As you are probably aware, we live in a global civilisation that is ecologically selfdestructing. To avoid the worst of the oncoming disaster we need to change the operating character of our whole society. The needed changes are so comprehensive that we speak of whole system change. We have the design skills and technical means to totally revamp how our society operates and live well within the ecological carrying capacity of the Earth. What is needed is the public will. What follows is a framework for enabling people to making sense of whole system change. It provides a basis for personal communication to help people grasp the interconnected nature of our environmental and social issues, and to see a hopeful way forward. Understanding Whole System Change is designed to cover the ground of large-scale transformative change without getting caught up in the detail. The approach is consistent with leading thinkers such as David Korten, Joanna Macy, Riane Eisler, and Paul Raskin. Although there may be differences in language or emphasis, you might assess whether overall this framework makes sense to you. We are in the midst of a Great Transition − and we need to accelerate it! There are millions of groups working for environmental and social well-being. You may be active in one or more such groups yourself. In Blessed Unrest Paul Hawken described us a ‘vast and largely unseen movement’. If things go well, historians in the future will look back and say that ours was the time of the Great Transition to a lifesustaining civilisation. Some call it the Great Turning. In my view, the key point of change for success to enable critical mass of ordinary people and influential decision-makers to grasp the need for transformative change, and passionately commit to making it happen. Therefore the most influential thing we can do is to ‘engage the unengaged’ − people who have not thought deeply about current global trends and their implications.
Whole system change The needed changes are so comprehensive and so good-hearted that we may speak of whole system change. They include changes in personal psychology, economics, industrial design and agriculture. Whole system change means doing everything required to actually become ecologically sustainable. Nothing less will do. The idea of whole system change can seem overwhelming to people. This article shows an approach to making it mentally manageable in a way that supports realworld changes. It uses a somewhat different logic than many of us are used to. We start with core principles and work out their applications. Although there are many ways to slice the cake, I have boiled the core operating principles down to just two: See what you think. A viable society will Operate for community and natural wellbeing And it will be ecologically sustainable I also include a ‘big picture’ map that highlights the major drivers of environmental destruction and therefore indicates the major elements that need to change. This map enables people to see how all the major factors are functionally interconnected, and that none of them can be neglected if we are to actually achieve sustainability. Images of whole system change What is a whole system change? It may be helpful to start with a few impressionistic images. We all changed profoundly as we moved from infancy into childhood and from childhood into adulthood. So much about us changed and yet we are ‘the same’ people. The shift from water to ice and from chrysalis to butterfly are whole system changes as is the shift from a temperate climate to an ice age on the one hand, or to runaway global warming on the other. The shift from war to peace is a whole system change. If we make it, our metamorphosis to a healthy sustainable society will be the springtime of humanity a new flowering of wellbeing after a millennia-long period of darkness. We the signs of this springtime everywhere … even as there are threats of war and ecological collapse. Thinking through whole system change Creating a viable society will involve millions of us forming a thoughtful understanding of what needs to change and then getting on with making the changes. So both education and practical action are crucial. Our practical projects become more meaningful when we place them in the context of co-creating a sustainable, fair and prosperous society. What follows is an approach to making whole system change intellectually manageable in a way that supports practical real world changes. It is based on four questions: 1 What are the core values of a healthy society and how can we embody them more in society? 2 What is the essence of ecological sustainability – and what do current ecological trends show? 3 How does the operation of our society as a whole operate tend to make environmental issues worse, and what are the crucial leverage points for change? 4 How can we catalyse a movement to shift the aspiration and practical operation of our society so that we actually become a sustainable global civilisation? A natural follow through from exploring these questions is to ask what (if anything) are you moved to do within your sphere of interest and influence to contribute to the transformative shift? Are there ways to make a bridge between what you are already doing and whole system change? I believe that when people think through these topics they will come to very similar conclusions about why and how we need to change. Why? Because these are not ideological questions but questions about how environmental and social reality work. The above four questions enable people to create a systemic framework that includes all relevant factors. Such a mental model points the way to a viable future. It equips people to intelligently assess the pronouncements of major business leaders and politicians, and to support constructive leadership. It also positions us to exert leadership ourselves within our sphere of influence. The questions can be answered using frameworks other than the ones I offer here. For example, I use ‘The Natural Step’ as a basis for understanding the essence of ecological sustainability, but the concept of ‘Ecological Footprint’ can also do the job.
