[Music] la good afternoon everybody and welcome to the 11th of 18 distinguished lectures on the big idea of sustainable development business and Community I'm Tom Gladwin the director of the Frederick a and Barbara M herb environmental Institute here at the University of Michigan uh those of you who are loyal followers of this series know that it has been designed to raise awareness to boost literacy to re-examine values and to hopefully Inspire visions of an American future that can be environmentally sound and simultaneously socially fair and economically prosperous this series is Affiliated as a journey to Detroit E Event leading up to the National town meeting for sustainable America being convened by the president's Council for sustainable development the series here is sponsored by the University of Michigan's business school school of natural resources and environment College of literature science and the Arts College of Engineering and the office for the vice president of research with external funding provided by the D Chemical Company and Mr and Mrs Fred herb as usual because this is broadcast on University of Michigan television and the community television network the question and answer process today will uh be done via 3x5 cards that you can fill in your question and they'll be brought down to be addressed to the speaker in that fashion a few notices about upcoming events and a few changes next Monday on March 22nd Paul Hawkin the co-author of sustainable capitalism cre the next Industrial Revolution with Amy and hunter lovens Paul will be speaking at 700 p.m. here in hail auditorium not at the originally designated time of 400 p.m. 700 p.m. for Paul hawen next Monday night next Friday March 26th at 400 p.m in this room we will have the Native American activist Winona luk uh speaking about sustainable native wisdom uh she was named by Time Magazine as one of of the country's most promising young leaders and by Ms magazine in 1997 as wom of the year and as many of you hopefully know we've added a whole afternoon on biodiversity in relation to sustainable uh development here on March 29th Monday starting at 2 pm there will be a distinguished panel of uh people that know tropical forest intimately uh and we'll be talking about the relationship of tropical biodiversity to economic globalization it it should be a very profound afternoon all of the other speakers in the calendar are still coming at their designated times see me if you have any questions about changes in the schedule now it is my pleasure this afternoon to introduce Donella H meta her life combines the following and everybody make a list of this simultaneously she is a systems analyst an organic Gardener a wool sheep Razer a Dairy Farmer a syndicated journalist an Eco Village developer a college professor of Environmental Studies at Dartmouth College and many other things an extraordinary package uh the whole earth magazine last year said she simply represents one of the most heartful intelligent Minds in anybody's Watershed which is a uh wonderful Honor on the Syria side she was originally trained as a scientist with a ba in chemistry and a PhD in biophysics from Harvard University she is extremely prolific author perhaps most famous and perhaps most controversial for her role in the limits to growth book of 19 72 which sold millions of copies in 28 languages and also its 1992 sequel beyond the limits of confronting Global collapse envisioning a sustainable future she began her nationally syndicated newspaper column which is a weekly it's called the global citizen which comments on world events from a systems point of view back in 1985 and has uh we received many awards on that she like many of our other speakers has have dabbled in television and uh she really helped PBS developed the very famous series the 10p part Series race to save the planet that I often use in my classrooms when I don't have a lecture prepared and so on so she is the recipient of numerous Awards a Pew scholar in conservation and the environment and a very prestigious 5-year M MacArthur Fellowship on the personal side she's lived for 25 years on a small communal organic farm in New Hampshire but is currently u enmeshed in a new larger Eco Village project that I hope she'll be able to talk about this is a woman who walks her talk my pleasure Dana [Applause] Meadows remember to turn this on can you hear me okay I'd rather speak from down here so I can make systems diagrams as the spirit moves me I'm waiting for the ring to get out maybe oh it's cuz this mic is on no that's off oh okay audio visual problems are typical in this series I see I'm going to assume they're not my problem um I've been asked to talk about systems and sustainability and um since I know the Stellar lineup of people who've already spoken to you most of whom are people who I am privileged to call my friends and and colleagues over Decades of trying to figure out what sustainability really means I know that you have seen a lot and we'll with the rest of this series seen a lot of the part parts of the puzzle you've seen you've talked about energy you've talked about consumption you've talked about economics you will talk about um other parts the business part next time when uh Paul hackin comes and um one of the amazing and wonderful things is that there are so many good people working at so many levels and coming from so many angles to say how can we live good lives for everyone on this planet in a way that preserves the functioning of the planet and all the other creatures in it um what my in so far as I have a role other than a cheerleader and um experimental farmer in this picture I guess it's to try to see it whole to try to see systems as a whole that's largely because I ran in an early and impressionable part of my life into people who had had some systems tools um and who taught me how to use them to picture to think to simulate to to understand systems as a whole and that's primarily what I'm going to talk about today but I guess I should start by talking about sustainability I'm sure you've heard a million definitions I'm going to use the very strict definitions that I suppose Herman Dy has already told you because I got