by Tony Brown, Director of the Ecosa Institute, May 2010

If we look at our history over the past 50 years it is clear that we, as an industrialized society, are exhibiting insane behavior. Albert Einstein has described this as,

"... doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."

The recent disaster in the Gulf of Mexico with the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon and subsequent oil spill is not only an environmental disaster, but is a testament to how little we have learned over the past decades. Since the 1950s we have had an almost continuous history of oil spills with only the major events, such as the Exxon Valdez spill in 1989, becoming big news stories. Looking at oil spill data is quite overwhelming as well as puzzling. (www.marinergroup.com/oil-spill-history.htm) One would imagine that any sane society would have found way to eliminate this kind of destructive behavior. Certainly if an individual rather than a corporation continually participated in this level of destructive behavior he or she would be seen as pathological and either treated or locked away. However we continue to allow the same technological process over and over and are told that,

"this time it will be different." While solutions to issues of environmental destruction have been proposed for decades, very little action has been taken. So why do we still create these these human-caused disasters? Are there lessons to be learned that can be connected into a broader contextual framework? What are the systemic impediments to creating a system that reduces or eliminates them? And are there models that can demonstrate a better systems approach?

There are a number of factors that create our ability to ignore reality and live in our own delusional world. One name for it is cognitive dissonance, a process where we ignore the facts that don't match our pre-determined view of reality. However, I believe that the underlying reason we create these disasters is a fixation with nineteenth century thinking. This kind of thinking leads to a narrow view of reality, an inability to make connections, a lack of creative thinking, and a belief in traditional solutions. Tie that to the power of vested interests in maintaining the status quo, mix in large doses of myopia and greed and we have the perfect formula for creating disasters.

Nineteenth century thinking, which gave rise to the industrial revolution, is still the prevalent method with which we attempt to solve our problems and create our future infrastructure. This kind of thinking produces large expensive centralized systems - giant corporate businesses, over bureaucratic governmental systems, and mega-economic entities that are "too big to fail". These are the structures that lead to disastrous events- the financial meltdown, the gridlock in government, toxic waste and giant oil spills, and the long-term slow motion disaster of global climate change.

Our approach to solving problems is largely founded in the Enlightenment, when the analysis of complex things was accomplished by disaggregating the elements that made up that system. This was a powerful methodology that allowed us to understand the mechanics of how things work. However, as our knowledge has increased, we have come to understand that this dissective approach to problems is no longer sufficiently powerful to address the complexity of the many issues we face. We have to develop a new more holistic systems way of seeing the world, one where every action not only has its own consequences, but also affect many other aspect of the whole system. The whole is no longer a collection of parts; it is both the parts and the system in a continuous dance of feedback loops. Our problems begin when, among other things, we ignore the feedback.

This nineteenth century view of the world leads us to focus on specialization. We have become a nation of specialists and our corporate and governmental leaders are victims of this pervasive trend. The corporate CEO is a specialist in steering a company to economic success. That is the only function and all issues and actions are seen through that prism. The cost of environmental disaster is seen more as a bottom line decision relating only to the corporation and its share value. It is very difficult for a leader in this position to take the larger worldview on how their actions reverberate through the environment, affect the livelihoods of millions of people, and impoverish the life support system we all depend on. Corporations are not created to be sensitive to social or environmental feedback. Maximizing profit is their sole function and only in as much as an environmental disaster might affect profitability is it taken into account. Fines and other penalties are often seen as a cost of doing business rather than causing an examination of core values. We have been educated to focus "expertise" in narrow specialized fields rather than to take a holistic view of the world and how events are connected.

While the nineteenth century was an analytical scientific and technological era, art was still seen as an essential element in an educated society; and while art was as fascinated by machinery and commerce as scientists and businessmen, it remained a civilizing force. We, in contrast, have put creativity on a back burner in our educational system. The first things cut when budgets get tight is art, music, dance, and the other activities that promote a creative mind. We push science and math as if this alone is what creates an educated person. As children we enjoy all sorts of creative activities in kindergarten and primary education, but as soon as we hit middle school these activities become limited and then disappear from the curriculum in high school. We are becoming a society of consumers of creativity rather than the developers of our own creative talents. New ideas, systems and ways of doing things, depend on creative thinking, not just the ability to do math problems and understand the nineteenth century scientific method. Without creativity we fall back constantly on the old ways of doing things. Design needs to be in the curriculum, not because we want everyone to become a designer, but because design is a problem solving skill and can create new ways of seeing the world.

