In the limited scope of this book I wish to present a brief review of the progressive destruction of nature, particularly in the domain of animal life, and at the same time to ill- trate some of the possibilities by BIII:- Ion-.--------------, which man can prevent this de- 3 ~----------~f_4 struction. As the mightiest creation of na- 2,51-______ a _ ___ ~L...-_j ture, man extends his influence into all of nature's provinces and in- 2 1--- - -------1---; habits all zones of the earth. ,,51----------1'------1 Civilization and technology, ulti- mate consequences of his unique 1 cerebral development, have pro- moted man to this position of O~>,I,.,oo-="'------------I power. An enormous population increase in recent centuries has 1850 1100 1700 1800 1BIIO 1800 .110.2000 made him one of the most numer- An ous of all animal forms. A com- h parison of the alarming climb of 5 earth's population curve (Fig. la) - ",0 with the graphical representation r-- of exterminated animal species 30 r- (Fig. Ib) establishes a striking conformity. The steeper the human 20 r-- population curve climbs, the higher 10- stretch the bars representing the h -r-- number of exterminated animal 1650 1700 17150 1800 18SO 1900 19SO 2000 species.

The central concern of this book is us human beings. The authors? basic question is: ?How is it that we can live in mutual care, have ethical concerns, and at the same time deny all that through the rational justification of aggression The authors answer this basic question indirectly by providing a look into the fundaments of our biological constitution, concentrating on what they term the emotioning, the preferences of living that guide the flow of the systemic conservation through systemic reproduction of the manner of living conserved. Humberto Maturana is renowned for developing the theory of autopoesis. He was founder-director of the Laboratory for Experimental Epistemology and the Biology of Cognition at the University of Chile in Santiago.

Cybernetics and human knowing: a journal of second-order cybernetics, autopoieses and cyber-semiotics.A quarterly international multi- and transdisciplinary journal devoted to the new understandings of the self-organizing processes of information in human knowing that have arisen through the cybernetics of cybernetics, or second order cybernetics, its relation and relevance to other interdisciplinary approaches such as C.S. Pierce's semiotics.