them from him I think oops do it this way I think he articulated the bio the three biophysical necessities of sustainability very clearly every renewable resource must be used at or below the rate at which it can be regenerated or can regenerate itself that's soils Waters forests our renewable resource base every non-renewable resource our fossil fuels fossil Waters minerals must be used at add or below the rate at which a renewable substitute can be developed so that when as is inevitable that resource is gone or so far depleted that it's too expensive to use we can get on to a renewable sustainable substitute every pollution stream must be emitted at or below the rate at which it can be absorbed or made harmless by the natural systems of the world and then typically I know Herman didn't explicitly put this in because it's of a different order than the biophysical rules but it's I'm sure what a fourth condition that he agrees with it's one that um that Carl Henrik Rober puts as the fourth necessary uh charact system characteristic in the natural step it's the one that has to do with the sustainability of the social system with Equity with the fact that every human being has to be cared for and secure and feel that the distribution of the the resources of the planet is fair not necessarily absolutely equal but fair without I I don't I have never heard any argument about the first three of these systems conditions anybody who knows the laws of the planet has to understand that those are the rules within which we have to design our sustainable systems I've heard a lot of argument on the fourth one I hear Carl Henrik roer get it all the time I don't quite myself see how one can argue with that one either um either either in order to design a world that I want to live in or to design a world that will not self-destruct on the social level so I'm going to consider that's my definition I'm going to be using all through this talk of what is sustainable and if you take that definition seriously as I do and you look around you don't see a sustainable system anywhere my own Farm is not sustainable uh my college is not sustainable my town is not sustainable my nation is not sustainable and the human socioeconomic system on this planet is not sustainable we we are very far from meeting any of those three rules and when I see that I see around me everywhere unsustainable systems as a systems person my ears pick up because one of the things that really attracts our attention as systems folks is uh a behavior in a complex system that occurs over and over and over again it occurs at different scales it occurs with different kinds of people within it it occurs in different ecosystems it seems not to be dependent on specific details but it seems to override those details and be present everywhere when that is the case we have a systems problem we don't have a problem of taking out one sort of people and putting in another or put taking out one technology and putting in another we have a problem of a system that is malfunctioning and producing a result that actually no one wants I don't know if anybody I have never met anybody who said who has said to me I really think we should Wipe Out the renewable resources of this planet or we should just use up the fossil fuels and not care what happens when they're gone or we should just emit pollution and and so it poisons things and builds up and it nobody wants those things to happen yet they're happening everywhere we are all and I think everybody understands this too this is another very common systems characteristic we are all producing this behavior of unsustainability we are producing it with every action in our lives we're producing it with the most rational and understandable and justifiable actions in our lives we are in a system that is causing us to live in unsustainable ways and so that from A System's point of view is almost irresistible to say why what is it what is that system that is doing that to us and uh I'm going to try I think that's a very complex question I've been asking it myself for 30 years um and I have some insights and I'm going to share as many of them as I can fit into an hour today um but first I need to start with what is a system before I talk about what is the unsustainability system this is the official textbook systems 101 definition that every every student can speak back pretty soon it's a set of interrelated elements organized to serve any particular function or goal it may not be the function or the goal of the people in the system or the actors in the system but there is a large system goal which holds together the system around which the system is organized toward which the system is always trying to produce this result and I colored the three most important parts of this definition the elements are the things the people the factories the physical stuff that you can count and measure and see the inter relationships are critical they are what we call the structure of the system they're what hold it together they're the rules of the game they are the rewards and punishments the prices the information signals all the things that hold the systems together the function or goal is sometimes not at all what the system or people in it would say it is doing but it is the result that is clearly being produced every time you see that system so for example um if I would say what is the function or goal of the um National economic system it there are a lot of possible goals but the one that the system is clearly producing is growth the one the system goes into conniptions if it doesn't appear is growth the one that everybody uh keeps trying to make the system do is growth so that's the function or the purpose or the goal of that system okay that's what I mean and by the way I've just given you and I better stop and point them out as I go two very important basic points in systems thinking the first came back when I said we all produce the result in the system that we don't want it and we do it out of rational response to the the the constraints and the incentives and the punishments that the system puts on us that's the number one really important systems Insight is that system Behavior comes