Is self-organization the answer to the foundational question of why life exhibits such complexity? And can it also serve as a guiding framework for how best to save complex webs of biodiversity amid the onslaughts of the modern world?
Self-organization exists throughout nature and socioeconomic structures. It refers to the spontaneous emergence of collective, complex order within a disordered system, due to localized interactions that follow simple rules, and occurring without external controls.
While conceptually abstract, given that uncertainty lies at its core, the applications of self-organization are everywhere. Advancing our understanding of the non-linear processes within complex systems that drive self-organization is also becoming increasingly important for developing evidence-based policies in a world defined by interdependence and escalating stressors.
Indigenous cultures, such as those that live within complex socio-ecological systems in the Amazon ecoregion, have long embraced these principles of uncertainty, interconnectedness, and non-linear dynamics. How will their wisdom, experience, and models of socio-ecological systems integrate with evidence-based policies for protecting the Amazon ecoregion?
Safeguarding the Amazon is one of our world’s most pressing, complex, and vital global challenges. Among the strategies gaining traction, supported by increasing financial investment, is the intriguing proposition to transform a portion of the region’s immense biodiversity into a sustainable “bioeconomy.” However, these proposals, and the policy makers responsible for negotiating their implementation across boundaries and cultures, often lack an understanding of how both economies and ecologies self-organize and scale.
Data-driven models of self-organization and critical collective phenomena in the natural world and within traditional Indigenous sociocultural structures, along with adaptive context-based frameworks, can help guide the transboundary development of a decentralized and circular socio-bioeconomy for the Amazon.
Self-Organized Criticality and the Edge of Chaos
Pioneering research on self-organized criticality (SOC) began in the 1980s and was made accessible to a wider audience by one of its godfathers, the late Danish physicist Per Bak, in his ambitious book How Nature Works. Beginning with the sandpile thought experiment (which was then experimentally reproduced in the lab), where at a critical threshold a single grain of sand can generate an “avalanche,” Bak showed how nature itself, at all scales, self-organizes around these dynamic “critical points” situated at the boundary between order and chaos.
The SOC model illustrated how the complex, emergent, and scale-free collective phenomena that we observe all around us can result from simple rules and collective self-organization around critical points (also known as “phase transitions”). This profound insight has since been observed in atoms, cells, social insects, cities, neural networks, financial markets, ecological and whole Earth systems, evolutionary biology, large-scale structures in the cosmos, and much more.
Argentine neuroscientist Dante Chialvo, one of Per Bak’s close collaborators, explains how this principle even extends to the human brain. “In terms of emerging phenomena, the only thing that we need to know in order to proceed to figure out how nature works is the sandpile of Per Bak. You have a nonlinear rule. You have energy being pumped, out of equilibrium of course, and you have local interaction. The brain works the same way.”
Chialvo himself has researched a diverse spectrum of self-organizing critical phenomena, from the brain and the heart to ant colonies, economies, epidemics, and proteins, but he considers all of these emergent collective phenomena to be products of the universality of fundamental physical laws.
Listen to Dante Chialvo speak about Per Bak, universality and how complex collective processes emerge from simple rules and self-organizing criticality.
Explore the full InterDialogue with Danie Chialvo.
Related theoretical frameworks have since been developed within the broad interdisciplinary fields of nonlinear dynamics and complex systems. These frameworks may hold further clues as to how these systems self-organize and persist “at the edge of chaos.” As Greco-Argentine-Brazilian theoretical physicist Constantino Tsallis explains, “A language is at the edge of chaos. Economics is at the edge of chaos. Earthquakes are at the edge of chaos… You have to be on the frontier between extreme chaos and very regular behaviors. In that frontier is where biology emerges, where economics emerges, where complexity emerges.”