Question 1: What are the core values of a healthy society? There are many ways to describe positive core values. In this section we are looking for an inclusive framework that makes them mentally manageable. Because it is so useful, I and others have adopted the framework put forward by futurist Riane Eisler. Eisler notes the distinction between what she calls partnership/respect relating and domination/control relating. In The Power of Partnership Riane Eisler observes: In the domination model, somebody has to be on top and somebody has to be on the bottom. Those on top control those below them. People learn, starting in early childhood, to obey orders without question. They learn to carry a harsh voice in their heads telling them they are no good, they don’t deserve love, they need to be punished. Families and societies are based on control that is explicitly or implicitly backed up by guilt, fear, and force. The world is divided into in-groups and out-groups, with those who are different seen as enemies to be conquered or destroyed. In contrast, the partnership model supports mutually respectful and caring relations. Because there’s no need to maintain rigid rankings of control, there is also no built-in need for abuse or violence. Partnership relations free our innate capacity to feel joy, to play. They enable us to grow mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. This is true for individuals, families, and whole societies. Conflict is an opportunity to learn and to be creative, and power is exercised in ways that empower rather than disempower others. Partnership relating is oriented towards the wellbeing of the community (as well as being mindful of one’s own self interest). Partnership values find expression in democracy, in the caring aspects of organised religion, and in the growing concern to protect ecological systems. The archetypal form is a mother working for the wellbeing of each member of her family. Dominator relating uses force and intimidation to establish one’s own advantage over others at the expense of the community. It is oriented more towards conquering than towards collaborating. The archetypal forms of dominator relating are patriarchal: fathers dominating their families and emperors dominating vast territories. This distinction is useful because it operates at every level, from human relationships through to business, education and global governance. We can look at any human institution and ask whether it is operating in a partnership mode or in a dominator mode. Eisler’s Partnership-Dominator contrast is also appealing because it describes not only values, but also ways of organising our behaviour. I believe that a healthy society will operate on partnership/respect values; this means that we can work out how to transform schools and the internal operations of businesses to embody those values. Thus we can imagine an organisation shifting from an authoritarian style to a collaborative, empowering style of management.
This operational aspect is important because there is reason to believe that our current dominator style as expressed in the aggressive expansion of fracking, GM crops, and the American invasion of Iraq is a major driver of ecological deterioration. Likewise, corporate lobbying and disinformation are a major impediment to transitioning to environmentally sustainable practices. The dominator pattern is also a major contributor to the inner unhappiness that produces retail therapy and other forms of excess consumption. Partnership and dominator are two contrasting approaches to life that operate on every level of human endeavour, from child-rearing to global governance. Many aspects of dominator behaviour are truly horrific, both historically and in terms of current events. Therefore it is important for people to know that in important respects some parts of humanity are becoming healthier and more balanced, and that there is a strong positive trend that may ultimately set the tone for a positive future. Different scales of the Partnership-Dominator contrast A healthy society will operate on good willed partnership/respect values at every level. It can be useful to see how both partnership and dominator play out at different levels. We have well-proven practical examples of how to apply a partnership style at the concrete levels of birth, parenting practices, education, and business operations. We also have well thought out conceptual approaches at the more abstract levels of economics and global governance. We know in principle, and to a great degree in practice, how to make partnership/respect relating work.
