Healthy Money Healthy Planet - library.uniteddiversity.coop

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population crises – are different facets of one crisis. 3 This makes it effectively almost
impossible to deal with one factor at a time; efforts to separate the results of our human
activity into component parts are only valuable if they are consciously dealt with as
part of a unified approach.
For an example of this, look at the way economic, social and environmental issues
are split in your nearest district council. Environmental departments warn the public of
undesirable environmental trends, but they aren’t encouraged to communicate with
financial planning departments, which praise ongoing economic growth and
development. The social services sections, meanwhile, may be completely isolated from
the other two. As a result of this separation, city councillors receive three disconnected
reports. The same is true at the national level. Most MPs leave economics to those who
are interested in the subject, and instead agonise over one particular section, such as
the police or agriculture. And each ministry has to make economic assumptions. New
Zealand’s Ministry for the Environment, for instance, has to operate under the given
that economic growth must be fostered.
So why do we fail to see what we are doing when we separate interconnected
disciplines in this way? Roy Madron and John Jopling suggest that it ‘must surely be
because we have a system of ordering our affairs that not only perpetuates and
aggravates these catastrophic trends, but that also conceals, distorts and misrepresents
what is going on’. 4 Perhaps it is time to find out what is going on and to reconfigure the
system?
Many of the world’s problems would be described by systems theorists as
‘wicked’ rather than ‘tame’. A ‘wicked’ problem is complex: a wide variety of people
care about it, and it is embedded in an evolving set of interlocking issues and