Systemic Management 2
Sustainable human interactions with ecosystems and the biosphere, part 2
A book by Charles W. Fowler
Sustainable human interactions with ecosystems and the biosphere, part 2
Motivation for Change
Why consider alternative management? How’s conventional BAU (business-as-usual) management been working for humans over the last seven thousand years other than by selecting for unsustainable. non-viable empire building? Alternative would be Gaia governance by managing human demands on Nature’s resources to maybe sidestep extinction.
Systemic management would be a global affair, so all management subsystems (e.g. UN, nation-states, states, counties, cities, NGOs, organized religion…, property owners) would be at odds with Blue Planet Governance. Human stakeholders are likely to fight to retain control until the final curtain (when they can’t fight for their rights and privileges). To Gaia and humanity’s posterity: sorry about that.
Systemic management “avoids using values (other than sustainability), emotions, politics, and opinion as the basis for policy.”
Exactly as it must be if humans are to persist long term on the planet. Let’s optimistically assume that as many as 1% of modern humans could change, could become sane. They would have every motivation to form a new world order and agree (per a new social contract) to live within mutually agreed to constraints (mutual coercion mutually agreed to).
Of course, if they formed an Ecolate Party in all regions, autocratic political systems would crush them, and zero Ecolate Party candidates could be elected to a city counsel, let alone to any state or national office (and no businesses, including those in the education business, would hire them or enroll them, so any academic who supported systemic management and all implications would have to have tenure to delay being cancelled).
Systemic management, being apolitical, is a better name than governance, which carries with it the baggage of political connotations. Rule by nature’s laws could be called a naturocracy (as I am guilty of doing), but the academics who can support ‘systemic management’, will not be able to do so out of the context of current control systems.
They may agree that it is the only viable approach to management (of humans), but assumed is that the UN and existing nation-states, if asked nicely to be reasonable, can agree to adopt systemic management as the basis for global management (of human demands on nature’s resources) based on evidence and not humancentric opinion and values (spoiler alert: no current control system can change or be tweaked or even shamed into its opposite).
Doing so, systemically managing humans, would be the 100% right and sane thing to do. Oh, but all political animals (the 99+%) are so denormalized as to not even be capable of considering the possibility of renormalizing from their condition of abject abnormality (non-viable, failure to persist as a long-term form of civilization).
But what if as many as 1% of 8.05 billion humans (80 million, of whom 60 million are dependents on the 20 million who have come to realize that voting with their feet is the only possible alternative to going down with the ships of states) decided to occupy Australia by paying twice the current price for all real-estate (current population of Australia is 25.7 million)? In a monetary culture, most who rejected limits, and therefore systemic management, would be willing to move to live in luxury elsewhere (assume the ecolate 1% have more foresight intelligence than average, and likely more access to money).
Eighty percent of Australia would be vacated by humans and returned to the indigenous populations of other animals and plants (humans, confined to <20%, would assume responsibility for removing human pollution and debris from Gaia’s 80%, but otherwise neither use nor extract anything so as to leave room for Nature and allow for Nature restorancy/respeciation).
Or, with a population of 5.1 million, if 0.1% of humans willing to live within limits were willing to vote with their feet, the continent of Zealandia could be occupied and the process of restoring forests to what they were pre-occupation by expansionist humans could begin (by contracting the human footprint to less than 20% of the land area). Reforestation would occur within a century with old-growth forests again covering most of Zealandia in 500 years. Species restoration, the evolution of new species, would take longer (about 10 million years). Initial settlers would agree to a rapid contraction in human population by birth-off over a 50 year period to avoid die-off while living on a one-off supply of storable food.
List of articles in this book review series: Systemic Management.