Tsallis developed a form of non-additive entropy—now widely referred to as Tsallis entropy—which generalizes the well-known Boltzman-Gibbs entropy and forms the foundation of his framework of nonextensive statistical mechanics and q-statistics. Q-statistics have been observed, modeled, and applied to explain a vast array of complex natural and social systems, resulting in thousands of peer-reviewed papers whose scope has amazed even Tsallis. In an effort to summarize and synthesize for a non-specialized audience the wide-ranging applications stemming from his work, Tsallis published a semi-technical review article through the Royal Society, “Nonextensive Statistical Mechanics at the edge of chaos: A bridge between natural and social sciences,” which was recently republished exclusively by The InterPlex.
Listen to Constantino Tsallis explain about the edge of chaos, the frontier between order and disorder, where biology, economics, language, earthquakes, and other complex phenomena emerge.
Explore the full InterDialogue with Constantino Tsallis.
Self-organized criticality, Tsallis entropy, and other fascinating and broadly applicable complex systems frameworks and approaches, such as scale-free networks, data and agent-based modeling, and much more, have been applied to specific dynamic social and economic structures and networks—from the self-organization of markets, political movements, trade networks, and inequalities to the inevitable shocks and collapses of these non-linear systems that exist at the edge of chaos. This has given rise to interdisciplinary research groups and courses in econophysics and sociophysics, which lay the foundations for studying bioeconomics through the lens of complexity and self-organization.
“Network science nowadays is an interdisciplinary field. Many people from social sciences know now that computational science [and modeling] has been so important, for ecology, biology as a whole, network medicine and econophysics, for sure,” says Jesús Gómez-Gardeñes, a Spanish physicist and complex systems scientist who leads GOTHAM Lab, where research focuses on modeling collective natural and social phenomena.
Socioecology and Biocultural Diversity
Complex systems phenomena, including the non-linear dynamics of self-organization, have been researched within ecological systems and Earth sciences. Extensive webs of interconnections have been modeled in soils, forests, oceans, food networks, and, in particular, climate patterns.
Methodologies and models of complex self-organization and networks of interconnections have likewise been applied to frameworks such as Gaia theory, rights of nature, nature-based solutions, and deep ecology. These holistic approaches have moreover had the benefit of helping to form intercultural bridges between modern scientific and socioeconomic systems and the traditional knowledge and socio-ecological systems of Indigenous Peoples. The question remains: can the same be said at this point for bioeconomics?
Indigenous Peoples in the bioculturally megadiverse Andes–Amazon ecoregion have long understood the complex social, ecological, hydrological, and economic interconnections of the region. Before their territories were fragmented by colonization, forced displacement, deforestation, “development” projects like roads and dams, as well as ongoing land grabs, they had established vast trade networks, forming what could reasonably be called a sustainable and circular bioeconomy. This traditional socio-bioeconomy was based on diverse systems of rotational agriculture, such as the chagra in northwest Amazonia and Indigenous small-scale swidden agriculture in southern Amazonia and the central and eastern Amazonian lowlands, the collection of wild forest products, handicrafts, hunting, and fishing.
In my dialogues with Indigenous leaders who are involved in the commercialization of traditional products, many have expressed concern that a Western1 approach to an Amazonian bioeconomy could encourage rising demand for only a narrow range of products or lead to outright exploitation and biopiracy—whether in biopharmaceuticals or in extractive activities such as gold mining. Such processes, they fear, would undermine dynamic and diverse traditional socio-ecological systems and ultimately do more harm than good to the more than 50 distinct aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems of the Amazon.
“As I see it, everything that is unique to us and our knowledge systems is being taught and imposed from the outside, and these plans for commercializing our territories often do not consider the role and knowledge of our wise elders,” said Murui-Muina (“Huitoto”) leader Roberto Ordoñez during an intercultural discussion on bioeconomics between academic researchers and Indigenous leaders in 2024. Ordoñez had explained to me earlier from within his beautiful Maloca along the Caquetá River, in July 2023, that “our health, our chagras, the climate, and all beings within, depend on the rivers and forests being respected and left to live and thrive.”
