hearthstone
10-12-2009, 12:14 PM
I have improved the draft about Donella Meadows' "visioning" and about the possibility of deciding how to make humanity sustainable with the participation of anybody at the grass-root level--please do comment constructively.
online for better navigation and formating:
Donella Meadows' "Visioning" (https://www.ModelEarth.Org/donella-vision.html)
Please do check back from time to time as I am still working on the draft.
Thank you! Mr. Jan Hearthstone - ModelEarth.Org
Donella Meadows' "Visioning":
Global Citizens Designing a Sustainable World Together.
There is a need for expediency--we find ourselves already on the downslope that comes after the set of exponential curves (representing the exploitation of resources, ability of the planet to heal itself, and the growth of population) starts indicating the downward crash-course, according to the Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update (Meadows 2004), the Global Footprint Network (Global Footprint Network 2009), and many other authorities on the subject. We are increasingly using more of resources than can be supplied by our planet and are overtaxing our planet's self-healing capacities. We are in a state of emergency. The "crash", that is so obviously coming, would be unprecedented in magnitude in human history if we let it happen. A great many horrible scenarios are presenting themselves, but there are no good scenarios in which the Earth is saved at the end--good scenarios that would be thorough enough to use as adequate "blue-prints" to (re-)construct the Earth anew (an Earth that would be demonstrably fully sustainable--why bother re-constructing an imperfect design?); good scenarios to use as "visionings" to be shared and strive for by all of us.
In our current situation we have a myriad well founded reasons to be alarmed; any reasons to be optimistic about our prospects on this planet are not founded on any rational grounds.
Our situation is not hopeless; all the ills that plague the Earth now are individually possible to deal with. We have all the knowledge and resources for to deal with each of our exigencies and problems. But it is difficult to deal with all of them at once and also in such a manner that one remedy would not ever undo the effects of any other appropriate remedies. To imagine the combined effect of all the remedies, to see what the whole picture would look like after all of the remedies have run their course, is not practiced to any extend yet. Yet this is where a great deal of hopelessness, confusion, and cynicism about our collective fate stems from. We have no assurance that our efforts will ever achieve desirable result (what should "desirable" results look like anyhow?).
We have to enter the crash zone as a fully sustainable humanity--the sooner we become truly sustainable, the better for us. The longer we continue applying sporadic, disjointed, ineffectual remedies without any clear idea what it exactly is that we want to achieve by applying those, the less able we will be to deal with what is coming to us. Some humans might survive, but in no shape that we would still recognize as "human" (except, perhaps, anatomically).
It is very important to know what this "fully sustainable humanity" should look like so that we know what it is that we need to do in order to become such a "fully sustainable humanity" that would be able to deal with the exigency. Without becoming truly sustainable we don't stand a chance. We could never hope to prevent the "crash" and to heal the planet while still continuing our unsavory non-sustainable societal and environmental practices.
The authors think in the Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update (Meadows 2004) that the next revolution will be the "sustainable revolution", and that it will happen "organically", and that it cannot be planned--I think that the very needed "sustainable revolution" will not happen at all at the pace it is happening now at (when it should already be in a full swing, considering that we, according to the data available from many sources, might already be on the downward slope of the vital curves). I think this "sustainable revolution" will happen only if we bring it into being very deliberately using a concerted effort. The "deadline" in this case cannot kept on being extended indefinitely. There is no more time left to rely on "hit or miss" methods meant to help us used in real time/space--every step of this revolution has to be "hit or miss" tested in models to avoid any waste of time and energy in real time/space (not to mention loss of many lives--both human and non-human!). There is no more time to merely hope that all the well meant good sustainable deeds and good sustainable trends that there are will (somehow, but we don't quite know how exactly, or even roughly) result in a sustainable humanity.
Donella Meadows(endnote 1) (1941 - 2001), well known to all serious environmentalists, was one of the very few environmentalists who realized that it is not enough just to want to improve on things in order to overcome the horrendous environmental and social crisis that humanity is facing presently. She knew that it was important that we have a vision of how a world we would like to live in should look like in order for our efforts to be successful in averting, in mollifying the effects of the "crash" that is to follow our having reached the limits of being able to punish ourselves and our planet without directly experiencing any repercussions. For this see her "Envisioning a Sustainable World" (Meadows 1994), and the chapter 8 of Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update (Meadows, et al. 2004) in which the need for "visioning" is described.
It was Peter Senge (author of The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization 1990) who introduced Donella Meadows to Robert Fritz's "Technologies for Creating" from where Donella Meadows learned of the need for, what she calls, "visioning" (or "envisioning" at times(endnote 2)). Robert Fritz's "Technologies for Creating" is best explained in the first edition of Robert Fritz's The Path of Least Resistance (Fritz 1984)--a "must" reading for anyone who wants to understand Donella Meadows' "visioning".
