Hi,
I have reflected on why we don’t get the change we need, and offer the following essays for discussion.
A Constellation Of Readiness.pdf (175.8 KB)
Hi @Roy . Glad to see you sharing your work here. Quite a bit of this resonates with my thinking as well. I’d be curious - what sort of application of your work or response to your work are you seeking?
Hello Robert,
Thanks for the question.
I have been seeking European Citizens to support an Intiative I have drafted. While I have had more than enough people say they will support it, when it comes to supplying the documentation so we can register it, the exchange stops. I am not sure if they think it is a scam or something, but it just stops.
If someting more comes of it, that is great. The UK Report, Global biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse and national security, suggests we are out of time. But we do what we can do. Who can ask for more?
Thanks, @Roy . It’s good to hear about your specific project. As US-based, I can’t do much about signing or signature gathering. Perhaps I may be of assistance in other ways.
My recent work focuses, among other things, on this: Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System - The Donella Meadows Project
Let’s play that game for a moment. Given the recent UK biodiversity report, what are the potential high-leverage actions available?
To me, the 2R forum seems largely focused on Meadows 1. and 2. - transcending paradigms and mindsets of the system. I would venture to guess, however, that most readers of this thread will already embrace paradigms and mindsets that acknowledge the validity of the biodiversity report. The question then arises - how to walk down the Meadows leverage scale until we gain on-the-ground traction on the problem at hand?
As non-UK resident, it’s not really my place to determine 3. “goals of the system” for the UK. I would suggest that is a point of attack any UK resident wishing to advance the biodiversity report should consider focusing on however. What exactly is the UK all about in the coming world? Any political program that runs afoul of that is bound to be overturned in the next election.
Reaching into the trans-paradigmatic tool bag once again, one might wonder why I am focusing on nation-state at the Meadows 3. level of analysis? That would be a good question. The proposed action program of petition signing assumes a nation-state political framing. As an alternative, one might step away from the specific element of petitions and consider if there is some effective form of trans-national political action capable of walking down the Meadows scale to effective ground level actions in a wider range of localities?
I’d venture to say 2R in general has more work to do on Meadows 3. “Goals of the system”. Namely, we could be more precise in characterizing “the system” (in this case, the system that supports biodiversity) and exploring the general nature and mechanisms of goal setting in that system. There is a lot of anti-modernity in these spaces. But how exactly that translates into constructive action going forward is less clear. My take is that modernity is very much part of “the system”, but is not the entire system. To find best leverage, I would advise beginning with the largest possible full systemic view.
Robert,
I appreciate the way you’re framing this through Meadows. I also think that’s the right way to look at the problem.
Where I think I may differ is in where the real bottleneck sits. We’ve spent decades acting at Meadows 4 and 5 by changing rules, incentives, and information flows through COP meetings, biodiversity frameworks, and national reforms. Yet emissions continue to rise, biodiversity declines, and even previously secured reforms are being rolled back.
To me, that suggests the system’s effective goal (Meadows 3) isn’t quite what we say it is. Political survival, economic continuity, and energy availability tend to override stated ecological goals whenever they come into conflict. I wonder if the issue isn’t that systems chose the “wrong” goals, but that they were optimised for a world that no longer exists.
Modern governance was remarkably effective at its core task: maintaining stability through growth under conditions of expanding energy and ecological capacity. Those conditions are now reversing.
The result doesn’t look like a failure of intent so much as a mismatch between goals and the mechanisms used to achieve them. The system keeps pulling the levers that once ensured continuity, and in doing so, now accelerates instability.
If that’s right, our challenge may be less about better execution and more about re-articulating goals for a new era, one in which endurance can no longer be secured through expansion alone. We can explore that re-articulation at a global, philosophical level, and perhaps gain insight into what it might mean for our own governments.
In that sense, it feels like we’ve looped back to where we started, from a wide lens, into Europe, and back out again.
It appears you have replicated an insight that Meadows attributes to Jay Forester for the original Club of Rome meetings:
““The world’s leaders are correctly fixated on economic growth as the answer to virtually all problems, but they’re pushing with all their might in the wrong direction.” ( Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System - The Donella Meadows Project )
On a Meadows 3 level, nation-states in general need GDP growth to legitimate themselves and secure themselves from international competition. Could any UK government survive on a platform of “reduce GDP in the UK to save planetary biodiversity?” Likely not! The goal at level 3 is locked in by mindsets and paradigms at levels 1 and 2. For that reason, parameter tweaking for biodiversity at levels 4 and lower will surely get pushed back at some point.
To me, the inescapable conclusion is the current Post-Westphalian nation-state system is mismatched to the purpose of nurturing life on Earth. The system itself was built to settle wars, not to regenerate ecosystems. Securing biodiversity is a subset of the problem of realigning global security in general.
From that POV, my own Meadows 3. goal is to aim strategically at a post-Westphalian world. Clearly, I have no direct personal leverage to just implement such a system straight away. But any of us do participate in what Benedict Andersen calls the “collective imaginal” - the communities and groupings we claim by way of cultural affiliation. To offer a small practical example, although I am a US citizen, I support the political program of Canadian PM Mark Carney quite a bit more than I support the program of Donald Trump. My loyalties are to the future of the world, not to power hierarchs. Carney’s world model strikes me as promising for transitioning to something like a network model of connected nations, which seems like a constructive goal capable of being addressed. In any case, without global political reform, it’s doubtful biodiversity programs are going to get much traction beyond purely local scales.
Thanks, Robert,
Yes, I think we’re very much in agreement here. I agree that Meadows already named this tension decades ago, and that GDP-legitimated nation-states are structurally locked into growth in a way that makes biodiversity a secondary objective at best. (Though I had not heard of Jay Forrester before.)
Where I was trying to start the conversation, though, was one level earlier — with how we interpret our circumstances before we even get to institutional redesign. The post-Westphalian system didn’t just emerge as a political structure; it’s embedded in a set of assumptions about progress, security, expertise, and control that still shape what feels thinkable or realistic.
From that angle, the challenge isn’t only that the nation-state is mismatched to nurturing life, but that many of us are still seeing the world through lenses optimised for an earlier era. Those lenses quietly set the boundaries for what kinds of futures we can imagine, whether technocratic, networked, or otherwise.
I’m very sympathetic to your point about the collective imaginal. My interest is in how we expand that imaginal, without simply swapping one optimisation logic for another. Before we decide what should replace the current system, I think there’s value in slowing down and noticing how deeply our inherited worldviews are still framing the problem and the solutions we reach for.
In that sense, my hope with this thread was less to advocate a particular institutional end-state and more to open space for re-examining the assumptions we’re carrying as we enter a genuinely new era, something that transcends national borders.
That’s generally what Second Renaissance does. By way of metaphor, in a recent textbook project for beginners, I needed to distinguish high-level and low-level programming languages. The gist of it is, no matter how high-level the language is (like voice prompts to an AI), it’s all going to need translated down to the bit level to have any impact on the machine. It struck me recently that the Meadows scale is rather like that - hanging out at level 1 and sorting through paradigms on its own does not accomplish much. My preferred process lately is to get up to level 1, take a stab at it, then start heading back down to ground level to see what happens. If what happens on the way down is not good, head back up and try again.
OK, so your concern is that culture in general is historically conditioned and not fit for current purposes. I’ll generally grant that. However, in considering the historical (and biological evolutionary record) of change processes, it appears that which emerges, emerges from what is already in place. The term “exaptation” summarizes this process. The new hatches out of the prior. From that POV, I’m less concerned to bury all current structures and far more interested in seeing what current structures might be bent to better purpose.
1 Like