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    hearthstone's Avatar
    hearthstone
     

    Taking Donella Meadows' "Visioning" One Step Further.

    Taking Donella Meadows' "Visioning" One Step Further:
    Designing a Sustainable World Together.

    Donella Meadows (1941 - 2001) who co-authored together with Jørgen Randers and Dennis Meadows 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) 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 undergoing presently. She knew that it was important that we have a detailed vision of how a world we would like to live in should look like in a detail in order for our efforts to be truly fruitful. For this see her "Envisioning a Sustainable World" 1994, and the chapter 8 of Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update 2004 in which the need for "visioning" is described.

    This is approach, which Donella Meadows calls "envisioning" and/or "visioning", was pioneered by Robert Fritz (Fritz 1984), and was suggested to Donella Meadows by Peter Senge, a colleague and friend of Robert Fritz, as it is related in "Envisioning a Sustainable World" (Meadows 1994). It 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. This might sound out-right banal, but if 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 very few people who would have an idea what a sustainable world should look like! And 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 they 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 might vary greatly from a person to a person. (However--this variety of what people understand under the term "sustainable" could be accommodated in a sustainable Earth model if those ideas could be provably sustainable. Please see the "Appendix".)

    There are some organizations and individuals whose aim is to achieve a collective vision of a sustainable Earth which, but again--this results in many different notions, so that in the end we realize that a global consensus on this subject is absent.

    I would like to suggest that all of these ideas of what a "sustainable" humanity ought to be should be unified globally, and that this should be done by unifying and vetting all of these ideas by modeling, by finding out in models what ideas of what "sustainable" should be, what ideas are more "sustainable" than others. This could be done in modeling 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" 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 would be a waste of time, lives, and resources, since all the differences among all the various models would have to be reconciled by trial and error method in real life/time. However--we don't have much leisure left in this, we find ourselves in a globally wide state of emergency.

    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" that often gets misunderstood has to be re-introduced into the "sustainable movement", then all our various visions of what a sustainable Earth ought to be have to be synchronized and unified into a single, comprehensive design that only then can be fully striven for by all of us.


    More on designing of a sustainable Earth at Designing the future collectively, Creating Peace,


    Discussion List: The Modelearth.Org Archives



    Bibliography:

    "Envisioning a Sustainable World" by Donella H. Meadows, written for the Third Biennial Meeting the International Society for Ecological Economics, October 24-28, 1994, San Jose, Costa Rica, Published in Getting Down to Earth, Practical Applications of Ecological Economics, edited by
    Robert Costanza, Olman Segura and Juan Martinez-Alier. Island Press, Washington DC, 1996 ISBN-10: 1559635037 ISBN-13: 978-1559635035
    "Envisioning a Sustainable World" by Donella H. Meadows is online: https://www.sustainer.org/pubs/Envisioning.DMeadows.pdf .
    It is a must read document; it explains best what "visioning" should be.

    Beyond the Limits: Confronting Global Collapse, Envisioning a Sustainable Future by Meadows, Donella H., Dennis L. Meadows & Jørgen Randers Chelsea Green, Boston, 1992 ISBN 0930031555

    Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update Chapter 8, By Donella H. Meadows, Jørgen Randers & Dennis Meadows, Chelsea Green Publishing Company, White River Junction, VT, ISBN 1–931498–58–X Release Date: May 1, 2004

    A synopsis of Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update is online at the Sustainability Institute (founded by Donella Meadows):
    https://www.sustainer.org/pubs/limitstogrowth.pdf

    The Path of Least Resistance by Robert Fritz
    Salem, MA, DMA, Inc., 1984, ISBN: 0-930641-00-0.




    Appendix.

    Some principles for designing of a sustainable Earth
    (online at https://www.modelearth.org/princmodsus.html):

    A design of a sustainable world has to start with very basic components. Once the bare-bone structure of the design is outlined well, then it is possible to start elaborating on this basic design.

    The most basic design component a sustainable world design is a simple viable community in 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 will 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.

    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, always keeping on mind that we might have to fall back to the very basics, if and when the situation would demand it, without incurring any demands on any of the neighbors, human and non-human alike!

    The design that would be based on the above stated principles would have the best chance to exist even where the environmental and social changes that we are currently undergoing would prove to be beyond the point of no repair, as certain people fear now-a-days. It would be resilient enough to withstand even changes that we cannot foresee now.

    Endnote:
    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.
    Last edited by hearthstone; 09-09-2009 at 05:38 AM. Reason: The test reformated itself after I published.
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