I have to emphasize: Donella Meadows' "visioning" gets misunderstood because "visioning" requires a bit more than mere intellectual understanding; it takes a while for the ramifications to "sink in" despite its being a very simple idea that says that we cannot get what we don't know what that, that we want to get, is. We have to first know what it is that we want, and only then we stand a chance of, maybe, obtaining it. There is nothing at all "visionary" about this. Donella Meadows' "visioning" is not anything handed down to us, to our very own specifications--we have to generate our visions ourselves. To paraphrase Robert Fritz: instead of reacting to outside (relative to ourselves) conditions, we set our goals ourselves according to what we really want (not that we might feel that we should be wanting), and start working towards what we ourselves decided that we really want.
Donella Meadows writes at the end of the subchapter of chapter 8 of Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update (Meadows 2004) titled "Truth-Telling":
(BLOCKQUOTE)
All the models, including the ones in our heads, are a little right, much too simple, and mostly wrong. How do we proceed in such a way as to test our models and learn where they are right and wrong? How do we speak to each other as fellow modelers with an appropriate mixture of scepticism and respect?...
(/BLOCKQUOTE)
Donella Meadows died prematurely, and, as far as I know, did not pursue the matter of "...test[ing] our models and learn[ing] where they are right and wrong..." to a conclusion. (I would like to be wrong on this--please let me know whether there are any sources that I should be aware of.)
When one surveys the sustainability movement, it becomes apparent (as it did to Donella Meadows) that although there is a lot of commotion about becoming sustainable, there are a very few people who would have an idea what a sustainable world should look like! It is more common to hear about what people would not like to have in their realities, rather than what their ideal realities should look like.(endnote 3)
To make things even more difficult, even if some people do have a good idea of what the ideal world that they would like to live in should look like, their ideas are in a very few instances alike, sometimes those ideas are even very divergent from each other.
It does not help that we have many definitions of sustainability either, because the interpretations of all those definitions might vary greatly from a person to a person.
However--this wide variety of what people understand under the term "sustainable" could be accommodated in a sustainable Earth model, providing, those ideas would indeed be provably sustainable--i.g.: it would be possible to demonstrate in models that they indeed are sustainable. Please see "Some Suggestions for Designing a Sustainable Earth Co-operatively." (bellow in the "Appendix" and online: principles of sustainability design (https://www.modelearth.org/princmodsus.html)
I do think that there is a way of "...test[ing] our models and learn[ing] where they are right and wrong..." possible. I would like to suggest that the testing of all of these ideas of what a "sustainable" humanity ought to be should be done by unifying and vetting all of these ideas by modeling, by finding out in models what ideas are more "sustainable" than others. This could be done by using all the available knowledge that we have of ecological and societal processes to determine the merit of the ideas inputted. Although everybody would have the access to the interactive modeling process, it would never be personalities that would determine the process; it would always be ideas that would be vetted on the basis of their merit alone.
The purpose of such "global unification" of the great variety of any ideas pertaining to human society and the global environmental concerns would not be any other than coming up with a single global model of what a sustainable Earth should be, because the Earth can only have one sustainable future at a time, and striving for various different models in real life/time is a waste of time, lives, and resources, since all the differences among all the various ideas would have to be reconciled by trial and error method in real life/time anyhow!--and we do not have much time left to be able to do that; we have to expedite this process by modeling. The modeling process in the end would be no more (but nothing less) than a tool that would take the horrendously wasteful and very inefficient way of finding out whether an idea is good or not by testing the idea in real life, and do exactly the same--finding out how good an idea is--in models! Why settle our differences on battle fields, if we can resolve our differences in model? It would not be necessary that "everybody" would have to take a part in such modelings; this could be started with a few people from each opposing sides of any conflict currently underway on Earth (be it a ideological, or even an armed conflict), to start presenting rational, defensible resolutions to any problems. No personalities (that are so "necessary" in today's political process) would be needed--only ideas themselves would be entering the modeling process.
Think of a model of an ideal world (ours) that would be based on real hard data, on all that we know about this world and all life in it--rather than on arbitrary ones as those used to create entire worlds for (so far) entertainment purposes only. A means of comparing, evaluating all of our notions of life on Earth could really be!
It would not matter what media for modeling would be used as long as the media used would serve the purpose. On a local community level (where everybody knows everybody else well) discussions and finding out what what all members of the community wish for a happy life are would, perhaps, be a good start. But still--all the "visionings" made in all local communities would have to be all synchronized globally in order to see how all local sustainable communities would get along on the global scale. For this there hardly could be a better tool than the Internet where it would be possible to have a by all accessible interactive model of an ideal Earth.
