Hello and welcome to today’s episode, I am your host Dr. Tara Naylor. Today, I am talking about creating the world we want, with imperfect action.
It is no secret that my own vision, is to create a world, where we all have the capacity to thrive, flourish, to be and feel healthy, and have the capacity to live to our full potential, on a planet with abundant, thriving living systems. This vision is summarized by the phrase flourishing within planetary boundaries.
But how to create this? Because it is clear to me, that we cannot rely on governments and large corporations, to create this for us.
So where do we start? I have my own four-part process to do this, with my steps being:
- Imagining and visioning the “world” we want
- Grounding our vision to reality, this is the limits and constraints
- Learning from the wisdom around us
- Creating and living the transformation
Now, I have talked a bit about the first three parts in other episodes, but today, we are focusing on creating, and living the transformation, and that, is where imperfect action come in.
Now if you are anything like me, I have a challenge with the imperfect part of action. I always have this clear vision of how I want things to be, what the end result will be like. I want my action, my plans to be perfect. But I have come to learn that life, is not always as we imagine it will be. I have also learned, that this is often a good thing, because it allows for wonderful surprises, and outcomes to happen, that we could not even imagine. This is the challenge, and also the exciting part, of creating the world we want. This is also the challenge of taking any form of health or environmental action, there is no such thing as a one size fits all product or solution.
I learned this in my first job, in the plant engineering department at a rural manufacturing company. One of my first projects at that company was the upgrade of an industrial wastewater treatment facility. This facility was unique, with small volumes of very different but often quite dangerous chemicals. These wastes had to be made safe, because they were being discharged into a small creek, that passed through farmland on the way to a major river.
Even after a lot of lab scale experimentation to find the right treatments, reconfiguring existing equipment, and buying some new equipment, expanding the facility, as well as spending many hours of programming the control systems. The facility and treatments did not initially work as we had hoped for. We had put in the right basic systems and structures. But, making them work together as we really wanted, took many hours of manual observations, and adjustments to programs and controls. We just had to keep working through, sometimes even turning off the automation until we got it right. Even after we got the system working well, we found that something as simple as a lazy operator, who did not regularly clean the tanks, could plug up pumps and back up the whole system. As wastes and processes changed so did the operation of the treatment plant, it was a dynamic system that took regular adjustments, care and observation. When we designed and built this facility, everyone involved in the project did the best they could, there were many high calibre people involved, but it still took a lot of observation and adjustment to get it working the way we wanted.
This for me is imperfect action. You see, one of the biggest challenges, when it comes to creating this world where we can all flourish on this finite planet, is that there is no, one size fits all approach. There might be certain elements or attributes we need, but how our models and systems perform is dependent on the place, people, events and circumstances involved. We cannot easily predict the outcome until we try and do something, there are just too many variables to consider. Especially when it comes to the complex, self-organizing systems we encounter as humans and in nature.
One of big mistakes we humans do on an ongoing basis, is that we choose a model or even a worldview, build systems and structures around and it and then instead of letting it go when it is no longer working. We just hold on, especially those who are benefitting the most.
Let’s use an economy based on economic growth for example. Long ago, it appeared that this model was raising more people up out of poor situation, but that is no longer the case. This model is fueled by energy and resource use. But, on a finite planet with 8 billion humans, there comes a point where the living systems our economies and lives are built on collapses. There are warning signs all around us already such as inequity, that the benefits of the growth is going to the people with the most already, that we are causing climate instability through our energy use, our use of resources is damaging water resources that we cannot live without. But still we cling on.
I just read an article about the coming global decline in human population, and the problem it causes for economic growth. The article did not hail human population decline as a good thing; I certainly think it is. But the article talked about it as a problem for continuing economic growth. We are just trying to cling on to an outmoded model, rather than being creating and responding to the signs our living world is giving us and changing our model.
Let’s get back to our imperfect action. If you and I and our communities are going to move forward, creating the world and lives we want, taking action, creating the new models and systems we need. The question is “What characteristics do we need to have?”
My quick answer is persistence, and a willingness to continually learn, observe, respond and adjust.
I think the hardest characteristics is persistence. When we are creating or building new systems and structures we often have to keep going back, learning, adjusting, improving, and responding to unforeseen situations and challenges. I will tell you that this was the hardest thing I learned as a young engineer. When you go to school or university you do a course or project for a period of time, get a mark and move on. For many people who work in consulting, they get a project or an assignment, work on it for a time and move on. You do not have to keep going back to clean up any mistakes and messes.
But when you work somewhere, like I did, in the wastewater example. After the contractors and the consultants have all left, someone has to make that system work. During the design phase of that wastewater facility, we made the decision that one process was not a problem so we did nothing additional with it, but later we learned that in certain situations it could cause a huge problem. So, we had to go back and do more work, with essentially no budget that time.
