cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/35842731
A drought in Russia led to riots in Egypt. Fires in Canada fueled deadly pollution in Spain. Extreme weather can have knock-on effects in faraway places that are not well understood and rarely accounted for in planning, a new paper warns.
The unprecedented wildfires that burned across Canada in 2023 not only scorched 70,000 square miles of forest, but also unleashed massive plumes of smoke that clouded skies from Chicago to New York to parts of Europe. The spike in pollution contributed to the deaths of more than 22,000 Europeans, according to one estimate.
Systems theory, as a discipline, is more needed than ever before.
its weird how the brilliance of Jay W. Forrester and the whole systems dynamics thing had a succession problem or something . Nobody took up the reigns afaik . just sort of faded out . donella meadows… As school of thought or discipline it really just got left abandoned and rudderless. ive been hoping some genius would revive it and bring it back to the public sphere in a meaningful way. at best we got some good stuff like permaculture out of it that got traction but still not the holistic tier that should exist . maybe its too abstract
I cannot express how deeply I want people to consider the effects of things at a system scale. Every. Single. Day. I mention to someone that something we are dealing with is evil, something seemingly benign. I have to try to explain why this thing is bad and it just seems so good damned obvious to me because I have been thinking this way for years. But for most people, cause and effect ends when they close their eyes.
But for most people, cause and effect ends when they close their eyes.
I’m mortified by the percent of the adult population that doesn’t really understand cause and effect in any meaningful or functional way. It took me way too long to realize its something ,that was assumed implicit to me when internally modeling other people’s mental models, actually doesn’t even apply to like 60% of the population. it explains a lot of my confusion for my life about peoples behavior.