out of the system its inter relationships its goals not the elements of the people the actors in it and that immediately has a profound uh effect on the way systems people talk because they rarely blame people for things they blame systems so the fact that people act in certain perverse ways that produce results that no one wants is not usually there are exceptions the fault of the people in our way of thinking they're the fault they're the rational behav behavior of people in the system and the question is what's wrong with the system not what's wrong with the people in it and secondly the important thing out of this di of this definition is the inter relationships it's something that systems people just have a ear for they spend a lot more time asking how the inter relationships go than asking who's the boss and who's on second base and things like that um because actually you could take all the people out of the University of Michigan put new people in as of course happens every four years with regard to the students and every X years with regard to the faculty and you it's still the University of Michigan so though people make a difference and in a minute I'll get to how they really make a difference um acting within a system the parts are usually interchangeable you take out one put in another and you and the system still behaves the same way have you ever wondered why every president of the United States ends up sort of doing and saying the same thing with certain peculiar side of uh characteristics but in terms of policy no matter which direction they come from they kind of Don't Stray very far from the middle that's because of the the system around president of the United States which really uh makes them fairly interchangeable there are some exceptions always exceptions okay um the interconnections oh here this is a better way of showing it the importance in terms of the what determines A System's Behavior where to intervene is something I've just tried to summarize on this slide at the top is is the function or purpose of the system the most important thing to determine its Behavior it may or may not be able to achieve its function or purpose it may be side blindsided by another system larger system or something but if it can the system will do what it is set up to do and that's its most important thing if you really want to change a system change that second are the inter relationships and connections the structure the feedbacks the information flows you can often change the behavior of a system massively just by changing the way information flows within it or who what of it information is available to whom third are the elements which usually are a low-level way of changing a system fire somebody and put in somebody else in their place rarely if you've not done anything here will that make a difference occasionally it will because actually you could put in a person or a technology or a machine or something that will in fact go up and change one of these then you can then elements make a difference otherwise they don't um all of this produces the behavior of the system which is Its Behavior it's its General tendency over time and if you freeze the system at any one point it's doing something which is an event this is what we see in the news at night it's sort of one snippet of the behavior of a system and one of the problems with the news at night is it focuses on events or at the most it gets up to elements and characters and personalities and things it gives us virtually no understanding of the long-term behavior of systems or why they're doing what they're doing okay that's uh another set of big systems lure here which you believe more when I show you a real system which I'm about to do um but let me back off a minute and say something else that comes naturally with the systems territory it's um there's a lot of system sayings and I'm sure you've heard them you know everything is connected to everything else the whole adds up to more than the sum of the parts uh systems is the science of complexity it's all almost the exact opposite of that which I was trained in which was science reductionism which is learning about something by taking it apart and studying its pieces which is a very legitimate way of learning about something but there is another way which is putting the pieces together and seeing how the whole interacts that's holism as opposed to reductionism that's the the real contribution of systems theory to a systems thinker it is just crazy to talk about tradeoffs between the environment and the economy it's just not even a thinkable thing because the environment and the economy are so clearly one integrated system and that just um it's it's surprising once you really get into systems how often you hear people talking about trading off one part of a system with another when you see very clearly that there's an assumed reductionism separation between parts of the system that just aren't so in the real world it causes some communication problems actually because you don't understand why people are even worrying about how to make the envir the economy Thrive independent of the environment it's just not even a fruitful question to ask okay there's so much cool stuff about systems I could I could go on for hours and I'm not going to do that I'm and I'm going and particularly systems with Rel with relation to this very perverse Behavior called unsustainability called a system undermining its own uh its own means of support I mean it's a crazy thing for systems to do I'm going to try to focus on that and I'm going to use as an example this is also going to show you kind of what a systems analysis looks like a very very simple system but it's one that is probably demonstrating un sustainability on this planet more clearly and unarguably than any other and that's the system of fisheries and I'm going to show you that partly because it's a very important problem in its own right and also because I think it's the clearest Harbinger we have of what's ahead of us in other systems and also I think it indicates begins to indicate to us how to fix these systems how to make them so they are not unsustainable so that's a system and uh I'm