Posts on the UN NGO Week 4 Sustainability dialog for “WorldWeWant2015“ – Post II references Post I below it, and is in reply to Alison Doig, working with Christian Aid, Green Alliance, WWF, Greenpeace and RSPB to understand the nature of the relation between environmental sustainability, quoted at the bottom. Alison lays out a set of simple but broad principles for sustainability, a preview of a longer paper, but missing key issues for working with the natural phases of developmental processes for environmental transformations. jlh
See also Jan 2014 OWG7 proposed World SDGincorporating this principle and others
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Post II Jessie Henshaw Fri, Mar 1, 2013 at 1:00 pm
Alison, Your approach seems quite sensible, but to be missing one of the key controlling variables for all these objectives. That’s whether the improvements you seek are “by an accumulation of larger steps” or “by an accumulation of smaller steps”. An accumulation of smaller steps is probably sustainable, and an accumulation of larger steps is necessary to get any process of change started, but quite unsustainable, is the interesting rub.
This distinction is also quite missing from the whole discussion, always has been actually, so you’re not to be faulted for overlooking it. Still, it does in fact control whether any of the things we hope will be sustainable actually will be. I’m a systems physicist and this is the subject I study, both how all sorts of development processes need to begin and end, and how easy it is for people to overlook the whole subject. I’d very much like to work with you if you see how to build any of this into your report in progress.
As a matter of change over time, start-up development always needs to be divergent and expansive, a series of ever bigger steps, and maturing development always needs to be converging and self-limited, a series of ever smaller steps. In-between the physical momentum of change builds and decays.
We’ve largely used up or maximized our use of the good quality sources on earth, for lots of our critical resource needs. It’s evident in their systematically rising prices, for one thing, but also in our rapidly declining rates of discovering new reserves, for half a century now! We’ve “eaten the good stuff”, and still plan to find more and grow the economy as before.
a fact
So, not that you couldn’t use your shopping and profits for values far greater than just having more, of course,
BUT, to prosper by increasing our wealth as we have been,
It seems like it'd be a real joy! Just catch them with your radiant smile.
we need to
*Double* our total previous use of natural resources
three more times this century !
It’s a detail overlooked by the world’s mainstream economists, and apparently nearly all the critics too. Our present economic plans are to keep prospering as we did over the past two centuries. That necessitates continuing to double of our resource uses every ~33 years in the future, then, or magical change only dreamed of.
It’s really ALL our long term professional economic modeling, all our long term environmental rehabilitation planning, such as responding to climate change, as well as all our long term government, finance and business plans, that “just assume” continued growing resource use as before. Just to make the point clear,… our long term plan is not only to “make bricks without straw” but also to project making bricks without water or clay!
Why it not adds up to our really needing 8 whole earths by the end of the century has to do with the sneaky mathematical properties of doubling… sneaking up on our brains. In each doubling period everything changes as much as throughout all its prior history. The oddest and most sneaky of all aspects of it, of course, is that this dilemma is quite real…
Even if we could find 7 more earths worth of resources as good as what we started with, it would actually end up just make our problems worse. “Enjoying them” would then reasonably be expected to involve 7 times the impacts we’ve had on the beauty and sustainability of the earth too…!! It also exposes the madness of our well meaning hope to rely on growth to pay for reversing climate change!
These problems add to the evidence that the fundamental in-feasibility of our long term growth plan has avoided most everyone’s attention. It’s not just “unlikely” that we’d keep finding many times the total amount of natural resources we’ve consumed before,… and that using them would have no effect.
You might as well be looking for an endless line of magical frogs to kiss.
1. Which global trends and uncertainties may influence how environmental sustainability is framed in the international development agenda over the next 10-30 years?
There’s a major global shift that will continue, and upset virtually everything people are planning on, because people are NOT planning on our world economic growth model to stop producing growing economic returns. It financially relies on consuming the earth ever faster. That is produces ever shrinking returns.
