What would the quickest introduction to place-based systems thinking look like?

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Jim Dodge & Co.’s “Where You At?” bioregional quiz is quite a classic (and still relevant):

1. Trace the water you drink from rainfall to tap.

2. Trace it out of the house and back to a river, aquifer or the sea.

3. What “soil series” are you standing on?

4. What was the total rainfall here last year?

5. When was the last time a fire burned through here?

6. What were the primary subsistance techniques of the culture that lived here before you?

7. Name five native edible plants here and the season(s) that they are available.

8. From what direction do winter storms generally come?

9. Where does your garbage go?

10. How long is the growing season?

11. Name five birds that live here. Which are migratory and which stay put?

12. What species have gone extinct here?

13. What primary geological processes or events shaped the land here?

14. What spring wildflower is consistently among the first to bloom here?

15. Name five grasses here. Any of them native?

16. What is the land use history here?

17. Where does your power come from and how is it generated?

18. Where is the nearest large wilderness?

19. How many days till the moon is full?

20. Point North.

This is the guy who in the middle of any discussion of any new proposal, innovation, plan or solution demands that everyone in the room revisit how fucking horrible the reality of the problem is. Working on an idea for clean energy as climate action? He’s there to tell you about starving polar bears you won’t save. Working on imagining a new public health program in a poor country? He’s there to remind you of the sick babies who’ll die anyway. Working on a hunch about a more sustainable product design? He’s there to remind you of the dark mountains of toxic trash that will pile up in China despite your efforts. You’re working on envisioning your contribution to the world as vividly as possible, and splash! Dark gray paint.

The dark gray paint guy always frames these interventions in terms of “realism” and savvy. “Let’s be realistic…” he begins. “Call me cynical, but…” he starts. “That’s a good idea, but don’t we need to be practical and remember…?” But tossing gray paint on new ideas is not realism, it’s a fucked-up power play.

Maybe the guy’s deeply depressed, in despair about the world, and feels a little better about that when others around him feel bad, too. Maybe he’s one of those smart and manipulative types who figures it makes him look smarter to cut down other people’s thinking. Maybe he possesses misplaced idealism, manifesting in the idea that unless we all acknowledge the injustice and oppression of the world with every breath, we’re insufficiently radical… or, maybe he’s just an asshole.

The one thing he’s not, is helpful.

In fact, experienced worldchangers know that dark gray paint is never a helpful thing while we’re trying to envision a new possibility. It doesn’t make the plan better, its just dispirits the planners. It dampens our passion and creativity without giving us anything in return. And for what? Despair and cynicism are far worse problems in the world than smart people trying hard to do new things, even if they fail.

There are, of course, some things that you need to do when launching into a new idea:

1. Know the systems. Know as much about the systems you’re working within/ trying to change as you possibly can. Do your homework. Know the politics. Know how your solution will work, if it does. You have an obligation to have a reasonably sophisticated understanding of the actual problem you’re attempting to fix: solutions framed as “so simple they’ll work anywhere” have a tendency to work nowhere.

2. Know the history. Learn about the solutions that have been tried before in your area. Which solutions failed? Which solutions had serious unintended consequences, or even made things worse? Which worked? Why don’t they work now? You have an obligation not to fail in the same way someone else has already failed before.

3. Know the craft. Find smart dedicated people who understand what they’re doing and learn from them. Making change isn’t a state of mind, it’s a craft: your allies have a huge array of practices, approaches, useful tricks, intelligent shortcuts and insightful stories that you can benefit from. If you spend time with them, they’ll share. One good mentor’s worth a dozen enthusiastic acquaintances. Having a little gang of brilliant colleagues you see once in a while will teach you a lot more than listening to self-labelled “change agents” at conferences. Keeping a journal of what you learn helps. Reading a lot about people who’s minds you admire helps. Finding social scenes where thoughtful solutions matter helps even more. You have an obligation to be as skillful at your work that you can be.

If you know your systems, know your history and know your craft and you have ideas that excite you, keep going! If you want to test the realism of your ideas, seek out tough-minded experts and honest peers and ask them, but only when you’re ready to make use of the critiques. Criticism, when sought, becomes a tool; seek it.

If you don’t know your systems, history and craft, your job now is learning, not inventing. Get on it. Start now.

In either case, stay away from any angry-looking dudes walking around with buckets in their hands. Don’t invite them to the party. Drop them from the discussion list. Defriend them. Block their twitter accounts.

