By Megan Seibert, Solutions Journal
This article is intended to introduce systems thinking into our common lexicon – to explain what it is at a basic level, how it can be used, and why it may very well be the key to humanity’s survival over the long run.
By Daniel Christian Wahl, Medium
An increasing number of people are beginning to understand that the world we participate in is too complex, magnificent and changeable for any single perspective to do justice to its diversity and complexity.
By Richard Heinberg, Resilience.org
In discussing climate change and all our other eco-social predicaments, how does one distinguish accurate information from statements intended to elicit either false hope or needless capitulation to immediate and utter doom? And, in cases where pessimistic outlooks do seem securely rooted in evidence, how does one psychologically come to terms with the information?
By Sanchayan Nath, Solutions Journal
If we are to understand how social-ecological resource systems can be better governed, we need to come out of our narrow academic cubicles and interact with other scholars who may themselves be confined in equally narrow academic cubicles.
By Tim Crownshaw, Economics for the Anthropocene
Insisting on more and shaping the world to suit our designs is a Faustian bargain. What we face is not so much a problem to be solved, but a crisis of culture stemming from the hidden conflict between Lotka’s principle and the boundaries of a finite world.
By Ted Howard, The Next System Project
The inconvenient truth is that we face a problem beyond politics and reform, beyond good projects and initiatives and campaigns – ours is a systemic crisis at the very heart of our 21stcentury political-economy.
By David MacLeod, Integral Permaculture
I suggest we join Morin and Pogany in renouncing the irrational exuberance that expects irresistible progress and economic growth extending to infinity. To break out of this cognitive prison habit may be very challenging indeed. However, at some point there will be no choice. It’s time to stop digging that hole that we think is taking us up the mountain
By Jody Tishmack, Anima/Soul
I wonder if the process of learning and discovering with our senses isn’t really what makes us human, what makes our life worthwhile. Perhaps this is how as humans we evolved our ‘big’ brains, our specialized neural networks. Maybe in exploring the word with our senses and trying to make sense of it all, we developed language in order to tell stories, we developed writing in order to keep records, and in the process we advanced our social group from tribes into culture and from culture into civilizations.
By Joe Brewer, Medium.com
If such an effort is truly needed, why hasn’t it taken form yet? Why hasn’t the field of culture design already been born? The answers are many and I will only focus on a few of them here to give a feel for what the process may look like as intentional efforts bring it into being (or not) in the next decade.
By David Taylor, Dark Mountain Project
Our world is experiencing a dark wood that appears to stretch to the horizon and beyond. A dark wood in which there are no maps, because we have created a forest empty of the stories that connect us back to our deeper soul, to our natural ground, to our understanding that we are all connected. When we lose our stories we lose this common ground, that which holds us and grounds us in a sense of the whole.