Systemic Awareness

Climate change threatens to affect humanity on the  individual level as well as the collective social level.  In order to prevent an ecological catastrophe, action must be taken on the collective individual level.  In other words, action must be taken on the level of the system, which in turn translates to many different actions being simultaneously undertaken by many individuals.

My interest in climate change was bolstered when I re-imagined the whole issue as a challenge facing the world itself, viewed as a potentially adaptive system.  I began to look at the world as if it were a single cell whose pattern of activities was driving it closer and closer to an undesirable future.

I realized that the challenges facing the earth are the same as the challenges facing any living system.  To survive, a system must be able to do two things: (1) perceive threats to their survival and (2), take actions to maintain survival on the basis of these perceptions.  

There is a third step that is implied between these two, and it is arguably the most important of all.  This is the creation of the appropriate links between actions and perceptions.  These links will allow for the perception of climate change (as well as the perception of appropriate ways to "change the change") to trigger the appropriate actions to prevent the undesirable changes.

There are two domains onto which we can apply the processes of perception and action that will be necessary to prevent a climate change.  These are the individual and the collective.  I think that it is most productive to choose the latter.  The reason is that the changes that will have to be made are structural and "macro" in nature.  They will certainly involve (at some point) changes made by individuals, but the necessary changes will have to be made on a large scale, by corporations or governments.  The problems have their origin on this level, anyway.

On the individual level, there is a large-scale recognition of the climate problem, although it is certainly not universal.  Unfortunately, this is less true on a collective level where the changes must be made.  

One thing is certainly clear:  This crisis can take lessons from biology and systems theory, and those disciplines can take lessons from it.  What we are seeing now is learning, taking place on a larger scale than has ever been possible.  This learning is not the kind that involves the memorization of facts.  It is the fundamental kind of learning that involves making adaptive connections between perception and action.

This kind of learning also occurs in the corporations and other systems that are responsible for the climate crisis.  Those systems learned to perceive threats and opportunities related to their financial survival, and they learned how to act in ways that would take advantage of their perceptions in order to generate capital.  The motivation for them was capital, and it is clear that this is a potent motivator.  It motivates the component parts of systems to adapt themselves to make a better system-better in terms of being more profitable.  

It could be said that the reason why climate change is such a difficult issue is that it occurs on a large timescale.  Although there is a payoff for preventing climate change, there is also a payoff for doing some things that will hasten climate change, and this payoff occurs in the shorter term.  However, it is not the fact that these payoffs occur on the shorter term that makes them better motivators, it is the fact that they are the kinds of payoffs that literally pay off.  

The motivation to work for climate change is to ensure long term survival.  The problem is that working for climate change has no short term payoff, and hence, no possibility for short term survival.  With short term survival in jeopardy, long term survival becomes irrelevant.

Next time, I will look into ways to make operations affecting the long term survival pay off positively or negatively in the short term...