Two paths to the future This diagram shows real-world consequences of partnership and dominator relating. Making partnership/respect values operational If it is true that a viable society will operate on positive values, how can we embed partnership values throughout society? There are many ways. Here are some examples. At an individual level, there are many methods of training that enable us to become more skilful at partnership relating. They include well-known disciplines such as Conflict Resolution, Non-Violent Communication and Crucial Conversations. Some that you might not ordinarily think of include the Feldenkrais method of body awareness, Aikido and improvisational acting. By acquiring these skills we can enjoy our lives more. There are also breakthrough techniques in the new field of energy psychology that enable people to rapidly resolve emotional distress and cultivate emotional resilience. EFT (Emotional Freedom Techniques) is one of them (www.emofree.com). Resolving our emotional stuff makes us less prone to move into dominator mode. Cultivating emotional resilience can reduce our desire to compensate for not feeling good in ourselves by e.g. shopping. So cultivating emotional resilience is a crucial aspect of transitioning to a viable society. Organisationally, the paper Simply the Best: Workplaces in Australia (www.cosolve.com.au/files/simply_the_best.pdf) shows that in the best performing workplaces (as identified by the Australian Business Council) managers use a partnership/respect style of relating. The connection is obvious: happier people spontaneously work better Unconditional respect is a pre-condition for students being able to learn. John Corrigan’s Group 8 makes the concept of unconditional respect both theoretically and experientially real to the senior leadership of schools; this flows through to the way teachers in the classroom relate to their students. Ricardo Semler’s Maverick describes how he changed his Brazilian pump manufacturing company from an authoritarian style to a style that supports individual initiative from workers. There are many other examples of highly successful companies that operate on good willed partnership/respect values. Internationally, after World War II, the United Nations was set up to be a community of nations. The World Bank was established to help Third World countries develop. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) was established to provide loans when countries got too economically out of balance. The idea behind the IMF was to reduce the stress on local populations that would tend to lead to war. So initially the World Bank and the IMF were meant to be partnership organisations. They were quickly co-opted to serve the interests of money and power (C/F The World Bank and the Poverty of Nations, Catherine Caulfield, Macmillan, London1997).
Question 2: What is the essence of environmental sustainability? The essence of environmental sustainability is that overall we do not destroy nature faster than it can regenerate, and that we do not introduce into the environment toxins that living cells cannot handle. Suppose you have a forest. And you log part of it. But an equivalent amount grows back somewhere else. As long as the amount that grows back equals the amount that was logged, in principle the forest is sustainable. You destroy part of the forest, but it can regenerate.
However, if you destroy the forest faster than it can regenerate, the forest gets thinner and thinner (or smaller and smaller) and eventually turns into grassland and then desert. The progressive reduction of the forest is unsustainable. So what we are looking at is cumulative environmental damage damage that accrues over time. In the long run cumulative environmental damage is unsustainable.
This way of looking at the essence of environmental sustainability comes from The Natural Step, developed by Swedish scientist Karl-Henrik Robèrt. He puts it more formally, however. The Natural Step – Four System Conditions for environmental sustainability In a sustainable society, nature is not subject to systematically increasing… …concentrations of substances extracted from the Earth’s crust, …concentrations of substances produced by society, …degradation by physical means, and in that society …people are not subject to conditions that systematically undermine their capacity to meet their needs. These are real-world conditions, not theoretical ideals. If we extract substances such as lead and mercury from the Earth and introduce them into the natural environment they act as poisons because living cells are not adapted to them. Similarly with substances produced by societyindustrial toxins. If we progressively reduce the physical basis for nature’s productivity we will destroy the ecological basis of our food supply. These processes are currently occurring on a large scale e.g. in the form of fracking, the release of industrial toxins into the environment and soil depletion. The requirement to meet basic human needs is not simply an idealistic wish. When basic human needs are not met people behave in ways that are environmentally damaging on a large scale. The Natural Step System Conditions provide a way of working out whether a business, a country or our global civilisation is operating in a way that is ecologically sustainable or not. For example, we may ask: are the fish in a given fishing ground repopulating as fast as we take them out, or are the fish stocks declining over time (e.g., currently tuna stocks are down 90% from former numbers). Thus, instead of arguing over absolute numbers (e.g., at what point will the fishery collapse?), for policy purposes we can simply note the trend line. Is a given environmental indicator getting worse? If so, it is time to change course. Is a critical environmental indicator getting worse faster? It is therefore time to go into emergency mode. The Centre for Integrated Sustainability Analysis at the University of Sydney works out numerically the embedded energy and material flows in entire supply chains. So we have the techniques and resources to measure whether the production of a given product is ecologically sustainable or not.
A number of businesses now do annual sustainability audits to assess how they are functioning against these criteria. Perhaps the most famous is Interface Carpets; Founder Ray Anderson tells the story in Mid-Course Correction. Two major breakthroughs occurred after Ray Anderson had Karl-Henrik Robèrt train his staff in The Natural Step principles. Interface realised that they could shift from selling carpets to selling carpet services. In practice this means they only replace worn out carpet tiles, rather than whole carpets. And they keep the used carpet tiles instead of throwing them into landfill. This is profitable, because Interface engineers invented a way to reconstitute the used carpet back into oil for manufacturing the carpet tiles a huge economic as well as environmental gain. How are we doing? Will Steffen of Australia National University produced a set of diagrams that show how population, economic increase and environmental damage in various sectors are all rapidly increasing simultaneously. In 2008 New Scientist summarised them in a special report called The facts about overconsumption. For an expanded view of this graph, go to see graph in detail. These graphs show gradual growth in areas such as water use and species extinction accelerating hand-in-hand with increasing economic growth the classic ‘hockey stick’ curve. The graphs tell a story. They are indicators of a dysfunctional global civilisation that must change radically if it is to survive its own success.