In order to bring Donella Meadow's efforts to a fruitful completion, which could not be anything else but for humankind to become truly sustainable, the idea of "visioning" has to be introduced into the "sustainable movement" on a full scale, and all our various visions of what a sustainable Earth ought to be have to be synchronized and unified into a single, comprehensive design that then could be striven for by all of us.
It would mean that all our differences, controversies, conflicts, and complains would be resolved in models with much less waste of lives, resources, and time, instead of resolving those in real life and, at the same, time creating new problems, as the practice is today.
It would not be necessary that all people from the whole world would have to start modeling an ideal world together at first. At first it would be sufficient that the modeling would be started, if only by a handful of people (Margaret Mead: "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has."(endnote 4), but--the modeling process would have to be accessible to anyone who would want to do so also! The whole process would have to be entirely transparent, entirely honest, non-hierarchical, no top-down anything at all; the process would have to be so clear that learning it would be an organic process for anyone--from the simpler elements to more complexity gradually and at everybody's own speed (please see "Some Suggestions for Designing a Sustainable Earth Co-operatively." (In the "Appendix"(appendix) and online: principles of sustainability design (https://www.modelearth.org/princmodsus.html) )
This concept of unifying of individual ideas of what our common existence on this planet could be used also resolving conflicts--it would eventually become an ideal grass-root government to put our current way of doing politics out of business entirely. Please see Designing a Lasting World Peace Together.
ENDNOTES:
Endnote1:
Donella Meadows co-authored together with Jorgen Randers and Dennis Meadows The Limits to Growth (Meadows, et al.1972), Beyond the Limits (Meadows, et al. 1992), and Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update (Meadows, et al. 2004), and wrote "Envisioning a Sustainable World" 1994 (these are only a few of her writings from among many others).
Endnote2:
The approach, which Donella Meadows calls "envisioning" and/or "visioning", is a part of "Technologies For Creating" (TFC), pioneered by Robert Fritz (Fritz 1984) is described in The Path of Least Resistance, (Fritz 1984) and is based on a common-sense notion that one cannot really ever get, achieve anything, unless one knows, as well as possible, what that something that one wants to get is. The best to show how difficult it is to get people to imagine what there should be in an ideal situation instead of listing everything that should not be there, let us quote from Donella Meadows' "Envisioning a Sustainable World" (Meadows 1996)
(BLOCKQUOTE)
A World Without Hunger
About ten years ago I ran a series of workshops intended to figure out how to end hunger. The participants were some of the world's best nutritionists, agronomists, 2 economists, demographers, ecologists, and field workers in development -- people who were devoting their lives in one way or another to ending hunger.
Peter Senge of MIT, a colleague who helped design and carry out the workshops, suggested that we open each one by asking the assembled experts, "What would the world be like if there were no hunger?" Surely each of these people had a motivating vision of the goal he or she was working for. It would be interesting to hear and collect these visions and to see if they varied by discipline, by nationality, or by personal experience.
I thought this exercise would take about an hour and would help the participants get to know each other better. So I opened the first workshop by asking, "What is your vision of a world without hunger?" Coached by Peter, I made the request strongly visionary. I asked people to describe not the world they thought they could achieve, or the world they were willing to settle for, but the world they truly wanted.
What I got was an angry reaction. The participants refused. They said that was a stupid and dangerous question. Here are some of their comments:
- Visions are fantasies, they don't change anything. Talking about them is a waste of time. We don't need to talk about what the end of hunger will be like, we need to talk about how to get there.
- We all know what it's like not to be hungry. What's important to talk about is how terrible it is to be hungry,
- I never really thought about it. I'm not sure what the world would be like without hunger, and I don't see why I need to know.
- Stop being unrealistic. There will always be hunger. We can decrease it, but we can never eliminate it.
- You have to be careful with visions. They can be dangerous. Hitler had a vision. I don't trust visionaries and I don't want to be one.
After we got those objections out of our systems, some deeper ones came up. One person said, with emotion, that he couldn't stand the pain of thinking about the world he really wanted, when he was so aware of the world's present state. The gap between what he longed for and what he knew or expected was too great for him to bear. And finally another person said what may have come closer to the truth than any of our other rationalizations: "I have a vision, but it would make me feel childish and vulnerable to say it out loud. I don't know you all well enough to do this."
That remark struck me so hard that I have been thinking about it ever since. Why is it that we can share our cynicism, complaints, and frustrations without hesitation with perfect strangers, but we can't share our dreams? How did we arrive at a culture that constantly, almost automatically, ridicules visionaries? Whose idea of reality forces us to "be realistic?" When were we taught, and by whom, to suppress our visions?
