Jessie is an environmental and human systems scientist who has been doing advanced research on emergent organization in nature for over 30 years. Her innovative work produced a practical new general scientific method for studying uncontrolled systems and led to numerous important findings.
One of those is the remarkable finding that the standard sustainability metrics used around the world are very unscientifically defined. They generally count the impacts we can trace and quite ignore the ones we can’t. It’s as if, culturally, we were all thinking “out of sight, out of mind”, as if that would work in nature! We can joke, but it also implies major changes in what we do, that the community is largely in denial of..
Her subjects include all kinds of lively complex systems such as, organisms, ecologies, cultures, communities, languages, technologies, weather, etc. Such systems generally originate with an initial seed of local organization and a process of accumulative development, forming a cell of organization by growth in an open environment. Jessie’s methods are based on using physics principles as diagnostic tools. She does not use physics to represent environmental systems with equations, but for investigating them, considered as self-defined objects of the environment. The method relies on data for displaying authentic images and behaviors of nature with "fidelity", not for making equations. The technique allows one to historically reconstruct the flow of innovation within a system’s own internal development, and then to anticipate the succession of other developments that are likely, or certain, in its future.