{"id":21607,"date":"2016-09-10T15:45:14","date_gmt":"2016-09-10T20:45:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=21607"},"modified":"2016-09-10T15:45:14","modified_gmt":"2016-09-10T20:45:14","slug":"some-thoughts-on-systems-change","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=21607","title":{"rendered":"Some Thoughts on Systems Change"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Some Thoughts on Systems Change<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/div>\n
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It becomes clearer with each passing day that simply ameliorating current problems is not going to be sufficient. This blog is about how we might scale up transformative change.<\/p>\n

There is an ongoing litany of alarming and depressing news regarding climate change and the\u00a0growing gap between our aspirations for addressing it and reality<\/a>\u00a0(and climate change is only one of the\u00a0nine planetary boundaries<\/a>). There is similarly grim news about exponentially\u00a0increasing levels of inequality<\/a>, conflict \u2014 including in what Naomi Klein calls\u00a0fossil fuel sacrifice zones<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 and the emergence of\u00a0a nation of refugees.<\/a><\/p>\n

Pondering appropriate responses to our increasingly chaotic and unstable global context has led me to identify a few central issues. First is the high degree of interconnection between the problems that we face. I would argue that proportionate reactions to climate change, for example, demand exploration of how energy is used \u2014 which in turn demands not just an understanding of the role of energy in our economies, but a preparedness to move away from relying on economic growth as the primary aim of economic policy. Generally we shy away from questioning the fundamentals of our economic system: if they come into conflict with the major issues we face, we somehow manage simply to ignore such conflict. See, by way of example, the\u00a0EU\u2019s (secret, internal) position<\/span><\/a>\u00a0during COP21 that nothing could be agreed which might jeopardise TTIP and similar agreements.<\/span><\/p>\n

Continuing on the theme of connection, or the lack of it, I\u2019m also struck by how little connection there is, generally, between top down responses to global issues and the bottom up movements also seeking to act on those issues.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>Again using climate change as example, the chair of IPCC working group 2, Debra Roberts,\u00a0commented<\/span><\/a>\u00a0on the general lack of access to high level processes and agreements:<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n

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Some Thoughts on Systems Change It becomes clearer with each passing day that simply ameliorating current problems is not going to be sufficient. This blog is about how we might scale up transformative change. There is an ongoing litany of alarming and depressing news regarding climate change and the\u00a0growing gap between our aspirations for addressing […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[242,1015,1228,14241,4931,14242,7472],"class_list":["post-21607","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment","tag-economic-policy","tag-fossil-fuel","tag-naomi-klein","tag-peter-lipman","tag-planetary-boundaries","tag-transformative-change","tag-transition-network"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21607","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=21607"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21607\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21608,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21607\/revisions\/21608"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=21607"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=21607"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=21607"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}