By george wesley dannells on Sep 4, 2008 in Baha'i Views
Recently I’ve posted some messages about various materials and processes intended to help reduce global warming. Each has its own pros and cons. None is perfect. The thing is — we’ve got a situation that’s complex because our behavior is impacting the whole environment, which is a highly complex system. No single solution is going to fix that. We have to learn how to think systemically. We have to assemble a set of mutually supportive solutions, each addressing a different aspect of the problem. To repair a damaged ecosystem requires both an awareness of complexity and an ability to create meshed solutions. …
The more I think about it, the more I suspect that this is our species’ current lesson. Think systemically. I recall that the Baha’i Faith teaches that humanity has evolved ever-larger social structures: individual to family to clan to tribe to city to city-state to nation, and now we’re supposed to be learning “The Earth is one.” Not necessarily a homogenous society, any more than the environment is homogenous; but part of a whole with an understanding that what affects one area surely impacts others as well. We can do this. The examples of how it’s done are all around us. The tricky part is, it means not just thinking outside the box, but dismantling the box and thinking in whole new dimensions.
http://ysabetwordsmith.livejournal.com/315043.html
Photo: Uploaded on May 1, 2008 by lauren_pressley on flickr, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 Generic
My friend Pattabi Raman, who teaches and gives talks on systems thinking, would call the attention of the reader here to László and Whitehead -gw