Within this complex context at the intersection of nationally and internationally funded governmental and non-governmental development programs, academia, industry, and traditional governance, Ordoñez is currently leading a new initiative—Kabure, which means “essence of life,” “breath of life,” or “healthy life” in the Murui-Muina language—for processing native Amazonian palm fruits (canangucha, milpes, guacarí, and açaí) endemic to the five forested Murui-Muina territories within the heavily deforested middle-Caquetá River region.
“The problem is that, often due to a lack of awareness, what people interested in exploiting forest products have been doing is destroying the fruit trees for commercialization. In the past, fruit trees were found near the communities. So, instead of going up to the higher ground, people often cut them down. Many of those trees don’t grow back; they die right away,” says Marcelino Sánchez Noé, an Indigenous leader of the Tikuna people, whose bioculturally diverse territories are divided between the Colombian, Peruvian, and Brazilian Amazon, and are also hotbeds of illegal gold mining.
Amazonian Bioeconomy
As global leaders search for new frameworks to protect the increasingly at-risk and deforested Amazon rainforest, organizing this vast, megadiverse ecoregion spanning nine countries into a cohesive bioeconomy has taken center stage. The overarching idea is to sustainably develop the Amazon by exploiting its rich biodiversity. This would be done by offering economic incentives to keep the forest standing, especially through the commercialization of so-called non-timber forest-based products (NTFBs).
Proposals and nascent policies for making this complex vision a reality are extremely varied. In my experience over the past several years participating in a range of events and discussions focused on bioeconomics, as well as helping to build interdisciplinary and intercultural projects that work to bridge traditional Indigenous knowledge and scientific and technical knowledge around sustainable alternative income sources such as NTFBs and traditional crafts, it often feels like there is no solid agreement on what exactly is meant (and what is hoped to be achieved) by a large-scale Amazonian bioeconomy in general, let alone a more descriptive “circular sustainable socio-bioeconomy.” Some past attempts to remedy this situation were made by trying to define some high-level principles of bioeconomies, but confusion persists, especially among those not directly involved in shaping these policies.
Furthermore, there has been little clarity around the role of international markets and the complexities and barriers that exist within trade networks and supply chains. Building an Amazonian bioeconomy to help protect the Amazon is a global issue that has limited visibility within many of the non-Amazonian countries whose strong consumer markets may be best suited for receiving certain “value-added” products from the Amazon, such as the US, EU, China, and Australia.
The broader interconnected geopolitical and socioeconomic factors at play are also loaded with nuance and uncertainty, though what is being discussed here should be inherently apolitical. The survival of the Amazon, with all its interdependent biodiversity and climate-regulating abilities intact, is of benefit to all of humanity, regardless of ideology. It is nonetheless important to mention certain relevant geopolitical shifts taking place that impact the present and future development and potential self-organization of an Amazonian bioeconomy, most notably the multidimensional movement of Brazil and several other Amazonian countries toward China. In terms of agricultural exports, China at present mostly receives beef and monocropped soy from the Amazon—a trend due to only increase with China moving away from US soy. China would presumably be an important export market for value-added bioeconomic products as well, partially due to niche demand, and partially in efforts to increase their political and economic influence and leadership in the region.
And if an intercultural consensus emerges that the long-term aspiration is indeed a large-scale Amazonian bioeconomy that targets wealthy export markets—as opposed (or in addition) to regionally and locally focused ones, and therefore most likely dominated by the strong economy of Brazil—then very specific international agreements that limit trade barriers for certified bioeconomic products would be important for facilitating a scale-free self-organization. For example, products derived from endemic biological sources, such as those being promoted for an Amazonian bioeconomy, could be explicitly exempted from tariffs and other barriers that may restrict or unbalance trade networks both between Amazonian nations and with international export markets.
Despite persistent obstacles, disjointedness, and frequent lack of clarity around the meaning and objectives of an Amazonian bioeconomy, many discussions, seminars, conferences, symposiums, colloquiums, forums, and the like do consistently emphasize the importance of governments and other funding agencies investing in specific commercially viable products that have added value (e.g., cacao, açaí, Brazil nuts, and biopharmaceuticals), centralizing points of production and distribution, and imposing other mandates and restrictions to commercial activities, while offering incentives that would increase the labor market and subsequently the production of these products in the Amazon.
