Systemic Management 1

Sustainable human interactions with ecosystems and the biosphere, part 1

A book by Charles W. Fowler

Sustainable human interactions with ecosystems and the biosphere, part 1

Systemic Management — What and why

When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it is hitched to everything else in the Universe — John Muir 1911

First paragraph:

We are faced with an uncertain future. Species are disappearing. Deforestation, agriculture, and fishing have changed ecosystems. Our polluted Earth is warming, the pH of our [the] oceans is declining, and introduced species are altering their habitat [as has the master invasive species, Lord Man]. Scientists discover more problems every day. We [as the expansionist form of human] may have evolved to become an extinction-prone species. Can humans manage other species, ecosystems, or the Earth in response to this information? No. Because of the complexity and interconnected nature of reality, management that seeks to control, dominate, or design [e.g. my life’s work] such systems is doomed to ultimate failure. Managing the nonhuman usually causes more problems than it solves.

Eric Sevareid’s Law comes to mind: “The chief cause of problems is solutions.” We humans cannot understand, at a predictive level, complex systems, let alone manage them. We can manage our demands such that we do not prevent the world system from maximizing empower (MPP/MEPP) . We certainly cannot design them like we design a car (a solution that is a major cause of problems).

“Systems can’t be controlled, but they can be designed and redesigned.”

— Donella Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer

This is systemic design. We can guess then test about what works (listening to Nature helps), then redesign, and guess-then-test again. The design for a viable civilization that results from centuries and millennia of iteration, is the one Nature selects for. The only subsystem we can design (systemically) is our WSS (world socioeconomic-political system or sociobiophysicalagroeco-policy system). Failure is an option. Extinction is a likely outcome.

The primary policy goal (an apolitical control system, a model for survival, e.g. that of the Kogi, is assumed) is sustainability for posterity and the biosphere. The outcome would be a planetary system that supports a maximum diversity of life, including human diversity upon which Nature’s selection process (evolution) can operate (most variations from what currently works are selected against, made to go away, and nobody, no species, get to choose to persist by a force of free will and determination).

One of the conclusions of this book is that immense change will be required; current efforts are exposed as largely artificial, superficial, and fallacious.

‘Normal’ is what works. ‘Abnormal’ (anomalous) is what does not work (long term). Healthy works, unhealthy doesn’t. What works is the genuine, the what-is, compared to the artificial or abstract. Our challenge is to recognize limits and define/redefine what is natural and normal without conflating our needs with our wants, nor putting self (e.g. likes/dislikes, for and against thinking) over system. Humility, love and understanding, may be among the few things we are not at risk of having too much of.

Our species has the choice of living within the limits of nature or facing the consequences of being anomalous — one of which is an untimely extinction. Defining what it takes [to persist] and then being a successful species are both complex, nontrivial matters.

“Choice” is a linguistic construct. There is no choice out there or even in our heads. We can “understand or die.” Understanding, as distinct from belief-based claims to knowing, is compelling, not subject of ready obfuscation and motivated reasoning/willful ignorance. The condition of “would rather know than believe” disallows choosing what you want to believe.

Virtually all modern humans have five digits on each of two arms (and would rather believe than know), a condition our K-strategist ancestors ancestors likely shared with respect to arm anatomy, but memetically (culturally), believing in belief may be a recent (prior 50k years) pathology expansionism has selected for along with a lack of foresight intelligence.

Look around, look to see what is working for other species, what has worked, and understand why, then mimic empirical examples of long-term persistence (sustainability). A viable culture needs to select for an ability to think about thinking (be metareflective) and abandonment of the artificial life (e.g. virtual social media screen time) and the attempt to live in large groups (>50). By thinking about thinking, by realizing the limits of presumed knowing, we can understand that we must abandon thinking and embrace systemic management, the realization that only by listening can we think, which means abandoning the artificial life and adopting the real, the reality-based existence (as distinct from belief-based) of a holistic systems-based worldview.

Living in a state of Nature will seem abnormal to the abnormal. Living as a subsystem of Gaia is what works. The condition of the maladaptive being selected out of the system is what works, so endeavor to live rightly such as Nature alone defines.

Systemic management is pattern-based rather than opinion-based management. The science behind systemic management provides information that needs no conversion; the translation inherent to current management becomes unnecessary in answering management questions systemically.

We educate droves of experts who pretend to know enough to have an opinion. Science, however, as Richard Feynman noted, “is the belief in the ignorance of experts,” i.e. opinion mongerers.

Precluding human existence is not an objective.

Precluding the existence of humanity must seem like the objective to all modern-day techno-industrialized (MTIed) humans (aka Anthropocene enthusiasts) who define “human” to be humans like themselves, a form of non-viable dissipative structure that is not remotely sustainable (able to persist, like all whirlwinds to hurricanes cannot persist by their nature, that which is not evolvable, and for the same energetic reason).

MTIed humans will pass away, but not because systemic managers declare it and work to make it so. The only form of civilization that systemic management can apply is to viable forms of complex society. Truth be told, of necessity, the existence of MTI culture must pass away, be precluded at least from dominating the WSS (world socioeconomic-political/sociobiophysicalagroeco-policy system.

In conventional management, stakeholders (e.g. managers, scientists, government leaders, organizations, institutions, indigenous societies, special interests, corporations, businesses, politicians, individuals, and ‘the public’) are involved in in decision making (none of the tens of millions of species, except one, are shareholders). Decision making is therefore entirely a political subsystem of society (human). The outcome predictably serves maximally the short-term self interests of the shareholders (i.e. is all but guarantied to be non-viable, with unforeseeable adverse consequences).

In systemic management, human stakeholders have input in what questions Nature will be asked, but their self interests are far from determinate. The management questions will seek to ask what management policy will maximize the empower of the subsystem and global system (Gaia) for all stakeholders, one at most of whom is the human species whose short-term self interests are irrelevant. Human stakeholders would have special interests and bias, but politics would be confined to braws in taverns when too much alcohol is consumed by the abnormal (e.g. perfectly normal MTIed humans).

Management issues/questions define the context of listening to the system comprised of perhaps millions of stakeholders, one likely the human species. Data (answers) needs interpretation, a difficulty that cannot be overestimated, a challenge few humans can meet minimally enough to raise above chance opinion (best guess is the best possible outcome). The provisional model for survival, the noted patterns observed (as objectively as humanly possible) determines management policy/action.

Or we can elect our favorite bar brawlers so they can get together and let them (likely mostly hims) decide policy. If they serve our short-term self interests, we’ll-vote for them (or follow them as autocratic Great Leaders as surrogate alpha-males of whatever gender. Or some humans renormalize and cease to be political animals to become normal animals again (or we can go extinct. Nature doesn’t care. Nature is unkind).

SUBNOTE TO FILE

I note that the only Odum cited in the book is Eugene Odum who wrote the first textbook on ecology, except for the chapter on energy written by his smarter brother Mycroft (actually Howard) T. Odum. Obviously those who taught Fowler and associates were part of the consensus narrative that H.T. was too “idiosyncratic,” as in outside the domain of consensus thinking, and so could be ignored (his daughter told me and a few others at a Prosperous Way Down workshop, he stopped going to ecological conferences as they had stopped listening, a complaint Nature could make if Nature cared what humans think.

I’m guessing H.T. didn’t care what other people think (like Richard Feynman) either, which allowed him to ask Nature questions other humans had not. I’m guessing Fowler’s embrace by academics and other servants of the WSS has been similar since 2009, so he may have more cause to consider H.T. a person of interest than the legions of other Anthropocene enthusiasts.

List of articles in this book review series: Systemic Management.