If we don’t, the implications are clear: even in the developed countries there will be starvation, disease and violence when there is insufficient food and water as the environment unravels. Peak Oil Peak Oil is that point in global oil production when oil prices inevitably increase because the availability of oil that is cheap to extract begins to decline. Some analysts assert that we have already reached peak oil. Our currently rising petrol prices are consistent with this view. From the perspective of climate change, Peak Oil is good news. It will reduce the amount of oil we burn. However, from the perspective of an economy unprepared for Peak Oil we are in for a rough ride. As Joseph Tainter shows in The Collapse of Complex Societies, the historical record shows that when societies reach the limit of resources they depend upon, and those resources decline, their leadership typically pushes harder to extract the remaining resources. Thus they accelerate their society’s decline by trying to amplify business as usual. Globally our current version of this is to extract oil from sources where extraction is increasingly difficult, such as coal tar sands and deep offshore drilling, and to rapidly push the expansion of coal seam gas extraction (fracking). Fracking destroys both prime farmland and aquifers, and can only provide a short-term energy respite in any case. Thus we are caught in what might be called Tainter’s Dilemma. We feel that we need both the energy and the income to keep our economy going. But the harder we push the sooner our demise will come. The way out is to accept reality and aim for a planned descent descent by design, not by disaster. Our wake-up call In 2008 a Russian research ship discovered methane plumes bubbling up from the bottom of the Arctic Ocean. The permafrost vault that covers vast tracts of frozen methane (gas hydrates) is developing cracks. It was thought that this deep permafrost could not thaw for a long time. The prestigious United States National Science Foundation issued a warning paper about it. http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=116532&org=NSF&from=news Since methane is a potent greenhouse gas, arguably this is beginning of uncontrollable global warming. This may be still reversible. The implication for public policy is that it is no longer realistic to plan to allow atmospheric CO2 to rise. Scenarios suggesting stabilising CO2 at 450-550ppm are out of date. Merely stabilising at current concentrations of CO2 will be insufficient. A responsible policy response requires going all out to not only reduce fossil fuel emissions; but also paying farmers directly to sequester carbon into the soil and publicising the need for this to our population at large. (Farmers can withdraw CO2 from the atmosphere through farming techniques that build up the amount of humus in the soil.) We have just considered the two core principles of a viable society. Obviously a viable society will be ecologically sustainable. It will also operate on positive values that support individual and community wellbeing, rather than on aggressively competitive values that destroy the environment, communities and individual wellbeing. Our next step is to develop a big picture map of how our society works as a whole, so that we become clear about what needs to change. It is not enough to see parts of what needs to change; we need to bring the whole picture into view, so that nothing important is neglected. Skilled practitioners in every discipline take account of the whole situation before they intervene. They don’t just jump to solutions; they take the time to work out precisely what is needed. That way they do not miss important factors, and they can identify the most effective places to intervene. This approach is especially important in terms of catalysing large-scale healthy social change. Here I will show a way of mapping the big picture that gives a systemic overview. Question 3: How does the operation of our society as a whole tend to make environmental issues worse? We are going to develop a map of the major elements that need to shift in order for our global civilisation to become ecologically sustainable. Our starting point is to ask: How does our society as a whole operate in ways that make global warming and other environmental and social issues worse? Our procedure is to develop step-by-step a diagram that maps the major elements of how our current industrial civilisation accelerating environmental decline. The Ecological Equation is our foundation. It shows the connection between consumerism and environmental degradation. Annie Leonard’s brilliant The Story of Stuff starts in the same way. The Ecological Equation The process of extracting raw materials through mining, industrial agriculture and cutting down forests produces environmental degradation. The raw materials are processed in factories, which produce their own environmental damage through chemical toxins, acid rain and the greenhouse gasses that accelerate climate change. All of these are involved in the production of the ordinary things that we use.
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