MANAGING HUMAN SYSTEMS

Conscious of the extreme ideological rejection of climate science by those who propose an economic system subject to market forces it is clear that the ecological and economic systems are interlinked and the framing of that relationship will foreshadow the future of the global eco-system.

So what should govern the systems and system interrelationships. Natural evolution, for example, has taken place in relation to the free play of the forces of nature, which might be supposed to have produced human intelligence and perhaps consciousness. The invention of technology changes, sometimes in unconscious ways, humankind’s relationship with the world. The power of destruction is not the same as the power of understanding combined with foresight. Our profound political failure, I suspect, is the failure to be responsible for the human systems that have been created, often without a deep appreciation of the relationship between means and ends.

The failure is seemingly no less self evident in the ecological as it is in the economic systems. To be starry-eyed about any system is perhaps the defining characteristic of being under the sway of ideology. At Inside Story at Al Jazeera, Richard Woolf and Chris Hedges discuss one of the most unexceptional, least distinguished in terms of human well being, societies on Earth – The United States in America. The discussion is via War In Context:

Others see signs for optimism, such as Truthdig’s, “Left, Right and Center”:

Ideologies developed for the economic system, are then brought to bear on the ecological system. Wisdom may lie in reversing the the priority while identifying the relationship between means and ends.

Related articles

• A lucid presentation on this subject, George Sugihari, On Early Warning Signs (SeedMagazine.Com)
• Gary Gussing, Captialism and the Good Life (Commonweal)
• Charles Eisenstein, Everything We Tell Ourselves About America And The World Is Wrong (AlterNet)
• George Monbiot, 2012: The Year We Did Our Best To Ignore The Natural World (The Guardian)
• Glenn Scherer, Climate Risks Have Been Underestimated For the Past 20 Years (AlterNet)
• John Aescheson, Reality’s Revenge: Will 2013 Be  The Year When Climate Change Deniers Get Hoisted On Their Own Petard? (Common  Dreams)
• It’s time to redesign our economic system (guardian.co.uk)
• Disease burden links ecology to economic growth (esciencenews.com)
• You: Biocultural resilience for systems change (ourworld.unu.edu)
• Anthromes: A New Paradigm for the Biosphere (disinfo.com)

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