In my new career in academia, I have been teaching a course on ‘Systems Thinking for Sustainability’.

After considerable iteration, this slide summarizes (for now) the ‘big picture’ I believe systems thinking reveals for sustainability.

It frames the sustainability challenge as a fairly daunting act of collective ‘unlearning to relearn’ – a U-shaped journey from the failing ‘market-led sustainability’ paradigm of today to a possible future of a ‘sustainable culture that has an economy’.

Those who already feel that a ‘sustainable culture’ is the obvious goal – or understand that the indispensable property of a sustainable system is homeostasis (balance) not growth – can effectively ‘jump across the valley’ without troubling themselves with the deeper issues.

Yet the reason to have developed the full U-shaped path is because I believe a collective, culture-scale shift from left to right will ultimately require that the various rationalizations on the left-hand side, which uphold today’s behaviour, be explicitly confronted and dismantled to ease their displacement by the sorts of ideas on the right-hand side. This is not straightforward as the justifications on the left-hand side are historical and culturally embedded and transmitted, and so it requires time and effort to contemplate them explicitly to understand how they emerged to produce today’s unsustainable behaviour.

Alas, the clock is ticking, so I see this U-shaped journey as effectively constituting a Race to Sustainable Cognition. Writ large, the diagram suggests that forty years after ‘sustainability’ entered the lexicon we are still not yet thinking about sustainability in a sustainable way.

There is a large amount of detail accompanying each step, but I share the slide in case it helps people connect and structure various ideas they may be reflecting upon. I doubt this is the perfect or only way to frame such things, but it seems to be serving well as a teaching structure.

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P.S. One subtle but important attribute of the diagram is that the concepts on the right-hand side (right brain, systemic, relational and processual) *transcend and incorporate* the concepts on the left-hand side (left brain, reductionist, materialist). That is to say, the concepts on the right can provide explanations for the concepts on the left – i.e. explain why those ideas were arrived at and can seem valid in certain contexts – but the concepts on the left cannot explain or incorporate the ideas on the right.

Hence, right-side thinking is ‘bigger’ or more universal. E.g., it understands that markets may be useful, but not always; it understands that natural systems may grow at some stages of their life cycle but must balance at every stage etc. Right brain/systemic thinking not only offers more comprehensive explanations of the world, it also contextualizes our past explanations! This is why systems thinking is now ascendant in many fields and why it represents the antidote to mainstream economics that has produced and continues to justify today’s externality-denying capitalism.