Systems Thinking Tools
What is causing the astonishing self-demolition of the West?
Thursday, January 5th, 2023After a successful 500-year run, why is Western hegemony slowly falling apart, and moreover, as Pogo famously said, why is it that “the enemy is us”? This essay will explore a complex of root causes, focusing on the built-in dynamics of the capitalist system, which drove it to produce the expected positive results – increasing [...]
A systems view of Western policy today
Friday, July 12th, 2019Complex systems are resilient, or resistant to change from another viewpoint. Human societies are complex systems. Historically they have exhibited this inertia – a tendency to repeatedly snap back to business as usual or some facsimile of it when faced with a long period of inevitable change. Modern industrial society confronts just this situation – [...]
The Age of Modernity and its Discontents
Sunday, January 27th, 2019When the whole world is globalized [read modernized], you’re going to be able to set fire to the whole thing with a single match.
—Rene Girard
In human history, every cultural age is more than a collection of disparate elements. It is an interdependent, interactive whole some of whose elements need others to survive, as do species [...]
Biochar – a Critical View Through the Ecosystemic Lens
Monday, October 30th, 2017I have been following the biochar story since it began to gain visibility over a decade ago. I view it from the perspective of forty years of farming informed by study of systems ecology. My understanding of both of these pursuits has evolved over that time in ways that will inform this critique. I began [...]
Folk Tales, Foreign Policy, and the Value of Systems Thinking
Thursday, January 30th, 2014In the tale of the boy who cried wolf, a boy who is tending sheep and serving as a lookout for wolves seeks to relieve his boredom and gain attention by crying wolf when in fact there is no wolf. This decision/policy succeeds for a while, then it no longer works. A systems thinking [...]
Why Systems Thinking?
Thursday, January 23rd, 2014My explicit focus on systems thinking in writing and teaching comes from an awareness, spreading slowly through the knowledge business, that it is an essential approach to all inquiry intended for application to real world problems. For its importance to be taken seriously and applied to all important issues in everyday life, systems thinking needs [...]
Food Production Systems in the Decline of the Industrial Age: A Call for a Socio-ecological Synthesis
Sunday, June 9th, 2013The sustainability of industrial food production has long been under attack for its destruction of the soil, water, air and other products and services essential to life on earth. Now the massive consumption of energy and other resources needed to build and maintain industrial society has led to the depletion of these [...]
Why Trying to Save Industrial Civilization with Alternatives to Fossil Fuels Only Makes Things Worse
Saturday, April 6th, 2013A recent Cornell report on how to convert New York state energy consumption to alternative fuels perpetuates the nonsense that in a declining economy we can convert NY or anywhere else to “clean” wind and solar energy, maybe dimming the lights a bit, and thus continue the party (industrial civilization and the US way of [...]
What systems thinking reveals: from biology to political economy
Saturday, February 9th, 2013The way we do science today suffers greatly from the dominance of the reductionist paradigm. A general pattern has emerged where technologies based on purely reductive science work for a while as expected, then start to produce unexpected and often unwanted results, outcomes that at least from a reductionist perspective are a surprise and are [...]
The Case for a Disorderly Energy Descent
Friday, May 20th, 2011The energy descent from peak oil production imposes decades of contraction in the global economy. An orderly contraction, particularly in the US, is not likely for a number of reasons. This is a summary of the case for a disorderly descent, garnered from many sources, a couple of which are listed at the end of [...]
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