This article argues that different cultures and their respective knowledge systems should partake to the sustainability debate. The focus is on insights that indigenous knowledge may provide, analyzing the principles which oversee indigenous relationship with nature, like reciprocity and caretaking. These principles move from a profound sense of unity and interconnectedness and put emphasis on the importance of giving back to nature. They offer an alternative perspective on sustainability that challenges the Western view. Such a view is still focused on maintaining the possibility of exploitation and embedded in a sense of separation from nature. The article discusses the need of creating a laboratory for sustainability, that is, a genuinely pluralist space in which multiple cultural expertise can interact and mutually enrich, yet maintaining their distinction and integrity. The main motivation of such an endevor should be to redefine the notion of sustainability in a more refined and thoughtful way: this is something vital for present and future generations.

EMBO Press is an editorially independent publishing platform for the development of EMBO scientific publications.

First, the article illustrates the concept of ‘cultural heritage’ as traditionally meant, namely relying on a historically consolidated narrative. Next, it undertakes a broader conceptual analysis and deals with three distinct issues: (i) the fact that the conceptualizations and uses of heritage largely depend on long lasting dichotomies (e.g., tangible/intangible, natural/cultural); (ii) the way in which cultural backgrounds shape the dynamics of valuing and approaching heritage; (iii) the temporal framing of heritage, which today, in the Anthropocene, also points towards how to deal with a future of uncertainty. Lastly, it introduces the notion of epistemic heritage, (i.e., the existence of multiple cultural ways of knowing), investigating its implications for both how cultural heritage is conceived and the future approached.

The potential for jointly using or integrating Western science and indigenous knowledge, especially in such fields as environmental management, is a hotly debated topic nowadays. However, the difficulties involved in such a task are not always fully understood and co-management experiences achieved only partially the expected outcomes. In this contribution, I show how a sound combination of the two bodies of knowledge would be possible only if there is a way to accommodate different interpretations of reality and knowledge criteria. The issue should then be faced at the epistemological level too, discussing the possibility and implications of a genuine epistemic pluralism. With reference, among others, to Feyerabend’s later writings, here I illustrate some possible insights for addressing the matter that a Western perspectivist stance could provide.

This article investigates the concept of ‘complex systems’. While not searching for some necessary and sufficient conditions that are valid for all of them, it acknowledges that complex systems can take different shapes, mainly depending on the features of their internal organization and how they interact with their environment. It then advocates a networked notion of complex systems that can accommodate their rich phenomenology and the various circumstances making them, focusing on two types of these systems: (i) one that is mainly characterized by the generation of stable patterns through self-reinforcing dynamics at the lower levels (Bénard convection) and (ii) a distinct one characterized by a more complex organization that makes them ‘minimally decomposable’ and showing autonomy (living systems). The article also assumes that the complexity of a system is analyzable by focusing on two distinct yet interrelated aspects: (i) the features of the system itself and (ii) the relationship between the system and an observer. Its final part discusses how complex systems cannot be adequately represented by a single model or description and how this is another distinctive aspect of their complexity.