Sustainability Calling

3Underlying Disturbing Processes: Asymmetries, Coriolis and Chirality

3.1. By way of introduction

This chapter is a contribution to fractal-based processes. In fractal constructs, we are using a basic function (e.g. in physics, a Mandelbrot or Varela equation), which represents the specifics of re-creativeness. It means that at each level of an assembly (an aggregation or percolation, an interacting population of persons, etc.), we are able to reproduce the same pattern and to detect a quite stable and smooth structure: an invariance of scale. Thus, the basic rules behind a sustainable self-organized system are like its backbone; they provide a kind of robustness to the global system.

In a sustainable system however, we need to provide additional conditions of working and evolving in order to ensure consistent re-creation cycles of the system, and a well-adapted continuation of the system working in its changing environment. Thus, any self-organized system can be regarded as an assembly of interacting subsystems, where each one is built up to cover a given function according to a specification hierarchy.

What we will describe in a system at physical level, is similar to what we encounter in cultural, political or economic systems; the means, the resources, the productions and the activities are organized so that the set of agents and actors will share the power of the global system and will act in a synergetic and specific way to meet the demands of the external world. Here, ...