Whatever the answers to those questions, the consequences of a culture of cynicism are tragic. If we can't speak of our real desires, we can only marshal information, models, and implementation toward what we think we can get, not toward what we really want. We only half-try. We don't reach farther than the lengths of our arms. If, in working for modest goals, we fall short of them, for whatever reason, we reign in our expectations still further and try for even less. In a culture of cynicism, if we exceed our goals, we take it as an unrepeatable accident, but if we fail, we take it as an omen. That sets up a positive feedback loop spiraling downward. The less we try, the less we achieve. The less we achieve, the less we try. Without vision, says the Bible, the people perish.
(/BLOCKQUOTE)
However, while it might be incomparably easier to decide on personal goals to achieve, or to get a small group to agree on what the preferred commonly shared existence (as in the quote above), the challenge in the case setting a goal for a favorable future of a whole planet is the need to unify coherently all the individual visions for a good, optimal future (developed to what-ever degree) of all who share and of all who will share the Earth!
Endnote3:
The best way to see that a very few people can describe an ideal world that they would like to live in is to ask them. Usually they would tell you at a great length about what they don't want to have in such an ideal world, but when it comes to describing what they would like to have in it, the difficulty becomes apparent.
Endnote4:
Margaret Mead with Gregory Bateson were at the beginnings of developing "Cybernetics" (Norbert Wiener) and "systems theory" (Jay Wright Forrester, Donella Meadows).
APPENDIX:
Some Suggestions for Designing a Sustainable Earth Co-operatively.
The need for designing a sustainable world co-operatively is explained at "The Need for Designing the Future Collaboratively" (introduction to modelearth (https://www.modelearth.org/intro.html)).
A design of a sustainable world should start with very basic components. Once the bare-bone structure of the design is outlined well, then it would be possible to start elaborating on this basic design.
The most basic unit, component of a sustainable world design is the simplest viable community conceivable with its basic habitat.
Viable community is the smallest possible social unit. It is viable in the sense of being able to perpetuate itself indefinitely on its own, without needing, for its biological and cultural survival, any contact with any other members of its species outside itself.
The basic habitat for a basic viable community is the physical environment that viable community needs for its optimal existence.
It is important that the basic design is as simple and transparent as possible, as "bare-bones" as possible--to the point that it could not possibly be any simpler!--even if, at first, we might think it too simple. But the design best start from very simple--if there are any difficulties to arise from complexity, it would be much easier to fall back onto a simpler design that is well understood, rather than start with a complex design and then, if difficulties should be experienced, we would not know where to go for safety.
Every simple viable community in the whole world would- have to be designed with taking its local conditions on mind, and with enough "buffering" around it to allow for any unforeseen expansions of its basic territory that might be necessary due to, perhaps, climatic changes, or just for extra measure to accommodate any, even unforeseeable, exigencies. The "buffering" zone has to include more than enough space for all other species that we share the Earth with for them to be able to live without being discomforted by us in any way, of course.
However, even that each individual sustainable community design would be fitted to its own unique local conditions, the basic principles of the design would be the same--when starting introducing more complexity into the design, the design has to continue to support lifestyles at the full width of the spectrum to accommodate every possible form of sustainable living. Any more complex societal forms (and there might be many) should organically arise from the simplest possible one, with no infringements on the basic capacities, so that if the need would arise, it would be possible to go back for all members of the community to a more basic form of existence without any difficulties. In this way a great variety of sustainable life styles would be possible to exist side by side without them interfering with each other, without incurring any demands on any of the neighbors, human and non-human alike!
In this way it would be possible to have even a very diverse of sustainable lifestyles without anyone being inconvenienced by any of the neighbors' different ways of living.
The design that would be based on the above stated principles would have the best chance to exist even if the environmental damage would cause extreme environmental conditions--it would be better able to withstand many changes that we cannot foresee now.Back to text
Bibliography:
Fritz, Robert
1984 The Path of Least Resistance. Salem, MA: DMA Inc., ISBN: 0-930641-00-0.
Global Footprint Network
2009 September 25 2009 Earth Overshoot Day MEDIA BACKGROUNDER.
(accessed October 5, 2009).
Meadows, Donella H. , Jørgen Randers, and Dennis Meadows
1972 The Limits to Growth.
New York: Universe Books
Meadows, Donella H., Dennis L. Meadows, and Jorgen Randers
1992 Beyond the Limits: Confronting Global Collapse, Envisioning a Sustainable Future.
White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing Company
Meadows, Donella H.