“The idea is to have biotechnology in the Amazon region so that you can profit from the biodiversity in the Amazon,” says Luiz Davidovich, a Brazilian physicist who long has been an important advocate for investing in science in the developing world, as past president of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences (ABC) and Secretary General of the World Academy of Sciences (TWAS). Davidovich has also been instrumental in fostering mutual respect between scientists and Indigenous people in Brazil, having been the first ABC president to invite an Indigenous leader—Davi Kopenawa of the Yanomami people—to be an honorary member of the Academy.
In addition to furthering his pioneering research in quantum metrology and science advocacy, Davidovich currently works as an advisor at Brazil’s FINEP, a government institution under the Ministry of Science, focused on investing in science, technology and innovation. FINEP is giving significant attention to fostering a sustainable bioeconomy in the Brazilian Amazon, through a mostly value-added approach that focuses on specific products and industries across the ecoregion that would generate the most investment, private sector participation, and profit, with a particular early focus on biopharmaceuticals. According to Davidovich, “The labs should be in the Amazon region and they should involve local communities, first learning from them how to identify the biodiversity and eventually teaching them also how that biodiversity could be used for [commercial] drugs.”
Explore the full InterDialogue with Luiz Davidovich.
Many of these kinds of initiatives—and the dialogues, events, and pilot projects that they foster—are likely necessary catalysts for shifting the collective conscience towards better valuing biological and cultural diversity, as well as reshaping the inequitable, destructive economic model that currently pervades the Amazon (dominated by agroindustry, particularly cattle pasture and soy monocultures, as well as legal and illegal logging and mining). However, in my experience working for more than a decade with Indigenous Peoples, and in extensive dialogues with Indigenous leaders from across the Amazon as well as experts in complex systems science, there is good reason to be skeptical of the scalability and sustainability of this kind of imposed and centralized value-added organizational approach to creating a diverse and interconnected Amazonian bioeconomy.
Both natural and socioeconomic complex systems do not tend to scale in that way, but rather through the self-organization of decentralized networks. An immense complex network that involves the multinational and megadiverse Amazon ecoregion—rooted in the interdependence and coevolution of biodiverse ecosystems, traditional socio-ecological communities, and modern economies—will likely face increasingly significant obstacles over time if it is forced into a framework of centralized management and control.
Interdisciplinary, Intercultural Collaborations and Adaptive Proposals
How, then, can the traditional practices and knowledge safeguarded by Indigenous Peoples and rooted in the Amazon’s rich biodiversity be woven together with modern approaches to understanding scalable and sustainable economic systems, such as self-organized criticality, q-statistics, data-based modeling, and others that are being explored within the interdisciplinary fields of sociophysics and econophysics?
Observing self-organization in the natural world and within Indigenous socio-ecological systems themselves offers some profound clues as to how a decentralized and scalable socio-bioeconomic network may be able to form and evolve in the Amazon. However, based on current scientific understandings, there is no reliable way to forecast such outcomes. Self-organization is spontaneous and emergent, and therefore extremely difficult—so far impossible—to deliberately generate or predict. Still, innovative, collaborative efforts to integrate principles of complexity with traditional worldviews appear to hold the greatest promise for “sustainably developing” the Amazon.
The interdisciplinary and pan-Amazonian Science Panel for the Amazon (SPA) is one such initiative that has recognized the complexities and interconnected sectors and stakeholders of a diverse Amazonian socio-bioeconomy. SPA has been calling for decentralized “innovation hubs,” as well as intercultural collaboration, local capacity building, clean energy initiatives, and much more. These efforts are meant to foster an adaptive science-based framework for a scalable, context-based circular bioeconomy, and more broadly, they have the clear (“simple,” in terms of potential self-organization) goal of preserving “standing forests and flowing rivers” in the Amazon, while not crossing vital climatic, ecological, and biocultural thresholds.
