Should we not stop wasting the planet?

Platform users were asked to submit their own questions around climate change ahead of the UN Climate Change Conference being held in Copenhagen this month.

Six questions were chosen and answers will be supplied by the OU’s academic experts. Here’s one of the responses...

We are trashing our planet to produce gimmicky goods that we buy, grow bored with and dump in landfill. Rainforests are turned into rubbish. Should the argument stop at climate change? Should we not stop wasting the planet?

By Andrea Berardi

Climate change is just another symptom of the true cause of our current predicament: our "no-limits" mindset. In April 1968 a group of 30 people from 10 countries gathered in Rome. From this meeting grew the ‘Club of Rome’, a loose association of people of 25 nationalities all united by their belief that mankind faced major problems which were of such complexity that traditional institutions and policies were not capable of dealing with them.

They commissioned a study which was eventually published in 1972 entitled The Limits to Growth (Meadows et al., 1972). This initiative was driven by the realisation that much of our economic activity consisted in using up limited resources, for example land needed for food production, the mining of metals and felling of forests as a resource for manufacturing, the mining of coal and extraction of oil as a source of energy. Also much of our economic activity resulted in waste materials being dumped into rivers and the sea, onto the land, and into the atmosphere, without thought for the consequences.
 
Most serious of all, though, this was, and still is, being done at an ever-increasing rate. A situation which, however one looks, and whichever symptom one chooses to focus on, is certain to lead to disaster. A finite Earth will not always supply an ever-increasing demand for materials nor absorb an ever-increasing amount of waste. Modern culture, rooted in traditional economics, is unable to look at the context within which the economic system operates. Complex interconnections cannot be considered within this framework of thinking. Thus, in the current mindset, there can be no brake on our currently unsustainable lifestyles. André Gorz, in his book, Ecology as Politics, states that: "we are dealing with a classical crisis of over-accumulation … with a solution to this crisis cannot be found in the recovery of economic growth, but only in an inversion of the logic of capitalism itself. This logic tends intrinsically towards maximisation: creating the greatest possible number of needs and seeking to satisfy them with the largest possible amount of marketable goods and services in order to derive the greatest possible profit from the greatest possible flow of energy and resources". (Gorz, 1980).

We need to look for a different foundation of thinking to be able to equip us with the appropriate concepts and techniques to deal with these emerging crises. Gorz goes on to say that: "The link between more and better has now been broken. Better may now mean less: creating as few needs as possible, satisfy them with the smallest possible expenditure of materials, energy, and work, and imposing the least possible burden on the environment."

Society needs the emergence of a new (and at the same time ancient) way of thinking. I say ‘new’ because systems thinking has only been articulated scientifically from the 1940s, and ‘ancient’ because I have come across the same thinking approach articulated in many traditional indigenous communities that I have worked with in South America.

In their 1990 report to the Trilateral Commission (a non-governmental organisation promoting the debate of cross-cutting international issues), Jim MacNeill, Pieter Winsemius and Taizo Yakushiji stated: Since World War II, governments have been preoccupied with economic interdependence, the coupling of local and national economies in a global system. But the world has now moved beyond economic interdependence to ecological interdependence – and even beyond that to an intermeshing of the two. The Earth's signals are unmistakable. Global warming is a form of feedback from the Earth's ecological system to the world's economic system. So is the ozone hole, acid rain in Europe, soil degradation in Africa and Australia, deforestation and species loss in the Amazon.

To ignore one system today is to jeopardise the others. The world's economy and the Earth's ecology are now interlocked – ‘until death do them part,’ to quote one of Canada's industrial leaders. This is the new reality of the century, with profound implications for the shape of our institutions of governance, national and international. It raises fundamental questions about how economic and political decisions are made, and their implications for sustainability. There is increasing recognition that the reductionist mindset that is currently dominating society, rooted in unlimited economic growth unperceptive to its social and environmental impact, cannot resolve the converging environmental, social and economic crises we now face. The ecological, systems and complexity sciences are often presented as alternative approaches for managing this "mess" in order to achieve favourable social and environmental outcomes.

The Open University has been providing courses in systems thinking and practice since its very inception, and the course T214 Understanding systems: making sense of complexity is the very latest offering for level 2 study. This course was presented for the first time in 2008 and is taught from February to October (eight months of part-time study).

Systems teaching at The Open University has extensive experience of enabling a transformation in mindset and provides a long history of challenging the predominantly reductionist and mechanistic teaching provision. Our courses have confronted the trend towards increasing specialisation and commodification within education by avoiding the exclusive focus on any singular discipline, and instead have encouraged students to take an interdisciplinary, integrating and 'big picture' view. This is reflected in T214 where the course is divided into four themes (the internet, the environment, organisations, and crime) which are used to progressively build up students' conceptual knowledge and applied skills in systems thinking and practice. T214 is a core course in the BA in Business Studies with Systems Practice, BSc in Computing and Systems Practice, and the Diploma in Systems Practice. It is also an optional course in the BSc in Technology, the Bachelor of Engineering, the BA in Business Studies, the BA/BSc in Environmental Studies, and the Advanced Diploma in Environmental Decision Making.
If you want to find out about student experiences on T214, there is a thriving alumni network.

The Open University also has a very active Open Systems Research Group. Members of OSRG are interested in applying and developing systems thinking and practice to the study of complex, interconnected situations. The group's research has application in a wide range of contexts where it is difficult to act because of uncertainty such as managing natural resources and climate change. 
 
 
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