1996 "Envisioning a Sustainable World." written for the Third Biennial Meeting of the International Society for Ecological Economics, October 24-28, 1994, San Jose, Costa Rica
In Getting Down to Earth, 1996 Practical Applications of Ecological Economics
editors Robert Costanza, Olman Segura and Juan Martinez-Alier Washington DC:
Island Press
Meadows, Donella H. "Envisioning a Sustainable World." is online: (accessed 10/06/2009)
It is a must read document; it explains best what Donella Meadows' "visioning" is.
Meadows, Donella H., Jorgen Randers and Dennis Meadows
2004 Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update.
White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing Company
A synopsis of Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update. Online at the Sustainability Institute (founded by Donella Meadows): (accessed 10/06/2009)
The Systems Thinker—"Moving Toward a Sustainable Future." includes chapter 8 from Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update (accessed 10/06/2009)
Senge, Peter M.
1990 The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization and Tools for
Building a Learning Organisation.
n.p.: Currency Doubleday
More on designing of a sustainable Earth at ModelEarth.Org
online for better navigation and formating:
Donella Meadows' "Visioning" (https://www.ModelEarth.Org/donella-vision.html)
Please do check back from time to time as I am still working on the draft.
Thank you! Mr. Jan Hearthstone - ModelEarth.Org
Donella Meadows' "Visioning":
Global Citizens Designing a Sustainable World Together.
There is a need for expediency--we find ourselves already on the downslope that comes after the set of exponential curves (representing the exploitation of resources, ability of the planet to heal itself, and the growth of population) starts indicating the downward crash-course, according to the Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update (Meadows 2004), the Global Footprint Network (Global Footprint Network 2009), and many other authorities on the subject. We are increasingly using more of resources than can be supplied by our planet and are overtaxing our planet's self-healing capacities. We are in a state of emergency. The "crash", that is so obviously coming, would be unprecedented in magnitude in human history if we let it happen. A great many horrible scenarios are presenting themselves, but there are no good scenarios in which the Earth is saved at the end--good scenarios that would be thorough enough to use as adequate "blue-prints" to (re-)construct the Earth anew (an Earth that would be demonstrably fully sustainable--why bother re-constructing an imperfect design?); good scenarios to use as "visionings" to be shared and strive for by all of us.
In our current situation we have a myriad well founded reasons to be alarmed; any reasons to be optimistic about our prospects on this planet are not founded on any rational grounds.
Our situation is not hopeless; all the ills that plague the Earth now are individually possible to deal with. We have all the knowledge and resources for to deal with each of our exigencies and problems. But it is difficult to deal with all of them at once and also in such a manner that one remedy would not ever undo the effects of any other appropriate remedies. To imagine the combined effect of all the remedies, to see what the whole picture would look like after all of the remedies have run their course, is not practiced to any extend yet. Yet this is where a great deal of hopelessness, confusion, and cynicism about our collective fate stems from. We have no assurance that our efforts will ever achieve desirable result (what should "desirable" results look like anyhow?).
We have to enter the crash zone as a fully sustainable humanity--the sooner we become truly sustainable, the better for us. The longer we continue applying sporadic, disjointed, ineffectual remedies without any clear idea what it exactly is that we want to achieve by applying those, the less able we will be to deal with what is coming to us. Some humans might survive, but in no shape that we would still recognize as "human" (except, perhaps, anatomically).
It is very important to know what this "fully sustainable humanity" should look like so that we know what it is that we need to do in order to become such a "fully sustainable humanity" that would be able to deal with the exigency. Without becoming truly sustainable we don't stand a chance. We could never hope to prevent the "crash" and to heal the planet while still continuing our unsavory non-sustainable societal and environmental practices.
The authors think in the Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update (Meadows 2004) that the next revolution will be the "sustainable revolution", and that it will happen "organically", and that it cannot be planned--I think that the very needed "sustainable revolution" will not happen at all at the pace it is happening now at (when it should already be in a full swing, considering that we, according to the data available from many sources, might already be on the downward slope of the vital curves). I think this "sustainable revolution" will happen only if we bring it into being very deliberately using a concerted effort. The "deadline" in this case cannot kept on being extended indefinitely. There is no more time left to rely on "hit or miss" methods meant to help us used in real time/space--every step of this revolution has to be "hit or miss" tested in models to avoid any waste of time and energy in real time/space (not to mention loss of many lives--both human and non-human!). There is no more time to merely hope that all the well meant good sustainable deeds and good sustainable trends that there are will (somehow, but we don't quite know how exactly, or even roughly) result in a sustainable humanity.
