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Ecological Literacy
&
Systems Thinking
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Why learn about global environmental
problems?
 Instrumental purpose
 Enriches life, contributes to meaning
 Empowerment
 Is knowledge power?
 Citizenship
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Connective learning as empowerment
 Is knowledge power?
– Information overload
– From information to knowledge to wisdom
 Ecology: the science of living systems
– Relational thinking
– Sustainability
• Meeting today’s needs without compromising the ability of future
generations to meet theirs
 A new opening in university education
– Interdisciplinary and integrative teaching & learning
– Hands-on learning
– Multicultural learning
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For a critique, see http://www.danielwillingham.com/daniel-willingham-science-and-educationblog/cone-of-learning-or-cone-of-shame
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How to teach and learn for
sustainability?
 Sustainability?
– Living within an ecosystem’s carrying capacity
– “Triple bottom line” & beyond
– Top-down vs. bottom-up approaches
 Ecological literacy
–
–
–
–
Need social knowledge, not just facts and numbers
Must be experiential -- go outside!
Seeking connections
Care -- we act upon that which we care about
 Ecology: the science of living systems
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Thinking in Systems
 “A system is an interconnected set of elements
that is coherently organized in a way that achieves
something (function or purpose).”
 Examples?
 Ecological footprint
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Basics of Living Systems Theory
 Holism: the whole is greater than sum of parts
– Emergent properties
 Evolutionary: adaptive & self-generative
 Composed of symbiotic networks
 Interdependence & feedback
– Balancing vs. reinforcing feedback
– Virtuous cycles: flows of information, energy & matter
– Surprise & nonlinearity are inevitable.
 Nested hierarchies
– Partially decomposable
– Developmental change: transcend and include
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Earth Systems Science
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Systems thinking means updating
the noosphere!
 We pay too little attention to history and are too fascinated by the events
they generate. (pp.90)
 We are not too skilled in understanding the nature of relationships (pp.91)
as the world is full of nonlinearities.
 We our attached to our mental categories. (pp.98)
 We lean towards monocausal explanations.
 We don’t recognize which factor is limiting. Growth depletes or enhances
limits and therefore changes what is limiting. (pp. 102)
 We rarely see the full range of possibilities before us (pp. 106). We are
subject to bounded rationality i.e. we make reasonable decisions based on
the information we have.
(Slide 31 from Sandhya Johnson’s Slideshare summary)
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Resilience Thinking
 A system’s capacity to withstand disturbance while
retaining its basic structure & function
– Change is inevitable
 Complex systems undergo adaptive cycles
– From simple, low energy to complex, high energy to decline &
reorganization or collapse
 Resilience and/or sustainability
– Sustainability  stability
 Human systems embedded in ecosystems
– … and vice versa
– Independence and interdependence
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Where is the
global
economy on
the adaptive
cycle?
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Sustainability
 What needs to be sustained?
 What is the purpose of the global economy?
 Why is purpose important in human systems?
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"In wildness is preservation of the world.“
~Thoreau
 What did he mean?
– “Wildness,” not wilderness
 How might this apply to resilience thinking?

… education?
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