Today we are plagued with vast, terrifying and seemingly insurmountable problems. We are fighting these problems – from; climate emergency, biodiversity collapse and viral pandemics to human migration, human trafficking and escalating conflict, with ever more complicated and sophisticated responses.
Modern humans have a mind-boggling capacity for creating complicated things. From the first simple bikes, cars and trains, to quantum computers that ‘think’ and learn for themselves. We are a society on the verge of combining robots with humans, generating an atmospheric shield to ‘protect’ us from the sun, creating vaccines in record-breaking timescales. We even have the worlds smartest minds arranging an exit strategy for elite billionaires to move to Mars!
Yet, we are one of the few – if not only – species that has actively and constructively destroyed our own habitat, depleted the very resources we need to survive, and are kindly and consciously reversing the natural process of selecting the genes of the fittest.
We are so drunk on our powerful and masterful achievements that we no longer think we have to live by universal laws – the laws of nature – we don’t see ourselves as ‘natural’ at all! We are reversing natural succession on a planetary scale and seem entirely comfortable with what we have achieved.
The consequences of our actions are out-sourced and out of sight. When we decide to buy cheap food grown on intensively managed land where the fertility comes from fossil fuels, and the ‘pests’ – also known as wildlife – are killed with toxic chemicals, we overlook the multiple and destructive indirect consequences.
The results are decoupled from the problem, which conveniently keeps the costs down for the polluter – the tab is picked up by the citizen, under the guise of addressing seemingly disconnected issues.
Issues on land such as; adapting to a warming climate, cleaning up the ocean dead zones, the cost of pollinating by hand due to an insect apocalypse and the devastating social and environmental cost of human migration caused by an area half the size of the European Union turning to desert every year.
In human health, the outsourced costs are vast: Since 1990, global cancer rates have almost doubled; autoimmune rates skyrocket, coeliac disease alone increases up to 9% each year; a tenfold increase in obesity; and now in the UK 1 in 54 children have autism. Rampant viruses from covid 19 to swine flu sweep through the world population, the latter of which resulted in the slaughter of 10 million factory-farmed pigs.
I believe that the most significant challenge we face today is not climate change, world hunger or a killer virus – these are all symptoms – it’s our inability to understand and work with complexity or find the real root cause of an issue.
We are trying to solve the ‘wicked’ problems of our modern times with the same thinking that created the problem. It’s just not that smart!
Indigenous cultures understood complexity. They lived as a part of a functional ecosystem where they could watch and learn from the guiding principles and patterns of nature. Elders, through storytelling and rituals, handed down hard-learned universal truths, which helped to ensure these people lived within their ecological means.
There are approximately 370 million indigenous people in the world occupying or using up to 22% of the global land area, which is home to 80% of the world’s biological diversity.
Had we not driven most of these peoples from their lands and decimated their populations, we could perhaps have had access to this ancient wisdom.
Instead, we worship the gods of economics and technology. The grand finale of these collective and compounding negative actions are to be picked up by future generations or borne by the poorest and most defenceless in the world.
Our reduced and simplistic ‘stories’ are meaningless snappy soundbites that have more to do with marketing than passing on universal truths. ‘Meat is murder’ or ‘animal agriculture emits more CO2 than the whole of the transport sector’ take just a second to say but several hours to debunk – and that’s if you can even get anyone to listen!
Getting to the root cause of a wicked issue requires the ability to see the broader and more complex, interconnected and ever-evolving picture; this takes time and the willingness to learn and think critically.
Who’s paying for that new scientific study? Who is really benefiting most from that new wonder drug? Are we asking these critical questions?
There’s no more slow and respectful debate around the fire these days; we are too busy binging on Netflix! After all, we can get the ‘truth’ from the two-minute slot on the BBC News or guardian online, can’t we?
So, where did it all go wrong?
During the so-called enlightenment, we became seduced by the notion that everything could be understood as if it were a machine. This makes complete sense when studying maths and physics. Still, the idea became so pervasive that the mechanistic paradigm became the predominant way of thinking and doing for three hundred years.
Applying mechanistic thinking to living systems such as human health and natural ecosystems is, frankly, disastrous!
Living systems are complex, interwoven, self-organising and emergent. The ‘whole’ system has properties that cannot be understood by separating and studying them with reductionist science.
In more recent years, and particularly in the fields of health and land management, a small but growing movement has been emerging. The people leading these movements have gone through an evolution of mindset from a mechanistic world view to one that understands whole system function – they have a ‘systems thinking’ or ‘holistic’ paradigm.