Donella Meadows(endnote 1) (1941 - 2001), well known to all serious environmentalists, was one of the very few environmentalists who realized that it is not enough just to want to improve on things in order to overcome the horrendous environmental and social crisis that humanity is facing presently. She knew that it was important that we have a vision of how a world we would like to live in should look like in order for our efforts to be successful in averting, in mollifying the effects of the "crash" that is to follow our having reached the limits of being able to punish ourselves and our planet without directly experiencing any repercussions. For this see her "Envisioning a Sustainable World" (Meadows 1994), and the chapter 8 of Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update (Meadows, et al. 2004) in which the need for "visioning" is described.
It was Peter Senge (author of The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization 1990) who introduced Donella Meadows to Robert Fritz's "Technologies for Creating" from where Donella Meadows learned of the need for, what she calls, "visioning" (or "envisioning" at times(endnote 2)). Robert Fritz's "Technologies for Creating" is best explained in the first edition of Robert Fritz's The Path of Least Resistance (Fritz 1984)--a "must" reading for anyone who wants to understand Donella Meadows' "visioning".
I have to emphasize: Donella Meadows' "visioning" gets misunderstood because "visioning" requires a bit more than mere intellectual understanding; it takes a while for the ramifications to "sink in" despite its being a very simple idea that says that we cannot get what we don't know what that, that we want to get, is. We have to first know what it is that we want, and only then we stand a chance of, maybe, obtaining it. There is nothing at all "visionary" about this. Donella Meadows' "visioning" is not anything handed down to us, to our very own specifications--we have to generate our visions ourselves. To paraphrase Robert Fritz: instead of reacting to outside (relative to ourselves) conditions, we set our goals ourselves according to what we really want (not that we might feel that we should be wanting), and start working towards what we ourselves decided that we really want.
Donella Meadows writes at the end of the subchapter of chapter 8 of Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update (Meadows 2004) titled "Truth-Telling":
(BLOCKQUOTE)
All the models, including the ones in our heads, are a little right, much too simple, and mostly wrong. How do we proceed in such a way as to test our models and learn where they are right and wrong? How do we speak to each other as fellow modelers with an appropriate mixture of scepticism and respect?...
(/BLOCKQUOTE)
Donella Meadows died prematurely, and, as far as I know, did not pursue the matter of "...test[ing] our models and learn[ing] where they are right and wrong..." to a conclusion. (I would like to be wrong on this--please let me know whether there are any sources that I should be aware of.)
When one surveys the sustainability movement, it becomes apparent (as it did to Donella Meadows) that although there is a lot of commotion about becoming sustainable, there are a very few people who would have an idea what a sustainable world should look like! It is more common to hear about what people would not like to have in their realities, rather than what their ideal realities should look like.(endnote 3)
To make things even more difficult, even if some people do have a good idea of what the ideal world that they would like to live in should look like, their ideas are in a very few instances alike, sometimes those ideas are even very divergent from each other.
It does not help that we have many definitions of sustainability either, because the interpretations of all those definitions might vary greatly from a person to a person.
However--this wide variety of what people understand under the term "sustainable" could be accommodated in a sustainable Earth model, providing, those ideas would indeed be provably sustainable--i.g.: it would be possible to demonstrate in models that they indeed are sustainable. Please see "Some Suggestions for Designing a Sustainable Earth Co-operatively." (bellow in the "Appendix" and online: principles of sustainability design (https://www.modelearth.org/princmodsus.html)
I do think that there is a way of "...test[ing] our models and learn[ing] where they are right and wrong..." possible. I would like to suggest that the testing of all of these ideas of what a "sustainable" humanity ought to be should be done by unifying and vetting all of these ideas by modeling, by finding out in models what ideas are more "sustainable" than others. This could be done by using all the available knowledge that we have of ecological and societal processes to determine the merit of the ideas inputted. Although everybody would have the access to the interactive modeling process, it would never be personalities that would determine the process; it would always be ideas that would be vetted on the basis of their merit alone.
The purpose of such "global unification" of the great variety of any ideas pertaining to human society and the global environmental concerns would not be any other than coming up with a single global model of what a sustainable Earth should be, because the Earth can only have one sustainable future at a time, and striving for various different models in real life/time is a waste of time, lives, and resources, since all the differences among all the various ideas would have to be reconciled by trial and error method in real life/time anyhow!--and we do not have much time left to be able to do that; we have to expedite this process by modeling. The modeling process in the end would be no more (but nothing less) than a tool that would take the horrendously wasteful and very inefficient way of finding out whether an idea is good or not by testing the idea in real life, and do exactly the same--finding out how good an idea is--in models! Why settle our differences on battle fields, if we can resolve our differences in model? It would not be necessary that "everybody" would have to take a part in such modelings; this could be started with a few people from each opposing sides of any conflict currently underway on Earth (be it a ideological, or even an armed conflict), to start presenting rational, defensible resolutions to any problems. No personalities (that are so "necessary" in today's political process) would be needed--only ideas themselves would be entering the modeling process.
