I soon realized I’d have to set my romantic notions aside, because clearly this work is not as well known as it should be. When considering writing this blog, I noted a funny little notion in my head that went something like this: “I don’t want to share the most important quotes from this book because I’ll spoil the reader’s own discovery process.” For brevity’s sake I treat the material in this blog as if it is all her own, but in fact there are webs of genius she worked in synergy with over the course of her career. Note that a significant amount of Meadow’s work–as is true of most great thinkers–is deeply informed by the thinking of her mentor, Jay Forrester, the team at MIT she worked with as a research fellow, and many others. You can get a sense of her dedication and character in this constructed “interview” by Molly Ryan on the Academy website. One of the major publications for which Meadows and colleagues are known is the 1972 book The Limits to Growth. The Academy for Systems Change merged with the Donella Meadows Institute in 2016, which was built around her work. Thinking in Systems is just one of her twelve books. She passed away in 2001 at the age of 59. Meadows was a renowned scholar, researcher, and academic, with a PhD in biophysics from Harvard. If you’ve been through the Systems Thinking Mini-Course, you know that this is one of the top three books I recommend for anyone engaged in making the world a better place. (You may want to check out the cliff notes, for a price.) I hope to supply you with enough to be inspired to dig deeper. There are too many critical nuggets in this book to summarize in one blog entry. (Find the rest of this talk and more on our Donella Meadows page.) We need to find a way to get these basics into widespread use, which is impossible if they remain in the ivory tower. However, if you (as one friend of mine did) find it less than accessible for your brain, please speak up by commenting on this blog or on my contact form. Thank goodness that I picked it up again a year or so later. “Part One: Systems Structure and Behavior” discusses system dynamics with a lot of “stocks and flows” diagrams that, in all honesty, put me to sleep. Thinking In Systems: A Primer confounded me when I first tried to read it. Upon viewing this talk for the first time I thought to myself, “I could have skipped my Green MBA degree and all 20 of those Bioneers conferences and just watched this talk over and over.” Not strictly true, but it did cross my mind.Īlas, there is a bit of an academic barrier here maybe more than a bit. Nevertheless, I think we can invoke this phrase intelligently, to bring an appropriate level of alarm and the need for cooperative action into wider acceptance.) A Book And a Recorded Talkīelow you will find the first section of a talk at the University of Michigan that helped crystallize for me the crucial importance of Meadows’ book. (Note that with a PhD in mythological studies, I’m familiar with the problematics of the heroic “save the world” trope. I would suggest skipping to the first part of the Donella Meadows’ talk embedded below in which she reviews a solid framework for defining “sustainable.” If you are less-than-clear that human society at large is unsustainable, perhaps this isn’t the blog entry for you. An in-depth understanding of what Meadows communicates in Thinking In Systems: A Primer provides for us a set of tools for understanding what it takes to become a genuinely sustainable society to avoid turning Earth into one big deserted or nearly-deserted island. The island was decimated to the degree that it could no longer support the Rapa Nui society (internal conflicts, external plunderers, and imported species and diseases all played their part). (As it happens, “systems thinking” is more on a par with simply “the sneetches.”) This is precisely why Systems Thinking Marin exists today, and why I’m writing this blog to you, the person who takes Easter Island as a warning. If you put “systems thinking” versus “dr seuss” into Google Trends, for example, there is zero comparison Dr. If you are not familiar with “systems thinking,” you are one of many, and this blog is a dive-in-the-deep-end introduction. Generally speaking, you and I lead our daily lives in much the way Rapa Nui inhabitants of Easter Island did: just trying to get by day after day, insufficiently attending to the long-term picture. This blog title, “One Book to Save the World,” is not meant as a pithy suggestion or a cute metaphor.