Powerdown Toolkit #3: It’s All Connected

This is the introduction to the third week of the Powerdown Toolkit 10-week community learning course created by the Cultivate Centre in Dublin. It has an accompanying TV show with a 30-minute episode accompanying each week of the course, soon to be aired on Dublin Community TV.

It’s All Connected: Whole Systems Thinking and Permaculture

Systems theory is an interdisciplinary theory of how we can understand the world in terms of the dynamics of a system: a network of interrelating parts which themselves can also be seen as parts.

This idea of “parts within parts” has been referred to as a “holarchy”- a nested series of systems, one within the other like Russian dolls.

Thus, an atom is part of a molecule which is part of a cell which is part of an organ which is part of a body. As a formal branch of science, systems theory emerged first within the ecological sciences, but has been perhaps most influential in the development of computers. Since the 1960s, its use in the understanding of humans interconnectedness with the rest of nature in the “web of life” has been a compelling and powerful motivation for the sustainability movement.

A complex system is a system which:

• consists of many different parts, which in turn join up at higher levels of complexity;

-where control is widely distributed throughout the system, though there is often some overarching centre which gives direction to the system’s responses and behaviour;

-a complex system is capable of learning and acting on what it has learned;

-it can respond to its environment through  feedbacks: in climate science for example, a positive feedback would be seen in a warming atmosphere melting the icecaps, which reduces the albedo effect as the ice declines, allowing more heat to be absorbed by the darker oceans, thus causing more warming; Negative feedback in this case might be the result of human awareness of what is happening leading to powerdown communities reducing their fossil energy consumption, and thus reducing their contribution to this warming.

-it is capable of non-linear change through these feedback mechanisms which may make it unpredictable and potentially chaotic, at least for a while, until a new equilibrium is achieved.

James Lovelock applied the idea of systems thinking when he used the term Gaia {Lovelock, J. Gaia- A New look at life on Earth 2000 } to describe the planet. The image of Gaia as a whole system allows us to think beyond the immediate effects of our actions- burning fuel to travel to work or heat the house for example- to see the wider implications for the system as a whole: the cumulative effects of fossil fuel burning leading to a warming planet with potentially disastrous effects for life around the globe, changing weather patterns leading to disruption of our own agricultural systems  and the environment which sustains us.

Permaculture

It was from a study of ecological systems than Australian ecologists Bill Mollison and David Holmgren developed the concept of Permaculture in the 1970s.

Their understanding of the interrelationship between the soil, food production and energy made them realise that the emergence of industrial farming through the process known as the “Green Revolution” could only last a few decades before we would be compelled to adapt to less energy and declining soil fertility.

Permaculture Design Principles were devised as practical tools for applying the lessons learned from nature to the conscious design of human homes, gardens, farms and to guide our interaction with the landscape.{Holmgren,D. The Essence of Permaculture } The aim of this design process is to develop systems that require minimal inputs and are to a large degree self-sustaining.

The idea is best developed with the concept of an Forest Garden consisting primarily of perennial vegetables, mimicking the layers of a woodland, each plant making the most of the diverse niches for space and nutrients, and as far as possible mutually supporting each others needs.

This whole systems approach gives us a sustainable approach to everything from farming and land use, to renewable energy and the economy, seeing them all as subsets of the wider planetary system.

Every system has points of leverage – that is, the parts, properties, and reactions which will enable you to get rich results from the system if we learn to apply the design principles learned from natural systems.

Response

One of the key ideas in systems thinking is to focus not so much on the constituent parts, but in the relationships between them: hence the adage “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts”.

When we apply system thinking to communities we move away from the notion of sustainable development which fails to understand the system constraints of resources and environmental degradation, and focus instead on sustainable resilience which allows us to first identify, and then put in place, the system conditions for sustainability capable of withstanding the shocks that may be coming.

By finding the system’s points of leverage we may develop more creative and ultimately more effective responses. Resilience has three properties:

1.    Modularity: that is, the resilient system consists of many parts which, despite their many interactions between each other, have a high degree of self-reliance and independence.  If one part gets destroyed, that is not fatal for the rest of the system, because the other parts can carry on more-or-less as before.  The opposite of modularity is connectedness: if one part breaks down the consequences will ripple through the system as a whole.

For instance, in the fuel-strike in the United Kingdom in 2000, a quite small number of members of the haulage unions came close to closing down the entire economy, simply by blockading the exit roles of the major oil refineries.  Modularity, like the cells of a resistance movement, copes with damage to the parts of a system, which carries on as a whole.

2.    Diversity: the parts (e.g. the communities) within the system differ sharply from each other.  Like plants in a woodland co-existing by using different niches of light and nutrient availability, they live in different places, with different barriers and opportunities, different supplies of local skills, different soils, different cultures, and they respond to all this in different ways, developing their own characters which then evolve with increasing diversity.  This is disconcerting for the bureaucratic mind – the top-down authority, which likes things to be done in the one best way, but it is a central property of complex systems.

3.    Tight feedback loops: this refers to how quickly and strongly the consequences of a change in one part of the system are felt and responded to in other parts.{Hopkins, R. The Transition Handbook 2008} While big, globalised systems based on large-scale organisations such as corporations and governments are inherently slow and cumbersome in their responses-like a huge oil tanker taking too long to switch course and avoid the ice-berg-  and often fail completely to see the wider effects of their policies, small-scale systems can move much faster.

For example, someone living off-grid will monitor their energy consumption carefully because they are closely connected to its source; global consumers may have little awareness of where there energy, or food or other goods and services actually come from, nor the environmental impact their production may cause.

A key element, therefore, of tight feedback is that a system like a community has the incentive to maintain a substantially closed system; that is, it reuses its waste, reinvesting it (for example) in local fertility; or else it exchanges its waste with other local ecosystems: what it does not do is simply dump its waste out of sight, calling on ever-increasing supplies of energy and materials.  Tight feedback loops mean that the system is aware of the whole extent of the energy and materials cycles to which it belongs, and takes full responsibility for them.

Opportunities for Change

As more science and data emerge about the environment, and in particular as our understanding of climate change develop and becomes more widely known, so we will be compelled to find whole systems approaches.

Oil price fluctuations and declining availability will make alternatives more appealing, for example renewables may become more cost-effective. The decline in global resources will lead us to become more reliant on local resources which we will have a greater incentive to take care of.

An awareness of the interconnectedness of the natural and human worlds will lead us away from hierarchical, top-down approaches as we realise that the system is self-regulating, and that no one is in control: we make the world through the some total of our choices.

Change is not always incremental or linear, and systems thinking can help us to manage change more effectively in society.

In climate change we are familiar with the notion of “tipping points” which may lead to an abrupt switch into a new climate regime.  This notion has been applied to social change also {Malcom Gladwell The Tipping Point 2000}

The system driver of the last few decades has been economic growth; a new vision, a new set of values underpinned by systems thinking may yet allow a tipping point of values into a new cultural state which, like the sudden tearing down of the Berlin Wall, will create the conditions for resurgence.