SYSTEMS, SYSTEMS, SYSTEMS
From Silos to Systems
Humans have a propensity for one-thing-at-a-time, straight-line thinking. But the world is made up of more than just isolated data points; it’s made of dynamic, complex, and interactive systems. In other words, we can be prone to blind spots.
Our modern culture rewards reductionist knowledge of experts. Lawyers, engineers, tech developers, and financiers specialize in discrete disciplines. Advocates and activists strive for policies that address specific issues, without a vocabulary or map to describe them in the context of a larger whole. It takes a multidisciplinary, systems-thinking perspective to see how the pieces—energy, economics, ecology, and behavior—fit together.
The Big (Systems) Picture
Each of these systems interlock to create the maze of challenges we’ll need to maneuver through over the next few decades. Declining energy availability. A complex economic system dependent on unsustainable growth. A disconnected and increasingly polarized human population. An increasingly degraded biosphere housed on planet Earth.
These challenges are spurred on by the global human enterprise—an emergent, energy-hungry Superorganism that will continue to try to grow and complexify at all costs.
The odds of changing this dynamic are slim. What we can change are the initial conditions of The Great Simplification and what life after the Superorganism looks like, in the hopes of protecting as much life as possible, human and non-human alike. This is the aim of my work.