“The idea and design from the beginning has been how to structure a science-based, technological innovation-based development pathway for the Amazon, which is geared towards a standing forest bioeconomy,” says Brazilian Earth systems scientist Carlos Nobre, co-chair of the SPA and leader of the Amazonia 4.0 initiative. “A new circular economy of healthy forests and flowing rivers, not monoculture.”
Over the past several years many of these innovative science-based ideas about building a transboundary circular bioeconomy for the Amazon have been presented by SPA to other scientists, policy makers, business leaders, and the wider public through various forms of accessible and effective communication.
At COP30 this past November, SPA launched their robust 2025 Assessment Report, much of it touching on bioeconomics, with one chapter devoted exclusively to “Connectivity for Socio-bioeconomies.” The lead author of the chapter is Colombian anthropologist Mariana Gómez Soto, who also holds a masters degree in holistic sciences and has worked for the past decade with Gaia Amazonas and the North Amazon Alliance, and who helped to spearhead the ambitious Amazonia Conectada coalition that was also launched at COP30. In this chapter, she and her co-authors write, “socio-bioeconomies may not replace the dominant capitalist systems, with which they are often interconnected, but with the appropriate incentives and subsidies to enhance equity, their growth and emergence can contribute to mitigating climate change and curbing food insecurity, and to promoting social-ecological resilience.”
Gómez Soto and her colleagues go on to explain some of the envisioned logistics of an emergent and scalable bioeconomy in the Amazon: “Scaling of initiatives through interconnected hubs, production sites, and networks could potentially reach broader segments of Amazonian populations and other markets by linking both urban and rural dwellers in decentralized production and collaboration as a means of cost-sharing rather than employing a vertical non-collaborative approach.”
Decentralized and appropriate energy technologies that preserve hydrological and terrestrial connectivity, along with the use and recycling of residuals and waste, are also essential for the development of a truly circular, sustainable sociobioeconomy. “This is the center for a circular economy. A circular economy has to recycle all residuals. Thirty percent of all food in the world is waste. So yes, this thirty percent of food waste has gigantic potential for producing methane [and energy]. Biofuels from residuals, the potential is gigantic in the Amazon,” says Nobre.
Listen to Carlos Nobre speak about his vision for a standing forest, flowing river circular Amazonian bioeconomy, and the importance of recycling residuals through decentralized energy technologies.
Explore the full InterDialogue with Carlos Nobre.
Simple Rules and Guidelines
As with the SPA assessment report, some other studies have called for a few simple rules, main objectives, and guiding principles for building a sustainable Amazonian bioeconomy which, if paired with investment and mutually respectful, equitable intercultural collaboration and benefit sharing with Indigenous Peoples, could potentially lay the seeds of scale-free self-organization that leads to the large transboundary, circular, diverse and sustainable socio-bioeconomy envisioned by many.
I recently spoke to Gómez Soto and asked her about the wider, multi-scalar vision that she and her co-authors propose for forming a sustainable socio-bioeconomy in such a diverse region as the Amazon. She explained that while the added value approach for certain commercially viable products is important for regional and international export markets, “dynamizing” diverse local markets based on biodiversity within the Amazon is fundamental.
When I expressed concerns about the complexities of scaling up an economy built on so much diversity, and the need for simple rules and guidelines to potentially identify, foster, and support well-aligned projects and self-organization, she said, “it has to be multidimensional and multiscaler in order to correspond to and be loyal to the particularities of the region, and also to the challenges of the transport, the distances and varied conditions. I do think that when selecting what socio-bioeconomy initiative to support, one could use the chapter to find guiding principles to identify if they meet certain characteristics, especially if the initiative has a rights-based approach, if it benefits collective decisions for distribution of benefits, and if the productive system is multifunctional and respects the thresholds of the ecosystems and the people.”
The proposed adaptive framework and guidelines of the SPA further support a “case-by-case, context-based” approach, meaning that there is no realistic way to centrally mandate how each bioculturally diverse region should participate in a circular socio-bioeconomy—the interconnections between diverse peoples, territories, ecosystems, and wider socioeconomic networks vary widely.2
Listen to Mariana Gómez Soto unpack some of the multidimensional and multiscalar dynamics involved with developing guidelines and an adaptive framework for an Amazonian socio-bioeconomy that prioritizes connectivity.
