Systems Thinking
Limits to Growth Redux
Twitter went aflutter this week with late-breaking (two years late) news in Smithsonian Magazine that Australian physicist Graham Turner had compared the findings of the landmark Limits to Growth report to actual recorded data from 1972-2000 and the Limits to Growth model held up remarkably well. Turner’s report, titled “A Comparison of the Limits to Growth with Thirty Years of Reality,” finds that in all five of the key global economic subsystems - population, food production, industrial production, pollution, and consumption of non-renewable natural resources - the Limits to Growth standard run scenario (essentially business as usual) looks uncannily similar to the actual data, whereas the other two scenarios - stablizing behavior and policies, and comprehensive use of technology - do not.
The Double-Edged Sword of Resilience
Capital Institute's work on financial system reform is very much driven by the concept of system resilience.
Buckminster Fuller Challenge Juror
Capital Institute’s John Fullerton has been selected as a juror for the 2012 Buckminster Fuller Challenge, an annual international design challenge awarding $100,000. We are grateful for the opportunity to bring attention to legacy of the challenge’s namesake. As one of the first engineers to contemplate the way design interacts with nature and society, he sought to create a world that worked for everyone through thoughtful innovation and deeply-considered policy. Bucky, as he liked to be called, contributed to the thinking of many of the earliest systems thinkers and understood the ideas at the core of system theory: “There are no solids. There are no things. There are only interfering and non-interfering patterns operative in pure principle, and principles are eternal.” And that, in many cases, the outcomes from “whole systems [is unpredictable] by the behavior of their parts taken separately.”
Learn more about the Buckminster Fuller and the work carried on in his name at BFI.org.
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Beyond Firm-Level Sustainable Capitalism
Submitted by Dan Thompson on Mon, 02/27/2012 - 5:50pm- Ai Weiwei
- Ai Weiwei
- Al Gore
- Al Gore
- Biomimicry
- Biomimicry
- David Blood
- David Blood
- E F Schumacher
- E F Schumacher
- Evergreen Cooperatives
- Evergreen Cooperatives
- Generation Investment Management
- Generation Investment Management
- Herman Daly
- Herman Daly
- Janine Benyus
- Janine Benyus
- Jeremy Grantham
- Jeremy Grantham
- Lester Brown
- Lester Brown
- Mondragon
- Mondragon
- Natural Systems
- Natural Systems
- Sustainability
- Sustainability
- Sustainable Capitalism
- Sustainable Capitalism
- Systems Thinking
- Systems Thinking
- Tim Jackson
- Tim Jackson
Author:
John Fullerton Co-authored by Peter Malik, Director of Center for Market Innovation at the NRDC