Change is difficult and, for some, terrifying. It also requires work and rethinking our value systems. It feels safer to stay with the nineteenth century systems we know rather than the system we have no experience of, and it is this fear of change that is used to maintain the status quo. Those who benefit most from the current system are those who attempt to undermine any information that would upset the existing system, be it the economic system, the energy system, our educational system or our governmental system. Those who benefit economically from the current structure of our society also have the resources to misinform, confuse and worry the population so that clear scientific information becomes suspect. Planning in the developed countries revolves around economics and in this field, in the commercial world, short term thinking rules. Myopia toward long-term problems means that we only address them when they become disasters. At the root of much of this is greed, plain and simple. The expectation is that enough is never enough and there is no such thing as being too rich. This may be explained as an evolutionary conditioning - when resources are scarce, the one with the most survives. Much of this can be seen as stemming from a misreading of Darwin. While Darwin never preached that nature was competitive, this theme was taken to heart by the industrialists of the age. The "survival of the fittest" became the excuse for all kinds of rapaciousness and exploitation. In fact the current understanding of natural systems is clearly that they are cooperative and symbiotic processes and without these we wouldn't exist. This is often demonstrated in traditional cultures where sharing resources is part of maintaining a cohesive group, clan, or society with the Potlatch culture of the Northwest being the ultimate system of sharing, both as a means of distributing goods and maintaining status.

The majority of our systems are based on the nineteenth century view that everything was unlimited - water, minerals, power, food production, forests, fisheries. We now know this is an illusion, yet we still operate as if it were true. So, a critical question to our survival in the 21st century is: what are the alternatives to these seemingly powerful, rigid, monolithic structures? Where can we look for a model that is capable of operating in a world where things are finite?

For billions of years natural systems have operated within a finite resource base, using only what was readily available and created a system that could operate successfully into the far future. Of course this system was shocked with environmental events of gigantic proportion, events such as the meteor strike that wiped out the dinosaurs. Yet the system managed to absorb those shocks and return to a state of dynamic equilibrium. So it seems prudent, if we are to find a new way of structuring our world, to look carefully at what nature tells us about systems and economics.

There are many lessons to be learned. Nature operates as a network; it is a complex system of connections. Nature has multiple real-time feedback loops that keep the system in balance and in a productive relationship with the network. Nature is the ultimate recycler; nothing goes to waste. In fact, in nature there is no concept of waste. This is a purely human idea. Nature operates at the minimum energy inputs compatible with maintaining a stable system and no more. Continued growth beyond a functional level is incompatible with a healthy system and over use of a critical resource leads to extinction. Natural systems are extremely diverse ensuring a multitude of different solutions to similar challenges.

How could nature's systems be applied to our society? First is a recognition that we need to move away from the monolithic structures we currently support. This means an end to "too big to fail". These systems are simply too cumbersome to react to fast changing circumstances. There is an anti-trust law on the books, but its implementation and its goals have been lost under a welter of corporate pressures. To begin to emulate the natural systems, we need to diversify the business structures. This means eliminating the many monopolistic structures that exist today; structures that buy innovation rather than create it. The majority of jobs in the US are created by small business. John Keefe of Money Watch defines "small" as a business with less than 50 people and reports, "...when the data are split by small, medium and large, job creation is in favor of small firms. Medium firms are neutral, and large firms are job losers."

