Spretnak, The Resurgence of the Real