{"id":34503,"date":"2018-05-24T07:09:42","date_gmt":"2018-05-24T12:09:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=34503"},"modified":"2018-05-24T07:09:42","modified_gmt":"2018-05-24T12:09:42","slug":"systems-thinking-critical-thinking-and-personal-resilience","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=34503","title":{"rendered":"Systems Thinking, Critical Thinking, and Personal Resilience"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n

Systems Thinking, Critical Thinking, and Personal Resilience<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/header>\n
As a writer focused on the global sustainability crisis, I\u2019m often asked how to deal with the stress of knowing\u2014knowing, that is, that we humans have severely overshot Earth\u2019s long-term carrying capacity, making a collapse of both civilization and Earth\u2019s ecological systems likely; knowing that we are depleting Earth\u2019s resources (including fossil fuels and minerals) and clogging its waste sinks (like the atmosphere\u2019s and oceans\u2019 ability to absorb CO2); knowing that the decades of rapid economic growth that characterized the late 20th<\/sup> and early 21st<\/sup> centuries are ending, and that further massive interventions by central banks and governments can\u2019t do more than buy us a little bit more time of relative stability; knowing that technology (even renewable energy technology) won\u2019t save our fundamentally unsustainable way of life.<\/p>\n

In the years I\u2019ve spent investigating these predicaments, I\u2019ve been fortunate to meet experts who have delved deeply into specific issues\u2014the biodiversity crisis, the population crisis, the climate crisis, the resource depletion crisis, the debt crisis, the plastic waste crisis, and on and on. In my admittedly partial judgment, some of the smartest people I\u2019ve met happen also to be among the more pessimistic. (One apparently smart expert I haven\u2019t had opportunity to meet yet is 86-year-old social scientist Mayer Hillman, the subject of this recent article<\/a> in The Guardian<\/em>.)<\/p>\n

In discussing climate change and all our other eco-social predicaments, how does one distinguish accurate information from statements intended to elicit either false hope or needless capitulation to immediate and utter doom? And, in cases where pessimistic outlooks do seem securely rooted in evidence, how does one psychologically come to terms with the information?<\/p>\n

Systems Thinking<\/strong><\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/section>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Systems Thinking, Critical Thinking, and Personal Resilience As a writer focused on the global sustainability crisis, I\u2019m often asked how to deal with the stress of knowing\u2014knowing, that is, that we humans have severely overshot Earth\u2019s long-term carrying capacity, making a collapse of both civilization and Earth\u2019s ecological systems likely; knowing that we are depleting […]<\/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":[4,7],"tags":[1499,4041,234,240,328,4579,3197,20230,6665,1453,1081,778],"class_list":["post-34503","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment","category-survival-2","tag-carrying-capacity","tag-critical-thinking","tag-ecology","tag-economic-growth","tag-fossil-fuels","tag-minerals","tag-overshoot","tag-personal-resilience","tag-resilience-org","tag-resource-depletion","tag-richard-heinberg","tag-systems-thinking"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34503","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=34503"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34503\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":34504,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34503\/revisions\/34504"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=34503"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=34503"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=34503"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}