This was a hard lesson, you did a good job with a good team, but you still need to keep going back to make changes and keep adjusting, anticipating and responding to conditions.
You may just get everything working well, and then something else happens and back you go again to make yet more changes and improvements.
Now, if you have listened to a few of these episodes, you are probably learning that I like to attach much of what I talk about back to science and fundamentals. I like to know I am not just making stuff up as I go along.
So let’s go to a group called the Academy for Systems Change. Their website has various articles and resources by the late Donella Meadows, a renowned systems thinker, and one of the authors of Limits to Growth. I want to tie this idea of imperfect action back to the fundamentals of how system work, for me this is embodied in this section of an article called “Dancing with Systems” and I want to read a section of it to you.
“ 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?
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.
We can’t control systems or figure them out. But we can dance with them!” Thank you Donella Meadows for that quote.
So let’s highlight a few things here:
We start with a vision, we get a general understanding of our world, we design our system and we look and listen and learn, respond and adapt to what that system is telling us. To illustrate this, I want to tell you a bit about my own imperfect action around food systems.
The food systems I want to live on are modelled on nature and they are local, seasonal, whole, enjoyable, low input that are full of variety and diversity. This is largely how nature creates abundant, healthy, resilient systems that are sustainable for the long term.
I initially focused on sourcing food, buying healthy local meats, regional organic grains and during the summer months good local-ish fruits and vegetables. I did this by shopping at markets, some specialty food stores, farm stands and some seasonal food festivals like cranberry and apple. The problem I ran into is that many of the farm stands for example come to town to cater to the tourists and cottagers, so they are only around for the 8 week, summer season. The farmer’s market also has very few fruit and vegetable vendors due to my location.
I had a vision that I would grow a lot of my own fruit and vegetable, some legumes, eggs and meat. In theory, I have enough space around my home to do this if well managed. The challenges and constraints were my time, as I still had my work, exercise and a home to maintain. Money, was also a constraint, I had some disposable income to do things myself but not enough to pay for professionals to set things up for me. I had some gardening and growing skills but was by no means an expert. So, I built new gardens, put in trees and shrubs, bought chickens, and increased my skills.
The trouble is that this can be a lot of work, because growing is only the first step, then there is the harvesting, replanting, storing, processing and still making your own meals. Due to various plant and crop failures and learning about what I enjoy doing, and what I can maintain, I have made quite a few changes to my plans.
BUT, I love connecting with people over food, not just toiling over my gardens in isolation. I adjusted my action plan, again. I would only grow the foods that tasted much better fresh, that I enjoyed or were new to me, were not easily available or that I needed in quantity. The rest I would buy through local markets or from growers because I enjoyed the relationships and connections that can be made.
This worked quite well until 2020 (global pandemic) hit and the availability of some fresh foods at local markets and even grocery stores became a challenge. That required another readjustment to growing more foods and sourcing some foods differently, but with improved skills and many lessons learned it has become easier. There have been many beneficial and unexpected side effects from approach. One of the most notable benefits has been changes to my eating habits. I get so much enjoyment from the process of my food from learning, gaining skills and doing and trying new things, that eating has become the culmination of the whole process, rather than something I obsess about. Another benefit has been the joy, connection and gratitude I feel, that something as small and inexpensive as a pack of seeds, with the right care can turn into massive abundance, no matter who grew it.
Every year, I assess what has worked and what has not from growing, buying, storing etc. Then in late fall and early winter, while enjoying the food I have stored, I make a plan for the next year.
From my own experience, there is no straight-line path to go from the start to the desired destination. For me, it has been a series of annual loops, with each year having successes, failures and unexpected surprises. Each year, I try something new, try different foods, gained new skills and knowledge, and meet new and interesting people. I am continually adapting and adjusting to what is going on around me and take that into account in my plans and actions.
This journey has given meaning and purpose, has connected me to nature’s processes in a deep and meaningful way, I have met many interesting people and each year I set goals and move towards them.
My actions with food have been imperfect along my whole journey, but I have made huge progress towards my vision. Through my reading and learning, I am seeing increasing signs of some trouble in the future, so I am doing my best to mitigate them now, but there are so many things I cannot predict.
For example: protecting my chickens and turkeys from avian bird flu, if the bird flu makes the jump to mammals and endangers humans and my dogs, what will I replace them with to keep my food supply coming? How can I protect my gardens and plants from an extended drought?
So, I really want to end this episode by saying, start visioning and taking action, even if you cannot see the exact path to your end result.
Because, even projects dealing with relatively simple systems, with plenty of resource such as access to experts and a good-sized budget, like the wastewater example, are not perfect.
If you have a vision, back it with action and are willing to keep learning, adjusting, improving and responding and are persistent with all that, you can create the world you want.
And, with that thought I will say goodbye for now.