You do not owe it to anyone to feel discouraged for their benefit. Let yourself get colorful. Enjoy the exploration.

PS: If you find yourself being someone who often tosses paint, perhaps you have some learning to do as well. Are you genuinely creating the biggest impact you could be? Is there a way you could offer your insight in a more supportive and effective way? Are you even really aware of how your “realism” is landing on your colleagues and allies?

“(from Viajes de Varones Prudentes, Suárez Miranda, book IV, chap. XIV, Lérida, 1658. Quoted by Jorge Luis Borges, Historia universal de la infamia “Etcetera,” Buenos Aires, 1935).”

It was a favorite conceit of some 20th century writers to discuss the limits of representation by describing representations which overwhelmed the thing being represented.

Lewis Carroll was the first to present as an absurdity the idea of “a map of the country, on the scale of a mile to the mile”:

“Have you used it much?” I enquired.

“It has never been spread out, yet,” said Mein Herr. “The farmers objected: they said it would cover the whole country, and shut out the sunlight! So we now use the country itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well.”

The idea of a 1:1 map (a map on the same scale, in the same size, as the place being mapped) not only bemused Borges but encouraged Umberto Eco to write his essay On the Impossibility of Drawing a Map of the Empire on a Scale of 1:1. In that essay, Eco decides that such a map is an impossibility, since given an enormous paper map,

“When the map is installed over all the territory (whether suspended or not), the territory of the empire has the characteristic of being a territory entirely covered by a map. The map does not take into account this characteristic, which would have to be presented on another map that depicted the territory plus the lower map. But such a process would be infinite. Two corollaries follow:

“2. At the moment the map is realized, the empire become unreproducible.”

Of course, today, paper maps are niche products, while hundreds of millions of people carry one their persons machines capable of capable of calling up detailed satellite maps of the entire Earth with at worst only a few seconds delay.

And increasingly the most urbanized parts of our world are being mapped and sensed and documented and photographed at finer and finer details. We already have a few models that map (or at least depict) places at finer than 1:1 scales; but in any case, having models that depict our cities (with varying degrees of usefulness and fidelity) in their entirety at 1:1 scales seems an almost boring inevitability, from a futures point of view. The map is being drawn and laid over reality, it has just been dematerialized.

Two follow-ons, though, are very interesting indeed.

The first is that, as William Gibson notes, the idea of cyberspace as a separate, distinct realm of being is a failed prediction. Instead, what’s happened is that the physical world has eaten, or been eaten by, the digital (or perhaps they’re both eating each other, like some two snake ouroboros… but let’s not get sidetracked). We live inside the digital, now, and the digital is increasingly focused on physicality and presence. If there is a map, if there is a model, we increasingly experience it from within.

The second is that what it means to live within a city is changing as living in a city and living within models of that city become simultaneous. Our way of being urban is itself a recent culture, albeit with roots that go back 10,000 years. We live amidst institutions, transportation systems, land use patterns, aesthetics and social mores fashioned by 19th and 20th century people and institutions. However, we no longer live in the world that shaped those people or created those institutions.

The places, relationships and capacities of cities are all changing as a result of living inside both the city and models and maps of that city at the same time. Some of those changes are now-commonplace observations within technology circles (like annotated landscapes, sharing systems and networked infrastructure flows). Others are I think poorly understand even by those now beginning to live them: I feel strongly that who we are being when we walk down the street (how we are being urban) is itself changing in ways that are difficult to describe with the language available to us now.

One interesting thought experiment is to go to a street you know well, find the oldest picture of it you can, and look at it as you walk down that street, and try to think of all the ways your thoughts, actions and interactions are being informed by access to understandings of that street and its context that would have been at least unlikely, if not impossible, twenty years ago.

Of course, being able to find and look at that picture on your phone in the first place is itself a sign that you no longer live in the city in which the photographer stood. That city had no 1:1 map.

Sure, there are specifics to point to (ones greatly more likely in a warming world), like heat waves, bigger storms, droughts, floods, wildfires and rising seas. These specific impacts have direct (and somewhat predictable) results: no one is surprised when a flood washes away a riverside town, or when a drought withers a crop.

But the specific impacts also have second order effects: effects that impact systems in other places and ways. A terrible crop may raise food prices; rising food prices may contribute to social unrest and instability.

