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Finding Organization in Natural Systems – “Quick Start”

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How Natural Systems Work… is by forming processes that produce a profit, used to grow it, in a burst of creative self-organization, to become sustainable ONLY IF the profits that built it get used to maintain what was built; the essential road map.

That general model of nature’s “facts of life” is your “quick start”.   Following is a foreword and then a compact introduction to a scientific method. Anyone can observe the details of how developmental systems work by just learning to study the development of individual systems in nature.  You start with learning how to identify natural “living systems” as what fills our environments from watching how they develop.  Then you can recognize them as cells of organization that produce resources for their own development.  Easier reading descriptions are found in:

“In a Nut Shell“ and Why ?¸¸.·´ ¯ `·.¸¸  The scientific method

How Natural Systems Fail… A growth system that can’t change to maintaining itself after building itself, becomes disabled.   As for our modern world economy, at the limits of the earth, keeps devoting more and more effort to expanding, it drains resources from maintaining itself. What’s wrong is the essential road map for sustainability is missing.   It is absent from our great cultural conversations, absent from the models of the professions and groups trying to stabilize the economy or seek “sustainability”.

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An Organizational Stages Model (OSM)

–  the science  –

Foreword: Understanding natural systems involves learning how to first recognize them as individually developing systems, and then discover some of the hidden organization within them.   You can find them where you see events have “lives of their own”.   The real learning is a “learning by doing” process, as the key is discovering how to define your words by referring to self-defining objects of the natural world, not defining words with other words or use abstract models.

Abstract languages are “self-referential” and what a science of natural systems needs is words defined by nature.   To understand system models, then, you then need to consider them as questions about the real world subjects that are NOT in the model… but referred to by the words associated with the natural subject, a new way of scientific thinking.

Most any history of events will have periods of accumulating change that speed up and then slow down.  That becomes the main subject, the key that unlocks the basket of productive questions  about “what’s happening”.   It’s the question that identifies a systematic process of change as a sign of a developmental process and evidence of a self-organizing system doing it.

When some local system of change is “taking off” or later “fading away”, you notice where it and begin piecing together what is doing it, by watching for regularly changing rates of change.    It could be anything from the history of your own career choices, to the stages of organization for “the big prom”, the founding of your own business or the dramatic global shifts in economies and societies that “history” is itself a record of.

 

 

 

 

[This is a sample graph showing a real systemic transformation.   Only the data is shown to focus your attention on the changing rates of change](i)

 

It definitely helps to have some kind of “data” to indicate when locally developing changes are speeding up or slowing down, and notice the turning point from one to the other.   The different periods of behavior display different states of organization, and are used for “building a narrative ” for how one transitions into the next.  The traditional scientific.  For systems with hidden organization, it’s the continuity of change that is the direct evidence, of organization you can’t actually see, but can expect to find if you look there for it.

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3Step process for Working With Nature

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Now one of the natural systems learning processed under the heading of “Contextual Systems Engagement.” Make a proposal.

    • A “Sustainability Learning” Proposal
    • Jessie Henshaw – UN representative of IPS & scientific adviser to the NGO Commons Cluster on natural systems, in response to the UN Major Groups call for:  “Crowd sourcing ideas for thematic areas and modalities of engagement for the one day intercessional with the Co-Chairs of the OWG and MGs and other Stakeholders”

    • – “Experiential Learning” and “Transformative Education”,
    • – For building bridges from deterministic, linear and Cartesian thought and word use, by exploring our observations of the environments and their living systems affecting our ideals.

    • 1. As a Break-out Group Activity 2. Outline of the process 3. Other Formats
      4. Purpose & Theory behind it
      5      . Why we rely on social networks to define our reality

      Added References: Draft Facilitator’s Guide& Typical “Public Pad” meeting template

       

      Foreword:
      Here I propose a meeting technique for small diverse groups of people to help enrich each other’s awareness of how their environments work and see what they have and need to work with to “work with nature”. Looking for the working parts the world around them, for how their own cultures work as systems that create their own economies, it might first seem they don’t know any more about that than they do about the weather. The trick is to shift attention from what’s hard to explain in our minds to noticing what’s going on and working all around us. PDF copy

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1. Learning to Work with Nature: – as a break-out group activity –

A diverse work group of 6 to 20 people would be assembled, helped by a facilitator, needing about an hour to just go through the basic 3Step process.   It’s NOT a discussion group, of people offering opinions, but a learning group of people offering connecting observations.  During the session they’d need to be able to write as they talk, building on each other’s observations, starting from being given or choosing an ideal goal to work with.