going to explain this to you so you will understand it completely in five minutes and the this is an extremely simple representation which can be computerized of the of a fishery system it the the it is so simple that you will immediately see complexities that could be added to it and a real Fisheries model would have a lot more complexity than this the virtue of this one is that I can explain it in five minutes and everybody in this room will understand it um and there's another systems lesson here about Simplicity very often when we model complex systems and there have been a lot of real real Fisheries models made we get about 90% of the insights from the first 10% of the modeling and I think that this is an example of this is only about 10% of of a real Fisheries model but I think it's already going to give us some interesting insights just in this short time here so remember we have elements we have inter relationships and we have goals or purposes or functions the elements in this system the real physical things are the fish and the fishing boats the square means that it's a a stock of fish it's a population of fish out in the ocean okay this arrow means that the fish are getting are eggs and raising new fish and regenerating themselves and this arrow means that they are being harvested and I should put in another arrow saying they're dying of natural causes but we're going to assume the fishery is going to catch them before they get to that point um the boats is another stock physical stock you could go into the system and count them at any time that's what those squares mean there are things you could go count look at accumulate in the system and they are they are built up through the investment in new boats people spend money and build boats and they depreciate over time because they wear out and that's the elements in this system and it's really simple just just one kind of fish just one kind of boat so on the uh red arrows are all of the interconnections the information that that connects this system together and so what this little silly fish model assumes is first of all the more fish you have the more fish we can regenerate okay and that's a very simple population model um and we're going to assume that the Regeneration rate the rate at which fish can successfully reproduce depends on how many fish are already there obviously if there are no fish there's not going to be any fish regeneration if the fish are way up at their carrying capacity of the of the ocean the food chain and so on there's not going to be any net regeneration okay so these fish will breed themselves up to in capacity and then hold themselves at that point obviously fish will be born and die but on net it will hold itself at that point that's a by the way the goal of the fish and so I put that in blue this the fish are trying to regenerate trying to populate their habitat and they'll do all they can to get themselves up there um I'll tell you more about the Regeneration rate in a minute because there's an important assumption in there numerical assumption I'm not going to get to the numbers for a minute um the fish are harvested depending on the number of fishing boats and the catch per boat the catch per boat depends on how many fish are there if there are fewer fish it's going to be harder each boat's going to pull in less at any given time so that's why that arrow is there uh leave this one out for a minute I'm going to leave the price out for the short term um the price times the catch gives the profit of the boat and if the profit is positive and if more boats are one wanted and needed it goes into investment in more boats okay I'm assuming and the boats wear out at a certain lifetime which I forget but I can 20 years um and I'm assuming that all else equal the fishermen would like their Fleet to grow at about 10% per year they may not be able to achieve that depends on the profit whether they have enough to invest but if they have enough they'll invest that they won't invest more than that if they have more profit they will does less if they you can see it's a simple model but there it is two important assumptions which are going to lead up to another important systems lesson about nonlinearities and those are my assumption about the how fast the fish regenerate depending on how many are there and my assumption about how many fish can be caught depending on how many are there and those are shown by two nonlinear curves which are here very important this is the Regeneration rate depending on the number of fish if there are zero fish it's zero if they're at the carrying capacity it's zero so it there has to be some sort of shape like this it doesn't have to be symmetrical we can change it but it's assuming that in the middle when there's the carrying capacities uh only about half occupied these fish have a better probability of living and and reproducing uh because there's unoccupied spaces uneaten food or whatever and so there's a peak and it falls down on either side to zero okay this is a totally madeup set of numbers real fish we'd have to go in and do a lot of research to to figure out that curve the second is the relationship between the fish and the catch and this is assuming if there no fish there's no catch if there are a lot of fish there's a lot of catch and that there's some kind of declining curve which we've made nonlinear here so as the fish population goes down it's harder and harder to catch the fish catch few and fewer clear okay that's it what's going to happen if we simulate the system if the system what we do actually to run it is we start with a certain number of fish and a certain number of boats and we set up those relationships and we turn it loose and it just simulates itself so if we start with only a few boats and a whole lot of fish what's going to happen it's really fun to figure this out try to figure it out before the computer does it's very humbling usually this is what happens given the numbers and the relationships I just showed you the purple is the fish starts with a lot comes down a little bit and levels off the red is the boats GR grows up quite nicely on that 10% growth curve and gets up to a sustainable level and it levels