When we think about climate, it’s the growing opportunities for instability that should worry us, particularly since modern economies are built on the efficiencies that come from having predictable access to resources, energy, goods and services. (Obviously, some matter more than others: a San Francisco which found its supply of luxury cars had vanished would just be San Francisco without luxury cars; a San Francisco which found its supply of water had vanished would quickly become the ruins of the city once known as San Francisco.)

The scary thing is that instabilities tend to breed: social unrest due to high food prices may well stop the flow of a critical resource, or lead to civil war, or create the conditions that export terrorism. When these instabilities stay in one place, we call it a failed state; but what extreme climate change threatens to do is to both breed instabilities in global systems and magnify local crises. This combination is far more destructive than the direct impacts of drought or floods or massive storms themselves, if for no other reason than that deeply disrupted human systems lose their ability to repair themselves, especially when other systems to which they’re connected are also losing stability.

This is why even “small” amounts of climate change are dangerous. It’s also why strategies to promote stability in unstable times are so important, though the strategies we most need are ones we don’t yet even have good terms for —- the closest we have are things like “ruggedization” (designing systems so they’re much less likely to fail in the first place), “increased dynamism” (producing increasing amounts of innovation through organizations that are learning rapidly) and “adaptive capacities” (being able to muster resources to change rapidly when change is called for).

What’s less helpful, in my opinion, is the term resilience. The very word “resilience” implies a capacity to bound back into shape that is simply impossible for many current systems: they’re brittle from top to bottom. Even the best resilience work I know of takes for granted an unlikely continuance of the status quo, and/or underestimates the consequences of its disruption. Given the actual magnitude of the climate impacts we face, much resilience work is talismanic, aiming to ward off harm without actually doing anything real.

What we need instead are places which are rapidly changing themselves to be sustainable over time, to withstand inevitable systems shocks, a prosper by finding new and better ways of doing things in changed circumstances, to become more dynamic as the pressures grow. That’s going to take, above all, abandoning the fiction that the status quo will last.

But you’ll never hear a pundit say that.

Seeing nature in the city; Viennese park. photo: Alex Steffen

Urbanization is now the dominant reality of humanity on Earth, and will grow ever more so over this century (and humanity is of course by far the most impactful driver of change on this planet). So if we care about the natural working of this world, we must look to the human realm in cities to find our solutions.

When looking for nature and connection to natural systems within a city, though, we must look through the land occupied by the city itself, and see the much, much larger area that is woven into the fabric of the city by trade and infrastructure, resource and energy use. Even the poorest cities sit at the centers of root systems that tap the water and soil and life of a huge number of distant places.

For reasons I’ve gone into in great depth before (especially in Carbon Zero), urbanization is in many ways the best possible response given the realities of longer lives and diminishing poverty. By bringing people together, we make possible much more ecologically frugal prosperity and much greater innovation and societal dynamism. So cities like great trees with large root systems are something we want.

The trick is that we want those root systems to be as sensible and ecologically sustainable as possible. Mostly, this means reducing the volume of resources and energy cities need to thrive, since extraction of resources and generation of energy are both harmful as currently done. Secondarily, it means making sure the places and ecosystems into which our roots run are being treated with the greatest possible integrity, and that our needs are being met as sustainably as possible. A city with extremely low-energy systems and largely closed-loop resource use can be fed by healthy farms, forests and natural systems, I believe.

What is much, much less important in practical terms is what natural systems work like within the city limits.

That’s because the most important job for any city to do, in planetary terms, is to be as wonderfully urban as it can be. Compact, deeply walkable communities served by transit, efficient infrastructure and good connective technologies give us the leverage to seriously reduce urban footprints. Therefore, maximizing compactness, walkability and efficiency are our main jobs in a city.

Too many old “green city” ideas seemed to be focused mainly on treating urbanization as an imposition on the landscape that needed to be (supposedly) healed in place by low-rise development, lots of urban farms and daylighted streams, on-site green infrastructure and local energy. The simple fact is that it is entirely possible to build a compact city with none of these things that is far more ecologically sound than a low-density community with all of them. Looking natural has very little to do with building sustainable urban ways of life, and the choice between the two is simple.