They’d use that ideal to lead them on an exploration of what people in the group already know from observing their cultural, economic & ecological environments, sharing with each other things they’ve seen are happening that could affect achieving the ideal. The product is a large collection of freshly shared observations on what’s happening and how it connects; they’d need to work with to proceed to planning for investments in changing their environment.

Drawing out each other’s observations on how things work

Continue reading 3Step process for Working With Nature →

For teachers, Natural systems, Research & Measures, Scientific theory, Stories & Experiences

Tricky Reading – the Indicator & the Context

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From a conversation on the Commons Abundance Network.

 

Of course I agree a lot is solved by having it clear what you are using the word “growth” to refer to.   But it’s easier to figure out we *should* be clear about what is being referred to than to really do it.   It’s so easy to fall into the trap of treating some “positive indicator” as the system, some changing number that “sounds nice” in name, to end up promoting something not knowing what the real situation is at all.

That’s exactly how the BAU approach to consuming the planet ever faster got off track, using a trusted set of indicators and not paying the least attention to how their meanings were changing radically over time.   So, that philosophy’s “mistake” was not paying attention to the whole system it was applying its values to.

It’s so easy to fall into the trap of treating some “positive indicator”
as “the system”

False priorities develop are all over the place that way.  Giving relief wherever there is pain and suffering, for example, ignores that injecting artificial supports just skews the indicator.  It changes the ability of people to care for themselves in the wrong way, giving them dependencies rather than independence, and directly causes their own local cultures to become useless to them and decay.

to help you watch where you're going...

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The false duality of mind & nature

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Tweets from Shoudaknown 7/17/13

1      The false duality of mind & nature is clear, in how events for each begin with bursts of self-organization and energy use, “eventfully”. ;-)

2      More revealing is how the eventfulness of mind and nature doesn’t occur in theories, relying on defined relationships not discovered ones.

3      Operating the earth as an equation, by our rules rather than natures, we go mad hoping our bursts of self-organization can be made infinite.

4      We misplace reality as what’s in our models, missing the eventful world still undefined they point to, not what we see but what we look at.

5      First language was created to express feeling, then split by using facts, needing models with controlled relationships, and unfeeling.

6      That’s why we are destroying the earth, and see but don’t feel it, relying on models that blind us to the meaning of what they help us do.

7      3Step Process of Learning to Work With Nature (not a theory, but a method of finding meaning in the facts of life). http://www.synapse9.com/signals/2013/07/03/a-3step-process-for-working-with-nature/ …

8      So, since models inherently can’t tell us the meaning of change, we now need our hearts to learn how environments work, to find what to do.

 

jlh

 

Mail & Comment, Natural systems, Policy discussion, Research & Measures, Transformation, What to do

UN Development Goals… leave out Common Needs

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Report I. (below) 18 June – Comment to UN organizers of Final Report on MDG’s in dialog with Major Groups –  MDG solutions are not designed to hold, because the goals were defined as performance metrics not cultural growth and development.  JLH

Report II. (above) Comment to UN President, Member State Delegates and UN SDG agencies, on the UN Sustainable Development Goal Progress Reports of UN Agency and Stakeholder Groups – UN Development Goals… Leave out the common needs for a world that works as a whole:

  1. UN High-Level Panel of Eminent Persons, Report on the Post-2015 Development Agenda – May 2013
  2. UN Development Group: The Global Conversation Begins –  Emerging views for an new Development Agenda – June 2013
  3. United Nations NGO and Civil Society Stakeholder Forum Initial Stocking Taking Analysis of the SDGs eInventory – June 2013
  4. United Nations Global Compact: Report on UN Post-2015 Development Agenda
  5. Sustainable Development Solutions Network An Action Agenda for Sustainable Development – June 6 2013

by: Jessie Henshaw UN representative of Institute for Planetary Synthesis (IPS) & Science Adviser on natural systems to the NGO Commons Cluster – PDF copy (See related problem/solution discussions linked below)

 

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1 Jul 13 – Report II.