You can see the physical evidence of it happening all over and as the main cause of our converging world crises, the world commodities crises, food crises, inequity and ‘missing middle’ crises, the related financial crises and ecological liability crises. It is giving us a world increasingly mired in conflicting interests, complexity, confusion, and indecision. Continue reading Post 2015 UN Sustainable Development Strategy→
Helene and Steven had raised the need to include finance in the narrative of “the commons” and Myra had said about my reply “Jessie, This is your clearest writing by far on the new financial commons. ” … so I hope it’s of use here. (The discussion was part of a follow-up to a CAUN Commons Action for the UN conference call with Barrett Brown, on the different kinds of “thought leaders” he had identified setting the course for the sustainabilty movement, using social science methods, reflected in his Fall 2012 article in Kosmos. fyi)
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Learning to speak nature's language
I. On Feb 4 2013 Jessie responded
Helene & Steven,
Great to have someone bring up the need to work on having a new financial commons. We need to map out how to transform finance, so that it acts to care for the earth as its main objective rather than to squeeze it dry as fast as it can, as at present. So we’d need to understand things that people already do that contributes to steering finance in one direction or the other, kind of unusual territory for social organizers…
So what we need to do is get our social language to somehow recognize nature’s process language.
It’s oddly obvious what creates the real value of money. People get confused, about it because it seems hard to connect logical theories with how the real world works. It’s the real world that gives our theories whatever reality, relevance and meaning they have, of course. The real value of money is as a unit of credit, for a share of anything the whole economy can do in exchange for money. It makes money a direct measure of what people want and the whole economic system and its networks of parts can do for them, its real value.
Below are two related comments from the Systems Thinking World “Where does the Money Go” conversations. They focus on why the value of money goes bad, and why that’s NOT that the money supply expands with expanding credit in the economy. The real problem is the viral process of multiplying bets allowed, a different feedback loop.
For further discussion of this natural systems view of how the money economy works, and why it fails, see the reference page “Concept$.htm” and the Natural Economy posts here. The classic failure of the money system occurs as permitted viral circles of betting demand unreal growing returns from the rest of the economy. That “betting economy” drains credit from the “productive economy” and the “grants economy” (aka the “Love Economy”) it supports, the original economy in which people use what they have for purposes other than money.
1) On STW 11/7/12
Duane – You pointed out that a very early use of money was cowrie shells. I think earlier evidence of money use were notches on sticks and wedge marks in clay, accounting for natural units and credits for them. But the questions remains, what is the actual seat of their value?? No artifact has a value without a use of value in relation to other uses of things, right?
So how do you then define what gives monetary markers value, if both the marker and the things of value themselves, have no independent defining characteristic making them valuable at all? Don’t they seem to only have value in relation to their how they are used in a whole system of other things of value? Continue reading What creates the real value of money??→
10/26/12 in Shining Light on “Dark Energy”, part of my “reality math” series, I describe how standard measures of business impacts vastly under-count them, and how it has equally misled our theory and practices of sustainable design.
We’re not counting the consumption required to deliver business services at all, and that’s commonly much larger than the impacts we can trace directly. The article is in the Sept 2012 SB “New Metrics of Sustainability” letter (& here as a PDF). The research for it is the peer reviewed 2011 SEA assessment method published in Sustainability (MDPI). In discussing it on Systems Thinking World I found good added ways to explain the huge problem it causes us. The graphic below shows the scale of the error, the typical four-fold under-count.
But… Why Does the Changing Information Matter ???
Loraine noted that if the same error of perception is the same for all, it might not matter, for example. So, the problem that misinformation distorts every decision you make wasn’t getting through. The question she asked help set up a good explanation.
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10/25/12 Loraine – Thanks for inquiring. I do recognize there is something in my work that is hard to connect with. Maybe its best exemplified by the weird quotes I get occasionally, like my dad’s, the outstanding physics professor who taught me to be so observant I could recognize behavior not following the laws of physics. He finally gave up in exasperation saying “Everything you say is true dear, it’s *just not physics*”. Needless to say, I also had no idea what to say to a response like that!!
The scales of counted and uncounted direct energy demands for operating the model business for the SEA case study.
