At its core, environmental education is about understanding the interconnections that exist in nature and between nature and human societies. According to David Orr, "despite a great deal of talk about systems, we continue to administer, organize, analyze, manage, and govern complex ecological systems as if they were a collection of isolated parts and not an indissoluble union of energy, water, soils, land, forests, biota, and air."
Systems help make sense of a large and complex world. A system is made up of parts. Each part can be understood separately. The whole, however, is understood only by understanding the relationships and interactions among the parts. The human body can be understood as a system; so can galaxies. Organizations, individual cells, communities of animals and plants, and families can all be understood as systems. And systems can be nested within other systems.
The audio clip below is an excerpt of a webinar David Orr led on Systems Thinking through NAAEE's monthly webinar series: Bringing New Ideas and Innovation to the Field of EE.
Transcript:
So, what is a system? Kenneth Boulding, the great economist, and once president of the American Economic Association, says, "Anything that is not chaos. If there's any pattern or structure, then you're dealing with the system.”
Donella Meadows put it this way, "System is an interconnected set of elements that is coherently organized in a way that achieves something—that consists of elements, interconnections that are purpose or function."
Barbara Jerome, a political scientist, goes on and talks about the same thing—interconnected elements. Derek Hardin, described as the great biologist, described it as being ideas in modern science that were one of the most important, but almost impossible to define.
Systems are inherently vague. For this particular culture, I think it is probably the most subversive concept because it describes us as being irrevocably interrelated. We are "no one is an island unto themselves" as John Donne once pointed out, and no thing is an island. We live in this constant flow of materiality and energies and so forth and so there's no escaping.
That's hard for people in the Western culture, maybe particularly in the United States because the awareness of systems undermines the idea that we're individuals and unique and we stand on our own and the idea of a self-made person or self-made man. Meaning when more and more things are connected, what goes around comes around.
The aim of environmental education for me, is helping students understand the pattern that connects. That phrase comes from Gregory Bateson. Understanding how systems work, whether it's the banking system, economic system, or simply the school system or local governments or whatever. And then extended time horizon data in the future. Most systems have behavioral characteristics that last, in the case of, for example, the enhancement of climate change, they last for centuries or millennia. We need to extend our thinking pattern to accommodate that.