systems thinking

Learning with our Senses

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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.

The Science Not Yet Born — Culture Design

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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.

Living in the Borderlands

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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.

On The Road To Extinction, Maybe It’s Not All About Us

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We can’t prevent the suffering and dying of wild life, and the Earth herself, when confronted by the unleashed forces of fire and water, but we can include them in our assessment of the cost. We might even grieve for them. Their losses are indeed ours, and if we do not see them or their importance to our lives, if we continue to either ignore and/or dominate all other life on this planet, it won’t be long till we join them.

Guiding the Evolution of Social Systems

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It is currently impossible to guide the evolution of entire societies. Yet this is exactly what humanity needs the ability to do in these turbulent and dangerous times. The litany of threats is well known — global warming, political corruption, conflicts and war, extreme poverty, extremist ideologies, and more — all intensifying in the waves of exponential change that now dominate the patterns of global change in the world.

Why Climate Change Isn’t Our Biggest Environmental Problem, and Why Technology Won’t Save Us

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Our core ecological problem is not climate change. It is overshoot, of which global warming is a symptom. Overshoot is a systemic issue. Until we understand and address this systemic imbalance, symptomatic treatment will constitute an endlessly frustrating round of stopgap measures that are ultimately destined to fail.

The Complexity of Cultural Evolution

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What does the ecological crisis have in common with global poverty? How does politics relate to economics? The study of history? The changing landscape of technology, arts, and culture? Why is there not a coherent School of Social Sciences that brings themes like these together in one place?

Uncertainty is the Best Tool to Navigate Toward our Post-Carbon Future

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Our present situation warrants a significant level of knowledge humility. We can’t know for sure how future energy systems will function, what they will cost, and the types of societies they will allow, but modelling efforts can provide indications of what is and isn’t possible if given sets of conditions prevail. There are important benefits that come with greater knowledge humility.

The Dangerous Delusions of Richard Dawkins

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In fighting for science against religious superstition and climate deniers, Richard Dawkins deserves some of his popular acclaim. However, rational as they appear at first, Dawkins’ ideas are based on delusions of their own. The flaws implicit in his own belief system may be less obvious than those of monotheism, but they are at the root of much that is wrong in the current mainstream worldview.

A Design School for Planetary Collapse

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Design schools all over the world are failing their students by ignoring the most important challenges they will face as they live through a time of unprecedented disruption and ecological collapse. Let me state plainly — we need a Design School for Planetary Collapse.

All Change or No Change? Culture, Power and Activism in an Unquiet World, Part 2

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It’s important to say at the outset that this is not about one story being in any simple way better than the other, let alone one being right and the other wrong. The point is that, by being able to contrast the two, we get a fuller understanding of the present moment than either could offer on its own.