Explore the full InterDialogue with Mariana Gómez Soto.
Yet, as emphasized earlier, self-organized criticality and non-linear dynamics are inherently uncertain, so embracing the hope of a scalable bioeconomic system for the Amazon that exists at the edge of chaos is likely to be a tough sell for both investors and institutions working to develop an Amazonian bioeconomy.
First of all, how many investors want to hear a pitch for a grand business plan for the Amazon that, if it works, is potentially one grain of sand away from cascading into an avalanche and crumbling?
Compounding this challenge is the hubristic worldview of most modern societies, of separating humans from nature, and an impulse toward control: nations seek control over resources and policies; institutions, researchers, and leaders over projects; corporations over supply chains; property owners over land. But, as Per Bak argued, that is not “how nature works.”
“The growth of any economy, but especially a diverse bioeconomy, is extremely challenging to forecast and model, let alone construct,” says physicist and complex systems scientist Rafael Hurtado, who is a leader and co-founder of the Econophysics and Sociophysics group at the National University of Colombia. “In a place like the Colombian Amazon, you have so much biodiversity and so many different potential products that many different groups of Indigenous people have used for centuries. The only known way to scale these kinds of networks and nonlinear dynamics is through self-organization, but this is inherently uncertain, and this is as the Western world has moved towards homogenizing raw products, not diversifying. Constructing a bioeconomy in the Amazon is going to be very difficult.”
Asked whether there is any way to increase the probability that an Amazonian bioeconomy can succeed in scaling to an impactful size, Hurtado responded, “what is certainly needed for this to be possible is a shift in both individual consumer and collective worldwide consciousness, as well as global agreements that better value cultural and biological diversity, in the Amazon and in other bioculturally diverse regions.”
This perspective resonates strongly with Indigenous worldviews, which emphasize autonomy and balance within dynamic, self-organizing systems. For this reason, many Indigenous leaders I have spoken with regard current bioeconomy proposals—often vaguely defined and overly centralized—as yet another extension of the same logic that has long undermined their territories.
“To make a bioeconomy work in our territories, we would first need some seed capital and capacitation,” says Sánchez Noé. “If a training process comes along, a process of saying, for example, ‘from cassava we can get this product, this product, this product,’ then that will generate knowledge, and we wouldn’t just work with cassava, but we’d also take advantage of using other fruits and start producing different products based on our knowledge and the new knowledge. Not only to sell here in the area, but also to find a national market, and why not an international one?”
It’s a scary proposition for many, but perhaps only a few simple rules and thresholds, agreed upon between nations, businesses, and cultures, along with investment in appropriate decentralized technologies, innovation, local capacity building, and security, are what is needed to kickstart a diverse and dynamic bioeconomy. Otherwise, for the Amazon at least, taking a step back and letting the Indigenous Peoples—who have self-organized in collective socio-ecological systems and have long known how to coexist and live in harmony with other dynamic self-organizing systems—lead may be the only “natural” answer if the biological riches of the Amazon are to result in equitably distributed economic benefits that also help to detain the mounting attacks on the diverse ecosystems of the majestic Amazon.
Banner image: A traditional Shuar medicine woman from the Ecuadorian Amazon, extracting pigments from an endemic plant. Credit: V.Circe.
- What’s often referred to somewhat reductively as the “Western world” at least, which in this analysis is especially meant to refer to the vast majority of modern societies, globally, that inherently separate humans from nature ↩︎
- While this interdisciplinary and intercultural analysis is focused on the megadiverse and at-risk Amazon ecoregion, certainly the adaptive and context-based frameworks and perspectives developed by SPA and collaborators like Gómez Soto are not exclusive to the Amazon, and should be considered when attempting to develop bioeconomies in other biologically and culturally diverse regions of the world. ↩︎
