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Donella Meadows was one of the leaders of a blundering, ineffective sort of environmentalism for many years in the last part of the twentieth century. As lead author of the doomsday book Limits to Growth - commissioned by the doom think tank Club Of Rome - she epitomized a heart sick, mean spirited and anti-humanist approach to change. Meadows built her career around doom mongering and hectoring humanity to stop developing, stop growing and stop enjoying itself.
Inspired by Systems Dynamics, a.k.a. systems thinking, Meadows and a coterie of fellow travelers fully embraced command and control governance as a mechanism to contain and diminish humanity, an objective that she and others justified with model based scenarios of impending global doom due to anthropogenic causes, especially population growth and resource consumption. A generation of concerned but uninformed believers treated her pronouncements as gospel and her methods as enlightened. She is still held in high regard by many and the influence of her work still has a baleful effect on global policy, especially in Europe where the Club of Rome is located.
Systems Dynamics is not at fault, it's a useful mental tool for analyzing small systems in great detail in a way that focuses on processes as much as parts and reveals flows of information and resources between sources and sinks . Large systems can't be analyzed as well since there are problems with identification and measurement of objects and relationships which prevent useful definition of system bounds. One can still gain improved understanding of large systems but not enough to allow control or identify safe interventions that won't have unanticipated consequences.
Late in life Meadows began to understand her errors. This column for Whole Earth Magazine discusses them.
People who are raised in the industrial world and who get enthused about systems thinking are likely to make a terrible mistake. They are likely to assume that here, in systems analysis, in interconnection and complication, in the power of the computer, here at last, is the key to prediction and control. This mistake is likely because the mindset of the industrial world assumes that there is a key to prediction and control.Better late than never I suppose though many had attempted to enlighten her for years before it had any effect. True believers tend to be relatively immune to new understandings and learn everything the hard way by making a lot of errors. Worse, they allow beliefs shown to be false to taint subsequent efforts. They don't quite let go of the old beliefs and seem to spend the balance of their lives attempting to salvage some dignity with ongoing justifications and modified versions of old ideas. There is a fine line between incremental reform driven by trial and error - the discovery machine in action - and stubbornly clinging to antiquated notions while putting a more amenable public face on them. In Meadows' words:I assumed that at first too. We all assumed it, as eager systems students at the great institution called MIT. More or less innocently, enchanted by what we could see through our new lens, we did what many discoverers do. We exaggerated our own ability to change the world. We did so not with any intent to deceive others, but in the expression of our own expectations and hopes. Systems thinking for us was more than subtle, complicated mindplay. It was going to Make Systems Work.
But self-organizing, nonlinear, feedback systems are inherently unpredictable. They are not controllable. They are understandable only in the most general way. The goal of foreseeing the future exactly and preparing for it perfectly is unrealizable. The idea of making a complex system do just what you want it to do can be achieved only temporarily, at best. We can never fully understand our world, not in the way our reductionistic science has led us to expect. Our science itself, from quantum theory to the mathematics of chaos, leads us into irreducible uncertainty. For any objective other than the most trivial, we can't optimize; we don't even know what to optimize. We can't keep track of everything. We can't find a proper, sustainable relationship to nature, each other, or the institutions we create, if we try to do it from the role of omniscient conqueror.
For those who stake their identity on the role of omniscient conqueror, the uncertainty exposed by systems thinking is hard to take. If you can't understand, predict, and control, what is there to do?"The future can't be predicted, but it can be envisioned and brought lovingly into being." hmmm, how is this different from the omniscient conquest just refuted? How is vision different from prediction? It seems to differ only in the lack of clarity and defined steps to achieve control but is otherwise identical in the intent to conquer. How can one vision be measured against another when outcomes are unpredictable? How is The vision selected? Is it no more than proselytizing and majoritarian domination? Same old, same old? Where is the thinking in such a project? It seems to be an abandonment of thinking, petulant refusal to play with a broken toy and embrace of belief as the whole of mental activity.Systems thinking leads to another conclusion, however—waiting, shining, obvious as soon as we stop being blinded by the illusion of control. It says that there is plenty to do, of a different sort of "doing." The future can't be predicted, but it can be envisioned and brought lovingly into being. Systems can't be controlled, but they can be designed and redesigned. We can't surge forward with certainty into a world of no surprises, but we can expect surprises and learn from them and even profit from them. We can't impose our will upon a system. We can listen to what the system tells us, and discover how its properties and our values can work together to bring forth something much better than could ever be produced by our will alone.
But read the column. There are a number of admirable views expressed in ways that make you want to believe. For example:
We can't control systems or figure them out. But we can dance with them! I already knew that, in a way before I began to study systems. I had learned about dancing with great powers from whitewater kayaking, from gardening, from playing music, from skiing. All those endeavors require one to stay wide awake, pay close attention, participate flat out, and respond to feedback. It had never occurred to me that those same requirements might apply to intellectual work, to management, to government, to getting along with people.There's truth in this, the tacit wisdom of everyday experience available to every living thing and understood at a deep level from an early age. Remembering to remember tacit wisdom is useful mental calisthenics for professional thinkers. What Meadows never quite seemed to grasp was the mutuality of life - coevolution. When you raft a river it changes you and it changes. Next time you are different, more experienced and perhaps wiser, but it is different too so you still have to pay attention and accept further change. The same is true of every natural system - from rivers to people - you can never take them for granted and close yourself to further change. Your visions are ephemeral snap shots of dimly understood near future states with some undefined but non-zero probability of occurrence. Each day lived in open acceptance of change is a delight as dimly perceived possibilities become sharply focused realities quickly slipping into the past before you properly relish them, soon to be replaced by the next reality in a continuous stream.But there it was, the message emerging from every computer model we made. Living successfully in a world of systems requires more of us than our ability to calculate. It requires our full humanity—our rationality, our ability to sort out truth from falsehood, our intuition, our compassion, our vision, and our morality.
Meadows' arrogance, her will to dominate and control, blinded her to mutuality and impeded her ability to change and grow. Possessing a tool doesn't mean that you can use it to good effect. Systems Dynamics is a fine mental tool, one of many that careful thinkers should have in their kits, but like all tools requires skill and talent to produce good work. Systems Dynamics can't be blamed for Meadows' misuse of it, her botched analyses, false predictions and damaging prescriptions. Her temperament and refusal to cooperate with reality are at fault.
She writes well about interesting subjects and while her ideas have little to recommend themselves reading them can help you clarify your own thoughts. A key to getting value from Meadows seems to be to do as she recommends rather than as she demonstrates. Meadows advises "Before you charge in to make things better, pay attention to the value of what's already there", but then proceeds to dismiss the parts of the system that don't fit her vision. This is an example of the key weakness of systems dynamics that makes it less useful for natural systems. Defining the bounds of the system, what is included and what is external, is a somewhat arbitrary decision too often based on preconception and bias. And let it never be said that Meadows was not a biased bundle of preconceptions.