Yet we continue to insist that the bigger the corporation the better it is for our economy. In natural systems there are factors that determine the size of an organism based on its function within the ecosystem. Perhaps, in the economic ecosystem, job creation, innovation, flexibility and diversity might be the criteria for creating a diverse, complex economic environment. One example of this kind of innovation is W. L. Gore & Associates. This company, with worldwide sales of $2.5 billion, is a privately held company freeing it from the pressures of a constant clamor for short-term profit. It has about 9,000 employees, called associates, located in 30 countries worldwide and has four basic guiding principles:

• Fairness to each other and everyone with whom we come in contact
• Freedom to encourage, help, and allow other associates to grow in knowledge, skill, and scope of responsibility
• The ability to make one's own commitments and keep them
• Consultation with other associates before undertaking actions that could impact the reputation of the company

The company is organized in a lattice structure, where job titles are virtually non-existent and team leaders emerge naturally based on praise from their peers. Uniquely, Gore's policy is not to let any one location grow too large. Once a location gets so large that people do not know each other and communications become more difficult, another subsidiary is spun off. This strategy allows marketing to talk freely with engineering and human resources to interact with R and D. This allows everyone to knows what is happening in the organization and promotes innovation through interactive communication.

With the advent of the Internet and instantaneous communication, this kind of organization could exist between companies. Communications between multitudes of small firms would develop a far more complex (not complicated) environment. Businesses could come together, collaborate on specific projects, then dissolve and reform as other projects arise.

Large monolithic centralized systems are extremely fragile and require huge resources to maintain. They can be paralyzed by relatively small events. When they fail the results are catastrophic. In small distributed systems the failure of several components do not collapse the whole system. Our mistake is to continually prop up these centralized failing systems because we are still embedded in nineteenth century thinking. Instead of creating a multitude of small distributed generating sources, all connected through a smart grid, we still pursue the mega-project despite the vast costs, the fragility of the systems and the impact technological failures have on our society and environment. It is the evolutionary development of distributed systems that has allowed natural systems to recover from and respond to environmental stressors.

We are told that the economic system of the free market in which businesses and economies operate ensures efficient allocation of resources and this could be true if, indeed, it were a free market. In nature, resources are allocated in a more efficient way. But the criteria for those allocations are different. They work on a system of energy flows that supports the interconnected networks of organisms, benefitting the whole system. The issue with the mega economic systems we have created is that they work on a very limited set of criteria - maximizing short-term profit for the benefit of the individual and ignoring the health of the system as a whole. The idea that even this system operates within a free market is flawed. Corporate pressures have ensured that the "free" market is skewed towards certain industries. The propping up of one industry over another with huge subsidies does not allow for free market economics to prevail. The fact that we pour millions of dollars of taxpayer money into the fossil fuel industry while trying to call for renewable energy is an exercise in self-delusion. Without government subsidies to the fossil fuel industry, solar, wind and other renewable energy sources would immediately be far more economic than the power produced from coal or oil. We need to create an economic ecosystem based on the model nature provides; small, diverse, interconnected, concerned with the success of the whole system, and adaptable. The micro loan system and the peer-to-peer loan system are perhaps rudimentary beginnings of this kind of approach.

One problem with attempting to change all these nineteenth century systems is that the feedback loops are far too few and are not in real time. The real impacts of our behavior are too often shrouded in misinformation and corporate PR departments. We need to develop information systems that identify impacts in real time so damaging behavior can be caught and changed before it becomes a disaster. Even better is to adhere to the precautionary principle, not to engage in a behavior until it has been proven safe for the environment and people. Incorporating long term feedback loops and acting on them in the present could prevent untold disasters. A simple exercise would be to examine the track record of the oil industry in its care of the environment before permitting new deepwater drilling. It is clearly a myth that the oil industry has or ever will have the technology to guarantee no environmental damage. Yet we are constantly bombarded with advertizing selling of old technology as essential and infallible. The nineteenth century was infatuated with technology and our continual trust in the power of technology to save us is deeply rooted in that mode of thought. We need to take a twenty-first century mindset and understand that technology is always fallible and that to unleash these technologies on the environment is to play Russian roulette with our living support system.

The tragedy of the Deepwater Horizon is not in the horrific environmental damage it does to the coastal areas of the gulf, or in the human and economic disaster it has brought to hundreds of thousands of people. The real tragedy is in our seeming inability to shake free of outmoded thinking. Our clinging to the value system that puts nineteenth century polluting energy sources ahead of twenty-first century potentials. The tragedy is a system that pursues old technologies and profit rather than caring for the welfare of people and the environment. It is nineteenth century thinking like this that takes us one more step closer to the day when our disregard for our critical support system, the Earth, will overwhelm us in a vast tragedy of our own making.