Human activity systems
When we consider what have been referred too as human activity systems Checkland the system boundaries are often less clear. We can define a City; within that we can define a Factory, Shop, Cinema, Theatre, homes – these have physical boundaries (walls) to help. But when it comes to Politics, Economics and Culture then the boundaries are more contested – there may agreement at the broad scale but as we dig into the detail it all become more judgemental and is not necessarily stable over time.
To take one example it used to be common place to talk about “broken families”, now it is common to talk about extended families, these are constructs based on a view of the world Checkland, p214-221 - in one case a view that a family consisting of 2 parents with a number of children, subject to divorce or separation was somehow broken, in the other an attempt to celebrate the freedom to end unworkable relationships and the resulting reshaping of familial, and other connections in a mature way. In other cultures the term extended family is used more traditionally to bring in cousins, aunts and uncles…the point here is not to make any value judgements but to highlight that the values we bring to the description of the world colour the way we look at it.
Locating people in the biosphere may seem a bit of geeky pedantry to complete the view of the system; actually it is a vitally important step.
What happens in the biosphere matters because it is essentially self balancing – except over a very long period of time Davies and Lovelock
When James Lovelock was building models of the world he made the surprising discovery that they can be self-correcting but that, subject to enough stress, they will flip – the change when it comes will be sudden and drastic Note: The Tipping Point . The reason to worry about global warming is not so much the gradual temperature rise (though resulting impacts in dry and costal areas can be devastating enough) but the tipping point is an unknown . It is almost certain that the self-balancing mechanisms are being stressed by human activity – with a range of consequences from disruptive climate change to existential threats in some extreme scenarios Lovelock, Klein .
The key point of this systems view is to locate people within a physical system – the world (actually the bio-sphere) within which we exist as individuals and groups. Some argue that we have become alienated from the natural world or lost touch with it. By cultivating systems thinking we can establish knowledge and awareness of our interconnectedness without having to resort to the wishful thinking that we need to get closer to nature. There are too many of us for that, we are using our brains to invent things that shape the industrial world we live in, there is no going back. Note: Legends of the Fall .
That thought brings us right to the critical point, what can we change and what do we have to live with? A corollary is if we change it, how much control do we have? It appears we that we are adding enough carbon to the atmosphere to trigger (or accelerate underlying) global warming; the resulting weather is outside our control.