Donella Meadows

So I totally agree.

I usually follow the definition of Donella Meadows.

She wrote this great book, Thinking in Systems.

I recommend everyone to read it, whether you're in L&D or not, honestly.

Just think about this question that Dave kind of already alluded to this morning around what are the essential elements of a sustainable and just food and farming system, right? Let's think for a minute, what are those? I think at a minimum we could agree that a sustainable and just food and farming system is going to provide healthy, nutritious food for everybody on the planet, right? What else? Well, I think it involves at least minimal harm to our air, our water, our soil, and the biodiversity that's in and around our farms.

By definition, as Donella Meadows has already pointed out this morning via Dave, we need to rely on a minimum or eliminate the non-renewable resources that we use, because by definition, they're not sustainable.

As a soil ecologist and agroecologist, I focus on soil.

We have to, at the very least, be not degrading our soil, and better yet, let's be improving it.

And certainly I think Crafting Engineering Strategy came out last year, and I think is, you know, the, the newest one, but I think there's, like, a lot of interesting ideas in, in there, um, for, for sure.

I, I think, you know, Thinking in Systems: A Primer by Donella Meadows-

Yes

... is, like, one that I think about a lot.

But practically, you're like, hmm.

Well, actually, maybe as Donella Meadows taught us, if you want to create change, you've got to understand the different leverage points.

And you don't necessarily launch in trying to change the paradigm because as she taught us decades ago, that's actually, although it's really powerful, if you can, it's the hardest thing to change.

So why not start working somewhere in the middle of the lever? And that's where my positive tipping points are coming from.

Is that a paper or a project?

It was a report that an incredible woman called Donella Meadows wrote back, I think, in 1972.

And she, along with Rachel Carson, who wrote Silent Spring and some others, things at the time were really appreciating that you can't have infinite growth on a finite planet.

And yet the whole of the economic system, which it still does, was predicating that.

And I invite people to take love seriously.

to take love seriously.

And just going back to Donella Meadows, one of the things that she, there are two things she did that I think is really important on this conversation.

She was asked what interventions change things the most.

Correct.

Which is why Donella Meadows, for example, systems thinker, MIT, she had these levers of systems change.

The strongest, most powerful lever of systems change is worldview.

So the first systems thinking unschool that I started in the world called Rebiz, that's what it focused on, worldview as the foundational awareness mechanism of change.