by Tony Brown, Director of the Ecosa Institute, June 2009

With Ecosa approaching its 10th year, it is interesting to see the stir of interest in "green" and in saving the world by changing light bulbs. However, people I know who have been seriously advocating change for the past ten years are frustrated, and concerned, by the shallow responses and the lack of serious action. The scale of the challenges and, yes, disasters facing our societies are far greater than most people appreciate. For the last 10 years Ecosa has tried to persuade, cajole or encourage change rather than "tell it like it is" because we believed being negative would get in the way of the message. The results of this approach have done little to change our society, so our new approach is to speak out without the sugar coating. Radical is derived from the Late Latin radicalis, having roots. The radical approach we are advocating looks at the root causes and proposes root solutions.

To some extent it is already too late. We are already committed to a three-foot sea level rise even if we produce no more CO2, and talk of reversing climate change is wishful thinking in the short term. But we do have the responsibility of stopping it from becoming worse. We are already facing a radical situation that will become obvious in the next few decades as changes in the climate and biology of our planet continue to accelerate. Our strategy is to solve radical problems with radical solutions and propose whatever solution is capable of meeting that challenge. Piece meal strategies are not sufficient. The greatest challenge we face is not about technology or energy or water, it is how to change the values of our society. As Jared Diamond notes in his book Collapse, those societies that succeed make "Two types of choices... long term planning, and a willingness to reconsider core values." As a society we are pathologically short-term thinkers. All our institutions are symptomatic of this kind of thinking and the collapse of the financial system is a harbinger of things to come. Rarely do we think on an individual lifetime scale, and to think in terms of generations appears to be beyond us. Unfortunately this means we will only react in the massive way necessary after disaster has become dramatically obvious. The lessons of Katrina, the hurricane that devastated New Orleans, have yet to be learned. To rebuild at or below sea level in a warming world is not a sustainable long-term strategy no matter how green the new home may be. There were some voices advocating against rebuilding, but they were labeled heartless and insensitive. However, like House Speaker at the time Dennis Hastert, they were thinking sustainably.

Hastert said "It makes no sense to spend billions of dollars to rebuild a city that's seven feet under sea level..." And, when asked about rebuilding the city, he said, "That doesn't make sense to me." While it is tragic that people should lose everything they have, it doesn't make sense to put their lives in jeopardy yet again by setting the conditions for a future disaster.

Promoting long-term thinking must be a priority and we must move beyond partisan shouting matches into making policy through reasoned and rational debate. Obviously a priority is to take the environment seriously. Yes, there are bills in Congress, yes, people are looking to reduce energy consumption, and yes, we are building some "green" buildings, but a close examination of these trends makes it clear that we haven't even scratched the surface. When it comes to a serious response to the devastating challenges we face, we all have to be courageous and question our closest held beliefs. It is no longer about saving the whales; it is about saving the humans and every other living creature on the planet.

The 2008 financial crisis is the perfect example of our short-term pathological thinking. The statements that we have "moved away from the brink" and that "the markets are recovering" are all very reassuring, but the root cause of the problem has not been addressed. No matter how Congress regulates the financial industry, the sheer size of these institutions is a major contributing factors to the collapse. Yet, as a society, we perpetuate the idea that these institutions are "too big to fail" and set ourselves up for another, likely more devastating, crisis in the future.

How could we change our thinking to implement real solutions instead of superficial ones? What models are there? The only example of a system that has transformed and changed and yet remained stable for billions of years, even after powerful outside shocks, is Nature. We need to model our institutions on these systems our planet has used to regulate itself for billions of years, which will require a different way of thinking.

In any robust natural system a major rule is diversity. This makes nothing "too big to fail". One small part of the system may collapse - a species may go extinct but there are a variety of other species waiting to fill the niche. Imagine Wall Street as a forest, a forest made of gigantic trees that overshadow the ground so nothing else can grow. They individually provide a habitat and living for many other entities and everything is fine until one of them dies and collapses. Then thousands, if not millions, of species are doomed to die with no other alternative environment to inhabit. They will try to migrate to another tree but the residents of that ecosystem will defend their own habitat. In many cases these trees are interdependent, and the effect on one cascades throughout the system. Soon the whole forest withers and dies. Our solution has been to prop up these fragile structures and provide a gigantic infusion of fertilizer in the form of money.

Another rule is complexity. Nature is a vast network of complexity and communication that is currently beyond our understanding. We are so enamored of own cleverness we don't realize how crude our systems are in comparison to nature. Nature's media is life, and the connections are physical, chemical, electronic and perhaps other media we aren't yet aware of. We rely on simple forms of communication which are often more complicated than complex, but the domination of the major corporate mono messages overwhelms the billions of Tweets, Facebook messages and YouTube videos. This marketing domination of corporate values discourages the growth of innovation, and stifles new ecosystems.

If the root causes of the financial meltdown were lack of diversity and lack of complexity what root solutions can we apply? We spend billions in propping up these dying trees rather than planting a thousand saplings and gradually removing these giants that limit diversity. We provide the giant entities with freedom to broadcast their messages and drown out the complex intercommunications that are potentially possible. We are addicted to gigantism as a solution regardless of the fact that it is the basis of the problem. The same analogy can be used for most of our institutions, such as education, information, energy and transportation. We have created a system that abhors the small, and kills diversity so it is no wonder that our major institutions are in trouble. We take each of these institutions and treat them as individual disconnected issues rather than one in an ecosystem of other issues. We don't think in a complex way, so it is difficult for us to find complex solutions. It is impossible to redesign the 21st Century using 19th century thinking, yet we are habituated to old modes of thinking that are no longer appropriate.

So is there a solution? Obviously a new set of values is vital and this can be changed by presenting different models. We are doing better things like increasing energy efficiency and recycling materials, but we are doing this in order to keep the same basic value system - the single family home. In order to continue to do better things, we need to think in totally different ways and develop different systems and structures that better fit the 21st century. What might those structures and places look like? How could our physical environment function in collaboration with both human needs and the needs of wild nature? We have to be able to think in systems to solve systemic problems. Systems thinking can lead to the design of a different kind of society - one that is perceptibly better, a more humane environment that nurtures the wildness of nature and celebrates human ingenuity and vision, rather than celebrating the rich and the inane.

Our new summer semester program, starting in May 2010, is designed to nurture systems thinking and give students the tools to be the designers of a different and better society. We will develop ways to view the world holistically, not just emotionally, but empirically and with discipline. This requires an ability to understand and practice complex thinking and understand interconnections and interrelationships between multiple disciplines. What we need above all is a radical reassessment of what the issues are, and what we can do about them, regardless of political expediency and the economic status quo. Survival requires that we change dramatically because the world is changing around us in ways that will be far more dramatic than at any other time in history - the urgency is now.