The refuge of paleo-environmentalists who finally twigged to the foolishness of model based command and control systems for society was to drop any pretense of predictability or controllability and baldly advocate visions, and so openly became cultists proselytizing received wisdom. As a cult priestess Donella Meadows put it:

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?

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.

Other's are still wrestling with their control demons.

On the one hand, we are convinced, as are many, that it is time to give up on the “protecting fragile nature” approach to conserving a desirable environment. Managing nature in preserves and leaving the rest of the world to its own devices does not and will not achieve our objectives.

On the other hand, what we desire may not be good for us. There may be great danger in proceeding with a democratic approach to the environment- the many may choose the shopping mall over the nature preserve. Indeed, many already have.

Yet we see no other option but to aim straight for our goal: a desirable environment to live in over the long-term, based on informed collective governance of ecosystems. As Winston Churchill said about democracy- “Democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” Viewing nature as a part of human systems encourages people to take responsibility for their ecosystems rather than just thinking of them as “the fragile nature out there”.

It is our hope that in this century we can improve our environmental governance by building a citizen’s “morality of nature” through education and participation, rather than by fear of the consequences.

Visions, a "morality of nature", indoctrination!! These fools have no idea what fire they are playing with.

Who defines this morality? What authority establishes the code of conduct, determines right and wrong? Once this totalitarian system is established what will prevent it from being hijacked by self-serving opportunists, as all other systems have been?

The blindingly obvious failure of those old systems thinkers was that they lacked a sophisticated understanding of dynamics. They engaged in wishful thinking rather than systems thinking - a.k.a. systems dynamics - when they discounted the tendencies of systems to evolve, a tendency that increased when portions of the system were constrained. Over time, anything that can happen will happen. Every living thing is a hacker. No authority can endure. Seeking to diddle this reality just makes a mess.

The still crippling error of these latter day paleo-environmentalists is that they still haven't grasped the authority problem. In reality there is no authority, there are authorities. And so, there is no morality, there are moralities. There is no democracy, in the majoritarian sense so beloved by totalitarians, there are democracies. It's systems dynamics, plural.

Vision and morality can't achieve the control totalitarians once sought to impose by force. It is a fiction that the goals of external regulation can be accompished by the internal regulation of a sufficiently propagandized populace. That's not how natural systems work, and human societies are natural systems, like it or not.

These natural systems will work best when they are not polluted. When their inputs are purer, when the information recieved is as good as we have, they will do better. If the paleo-environmentalists truly wish to help then they should disband and become truth tellers. What society - the social minds - do with such truths can't be controlled or even guided. They define virtue and morality. They are the authorities. They are fallible, but not evil. Mistaken, but not bad. They live and learn.