Think of a model of an ideal world (ours) that would be based on real hard data, on all that we know about this world and all life in it--rather than on arbitrary ones as those used to create entire worlds for (so far) entertainment purposes only. A means of comparing, evaluating all of our notions of life on Earth could really be!
It would not matter what media for modeling would be used as long as the media used would serve the purpose. On a local community level (where everybody knows everybody else well) discussions and finding out what what all members of the community wish for a happy life are would, perhaps, be a good start. But still--all the "visionings" made in all local communities would have to be all synchronized globally in order to see how all local sustainable communities would get along on the global scale. For this there hardly could be a better tool than the Internet where it would be possible to have a by all accessible interactive model of an ideal Earth.
In order to bring Donella Meadow's efforts to a fruitful completion, which could not be anything else but for humankind to become truly sustainable, the idea of "visioning" has to be introduced into the "sustainable movement" on a full scale, and all our various visions of what a sustainable Earth ought to be have to be synchronized and unified into a single, comprehensive design that then could be striven for by all of us.
It would mean that all our differences, controversies, conflicts, and complains would be resolved in models with much less waste of lives, resources, and time, instead of resolving those in real life and, at the same, time creating new problems, as the practice is today.
It would not be necessary that all people from the whole world would have to start modeling an ideal world together at first. At first it would be sufficient that the modeling would be started, if only by a handful of people (Margaret Mead: "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has."(endnote 4), but--the modeling process would have to be accessible to anyone who would want to do so also! The whole process would have to be entirely transparent, entirely honest, non-hierarchical, no top-down anything at all; the process would have to be so clear that learning it would be an organic process for anyone--from the simpler elements to more complexity gradually and at everybody's own speed (please see "Some Suggestions for Designing a Sustainable Earth Co-operatively." (In the "Appendix"(appendix) and online: principles of sustainability design (https://www.modelearth.org/princmodsus.html) )
This concept of unifying of individual ideas of what our common existence on this planet could be used also resolving conflicts--it would eventually become an ideal grass-root government to put our current way of doing politics out of business entirely. Please see Designing a Lasting World Peace Together.
ENDNOTES:
Endnote1:
Donella Meadows co-authored together with Jorgen Randers and Dennis Meadows The Limits to Growth (Meadows, et al.1972), Beyond the Limits (Meadows, et al. 1992), and Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update (Meadows, et al. 2004), and wrote "Envisioning a Sustainable World" 1994 (these are only a few of her writings from among many others).
Endnote2:
The approach, which Donella Meadows calls "envisioning" and/or "visioning", is a part of "Technologies For Creating" (TFC), pioneered by Robert Fritz (Fritz 1984) is described in The Path of Least Resistance, (Fritz 1984) and is based on a common-sense notion that one cannot really ever get, achieve anything, unless one knows, as well as possible, what that something that one wants to get is. The best to show how difficult it is to get people to imagine what there should be in an ideal situation instead of listing everything that should not be there, let us quote from Donella Meadows' "Envisioning a Sustainable World" (Meadows 1996)
(BLOCKQUOTE)
A World Without Hunger
About ten years ago I ran a series of workshops intended to figure out how to end hunger. The participants were some of the world's best nutritionists, agronomists, 2 economists, demographers, ecologists, and field workers in development -- people who were devoting their lives in one way or another to ending hunger.
Peter Senge of MIT, a colleague who helped design and carry out the workshops, suggested that we open each one by asking the assembled experts, "What would the world be like if there were no hunger?" Surely each of these people had a motivating vision of the goal he or she was working for. It would be interesting to hear and collect these visions and to see if they varied by discipline, by nationality, or by personal experience.
I thought this exercise would take about an hour and would help the participants get to know each other better. So I opened the first workshop by asking, "What is your vision of a world without hunger?" Coached by Peter, I made the request strongly visionary. I asked people to describe not the world they thought they could achieve, or the world they were willing to settle for, but the world they truly wanted.
What I got was an angry reaction. The participants refused. They said that was a stupid and dangerous question. Here are some of their comments:
- Visions are fantasies, they don't change anything. Talking about them is a waste of time. We don't need to talk about what the end of hunger will be like, we need to talk about how to get there.
- We all know what it's like not to be hungry. What's important to talk about is how terrible it is to be hungry,
- I never really thought about it. I'm not sure what the world would be like without hunger, and I don't see why I need to know.
- Stop being unrealistic. There will always be hunger. We can decrease it, but we can never eliminate it.
- You have to be careful with visions. They can be dangerous. Hitler had a vision. I don't trust visionaries and I don't want to be one.
