Systems Theory and Getting Out Of The Way

Sustainability needs system wide dynamic balance. Dynamic balance requires a closed loop. Any climate action needs to be based on an understanding of closed loop systems in dynamic balance.

Our cultural conditioning has burnt into our epigenetics a collective aversion to the idea of dynamic balance and adaptive stasis.  Stasis here refers to the dynamic balance of a system, like the human body regenerating, preserving, redistributing, growing within system boundaries. Not stagnation. 

Assuming that mother earth would forever keep giving, that natural resources were infinite, was a logical assumption for our hunter-gatherer  ancestors living and moving in small and mostly isolated tribes. But that ceased to be true several hundred years ago as we aggressively colonized the last patches of habitable land, and possibly irreversibly altered the biogeochemistry of the ocean and atmosphere. We built our disastrous idea of continuous growth into most human created systems, like the economy.  And despite the catastrophic outcomes of several of these systems we kept the most unsustainable ones going. For example, a system that over time enables and encourages the accumulation of wealth to the point where thirty people have more wealth than half of humanity is not a sustainable system. The negative feedback loop is absent or malfunctioning. Eventually these runaway trains, cancerous systems, and ponzi schemes will implode, but not before causing a lot of harm. 

A higher order system may not be disrupted by a sub-system collapse. In the case of spaceship earth, if we break all our nine planetary boundaries and trigger a set of cascading tipping points, we may lose ninety nine percent of all biodiversity and drive Homo Sapiens into oblivion, but Gaia will go on. In that future things be fine and dandy, but it won't include us.

Is there a  call to action? The best approach to regeneration of natural systems is to simply get out of the way. These systems don’t need our help. The only thing they need is inaction from us.  Except perhaps where we have depleted them to a point of no return, like forests we have converted to grasslands, or fish stock that we have consumed to almost zero. If a system is too far gone then we may have no choice but to very carefully and minimally intervene, try and nudge that sub-system back within its control limits and then get out of the way. Getting out of the way will require a major update to our views on stasis, balance, regeneration, interdependence, preservation, redistribution, growth, wealth accumulation, power.