Tag: Donella Meadows
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exploring systems thinking & sustainability
“There’s so much talk about the system. And so little understanding.” Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance In a 2012 paper, Prof. John Sterman of MIT raises the intriguing question: Is the sustainability movement itself sustainable? Do current approaches to sustainability make any real difference to the long-term sustainability of human…
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the drivers of transition
What might it “look like” to “achieve sustainability”? It seems to me that this desirable process wouldn’t occur as a “monolithic”, simultaneous, homogenous, all-encompassing global or societal movement, but rather as the converging transitions of many, many different individual systems and sub-systems. These could be, for example, a city’s mobility system, a region’s water system,…
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exploring the limits to growth
In 1972, a group of top scientists from MIT published a ground-breaking book called The Limits to Growth. The researchers, lead by Dennis Meadows, applied the newly created field of systems dynamics to explore what they called the world problematique – the complex of problems affecting the globe including poverty and inequity, environmental degradation, institutional…