Donella Meadows' "Visioning":
Global Citizens Designing a Sustainable World Together.
(a draft)
By Mr. Jan
Hearthstone - ModelEarth.Org
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. (I might be wrong, but where are they? I
know that there are many good actions undertaken for lessening the
burden, but I have to yet see a detailed good scenario, in which we
all survive in a better shape than the one we are in now, presented
anywhere.)
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 any lasting desirable
results (what should "desirable" results look like anyhow?), all we
have is a hope that our "stabs" at improvement might somehow
(mostly we don't know how) help.
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--a point I, the author of this
article, would like to dispute! I think that this "sustainable
revolution" has to, indeed, happen organically, but that it
has to be very deliberately designed!. We have to
know what it is that we want to achieve with our efforts!
I think that the very needed "sustainable revolution" will not
happen at all at the pace it is happening now (when it should
already be in a full swing, considering that we, according to the
data available from many sources, are already 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 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 being exercised now 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 experiencing any repercussions
sooner or later. 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" (TFC) 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 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":
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?...
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:
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
models? It would not be necessary that "everybody" would have to
take a part in such modelings immediately; 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 means for modeling would be used as long
as the means 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:
www.modelearth.org/princmodsus.html )
This concept of unifying of individual ideas of what our common
existence on this planet could be used also for resolving
conflicts--it would eventually become an ideal grass-root
government that would 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). Back to text
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, please see a quote from Donella Meadows'
"Envisioning a Sustainable World" (Meadows
1996)
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.
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! Back to text
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. Back to text
Endnote4:
Margaret Mead with Gregory Bateson were at the beginnings of
developing "Cybernetics" (Norbert Wiener) and "systems theory" (Jay
Wright Forrester, Donella Meadows). Back to
text
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"
(http://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 the basic
design.
The most basic unit, component of a sustainable world design is the
simplest viable community conceivable within 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.
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, during the designing, 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 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 sustainable 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!
The design that would be based on the above stated principles would
have the best chance to exist even if the human-made environmental
damage would cause extreme environmental conditions--it would be
better able to withstand many changes that we even cannot foresee
now.
Hunter and gatherer type of communities would well fit within any
wilderness meant to preserve wild life, so would pastoral type
communities--all it would require is that there is more than enough
"buffering" included with the territory of any different
sustainable life styles to allow for any kind of changes without
running out of land for any species to live on.
This would mean that there would be at any point of time
very few people around (as few as possible), and this would
be good.
What is happening on Earth today could be seen, in terms of
geological time, as a continuation of a stabilizing process that is
aiming towards an equilibrium of a major disturbance that came,
more likely than not, from the outside of the Earth system that
caused the demise of the dinosaurs and made possible the ascend of
humans.
The existence of humans and the disturbance of the Earth system
caused by them is just a repercussion of this stabilizing process.
Eventually a dynamic equilibrium is going to be achieved. There
could be a little disputed over this.
Humans, and countless other species, could ride out all the
difficult times ahead of us much more smoothly, if it is recognized
that the latest disturbance caused by humans is also fixable by
humans themselves--we have all the knowledge and resources to make
it happen. This is, though, only going to happen if we humans are
truly as intelligent as we proclaim ourselves to be. 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.
<http://www.footprintnetwork.org/images/uploads/EO_Day_Media_Backgrounder.pdf>
(accessed October
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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
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International
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Earth, 1996 Practical Applications of Ecological
Economics
editors Robert
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Meadows, Donella H. "Envisioning a Sustainable World." is online:
<www.sustainer.org/pubs/Envisioning.DMeadows.pdf>
(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):
<http://www.sustainer.org/pubs/limitstogrowth.pdf>
(accessed 10/06/2009)
The Systems Thinker—"Moving Toward a Sustainable Future."
includes chapter 8 from Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update
<http://www.thesystemsthinker.com/V16N9.pdf>
(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
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