Comment

Comment by David Eggleton on September 4, 2011 at 10:23am

Not speaking for the group:  after poking around the site he invited us to visit, my sense is that he hopes he has here tapped into a market.

Comment by Les Squires on September 4, 2011 at 10:12am

What does this group think about the appropriateness of postings by rasheed yusuf?  Need your advice....

Comment by David Eggleton on September 2, 2011 at 6:45am

Friends, if you feel a lengthy comment coming on, please start a discussion instead.  Thanks!

Comment by Ellen LaConte on September 2, 2011 at 6:20am

As a proponent of systems and resilience thinking (in my book Life Rules) I have found very helpful, in addition to Capra and, certainly Donella Meadow's translucent Thinking In Systems, a miracle of a book by the late Paul Weiss, one of the original epigenetics theorists. His The Science Of Life: The Living System - A System of Living (1973) ought to be republished and studied by all of us, along with Overshoot and Resilience Thinking and David Holmgren's work, for example. I will cite it frequently in the second edition of Life Rules. It brilliantly undermines genetic determinism and answers questions about determining factors in evolution by showing the evolutionary/ directional relationship between the macro level of systems -- the largest, governing and relatively stable/rule bound holons in which a scale of smaller subsystems participates (Eg, the organ, the body, the community, the biosphere) -- and the smaller and smallest constituting holons/participants which are extroordinarily free to adapt, tweak, invent, innovate, change. His book offers  scientific validation for economic/political (re)localization at the logistical/provisional level and guidance/governance/information management at what would be a regional/national/inter-nation level. In gen'l, it appears that the bottom-up, grassroots, collaborative and remarkably democratic interchanges and adaptations that occur at the micro-system level cannot know what they are about (literally) without the evolving guidance/ intelligence/patterning, as it were, legislative action of the largest system -- that which they (are to?) ultimately become. In human societies that would be something like the culture, worldview, level of consciousness that shapes/influences the political economy and relations of people within it. Anyway, I just got obtuse or maybe just obstruse in that attempt to translate. Weiss's book is not a casual read, but a vital and mind changing one.

Comment by Jeff Mowatt on September 2, 2011 at 3:42am

As can be seen in the bibliography for our P-CED model, the influence of system thinking is Fritjof Capra

Comment by Caroline Savery on June 17, 2011 at 12:48pm

Love all the great discussion happening here!  It's so important to consider systems theory when evaluating sustainability.  I learned this within my own life and in the development of my feature documentary film, "Sust Enable."  

I am co-producing and directing a documentary "what does sustainability mean?".  It's based in Pittsburgh, PA and is in fact a Transition Pittsburgh project!  We are really ALL about sustainability--borrowing from the sustainable principle of holism (also known as "systems thinking" or being "process-oriented") we are addressing our core question, "what does sustainability mean?" on all levels of our film's creation: the story, the style, and the real world production processes will embody our continuously developing understanding of sustainability.  

This approach inherently makes for an experimental film... but we believe a new kind of filmmaking is necessary to tell the stories relevant to our emerging understanding of sustainability.  Our goal is to help make difficult and abstract sustainability theories more accessible to the average moviegoer by transmuting them into a nonfiction story of emotional resonance and artful storytelling.  We wish to go beyond the soundbites of commercial advertising to look beneath the surface at the deeper theories of sustainability out there...

Systems thinking is, in fact, a huge part of this.  We will be interviewing systems thinkers including Dr. Allenna Leonard (of the Viable Systems Model), Dr. Michael Ben-Eli (student of Buckminster Fuller, founder of the holistic Sustainability Labs), and Dr. Aleco Christakis (co-founder of the Club of Rome, co-author of "Limits to Growth" and former president of the International Society of the Systems Sciences)!

But we need your support to make this visionary film come to life!!! Please check us out:http://www.indiegogo.com/sust-enable-the-metamentary  And share with your friends!

And don't hesitate to contact me with any questions or curiosities.

Best regards,

Caroline

Comment by james greyson on February 4, 2011 at 2:07pm

Have started a new 'Systems Thinking in the News' blog with tweets; maybe of interest to the group?

Imagine if the news helped people to see problems as symptoms of systems that can be fixed?

The news could build people's innate curiosity about how snippets of information link together. We could rapidly become a society in the habit of seeing issues as aspects of a global whole. The news could raise debate about how to fix the small number of systemic errors that cause almost all the negative news we hear every day.

So far the news works the other way, hiding the links between issues and leading the public to imagine that rapid whole system change is either impossible or easily achievable by following some narrow reductionist 'patchwork policy'. The blog on this page brings global-scale systems thinking and practical policy options into the news.  

 

Please follow this blog at blindspotting on twitter.     A short link for the blog page is http://bit.ly/systemsnews

Comment by Susan Gleason on November 12, 2010 at 8:53am

Fantastic site, Lindsay! You may already know this, but almost all of YES! Magazine's content is on a Creative Commons license — feel free to repost anything of interest (lots of Transition related articles). Reposting guidelines are here http://yesmagazine.org/reposts and RSS feeds of our latest headlines are here http://www.yesmagazine.org/feeds-and-community/rss-feeds

Comment by Don Mikulecky on November 8, 2010 at 4:06am

Hi, Glad to join you. So far my stuff is very academic. I want to learn.

Comment by Lindsay Curren on October 4, 2010 at 10:52am

Transition Voice launched today—www.transitionvoice.com—please share on FB and Tweet, post to your Transition initiative website, anything to help us get the word out.

Best,

Lindsay Curren
Transition Voice
Editor-in-Chief

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