Donella Meadows was the lead author on The Limits To Growth, a highly influential book in the world of sustainability. I am not a huge fan of that book, as I worried the book was over-ambitious in its conclusions which may have helped creating a panic about population. The danger being that some nasty bigoted people sought to justify their ideas in the cloak of sustainability. Her later, posthumously published, book is less ambitious and all the better for that. She notes that systems matter, a message that is worth remembering.
Cheap Isn’t Enough
One of the things that I emphasize in my classes is just how cheap renewable energy has become. The obvious question being, “why aren’t we just using renewables if they are so cheap?”
There are specific challenges, such as intermittency, but these are gradually being solved, e.g., batteries. A broader point is that systems are resistant to change. Energy in wealthy countries is delivered by power grids. These are very complex endeavors and the grids have generally been set up with fossil fuels in mind. Changing them is hard, not least because it is easier for people who know how to run a grid with fossil fuels to keep on doing so. To be fair to those who manage the grid, the public will freak out if a well-meaning mistake means that the grid fails. Change is risky by its nature, not changing brings its own issues but often not to those making the decision.
Once an economy has a lot of oil-burning furnaces and airmobile engines, it cannot change quickly to furnaces and engines that burn a different fuel, even if the price changes suddenly.
Donella Meadows (2008) page 23
Systems matter in sustainability, we need to change these if we want progress. I have no doubt that societies will all move towards renewables (many have already) but we don’t want the transition to be held up for years because we can’t get the systems to change. But change needs hard work and challenging coordination. It requires people who understand systems and are willing to do the hard work to shift them.
If Systems Matter In Sustainability What Are They?
Meadows explains the nature of systems. She explains that they must contain elements (which can be intangible), interconnections, and a function or purpose. The purpose is important. It doesn’t need to be explicit but a purpose must exist for a system to exist. For example, an electrical grid is there to provide electricity to buildings. It isn’t just electricity moving about the country willy-nilly.
A system is more than the sum of its parts which explains why they tend to have a bit of a life of their own. It is for this reason that systems are hard to study and even harder to nudge in the way you want them to go. We need to work at it though.
For other relevant posts see here, here, here, and here.
Read: Donella Meadows (2008) Thinking in Systems, Chelsea Green Publishing
