The great challenge of our time is to create sustainable communities – communities designed in such a manner that their ways of life, technologies and social institutions honor, support, and cooperate with nature’s inherent ability to sustain life. We do not need to invent them from scratch but can model them after nature’s ecosystems, sustainable communities of plants, animals and microorganisms.

The first step in this endeavor must be to become “ecologically literate,” i.e., to understand the principles of organization that ecosystems have evolved to sustain the web of life. In the coming decades the survival of humanity will depend on our ecological literacy – our ability to understand the basic principles of ecology and to live accordingly. Ecological literacy, or “ecoliteracy,” must become a critical skill for politicians, business leaders, and professionals in all spheres, and should be the most important part of education at all levels - from primary and secondary schools to colleges, universities, and the continuing education and training of professionals.

We need to teach our children (and our political and corporate leaders!) the fundamental facts of life - that one species’ waste is another species’ food; that matter cycles continually through the web of life; that the energy driving the ecological cycles flows from the sun; that diversity assures resilience; that life, from its beginning more than three billion years ago, did not take over the planet by combat but by networking.

Ecoliteracy is the first step. The second is ecodesign. We need to apply our ecological knowledge to the fundamental redesign of our technologies and social institutions, so as to bridge the current gap between human design and the ecologically sustainable systems of nature.

Following environmental educator David Orr, I have come to adopt an ecological defi nition of design as “the shaping of fl ows of energy and matter for human purposes.” Ecodesign is a process in which our human purposes are carefully meshed with the larger patterns and fl ows of the natural world. Ecodesign principles refl ect the principles of organization that nature has evolved to sustain the web of life. To practice design in such a context requires a fundamental shift in our attitude toward nature, a shift from finding out what we can extract from nature, to what we can learn.

In recent years, there has been a dramatic rise in ecologically oriented design practices and projects. They include a worldwide renaissance in organic farming, involving technologies based on ecological knowledge rather than chemistry or genetic engineering to increase yields, control pests, and build soil fertility; the organization of different industries into ecological clusters, in which the waste of any one organization is a resource for another; the shift from a product-oriented economy to a “service-and-flow” economy, in which industrial raw materials and technical components cycle continually between manufacturers and users; buildings designed to produce more energy than they use, emit no waste, and monitor their own performance; hybrid-electric cars achieving fuel efficiencies of 60 miles per gallon and more; and the development of efficient hydrogen fuel cells that promise to inaugurate a new era in energy production – the “hydrogen economy.” These technologies and projects all incorporate the basic principles of ecology, and thus tend to be small-scale that are diverse, energy efficient, non-polluting, community-oriented, and labor intensive.

To implement these technologies effectively we will also need to redesign many of our social institutions. For example, we need to change our tax system from taxing the things we value – jobs, savings, investments – to taxing the things we recognize as harmful, like pollution and resource depletion.

We need to end the numerous perverse subsidies of unsustainable and harmful industries and corporate practices. We must recognize that unlimited economic growth can only lead to disaster, and need to reorganize our economies accordingly.

The technologies available today providecompelling evidence that the transition to asustainable future is no longer a technical nor aconceptual problem. It is a problem of values and political will.

Fritjof Capra is a founding director of the Center for Ecoliteracy in Berkeley, California. He is the author of several international bestsellers, including The Hidden Connections.