But that was years ago, and I do see a lot more clearly what keeps people from recognizing how I depart from the common perspective. I am, after all, talking about systemic errors in perception. In this case it’s for the world’s standard setting bodies for economic measures. They’ve been thinking our data was the reality, unaware of how much of business system impacts are hidden from view. Thinking our information is reality is a problem lots of places. Continue reading How mismeasures steer us wrong→
Recently Horst G Ludwig said in effect, it’s all just impossible. He said it in a way, from really understanding the self-conflicts within most solutions, that prompted this rather clear statement of one of the exceptions we’ve been discussing, that others commented on liking a lot.
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Horst – I think you’re missing some of the options, to say “As long as UN seeks to save the monetarian-economic system nothing can be done.” What I’d agree with you on is that “The problem is that we are living in idiocratic worlds…”. Living by ideologies not connected to reality is clearly a failure of ideas, but it does not mean that no fresh thinking is possible.
Over-investing in the commons till it’s barren
At least one alternate way to end the destructive use of money that exploits people and the earth seems to take only fresh thinking. For example, the tragedy of the commons is that the commons can’t remain bountiful if you over-invest in exploiting it, like using your cattle to multiply the cattle grazing on the village green, in the example Harding gave.
So, for our earth as a commons to remain profitable for investment, something needs to limit the growth of the investments for exploiting it. It would protect both the value of the investments and the value work, by forestalling an otherwise inevitable tragedy of our ever growing ‘husbandry’ of investments grazing on “the commons” till it’s barren. Continue reading Fresh Thinking for The Tragedy of the Commons→
There are a great variety of reasons to organize people
Sometimes it’s to discover something or to accomplish somethingSometimes it’s to connect people who share their views Sometimes for people who share a common world from different views… (but have remarkably different talents and views)
If you know of good examples or methods not mentioned here,
please post comments
It’s Collaborative Work between groups of stakeholders that often “don’t speak the same language”. It takes art, patience and a sound method to get them to immerse themselves in the environment of the problem or opportunity that they need each other to respond to as partners.
It follows nature’s model of systems design to begin the growth of any system with a business model for multiplying one’s control of their environment. That’s what happens when planting a seed, that grows by multiplying it’s ‘secret’ internal design, consuming its host environment ever faster, at first. It doesn’t pay in the end, though, for either businesses or any other kind of economic system, to keep following that model, as if endlessly getting nature ever more pregnant could be the soul (or ‘sole’) purpose of self-organization.
When you get environments pregnant you also need to budget for child care, is the point. That’s the time a growth system stops using its profits for its own self-inflation, and switches to using them instead for discovering its original purposes and nurturing them. Study any kind of growth system that fulfills its own purposes. That’s what is done to discover and fulfill their ultimate purposes.
Systems build on growing profits and give them away to keep thriving.
I’ve written extensively, from numerous perspectives, on both the systems science and financial implications. What’s implied is our need to follow nature’s example, and instead of investing in self-inflation to consuming our host ever faster…, giving away our profits to find our true purposes in having begun to grow.
Getting the whole system to reorient its purposes, from growth to funding what matters to us… would indeed involve some “rethinking”. It might be easier than it seems at first, though, as it seems to be for lots of other kinds of systems in nature that do it casually and simply, without a thought actually. They often succeed by just giving all their products away to see what others make use of. That’s what the cells in organisms and the organisms in ecologies largely do. They don’t give away what is needed for them to operate, though, so there’s some sort of line between what they must give away for the whole to thrive, and must keep for themselves to thrive.
Knowing that it’s probably a physical necessity for our survival makes it easy to discard the options that obviously wouldn’t work, and send you “back to the drawing board” looking for the secret to the ones that would…
Preface: My last post on the dramatic declining share of wages in GDP since 1970 mostly discussed that remarkable change in behavior of the whole system in relation to how the numbing complexity of business would make computers better “wage earners”, shifting income from wage earners to investors. Complexity too great to follow what’s happening… ??The graph here is a simpler version, showing the same dramatic shift in the disproportionate changes in wages and GDP since 1970.