Nature, greenery, connection to life and more ecological local systems are both possible and important within a city: it’s just that they must be urban versions of these things, where the goal is feeling and function, not naturalistic appearance. Urban forests of full-grown street trees, road pavement reclaimed as linear parks, bioswales and rainwater harvesting, balcony gardens, community mini-farms, parks and waterfronts – all of these can enrich our lives, and make life in the city easier, more relaxed, and often a bit more sustainable.

(Indeed, I think smart cities will start plowing up their parking lots and asphalt and creating far more and far greener public space as a means of increasing quality of life and sense of connection to the larger world in very dense places).

What we don’t need is cities attempting to be poor, damaged versions of natural places. Urban restoration as a project to make cities better cities is a terrific idea; urban restoration meant to undo urbanism is mistaken in its very core.

One of the things I’d like to see much more of is places and systems within cities that enable good systems storytelling – urban gardens that help citizens understand the process of growing food and the nature of their city’s foodshed; water systems that help citizens visualize the source of their water, its finite capacities and where and how water is used in their lives and in their cities; retail stores that tell their products’ backstories; metering, displays, even public art that helps people understand the flows of energy into their cities and the impacts producing that energy is having on the wider world; and so on and so forth.

To my mind, the best ways to see nature in a city are as a companion in urban life and as a metaphorical tool for understanding the world, since that’s what I think will help lead us towards cities that deliver both beautiful urban life and healthy planetary life.

“What kind of peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war. Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave. I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, the kind that enables men and nations to grow and to hope and to build a better life for their children – not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women, not merely peace in our time but peace for all time. …

“I speak of peace, therefore, as the necessary rational end of rational men. I realize that the pursuit of peace is not as dramatic as the pursuit of war – and frequently the words of the pursuer fall on deaf ears. But we have no more urgent task.

“Some say that it is useless to speak of world peace or world law or world disarmament – and that it will be useless until the leaders of the Soviet Union adopt a more enlightened attitude. I hope they do. I believe we can help them do it. But I also believe that we must reexamine our own attitude – as individuals and as a nation – for our attitude is as essential as theirs. And every graduate of this school, every thoughtful citizen who despairs of war and wishes to bring peace, should begin by looking inward – by examining his own attitude toward the possibilities of peace, toward the Soviet Union, toward the course of the cold war and toward freedom and peace here at home.

“First: Let us examine our attitude toward peace itself. Too many of us think it is impossible. Too many think it unreal. But that is a dangerous, defeatist belief. It leads to the conclusion that war is inevitable, that mankind is doomed, that we are gripped by forces we cannot control.

“We need not accept that view. Our problems are manmade; therefore, they can be solved by man. And man can be as big as he wants. No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings. Man’s reason and spirit have often solved the seemingly unsolvable, and we believe they can do it again.

“I am not referring to the absolute, infinite concept of peace and good will of which some fantasies and fanatics dream. I do not deny the value of hopes and dreams, but we merely invite discouragement and incredulity by making that our only and immediate goal.

“Let us focus instead on a more practical, more attainable peace, based not on a sudden revolution in human nature but on a gradual evolution in human institutions, on a series of concrete actions and effective agreements which are in the interest of all concerned. There is no single, simple key to this peace, no grand or magic formula to be adopted by one or two powers. Genuine peace must be the product of many nations, the sum of many acts. It must be dynamic not static, changing to meet the challenge of each new generation. For peace is a process, a way of solving problems.

“With such a peace, there will still be quarrels and conflicting interests, as there are within families and nations. World peace, like community peace, does not require that each man love his neighbor; it requires only that they live together in mutual tolerance, submitting their disputes to a just and peaceful settlement. And history teaches us that enmities between nations, as between individuals, do not last forever. However fixed our likes and dislikes may seem, the tide of time and events will often bring surprising changes in the relations between nations and neighbors.

“So let us persevere. Peace need not be impracticable, and war need not be inevitable. By defining our goal more clearly, by making it seem more manageable and less remote, we can help all peoples to see it, to draw hope from it, and to move irresistibly toward it…

“So, let us not be blind to our differences. But let us also direct attention to our common interests and to the means by which those differences can be resolved. And if we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.”

—President John F. Kennedy, 1963

(You can read the rest here.)

Ed Abbey was a man full of faults, but he did know how to call BS when he saw it:

“I say, oh you young fuddie-duddies, you young fogies, you prematurely middle-aged! You cappuccino drinkers! What right have you to be so dull, so blasé, so jaded, so conservative, so timid, so morose and defensive? At your age? So bored with protest, so disdainful of revolt? What have you done to earn your indifference?”

