Issue #17
Our system’s purpose
Donella Meadows is mainly known as one of the coauthors of The Limits to Growth with her husband Dennis Meadows, and their colleagues Jørgen Randers and William Behrens. This 1972 report commissioned by the Club of Rome is often viewed as the starting point of today’s sustainability movements, as it exposed the impossibility of basing infinite exponential growth on limited resources. In doing so, it somewhat changed the nature of the discussion itself: we basically went from “Stop using pesticides” (thanks in part to Rachel Carson’s great book Silent Spring) to “What should we use our finite resources for?”
The book was initially quite controversial. After all, it was the time when Milton Friedman introduced his doctrine, writing in the New York Times that ‘The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase Its Profits’… To make matters worse, the book was often misunderstood, and Donella became a columnist for 5 years, trying to distill her thinking one article at a time. These writings, collected into a book, ‘The Global Citizen’, may be a bit dated in terms of examples and statistics (we still had hope to avoid climate change at the time!), but it is a formidable glimpse into this great woman’s personality and mindset.
However, if there is one book to read, it has to be Thinking in Systems.
Donella Meadows wrote it as a manuscript to help her friends and students grasp the concepts of systems, and it has later been published posthumously. This little gem of a book has been an eye opener for me, and has clearly influenced the way I approach sustainability issues and transition plans. (For more on Donella Meadows’ work: see the Donella Meadows project.)
Systems are key
We are used to solving problems by breaking them up into small and manageable pieces, and then focusing on each piece separately. This works well for complicated problems like an engineering challenge. For example, if a coal-fired boiler is emitting too many greenhouse gases, one can develop and install a carbon capture device. This solution will limit the harm, but is not addressing the problem at its root: we are still burning coal.
Thinking in systems takes an almost opposite approach: rather than zooming in on separate pieces of the problem, one zooms out on the context of the problem.
In our basic example of the coal-fired boiler greenhouse gas emissions, coal is burned to respond to an energy need, and coal mining is dangerous (killing too many miners every year). What if these miners were trained to install solar panels? They would have better (and safer!) jobs, energy needs would be fulfilled, and greenhouse gases would be cut down.
This way of thinking is particularly useful for complex problems, with many spillover effects between different subjects (mining, energy production, job safety, etc.). But since our human brains are limited, we still need to analyse problems through simplified models. For that, we break up systems into three main components:
Elements
These are the individual parts of a system. They can be individual things, like a person, a tree or a coal-fired boiler, or entire subsystems, like unions or the mining industry. One can consider elements as small or as large as needed to draw a useful, intelligible model. These elements are the most visible and tangible aspects of a system. However, they are often the least important when trying to transform a system, i.e. changing the power plant operator will at best have a very marginal effect on greenhouse gas emissions.
Interconnections
These are the relationships or interactions between the elements of the system. They describe how the elements influence each other. They can be physical flows, like coal moving from the mine to the power plant, or informational flows, like the demand for electricity in the system. They may include feedback loops that will reinforce a flow (think compounding interest rates) or balance a flow to maintain an equilibrium (like a heater’s thermostat). There may also be delays, constraints, hierarchies, tipping points, etc.
The structure of these interconnections is often much more important to understanding and influencing a system than are its individual elements.
Covering all the different types of interconnections would be way too long for this letter, but there is one category of flows I would like to focus on: those that are monetised and accounted for as ‘GDP’. The coal moving from the mine to the power plant is sold, generating a flow of money that adds to the country’s GDP. The stock of coal in the mine is an element of the system, but as long as it stays in the ground, it is not flowing… and is not GDP. Other flows are just not accounted for and similarly will not make it into GDP, for example the flow of carbon dioxide being absorbed by a tree, for free.
Purpose
The purpose of a system is what it is designed to achieve. Often the least visible part of a system, it is nonetheless the most crucial component to understand a system’s behaviour. And though it is certainly the hardest one to change, it is also the most potent lever of transformation, beyond interconnections.
A critical point here is that we are not looking at the intended, explicit purpose of the system, but at the observed results, or what the system is actually doing.
Taking our entire socioeconomic system as an example, leaders and politicians will usually state a purpose along the line of increasing the well-being or safety of citizens, or pulling as many people out of poverty as possible… Unfortunately, these explicitly intended purposes do not often match reality. Looking at the observable result, it seems the purpose of our socioeconomic system is to transform natural stocks into flows that can be counted and exchanged for money. We are depleting planetary stocks from the lithosphere (pumping oil from the ground) to the hydrosphere (polluting water sources) to the pedosphere (transforming land for human uses) to the biosphere (killing life on Earth) and filling our atmosphere with greenhouse gases… All this to maximise the measurable flows of GDP. For factual data, the latest Circularity Gap Report is a goldmine.
Today, only 7.2% of our global economy is circular… which is another way of saying that 92.8% of resources used go to waste!
An anecdotic piece of evidence about this mismatch between people’s well-being and GDP can be found in a recent publication from the United Nations on ‘Extreme poverty and human rights’ in which the author, Olivier De Schutter, presents the limits of fighting poverty through economic growth measures that can be counterproductive, especially if they promote extractive and exploitative activities. The paper also looks at the interconnections between poverty and mental health issues. As a small piece of the puzzle and interesting food for thought: extractive activities deplete nature… and the lack of contact with nature increases mental health issues.
Levers of transformation
Arthur Keller is right to say we humans do not have an environmental problem; it is Nature that is facing a human problem. But luckily, we can also be actors in shaping a brighter future!
The least potent levers of transformation are the individual elements of a system. But there can be exceptions: if replacing our power plant operator is useless (from a macro point of view), choosing our leaders carefully can make a difference.
More interestingly, we can modify interconnections between the elements. The easiest is to carefully play with information flows. For example, all the work being done across the globe to improve sustainability reporting is doing just that, albeit too slowly and with frustrating delays…
Most of the usual environmental solutions focus on these first two components of our system: from electric cars that replace the ‘car element’ to regulations that modify ‘interconnections’. All these are great, and necessary. But with six of our nine planetary boundaries crossed (see the Stockholm Resilience Center), they will not be sufficient alone to bring us back into the safe living zone. For that, we also need to change the purpose of our system!
We need to go from ‘transforming nature into GDP’ to ‘let’s build ourselves a nice and safe place to live’.
That requires a cultural shift akin to a change of civilisation. And we need it now. I hear all the voices saying “it’s impossible!”, but I also heard somewhere that “impossible is not a fact, it is a dare”. So, let’s dare!
As usual, this letter, originally published on LinkedIn, is meant to open a discussion: join it here.
Lenny Kessler