What physics was for engineering in industrial society, biology/ecology can be for a new society. The biosphere is more than the sum of all living phenomena. The biosphere emerges from the interaction between these phenomena to become a "self-regulating totality."

A new biology and a new philosophy of life are being developed today at the forefront of the most crucial and significant science. Based on the epistemological orientation of Gregory Bateson, which unites Information Theory and Biology, the famous School of Cognitive Biology of professors Humberto Maturana and Francisco Verala is developing. A no less exciting approach is that represented by the so-called Paris School of self-organized systems, which is represented here by its best-known author, Henri Atlan. James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis formulate the famous "Gaia Hypothesis", a planetary model of cellular dynamics. Hazel Henderson sets out the economic scheme, and John Todd the ecological one.

Cultural historian William I. Thompson, looking at this fascinating panorama as a whole, deduces the emergence of a genuinely new paradigm: life as cognition, communication, knowledge. For the first time since Newton, a new ecology of consciousness emerges, the foundation for a new political and economic order. And ultimately, for a new way of living.