Michael, 1/7/09 post to Britt’s list - Amerikalistan
Odum is certainly a major contributor to modern systems thinking, but he represented the parts of systems as numbers in equations that were controlled by the rules of their inter-relationships. That’s one metaphor that helps track what is physically happening, until the relationships and their rules change by some other process. I think it’s important to go a step beyond that to understand them better.
Learning to watch for where, when and why the rules might change leads you to recognizing that systems are actually composed of many separate parts that have a lot of independent behaviors, and are not entirely controlled by their relationships. That’s a big problem for equations. The working parts of systems as themselves systems, and develop new behaviors as their environments (including separate larger scale systems) change. I call the way systems adapt to their own environments “learning” when it appears to be their own developmental processes doing it. I find that learning is more important in how systems respond to environmental change than control.
Your example is a good one, though. A little more directly parallel to our situation is the switch trees make away from explosive growth in their very first springtime. That’s when the little shoot starts by consuming its tiny seed resource faster and faster, and then switches to responsive seasonal growth that lasts years and years, letting it expand many many times the scale of their seed.
I think the tally is in, though, as to whether humans are getting the signal to do the same. The global overshoot crisis is clearly upon us and the universal consensus plan is still to multiply explosively forever. We have a new inspirational government about to consume an almost inconceivable amount of resources to reestablish a completely unsustainable path of expansion. I’m all for stabilizing things till we find how to chart a sustainable course, but just hastily throwing huge amounts of time talent and energy only to reinvigorating an endless explosion plan that just blew up badly, does not seem like a good investment.
Phil Henshaw
NY NY www.synapse9.com