The systems thinking paradigm is the only world view with the capacity to solve our ever more pressing and dangerous wicked problems – be it in our inner ecosystems (our bodies) or our outer ecosystems (our farmland and wild spaces).
‘’I challenge the idea that those who drove us into the ditch are the best ones to get us out of it.’’ Marianne Williamson
In fact, I would dare to say that the brightest and most successful people currently thriving in our mechanistic world are the least qualified to ‘drive us out of the ditch.’ These people, who may have unlimited power and resources, could make matters a whole lot worse!
What is so desperately needed now is for people to rise up and say, ‘enough is enough’, to rebel intelligently and quietly by taking the time to develop your own capacity to see the whole picture.
We have access to incredible brains with spectacular specialist knowledge of the specific subject matter, the problem is each is working in a silo separate from the other. This is the age of complexity. A new set of skills are required to work alongside these specialists; It’s the capacity to see across specialisms and view the world as the living, complex intertwined system it is. Only then do we stand a chance of solving these seemingly insurmountable global problems.
Everyone must take up this challenge before it’s too late.
In this series of emails, I plan to cover a wide range of issues; in each example, I’ll show you that we have created the very problems we are currently fighting against and how systems thinking can help to solve them. I hope to illustrate how every issue that seems separate; crop failures and the explosion of cancer in humans for instance, is utterly connected.
Our inner ecosystems and our outer ecosystem are really just one whole system.
Here’s an example to get you going. (I think this could be a video)
I’m a regenerative livestock consultant and a ‘holistic manager’ I use whole system thinking to help to solve the huge problems the livestock industry currently face. But the same way of looking at the world can be applied to human and planetary health – it’s based on principles that are universal.
An example is how we tackle the huge livestock health issue of internal parasites. The mechanistic world view would suggest we need to treat the infestation with a wormer. It seems to work okay, so the farmers become reliant on that expensive apparent solution.
Over time the wormers are no longer effective, the parasites are becoming resistant and parasite infestations are at an all-time high.
If you take a whole system view, you would ask, what’s the real roots cause of this issue? Why wouldn’t this happen in functional nature?
In nature, large groups of herbivores group together for protection against predators, which means the animals trample, dung, and urinate on the vegetation; they won’t come back for an extended period which breaks the lifecycle of internal parasites.
In a pristine environment, animals have access to a wide range of plants with anthelmintic properties (anti-parasite), and the plants are growing on health mineral-rich soils. Plant medicines and nutrients help animals resist disease.
Any animals in a herd that impacted by a parasite burden will be slower and less resilient so are the first to taken by a predator – their genes are the least likely to be passed to the future generation. Nature is selecting for the animals with the most resistance to disease.
In natural functional ecosystems, many organisms help to kill and suppress the parasite larvae. Dung beetles bury and compost the dung very rapidly so that there is less habitat in which the parasite can breed, and the vegetation can regrow quickly. On the dung beetles’ legs, tiny mites hitch a ride; these mites’ favourite food is the larvae of flies – another problem species to livestock farmers.
Unfortunately, the wormers farmers are currently using to try and tackle the parasite issue kill dung beetles! The set stocked grazing systems that farmers now adopt allow constant re-infestation of the livestock. The depleted and over-managed soils lead to livestock deficient in minerals and susceptible to disease. The lack of diversity in the sward offers no way for livestock to self medicate. In the livestock industry, we have been genetically selecting for the more docile animals that fatten quickly at the expense of the genes that protect from disease.
The insecticidal treatments used to treat the face flies further disrupt the invertebrate populations, including the predator wasps and insect food source for the birds that help to eat flies and parasite larvae and help to prevent the booming of any one population.
The sick animals become more likely to need antibiotic intervention for other health issues, which further depletes their natural immunity and innate resilience, damages the ecosystem, and impacts our gut microbiome – the community of organisms that is the seat of all human health.
And so it goes on. A similar complex and intertwined story plays out for every planetary health, livestock health, and human health issue!
The wormer is making things worse.
There’s a good news story at the end of all of this, however. By understanding the whole system function, we can create management that embraces how natural ecosystems regulate themselves. All the farmers we work with adopt these principles.
As citizens choosing to buy the food these natural land managers produce, you are choosing to be an active agent in a functional living ecosystem. By reading and learning from our educational email thread, we will bring you stories and hope for the future at a time of unprecedented change and disruption.
Caroline Grindrod