I very much like the concept that one has to earn one’s detachment, one world-weariness, one’s sardonicism. Go spend 10 years on the barricades, and then we’ll commiserate about the burden of the world and the crooked timber of humanity. I’ll even buy the first round.

Until then, go do your duty to humanity and contribute something… or make way for those who will.

You can listen here: http://lftlc.com/podcasts/future-cities

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Perhaps you’ve met this fellow before. This is the Yeti Crab. Until last year, no one even knew he existed.

Yeti crabs live next to the volcanic vents 7,500 feet beneath the surface, 900 miles south of Easter Island, and they’re pretty weird and mysterious creatures: they’re blind, albino, only distantly related to other lobsters and crabs (they’ve been given a new taxonomical family) and we don’t actually know how they manage to survive where they live.

“Dr Segonzac told the BBC News website that the ‘hairy’ pincers contained lots of filamentous bacteria. Some scientists think the bacteria detoxify poisonous minerals from the water, allowing K. hirsuta to survive around the vents. Alternatively, the animal may actually feed on the bacteria that live in the hair-like strands.

In fact, much about them is unknown. But mysterious though they are, in crustacean terms, they’re rockstars: news of their discovery has swept the blogosphere.

But what, if anything, does their discovery mean? Well, the scientific meanings will take a long time to emerge, and may or may not end up being that interesting (though knowing how to filter poisonous water with tame bacteria would be a neat trick to biomimic). The cultural meanings are a different matter.

I think that we’re so thrilled about discoveries like this because it sometimes seems like the world is too small, too crowded, too well-mapped, too known to admit the possibility of mystery and adventure. Discoveries like the Yeti Crab remind us that we still know very little about a great number of things. Our planet is still, largely, a mystery to us. As H. L. Mencken wrote, “Penetrating so many secrets, we cease to believe in the unknowable. But there it sits nevertheless, calmly licking its chops.”

And that, I think is a worldchanging lesson in itself. As environmental pressures mount, it becomes obvious that some planetary management is likely to become necessary. Our best first bet, of course, is to do everything we can to turn down the greenhouse heat by cutting emissions as radically and quickly as possible, and to save all the parts by protecting critical habitat and surveying the planet’s genetic diversity.

But we’ve already screwed up pretty badly, and much of the evidence seems to suggest that no matter what we do now, we’ve already committed ourselves to profound climate change, species loss and ecosystem degradation. We can still head off the worst of it, but we can’t avoid big problems now. We’ve bought the ticket, and we’re going to take the ride.

One of the consequences of the state the planet’s in is that we lose our innocence. We are impacting every system, every flow, every creature on Earth in some way, already. There used to be a time when we called nature humanity had changed “gardens” and nature humanity hadn’t touched “wilderness.” It’s all gardening now.

“There is no footprint-free world. Every block of the world’s wildlands is already severely impacted. Not only are they internally impacted through macroevents such as the megafaunal extinctions and selective extraction of old-growth timber, but the very frameworks of their existence—global warming, acid rain, drained wetlands, green revolutions, wildland shrinkage, introduced pests, and many more-are set by Homo sapiens. The question is not whether we must manage nature, but rather how shall we manage it-by accident, haphazardly, or with the calculated goal of its survival forever?”

We have an obligation to become better gardeners. Consciously managing our impacts on the planet is a moral imperative, since our impact now extends to everything, so too must our vision.

And, this, to me, is the thought for which the Yeti Crab should become the mascot: we as a culture need to serve an apprenticeship with nature, and we need to do it now. We don’t know much about the world, really. We’re learning quickly, but ecological knowledge is an ocean, and we’ve only just left the shore.

We’ll need that knowledge to respond on a scale commensurate to the magnitude of the problem.

We cannot refuse to act. We will have to be active gardeners. We won’t have the luxury of full knowledge. But we needed be blind, and rush headlong into dangerous plans. We can act boldly but carefully, informed by a reasonable humility about our actual powers, and proceeding with open minds and light touches until we know more about what we’re doing.

As I’ve written before, planetary management is as much an art as a science. The Yeti Crab reminds us that we’re still only beginning to learn our art.

Get these straight and we’re already engaged in the first task of planetary thinking.

(Then the second task begins: remaking a world of human systems not built to fit these realities.)