The Italian mathematician Luigi Fantappiè named it sintropia in 1942, out of his work on the equations of physics, and Albert Szent-Györgyi, who won a Nobel for isolating vitamin C, proposed the same word in 1977 for the drive he saw in living matter to perfect itself. I met the word later and lower down, in the soil, through the way Ernst Götsch farms in Bahia, planting the way a forest assembles itself, in dense succession with heavy pruning, so that each generation of plants feeds the soil and the light of the generation after it, and that is where many meet Syntropy for the first time, with their hands in the dirt, because nature doesn’t make it difficult. What the physicists wrote down and what the farmer does are one and the same movement, Life concentrating itself into higher levels of order, and the whole of this pillar is me following that one movement from the paddock all the way home.

People ask me where entropy fits, and for me entropy exists only because of Syntropy; the physics of a closed box is real, and Life answers it by taking the lid off, because the moment the lid comes off Life walks in and starts stacking sunlight into grass and grass into forest. Where I see entropy at work is in the idea phase, in the mind of a human being running a fantasy, which for me means an idea with no living pattern under it, and you can read that in any paddock, because pests and disease only ever come into any system to indicate that there’s something lacking, and the root and the origin of that disease doesn’t sit in the leaves, it sits in the soil. Everything alive is performing a function with purpose, and the whole of my practice comes down to one move, to question the function. What is the grasshopper doing here? What is the guinea grass doing here? What is this weight in my chest doing here? Ask it the way you would ask a volunteer that came up in the bed, and it will tell you, and it won’t be in English, and you will feel it.

Ten years into this work I can say that I was reading my own biography in that soil the whole time. Trauma is like locked up nutrients in the soil, they’re locked up, they’re not free, and the subsoil of a person holds exactly what a farmer finds under a compacted paddock, everything the system needs sitting right there, waiting on a root deep enough to reach it. Out in the forest a tree meets a dry spell by dropping a few leaves, sending a taproot down and waiting, and your cells carry that same acceptance, which is why a cut on your hand mends all by itself. Each of us is the farmland our community grows on, and what you have been carrying as a weight is a nutrient still locked. I’m a student of all of this. I’m not a teacher, I’m not a trainer, I’m another mammal that is very excited about growing life, and the Human Ecology & Sovereignty pillar is where that excitement carries the same word out of one body and into a household, a community and a bioregion.

The biggest way to start is to start small, one square metre, because in one square metre you can grow a lot, and the three questions I walk every piece of ground with are the same three I walk my own interior with. Am I increasing life? Am I creating more complexity and diversification? Am I operating within natural cycles of time and life, or am I going a little bit on my own detour? Those questions will carry you through the rest of this pillar, from Goethe, the Formgiver, who learned to see living form from one plant, through Life in Syntropy, an interview from the field where all of this began, and on into The Spirit of Syntropy, the living intelligence underneath the method.