Theme: Systems

Sustainability is hip, but no more so than when I was young. My parents bought cane sugar and raffia at the Fair Trade shop and at the end of the year, my father donated a large part of his profit to organizations such as Greenpeace and Oxfam. In 1972, when I was five, the Club of Rome published their Limits to Growth report which explained why unbridled growth is impossible.

The Club of Rome was a prestigious global think tank of scientists and dignitaries, including the former Queen of the Netherlands, Beatrix. The organization tried to bring economic growth and its limits onto the international political agenda. Its conclusions were profound: in a world with scarce resources and a fast-growing population, the system would reach its limit somewhere in the twentieth century, leading to collapses that would stall economic growth.

The precise details of the report’s predictions may not have been accurate. Indeed, these days the discussion centers around greenhouse gases and climate change, and there’s no mention of them in Limits to Growth. But its core premise, that humanity may be pushing the Earth to breaking point, remains true.

The report and its definition of sustainability were grounded in a system approach. That only became clear to me when I read Donella Meadows’ Thinking in Systems. She was one of the main authors of Limits to Growth, together with her husband, Dennis Meadows, Jørgen Randers, and William Behrens III.

Thinking in Systems opens with an explanation of why certain kinds of problems actually exist. She says that hunger, poverty, unemployment, environmental disasters, and climate change are stubborn problems that are the result of how things are organized. Nobody deliberately creates those problems, nobody wants them, and yet they’re there. That is because they’re system problems, undesirable effects of how systems are structured. We can only tackle these problems if we’re willing to see the system as the source of its own problems, and if we are prepared to restructure the system.

Meadows goes on to define what a system is:

• A collection of people, cells, molecules, or other interconnected things that produce their own behavior.

• These elements are organized to aim for an objective.

• A system is more than the sum of its parts.

• A system can display adaptive, dynamic, targeted, self-organizing, self-preserving, and self-repairing behavior.

• A system can change, adapt, respond to events, have goals, and heal wounds in ways that are lifelike.

• A system is resilient and many systems are evolutionary.

Every system consists of elements, interconnections, and either functions (for non-human systems) or objectives (for human systems). The elements are the most visible aspect but they rarely provide insight into the overall behavior of the system. The functions or objectives determine how a system operates, but you can only understand them if you observe the system in action. Take a company, for example. The ‘elements’ might be the people that work in it. But if you study them, you won’t learn much about the company’s overarching aims.

Donella Meadows uses the word ‘resilience’ to indicate a system’s capacity to survive in a fluctuating environment. It’s about the system’s ability to adapt, to recover, and to repair itself.

The word ‘resilient’ is also sometimes used as a synonym for ‘sustainable’. And rightly so. A sustainable system is one that stays alive. In fact, resilience is the only way to define sustainability. A steak or a t-shirt can’t be judged as sustainable in isolation, because the term can only be applied to a larger system. The impact of a product on sustainability depends on more than just how it is manufactured. It also depends on how it is used within the larger system. How much of it is used, how often, and in combination with what other products? As an advisor in the field of sustainability, I was constantly trying to explain to companies or investors that sustainability is a feature of a system as a whole, not of its elements. After a few years, I realized that most of the time, the best thing I could do was give them Donella Meadows’ book.