Left out are the deep common interests we ALL share, a secure world working together as a whole.

The progress reports on the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals display an inspired cultural image of the future, but tragically omit the most important practical necessities of sustainability. Over time the discussion has drifted, toward being only about sustaining ideal economic development, quite overlooking the conflicting critical tasks of sustaining the Earth. It’s been thrilling to observe the process of dream weaving online, and in the many meetings I’ve attended at the UN.   There’s clearly been a massive response from the global social networks, and an eagerness to build a new vision for our future. The vision we see forming is highly impractical though.   For me, as a natural systems scientist who understands the implications, it has been extremely painful to watch as the discussion proceeded, with the critically important steps of sustainability being consistently left out.

Continue reading UN Development Goals… leave out Common Needs →

Natural systems, Policy discussion

a Care Giving Purpose – a neglected constituency

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A three minute message originally for the UN,

Caregiving Purposes

(YouTube video)

As a way of life no one would make a practice of consuming ever more of their neighbor’s resources.  If we just pay someone else to do it for us though, and the profits are used to grow the process, people get so distracted they lose track of where the profits are coming from, … making the temporary fountain of wealth seem like a good enough idea to organize a whole civilization around.

The science I study clearly points to our society rapidly causing the greatest tragedy of the commons the earth has ever known.    We don’t recognize our roles in it, simply for not looking at how our money does what it does for us, passing on our requests for services and generating profits to grow our ever increasing requests.

By looking at money only in relation to our own needs we are “laundering” the information about what our incomes, spending and savings really do, to the earth and for us. It’s visible enough we could easily get the idea of if we wanted; that it’s using money to make money that grows wealth and overshoots, spoiling the wealth created.   So it’s our every-day practices of using money that overwhelm any way of creating reliable profits, passing on messages to add to demands beyond their limits rather than to care for the productive partnership people build with nature.

Spending the time and effort to see how our money system uses the earth has other returns. Gaining that ability to recognize how systems behave beyond our intent lifts a veil on new perceptions of nature and nature’s systems, with real benefits. Whether your first concern is cultural values, or economic ones, or religious ones, professional or artistic, it’s much the same.   To learn how nature can work for you, you need to first find how to recognize nature’s systems and how they work.

It lets you watch and become familiar with the many more kinds of individually behaving living things around you. You begin to notice the communities, cultures, economies, industries, professions, networks, governments, environments, ecologies, and people’s lives, etc, around you, in a new way. You notice we’ve been ignoring them as living things, and how they behave by themselves, as a quite important neglected constituency on earth.

Each living system has its own internal organization and lively behaviors, that developed as it grew, as our own did, and as those of every other living thing.   You may study them your own way, (no one actually has any other way…), but your approach needs to be a quite open minded and objective, like a scientist or a business person takes, or a parent takes, toward their care giving purpose, and use it to care for the earth.

 

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Whole Culture Led not Technology Driven – getting SDG’s to really work

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The UN’s idea of Sustainable Development Goals (SDG’s), as a “unified policy framework”, and seemingly everyone else’s too, turn out to be “missing something”,

Missing the glue that fits and holds the many parts together, high aspirations lacking a real method for connecting the parts

In the UN’s “Vision of a Future Worth Choosing“

“The High-level Panel on Global Sustainability argues that by making transparent both the cost of action and the cost of inaction, political processes can summon both the arguments and the political will necessary to act for a sustainable future.”

Human cultures have NEVER changed according to plan, is the problem.  That’s now how societal change works.   How people are discussing the implementation of the SDG’s, called a “unified policy framework”, is almost entirely as just a list of ideals, almost like “complaints” about how economic development didn’t fulfill our best intentions over the past century…  No, it certainly didn’t.