After we got those objections out of our systems, some deeper ones came up. One person said, with emotion, that he couldn't stand the pain of thinking about the world he really wanted, when he was so aware of the world's present state. The gap between what he longed for and what he knew or expected was too great for him to bear. And finally another person said what may have come closer to the truth than any of our other rationalizations: "I have a vision, but it would make me feel childish and vulnerable to say it out loud. I don't know you all well enough to do this."
That remark struck me so hard that I have been thinking about it ever since. Why is it that we can share our cynicism, complaints, and frustrations without hesitation with perfect strangers, but we can't share our dreams? How did we arrive at a culture that constantly, almost automatically, ridicules visionaries? Whose idea of reality forces us to "be realistic?" When were we taught, and by whom, to suppress our visions?
Whatever the answers to those questions, the consequences of a culture of cynicism are tragic. If we can't speak of our real desires, we can only marshal information, models, and implementation toward what we think we can get, not toward what we really want. We only half-try. We don't reach farther than the lengths of our arms. If, in working for modest goals, we fall short of them, for whatever reason, we reign in our expectations still further and try for even less. In a culture of cynicism, if we exceed our goals, we take it as an unrepeatable accident, but if we fail, we take it as an omen. That sets up a positive feedback loop spiraling downward. The less we try, the less we achieve. The less we achieve, the less we try. Without vision, says the Bible, the people perish.
(/BLOCKQUOTE)
However, while it might be incomparably easier to decide on personal goals to achieve, or to get a small group to agree on what the preferred commonly shared existence (as in the quote above), the challenge in the case setting a goal for a favorable future of a whole planet is the need to unify coherently all the individual visions for a good, optimal future (developed to what-ever degree) of all who share and of all who will share the Earth!
Endnote3:
The best way to see that a very few people can describe an ideal world that they would like to live in is to ask them. Usually they would tell you at a great length about what they don't want to have in such an ideal world, but when it comes to describing what they would like to have in it, the difficulty becomes apparent.
Endnote4:
Margaret Mead with Gregory Bateson were at the beginnings of developing "Cybernetics" (Norbert Wiener) and "systems theory" (Jay Wright Forrester, Donella Meadows).
APPENDIX:
Some Suggestions for Designing a Sustainable Earth Co-operatively.
The need for designing a sustainable world co-operatively is explained at "The Need for Designing the Future Collaboratively" (introduction to modelearth (https://www.modelearth.org/intro.html)).
A design of a sustainable world should start with very basic components. Once the bare-bone structure of the design is outlined well, then it would be possible to start elaborating on this basic design.
The most basic unit, component of a sustainable world design is the simplest viable community conceivable with its basic habitat.
Viable community is the smallest possible social unit. It is viable in the sense of being able to perpetuate itself indefinitely on its own, without needing, for its biological and cultural survival, any contact with any other members of its species outside itself.
The basic habitat for a basic viable community is the physical environment that viable community needs for its optimal existence.
It is important that the basic design is as simple and transparent as possible, as "bare-bones" as possible--to the point that it could not possibly be any simpler!--even if, at first, we might think it too simple. But the design best start from very simple--if there are any difficulties to arise from complexity, it would be much easier to fall back onto a simpler design that is well understood, rather than start with a complex design and then, if difficulties should be experienced, we would not know where to go for safety.
Every simple viable community in the whole world would- have to be designed with taking its local conditions on mind, and with enough "buffering" around it to allow for any unforeseen expansions of its basic territory that might be necessary due to, perhaps, climatic changes, or just for extra measure to accommodate any, even unforeseeable, exigencies. The "buffering" zone has to include more than enough space for all other species that we share the Earth with for them to be able to live without being discomforted by us in any way, of course.
However, even that each individual sustainable community design would be fitted to its own unique local conditions, the basic principles of the design would be the same--when starting introducing more complexity into the design, the design has to continue to support lifestyles at the full width of the spectrum to accommodate every possible form of sustainable living. Any more complex societal forms (and there might be many) should organically arise from the simplest possible one, with no infringements on the basic capacities, so that if the need would arise, it would be possible to go back for all members of the community to a more basic form of existence without any difficulties. In this way a great variety of sustainable life styles would be possible to exist side by side without them interfering with each other, without incurring any demands on any of the neighbors, human and non-human alike!
In this way it would be possible to have even a very diverse of sustainable lifestyles without anyone being inconvenienced by any of the neighbors' different ways of living.
The design that would be based on the above stated principles would have the best chance to exist even if the environmental damage would cause extreme environmental conditions--it would be better able to withstand many changes that we cannot foresee now.Back to text
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More on designing of a sustainable Earth at ModelEarth.Org