By Norton Smith, Resilience.org
We live with the belief that we have created an economic system called capitalism and that we have control over it though government policy and taxes. What if the tables were turned and capitalism only describes a self organizing system that creates itself in an environment of surplus goods and services?
By Richard Eckersley, Resilience.org
The work on progress indicators is all well and good, especially in challenging the political priority given to GDP. However, over the years I have grown more sceptical of the possibility of measuring, accurately and fully, the state of nations and the wellbeing of their people.
By Anne B. Ryan, Feasta
We need keystone policies that are underpinned by a vision of a rich social, personal and economic habitat for people. The role of politics is to design institutions and policies that enable people to co-operate and that facilitate citizens to act for the common good. The policies mentioned above function in this way. If key principles are observed or key attitudes developed, many structural problems can work themselves out in practice.
By Sue Pritchard, Sustainable Food Trust
We often talk about how important it is to see the ‘whole system’ – to understand more fully the relationships and interdependencies in the world. Our own work – across food, farming and countryside, public health and wellbeing, economics and rural development – seeks to illuminate the links.
By Daniel Christian Wahl, P2P Foundation Blog
On the one hand I believe it is vital to accept uncertainty, not-knowing, and unpredictability fully to the point of deep humility. On the other hand, I also believe that we need to choose to act from the conviction that we can design for positive emergence in complex systems even if it is not an exact science and we cannot know with certainty how our efforts will turn out to affect transformative change.
By Ugo Bardi, Cassandra's legacy
The Earth's ecosystem is a typical complex system. It reacts to perturbations, even minor ones, sometimes very strongly. Don't expect it to remain stable just because it has been stable up to a certain moment.
By Margarita Mediavilla, Resilience.org
From my point of view --which comes from systems dynamics and environmentalism rather than from feminism-- one of the tools that can best help feminist economics articulate a coherent discourse is the pattern of collapse.
By Otto Scharmer, Medium
The classical university was based on the unity of research and teaching; the modern university has been based on the unity of research, teaching, and practical application. I believe that the current historical moment, with one civilization ending and dying, and another being born, invites us to reconceive the 21st-century university as a unity of research, teaching, and the praxis of transforming society and self.
By John Thackara, John Thackara blog
No textbook for the new foundation course exists – which is probably just as well. The course is better thought of as a journey, than as a body of knowledge.
By Pablo Solón, Systemic Alternatives
The premise of systemic alternatives is that the environmental, economic, social, geopolitical, institutional and civilizational crises are part of a whole, are interrelated and feed into one another.
By Julia Adeney Thomas, Local Futures
The challenges of our altered, unpredictable Earth System cannot be met by technological tinkering within the very systems that pushed it over the edge in the first place. There’s nothing for it but to roll up our sleeves and begin the hard work of transforming our political and economic systems with the aims of decency and resilience.
By Daniel Christian Wahl, Medium
The Science of Qualities is really an extension of conventional science in the sense that it depends upon consensus, agreement and a methodology whereby people come to recognize the agreement or the consensus they have about the qualities of experience of other beings.