What isn’t mentioned, though, is how to change that.  How would the economy’s normal steering mechanism might be changed, if it didn’t go where we’d want in the first place?   How would a new steering mechanism be created that would be more responsive to rational concerns about fairness and our role on earth?   Just a list of desires for what didn’t happen is really just wishful thinking, a delaying tactic perhaps, rather than addressing the problem.

The simple framing of this problem below, what steers the economy, is followed by my brief reports to CAUN on how the “connecting the parts” problem came up in the DESA workshops on implementing SDG’s.  The Workshop Agendas offered a fairly comprehensive view of the “technology push” transfer techniques being contemplated… which helps illustrate the basic problem that human cultures don’t learn that way.

the servant became master, the served the slave
A choice between Whole Culture Led and Technology Driven change...

A. Technology Driven Change, the “tech solution” – leaves cultures shaped to serve technology values, perhaps with ignorance of culture

B. Culture Motivated Change, “the cultural solution” – leaves technology shaped to serve cultural values, perhaps with ignorance of how things work

What thrives in nature is the cultural solution, when… cultures are able to understand what technologies are physically profitable, linked together to produce more than they consume, and… their choices show long foresight in being responsive to where profit ends… Continue reading Whole Culture Led not Technology Driven – getting SDG’s to really work →

Natural Economy, Natural systems, Policy discussion, Scientific theory, What to do

Missing Principles of Ecological Thinking – in plans for the Earth

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The following list of 12 principles of ecological thinking seemed missing from consideration in the comments of UN member nation delegates and others at recent meetings led by the UN, in its major effort obtain a consensus on sustainable development goals (SDG’s) for 1) eliminating widespread poverty, 2) responding to climate change and 3) maintaining steady economic growth for all… for framing the UN Post2015 development plans.  The good reception I got mentioning couple of these to some of the experts at the meetings prompted me to send them an email with this longer list.

The changes needed in the world economy are SO massive, eliminating endemic cultures of poverty for 1/8 of humankind, doubling the size of the world economy while cutting fossil fuel use back to ~1960 levels, in ~30 or so years, is “a very full plate” agenda.  One might see it as more of a full emergency global economic rebuilding, to save the earth.

The UN leadership prepares extensively for such meetings, providing briefing documents and inviting very expert speakers, generally all show clear efforts to consider the true complexity of intervening in cultural/economic/environmental systems for making such big changes.  The UN doesn’t make a real effort to educate the delegates or other participants as systems thinkers, though, to understand and be able to discuss the real nature of the complex problems we face in proposing to rearrange the human ecosystem.

Feeding but not directing the thinking of others, does mark a conservative approach to intervening in the social and political cultures the UN serves, though, and is quite traditional at the UN.  I think today ecological thinking has advanced some, and the problem we face has changed a lot.  So now that conservative approach comes at some real cost.  It allows a low level recognition of our real problems by world decision makers to persist, and important false directions to go unchecked. Everyone seems to agree we have little time to discover the errors we’re making in our use of the earth and getting them straightened out.  ed 4/30/13

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Colleagues, I was delighted to get positive reactions from thought leaders as you each are, at the UN OWG-2 meetings last week, to my pointing out key principles of natural systems not being considered by the delegates.    I thought I’d summarize a list of 11 of them, from my notes on the meetings while the week is fresh in our minds.   I represent the Commons Cluster in the NGO Major Group, and this is part of my own work in that group.

I first noticed the first five this week, while carefully listening for the questions the delegates were consistently not asking.   The other six are one’s I’ve studied carefully for decades.   They’re mostly very logical, perhaps even obvious, but missed by people tending to think and talk in terms of our own social purposes, ethics and values.  So asking what choices are on “nature’s menu” of options is honestly just overlooked.

Because they don’t automatically connect to social values, yet at least, lots of people also respond as if these natural principles are just “too far out to consider”.   So these may seem  “a little far out”.   I think are quite accurate descriptions what’s on nature’s menu of options and rather relevant to our work, though.

