CONTENTS

My View of the World

 It was a changing month in the world(view) change literature. The Department of Defense came out with a report on “Abrupt Climate Change” that offers an “extreme” scenario of what and when an abrupt climate change could imply for national and international security. The document was remarkably apolitical, constructed by true military analysts and built on a strong scientific background. For a review of the report from a political perspective and a link to the PDF, visit an article in Grist Magazine. Nevertheless, I do have some observations from the point of view of the Worldview Change Project. You should read the report before reading below. The report is highly readable, written for politicians. It has a 4-page summary and about 18 pages of report.

• The study team apparently did not use computer modeling to generate its scenario, meaning they did the complex modeling in their heads. Nonetheless they based many of the projections on climate change models. They paid heed to feedbacks at least in climate change. The riskier part of their analysis comes with the social analysis where less computer modeling exists and feedbacks were no so clearly identified. Also their time frames and magnitude of changes would depend on quantitative modeling.
• Their noble reliance on past climatological and archeological experience is very good but they failed to make the point directly that conditions today are vastly different from the eras of past collapsed civilizations. The world is much smaller today and far more interlinked.
• They made few direct references to changing lifestyles as a remedial action, although they made plenty of references to the differences between rich and poor nations. They stated that humans probably cannot avoid an abrupt climate change, yet promptly addressing environmental conflicts and energy use can ameliorate the impact.
• There were no references to underlying belief systems and assumptions driving the behavior. These were assumed exogenous and un-changeable.
• They do not assume that environment already plays an important role in the current array of problems and that most of the trends are already underway (hopefully with the exception of the worldwide deep ocean conveyor belt collapse).

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Events This Month

This month I’ve tenderly put down the self-employed foot (even rejecting a possible 9-5 job offer).  I learned about Schedule Cs and Self-employment tax and will start a SIMPLE Era for small business owners with less than 100 employees.  Of course that body of employees would be just me.  I have done some freelance editing, sold an article, and taken contracts with a local school district and a large conservation organization to evaluate a project in Latin America.  One of the avenues that I am patrolling now for a means to write the book is through the greater flexibility (and insecurity) of a self-employed being.  Perhaps it is a step toward a self-actualized being.  More on that in a couple of years.

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People Involved with the WCP:  Donella Meadows

After Daniel Quinn, the late Donella Meadows’s has been
heretofore the most influential mind on this aspiring novelist and
Worldview Change agent.  For many years, she was a
professor at Dartmouth College who later resigned her post
(after becoming the first woman tenured professor there) to
become a full-time writer on sustainability and systems thinking. 
But before that, she had earned remarkable fame (though that was
never her objective) in the system dynamics world.  Her name
echoed around the world as lead author of Limits to Growth in
1972.  She has made multiple contributions to the field of systems
dynamics, especially honing the notion of computer modeling, and
the systems of sustainability.  One could go on at great lengths,
as those in audience who have had the great privilege know, but
her influence on this project came through the notion that
paradigms (she adopted the word from Thomas Kuhn, another
inspiration for this project) drive human behavior.  To tip our world to sustainability implied changing deep paradigms that structured the system.  I had the good fortune of her message as a student of Dana’s.  I took her environmental journalism class where she helped me publish my first three-figure story, in Wildlife Conservation.  She was also on the advisory board of an environmental publication that I edited at Dartmouth and helped found the Sustainability Institute (see below).  Unfortunately it wasn’t until the last couple of years that I have drawn most influence from her writings as they have become eminently relevant to the Worldview Change Project.  Also unfortunate, I can no longer benefit from her wisdom as she passed away in February 2001.  You may visit an article she wrote about me and I about her.                         

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Notes

1. I launched a campaign of mailing out the Worldview Change Project promotional CD, since frankly the likelihood of actually seeing these people scattered about the country isn’t even as high as my helping to change the predominant worldview.  Fortunately I have been receiving some positive feedback (in the common parlance, not systems jargon).  Drew Jones, a systems modeler with the Sustainability Institute said of the PowerPoint presentation:  “Technically, it is amazing.  Very effective at engaging me…  The case you make is compelling as well.  Solid layout of why to do this work.  Content-wise, the focus on world view change is sorely needed, of course.”

2. So I have been asked, what’s novel about a novel?  I am studying systems theory, reading the history of science, anthropologists, and a wide bookshelf of other academic materials.  Yet I persist in believing that a novel will best suit the Worldview Change Project’s goals.  The answer of course will be contained within that book, whose skeletal plot is now only emerging from the dark shadows, bone by bone.  But since humans are essentially story-telling and story-hearing creatures and it is necessary to step out of a box before one can see the box, novels, especially ones doused with a little fantasy, allow readers to suspend their beliefs, even temporarily, without a kick and fight as they would if they were reading a political treatise.  One does not need to stand firm in defending one’s beliefs, when one is standing in another’s world.  Books like Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael, Plato’s Republic, Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and Orwell’s Animal Farm all used fiction as a far more precise delivery system than any frontal attack would ever attain.  But being fiction does not mean research is not rigorous.  No one would ever accuse of Tom Clancy’s research of being loose.  Thus, though fiction I may write, the broad depth of research will be reflected in chapter after chapter and in the extensive notes in the back.  But they won’t be normal end notes.  Wait and see.

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What I’m Reading

For all those of you who deeply believed that “worldview”
was a term as fuzzy as a rabbit, think again.  Don’t
underestimate that rabbit.  With the help of David Naugle
and his book Worldview: History of a Concept, I have
come to realize that the term worldview has not been taken
lightly over the years, least of all by Germans.  The founder
of the term according to this Christian scholar was
Immanuel Kant, weltanschuung.  The irony is that he used
it but barely.  Other big names developed the term
extensively:   Hegel, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche, among
many others.  The term has an active philosophical tradition
and some relevant contributions to this project.  Nietzsche
responds to the question “What is truth?” like this: 

“A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and
anthropomorphisms ¾ in short, a sum of human relations,
which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished
poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem
firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people:  truths are
illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and how matter only as metal, no longer as coins.”

We’ll see how to work that into my book.

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Links

 This month’s link is the Sustainability Institute.  Since I have cited it more than once above directly and indirectly, I would like to pitch that this organization is doing some innovative work in the use of systems to promote sustainability.  Donella Meadows was one of the founders of SI. 

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“Cosmopathy” is the pathology of worldviews, whereby a person suffers from competing worldviews or the need to change worldviews because the gap between the worldview’s beliefs and perceived reality cause a breakdown, a condition which the Worldview Change Project aims to help.  Cosmopathy is distributed to those interested in the progress of the WCP.  Your name can be added or deleted by submitting a request to the author.