Panel discussion on Systems thought contributions to sustainability [Howard Odum, Russell Kick & Hector Sabelli, ISSS 1998 Plenary Session, July 24/98]

These notes are a rough transcription, prepared as each individual presenter and/or commentator spoke at the ISSS 1998 conference. Gaps and errors have likely occurred. For more accurate citations, please consult the original presenters. These notes have been contributed to the ISSS by David Ing, of the IBM Advanced Business Institute (sabi@systemicbusiness.org).

Howard Odum

• Steady growth
• Climax

• All systems pulse
• If one pulse is dominant, it may take over the system

• Stage 1 growth: e.g. capitalism
• Stage 2 climax
• Stage 3 descent
• Stage 4 low energy

• Need to look how we adapt to coming down the curve: civilization in decline.

Russell Kick

View as a single system go back to Lao Tsu

• Albert Einstein, Kenneth Boulding, ...

• We are one subsystems, maybe a decider in the short run, on the use of resources

• Capra on understand humanity

• technology, etc. or ...
• change in consciousness: common sense

Millennium will see the change, as the result of enlightened self interest

Hector Sabelli

Process method says ...

1. oneness with change: action
• No equilibrium, nothing is sustainable.
2. Always opposites
• Competition and cooperation
• Reality is sharing of territory
• Increase that looks exponential at this time: bipolar feedback, positive and negative, will end up biotic, beyond chaos.
• The direction depends on change in feedback, with two opposites symmetric
3. Sustainability can't exist in equilibrium, but opposites can create something new: e.g. women and men produce children.
• To simplify this phenomena into feedbacks is too much.

• What we are most convinced about, we are the most wrong about.
• Flood: managing the unmanageable, knowing the unknowable.

Systems perspective: least action.

Panel Discussion

• Sabelli: Not separate negative and positive feedbacks.
• System implies feedback, but doesn't mean that we'll survive after exponential growth.
• Population growth as a result of medicine and hygiene: cause has produced the opposite effect on benefits.
• Lowest growth in Europe, especially Italy -- which is a Catholic country.
• Women are having fewer children, which is another negative feedback.
• We don't really know: military thinks about strategy, but we only have tactics, we don't control the long run.
• Rejoinder: Could look at positive or negative as perspectives, depends on what you define as the problem.

• Kick: Speculation, although some research.
• Quantum physicists, David Boehm might suggest a paradigm shift is in motion, but change occurs slowly.
• Brain research, objective and subjective, with spirituality increasing.
• Only takes 100 people to change the earth? A little optimistic.
• Paper sessions on spirituality demonstrate interest.
• Odum: Pulsing not only to the whole of the system, but also to information as a system, spirituality as a system.
• How do you transfer the best of the culture at one peak, to the next peak.
• Finding the right pulse is to look at history: may need some fundamentalism, to understand.

• Odum: Greed, as competition to maximize capital is today's system.
• When we need to cooperate, need to rewrite history to say that it was right for that time, but wrong for now.

Scientific research into wrongness. What we're most certain about, we're most wrong about. But the only research methods are reflexive phenomenology or (?) as inward and outward. Jung. How do we then do scientific research?

• Sabelli: Jung is the answer.
• We all know how to do a good education. The problem is to make the schools do the right education.
• We all know the answer to pollution to the environment. The problem is how to make the change.
• Priority of supremacy.
• Need to point out to people that health is an individual problem, e.g. cigarette warnings in the U.S.
• Supremacy of the complex:
• Psychological aspects in the concept.
• Miller is a psychiatrist.
• Jung and Godel, and Pythagoras, and Plato: reality is cosmic forms of nature, projected.
• We don't make subjective reasons. Brain is natural, plus we have training in the environment.
• In mathematics, we can calculate how planets move, but it's an invention. The cosmos is inside our heads.
• Rejoinder: Simple methodology?
• Sabelli: Return to three ideas.
1. Always study time series.
2. Always look at both sides, opposite. The opposite of a great truth is another great truth.
3. Opposites co-create. Need to get beyond equilibrium. Processes simultaneously create and destroy.

Wrap-up by Howard Odum

• Positive/negative may be another way to talk about pulsing.

• Predicting is difficult.
• At the larger scale, no longer predicting, just see how we fit it.

Wrap-up by Russell Kick

• If we can change the paradigm from materiality to spirituality, the correction may take place with us.
• Greed is at an all-time high.
• Correction may be at hand, with pendulum swinging back.

Wrap-up by Hector Sabelli

• There is no one view of systems.
• One formulation is equilibrium
• Another formulation is homeostasis: Gaia
• Other studies that may be other types of systems, e.g. exponential change.
• Then things will end.
• They have empirical data, Gaia doesn't.
• Is there evidence that spirituality will help the earth?
• Are we better off in places like India (spiritualism), or in western hemisphere (science, technology)?
• Will move from the material to the spiritual.
• The world goes from the simple to the complex. The end point may be the vision of God.
• This, however, is not simple spirituality, but scientific spirituality.
• Not dogmatism.