This post is on how the same shift from wages to profits reduces demand for the products, “made for people” but for which neither business decision making tools nor investors have an appetite. The economy visibly changed behavior. It was coincident with computer decision making emerging as a leading tool of business, and the historic numbing complexity everyone has experienced (reflected in changing language use).
The third important way is a later realization. Computers are overwhelmingly better at making deterministic predictions… but can’t be programmed to consider human values, so they’re omitted from the rules for what to optimize… Computers are even more likely to keep applying old values that no longer apply than humans too. When resource prices go up, for example, the old standard investment models say “speed up”, while nature is signaling “slow down”.
It may seem there’s nothing more dispassionate and “neutral” than automated decision making, but that easily becomes purely ruthless too. So it seems to create a “perfect storm” of misdirection to use computers to multiply their programs in a time of fundamental change in our world. If the model says “choice A = X profit” there’s no way to tell if a different story would be told had humans studied how ‘A’ applied in the current circumstance, so the model built without human values also omits any way to argue with it.
You can see one global effect of this naturally “inhuman” decision making of computer models in their universal penny shaving for profit. That seems directly behind the ever stricter control of decisions, since computers were introduce, by the computer’s measure of value, “the bottom line”. Before that, business people needed to think of the business as a whole, and not a single number, ruling almost every choice. So it produces ever growing pressure to “make money” for the sake of money, whether making a bit less to invest in other values might be a better fiduciary choice.
Author’s Note: 2/16 – My work on this problem dates back to the 70’s really, and my developing methods for “whole system accounting”. In simple terms “whole system” or “inclusive” accounting means you can’t keep “robbing Peter to pay Paul” without noticing. It comes from the customary methods of natural science, not used in economics. Instead of using arbitrary accounting categories, one uses naturally defined partitions of the whole system to define your categories. One is ultimately forced to get it right by there being lots of natural reasons you can’t keep “robbing Peter” (calling what’s unaccounted for ‘externalities’) without dire consequences.
Whole system accounting models force you to look at what you are leaving out of the model, by requiring the use of accounting categories that add up to the whole, partitions of the system. That’s what natural science does to validate the data collection and produce “closed accounting” of the system in question. Oddly so do business financial accounts, but just not economic accounts. Using partitions of the whole for your accounting categories forces you to estimate how much is going uncounted. The first discussions of complete economic economic models of that kind are my 1983 General Allocation Theory and 1985 Unconditional Positive feedback in the economic system in the SGSR proceedings for that year.
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1970 marked the sudden end of steadily growing US wages, as a sharply accelerating trend of growing economic inequity and loss or resilience began.
“Information overload” was a rapidly growing topic of conversation and computers emerged as the premiere tool for driving business profit.
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Was that how humans began to be replaced by technology,
as things got too complex?
comment 1.
I think the question is quite relevant, and in line with Nobel laureate Wassily Leontief’s 1983 warning that humans will go the way of the horse in the business of providing goods and services. What most people don’t know is that started dramatically in ~1970,
Indexing UN GDP (1880 to 2010) and US median wage levels (from 1948) at 1970 shows how they grew at the same rates before 1970, and then have been growing apart. It shows the divergence between levels of wage incomes and wealth, a societal shift from earned incomes and wages, toward unearned income and finance.
It’s remarkably clear in the data, quite indelible as a “coincidence” between introducing computers for business use in ~1970 and the “the great divergence” of breaking American society apart with lagging earnings from employment and multiplying earnings from wealth. Why did it occur. Following from my 2010 Complexity too great to follow what’s happening… ?one could explain it as cause by the numbing increase in the complexity of everything we do, affecting people but not the computers or the calculation of profits. Looked at from a social view of ever faster increasing economic inequity… it looks more like people using computers to make money, robbing Peter to pay Paul and not counting it.
For those interested, here’s the same data without indexing the wage curves to GDP:
History US GDP with Percentiles of Median Wages approximately scaled as partitions of the whole
