Who… else thinks like I do?

Influences - Correspondents - Reading  - Fields - Bookmarks

Jessie Lydia Henshaw
id (at) synapse9 dot com  5/23/08, 10/10/31,9/1/13 really needs an update...!   

... What has changed the most in 5 years since the last good update is my extensive involvement in the UN commons movement, Helene Finidori in particular, and the whole group at CAUN, great advances in my ecological systems thinking, through extensive correspondence on systems thinking world, important research papers published, discoveries galore about how silos of thinking and reasoning develop as invisible barriers to communication, and now a remarkable fit found with Pat Thompson's Hestian feminism and home economics, as care for the home as the commons for a living culture, of a family or kind of collective society.   It's such a good match!!    

... All along, since the late 70's in fact, I have found no one actually exploring the same life-cycle of transformative organizational design stages that energy systems display , discussed in "chapters.htm", and "pages.htm".   But in Dec 2016 I came across Dasaratha Rama in a Facebook systems thinking forums I've been frequenting for years. So maybe that is a sign of connections to come!

One could never make a whole list of all the important unbiased explorers of the world or the gifted and insightful individuals connected to your own life experience.   There does seem to be a line one can draw, though, particularly for those who try to 'explain things'.   Some see the object of explanation as perfecting the model in their minds and others seek to guide readers to and display the real complexities of the environmental events that animate our world.   I've been searching a long time and people are finally getting enough of an idea that what I'm talking about are the latter type, for some people to start mentioning some others.   It seems worth mentioning the select few of those who appear to be somewhat 'adept' at it.  

Years ago this page contained lists of people I guessed were heading in the direction of studying the real life of individual events, how they develop and how to watch what becomes of them.   That list went away.   So few searchers seem to even experiment with the idea of making the whole physical process of natural happenings themselves the subject, rather than just trying to perfect our own descriptions.    Now I seem to have another list, of a few who succeeded in failing to be seduced to explain things as only existing in their own minds, a few that at some point just 'left that box behind'.   Even fewer have become somewhat adept at sketching out what they find looking at the world that way.   I guess I now have four.   

I’ve just been finding Wendell Berry’s poetry most enjoyable for how he explores many of these very same issues of change and the place of reality.   Jane Jacobs the urban historian does much the same in her portrayal of the life of cities and the intense inconsistency that makes them thrive .   A recent discovery is Walter Lippman the political scientist who beautifully described the cognitive dysfunction of politics.   There's also Malcolm Gladwell, the investigative journalist who very inventively gets big chunks of it too.   Being adept at it seems to involve their all noticing and finding pleasure in 'the twist'.   Every story has a natural twist, the 'dive' you take that if done well 'turns around' or 'turns inside out' in mid-process, and is one of the main things that confounds our attempts to perfect our explanations.

Sources, Other people - [the partial short list] [I found more physics in other places]

• Economic systems theorists: J.M. Keynes, Kenneth Boulding,
• Process ecologists: Howard T. Odum, Fritz Holling, Rob Ulanowicz, Stan Salthe
• Complexity as exploratory learning processes: Gerald Midgley, Peter Allen
• Designers: Buckminster Fuller, Lou Kahn, Jane Jacobs
• Environmentalists: Lester Brown & World Watch,
• Scientific archeology: NASA Archeology, Joseph Tainter, Colin Renfrew, Erich Neumann
• Evolutionary Developmental Biology, Steven J Gould, D'Arcy Thompson, Kirschner & Gerhart
• Network science, Self-organizing software devl., Alife, von Neumann, Barabasi
• General systems theory:  Bertalanffy, Ashby, Weinberg, Donella Meadows
• Old guys finding useful errors: Lamarck, Leibniz, Zeno, C.L. Henshaw, S.A. Forbes
• Writers on change: George Orwell, Walter Lippman, Malcolm Gladwell
• Poets of change: Wendell Berry, Robert M. Pirsig
• Comedians: all of them, New Yorker Cartoons
• Numerous friends asking great questions and sharing life experience
• Sustainability science (when not duplicating the mistakes being corrected...arg!)
   

Fields of Exploration & Influences...  Everyone reading this is, and knows of numerous other groups and individuals, schools of research and spiritual paths that seek to learn how to be resourceful with understanding our complex personal and community relationships with each other and the earth.    Some of those I've most learned from were the leaders and followers of the appropriate technology movement and various cultural, spiritual & activist movements of that time, and from the number of transformative personal relationships that so much of my own thinking developed as an extension of.    I was also particularly inspired by the deep and pure thinking of Louis Kahn, the global awareness of Kenneth Boulding,  the study of growth and form of D'arcy Thompson, the free thinking genius of Bucky Fuller, and by their quests for understanding pure form and process.    I found their hints very helpful while searching for that myself, much of it focused through the problems and potentials of architectural design that first showed me what was missing from my background in physics.    What made my choice to change direction possible and very productive for me was partly an emersion in phenomenology through living with some friends studying for their Ph D's in philosophy for a few years while I was trying to figure out what to do after graduating from college in 1968.   After I started developing my own 'new theory of physics' in the late 70's I began to find and study other disciplines that were attempting to do the same.   Both popular and research environmental ecology, the dynamic systems models as used by Meadows' to study limits to growth, Bertalanffy and Weinberg's approaches to  general systems theory,  the systems ecology of H.T. Odum, Prigogine's non-equilibrium thermodynamics, and complexity/chaos theory as that came along were all parts of that.   I started my wider readings with micro-climatology of Geiger and later a wide variety of economics and various of 'the worldly philosophers' including many popular books with original theories of social or environmental change.   I didn't read large amounts really, but very widely sampled.    

I was also carefully reading some of the wonderful historians, anthropologists, archeologists, evolutionary biologists, paleontologists and investigative journalists who appreciated change as a environmental learning process like Henry Guerlac, Jane Jacobs, Joe Tainter, Colin Renfrew, Stephen J Gould, Mark Kirschner and Malcolm Gladwell.   It wasn't just their answers that I learned from, but also the echoes of their disappointments and how they kept making better and better mistakes.   I really learned a lot from echoes of free thinkers of all kinds,  what pieces I could hear getting picked up in the media or through conversations, what pieces got misused, what were used in new ways.   The field of network science is a relatively new interest, but clearly has major potential for exposing the detailed design of working complex systems, if applied using the exploratory paradigm as a small minority of people in the field are actively doing.  Another area of great interest is Gestalt learning theory for identifying clearly what the conflict is between mental models and environmental processes.  My main recent fields of greatest interest have been sustainable design methods and  sustainability science, and using them to learn about techniques for environmental intervention and partnerships.    Much of that is directly the work of solving on the ground the problem that scientific models, based on physics, leave out all of what have been my greatest sources of inspiration, nature's individual working parts... !

Science Reading Library (~250 good books as of 10/08)
I learn from how people struggle with a question, because that raises really good ones.  Clear answers are quite hard to come bye in a culture being forced to rethink it's thinking by necessity of finding the old way in deep conflict with its physical world.  
Books that Changed my Thinking, (by date present copy acquired)

Books with unusual depth, (by date present copy acquired)

Books with unusual spiritual value (by date present copy acquired)

Books with unusually telling documentary (by date present copy acquired)

Others valued for content or vision (by date present copy acquired)

I did a lot of correspondence in 2008, though only a few of these correspondents of that time.   It was an influential time leading up to and from the first financial collapse, discovering how completely people don't understand each other, I guess you could say... and finding lots of help understanding why, but no help getting through in the end except to finally get over my ten year writing block and start producing the best papers of my life in 2010: