Gunter Pauli, with Cheryl Marie Cordeiro.
Gunter Pauli is author of ‘The Blue Economy’ and initiator of the Zero Emissions Research and Initiatives (ZERI) network that began from 1994. ZERI was based first at the United Nations University (UNU) in Tokyo, as a network of 3000 scientists searching for pragmatic solutions to poverty, climate change and competitiveness. It targeted redesigning production and consumption into clusters of industries inspired by natural systems. Pauli was in 1992, CEO of Ecover, where he built the first zero emissions factory for detergents out of wood. He has an honorary doctorate in economics from the University of Pécs, Hungary.
Text & Photo © JE Nilsson, CM Cordeiro, Sweden 2016
In 1976, Fritjof Capra, Ph.D, a Vienna-born physicist and systems theorist published The Tao of Physics [1] that explored the way in which modern physics was changing our world perspective from mechanistic to holistic and ecological. It was this underlying influence of systemic thinking and modeling of thought I was interested in when given the opportunity at the School of Business, Economics and Law at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, to meet with two distinguished individuals belonging to the realm of systemic thinkers and activists in an evening of lectures – Gunter Pauli, author of The Blue Economy [2] and founder of the Zero Emissions Research and Initiatives (ZERI), and Göran Carstedt, Assar Gabrielsson Professor