  1. We talk about “not crossing planetary boundaries” in the future, with world resource prices rising for a decade, problems emerging of increasingly unmanageable complexity, and conflicting interests tying our hands with indecision, all indicating we crossed the boundary well in the past.
  2. We want both “sustainable development” and “economic development” overlooking the conflict, one being for cultures learning to create wealth with their own resources, and the other for cultures learning to create wealth with growing amounts of other people’s resources.
  3. We talk about growth for “curing poverty” when it’s now causing it and worsening debt crises, with growing competition for limited resources that takes limited supplies from lower profit sectors to give to higher profit sectors, visibly accelerating as supplies hit more severe limits. Continue reading Missing Principles of Ecological Thinking – in plans for the Earth →
Natural Economy, Policy discussion, What to do

Growth lifting all boats, no longer

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Post to UN NGO thematic consultation on: Environmental Sustainability and Equality

Why growth is now driving inequity,
not the reverse

A popular but mistaken idea is that what is needed to relieve inequity and the food crisis, is a restoration of long term economic growth.   Now that the economy is beginning to press ever harder on the fundamental limits of the earth’s resources, the exact opposite effect is taking place, as growth efforts cause competition to intensify for shares of less and less available resources.

We’re at the limits of cheap resources.  That’s the line we crossed.   So to provide the supplies demanded by the most profitable and fast growing sectors of the world economy, resources need to be taken away from the less profitable sectors, causing them to stop growing and go into ever greater debt.

Growth lifting all boats, no longer - André da Loba, NYTimes

The evidence of that happening in how the commodities markets have exhibited 10 years of escalating prices for essential food and fuel resources.  That directly indicates the transfer of resources from weak to the strong competitors, that the resources available are going to those who can afford higher and higher prices.  That is greatly adding to the other strains causing the food crisis and the world debt crisis, both experienced as “increasing inequity”. Continue reading Growth lifting all boats, no longer →

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“Active Learning” more than goals… For SDG’s we need to Rethink

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This is a copy of a requested comment on the UN NGO Major Group’s recommendations for the UN Post2015 Sustainable development goals, being developed by the UN Open Working Group (OWG) of member country representatives, guided by the UN’s consultants and representatives of civil society groups around the world.   It’s a really exciting thing to be part of…


Comments on draft NGO SDG framework Post 2015
on the SD Knowledge Platform site

I represented the NGO Commons Cluster at the major groups HLPF meeting, 1st OWG meeting and CIVICUS meetings at the UN in the past month.   I’m a natural systems scientist, and for decades have studied a type of physics for understanding why systems like economies are sometimes smoothly self-managing and then sometimes spin out of control.   I’m also active in CAUN.  For reference to what we are learning about how to apply commons principles to the SDG’s, see our 1) proposal for the UN to adopt the commons approach and our 2) draft “Ideal Model” for a global commons approach and for engaging civil society in solving SD problems.  These proposals were reposted to Post2015.org #1 & #2.

We have a lot of rethinking to do:
My main comment could go after pp #1:

A lot of rethinking is apparently needed, as current sustainability efforts are being ineffective, need to be brought into question and new direction found. There’s clear evidence of many kinds that after 40 years of mounting efforts there has been little appreciable effect on the course of the economy’s ever swelling strain on the earth’s resources and living systems. The one exception is unintentional, the current slowing rate of increasing impacts due to the slowing of world economic growth. That’s only from the failure of economic recoveries following the 2008 financial collapse.

So it appears, essentially, that **we don’t know what we’re doing yet**, and so need to take a more active learning approach rather than focus the effort at expanding on current methods, that now seem unproven. Promising new directions like a rejuvenated “commons approach” for facilitating multi-stakeholder collaboration on common interests, are only just being explored. But we believe some way needs to be found to use the active engagement of civil society’s resources central to the world’s SDG framework, and to bridge the silos of thinking now keeping our solutions from changing our problem.

[the following notes would help with turning “needing to rethink” into an “active learning approach” for finding new direction. It comes from email comments on the evolving “commons approach”.] Continue reading “Active Learning” more than goals… For SDG’s we need to Rethink →

New systems science, how to care for natural uncontrolled systems in context