Change is an elementary phenomenon in life. It is most visible in movement of matter. It is useful to look at a simple, well observable and controllable system: a mass m at the end of a spring. It is the classical model of linear elasticity, associated with the 17th-century British scholar Hooke. Change is in [...]
Danish colonisation of Greenland started in 1721, but a Norse colony in west Greenland had already been an outpost of Europeans throughout the period 985–1500 AD. There had been contacts between North American hunters and European farmers. It seems that the Norse community managed quite well for the first 150 years, with a maritime-terrestrial economy [...]
Living on a plane. "Ana-Maria P. is the president of Powerstorm, a US company working on sustainable telecom solutions focused on reducing CO2 emissions in emerging markets. How often do you travel? I basically live on a plane. I recently calculated this and in the last four years, I spent only three months at home…The [...]
The consumption of meat is increasingly becoming controversial as a spectrum of activists point at the negative side-effects for animal welfare, human health, local pollution and climate change inducing greenhousegas emissions. The meat industry and its suppliers see their profits and expansion opportunities under threat, arguing that there are already many regulations in place and [...]
Every now and then I meet friends who have given up on changing the world: “It is too complex, too violent, too far away, and I feel powerless in the face of it. So I try to focus on my own family, neighbourhood…”. Somewhat paradoxical, this attitude is partly a response to the information overload [...]
We humans make mental ‘maps’ of processes around us in order to live and survive. Many of those maps are simplified, based on a limited set of acquired habits and experienced events. The maps also tend to assume single and linear relationships between causes and effects. Assuming that more cars (A) cause more traffic accidents [...]
There are quite some book on system dynamics which make a connection with sustainable development problems and solutions. Based on personal contacts, I choose two for a brief intrduction. The first one is the book Managing Complexity in Social Systems - Leverage Points for Policy and Strategy (2nd ed. 2023) by Christoph Mandl. The seond [...]
Lisbon, 13-16 July 2016 The 22nd ISDRS conference, titled Rethinking Sustainability Models and Practices: Challenges For The New and Old World Contexts, in Lisbon was very well organized, in the nice setting of the Universidade Nova de Lisboa and with a festive dinner in the old monastery of San Jeronimo. Nothing to complain about for the 450+ conference [...]
One way to explore integration of the natural and the social sciences is the construction and use of simulation games and policy exercises (cf. Chapter 10 and 12). Since 2013 several websites have come online about games for sustainability. Some of these are (very) simple games about public goods, used in what has become known [...]
Reading the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) that were agreed upon by the United Nations in 2015 in the document Transforming our world: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (sustainabledevelopment.un.org), I am struck by the high level of aspiration not to say idealism. The Goals do indeed demand a transformation and, besides focused technological innovations, crucial [...]