Summer Conferences
Be sure to take a look at OneThing39 and the wonderful summer conferences coming your way. Or, click to the right here on the countdown clock or the Systems Thinking & Dynamic Modeling icon.
From Sightline – the bloggers and researchers of sustainability in the Pacific Northwest – comes this new item in their continuing series on fewer drivers. Here, this blog speaks about three different long-term flows slowly impacting the American car craze . . . and, thereby, road construction and the car industry and gas prices and transit use . . . and who knows what else.
Young People Are Driving Less | Sightline Daily.
Related articles
- QuickThing14: driving car companies crazy (itsallonething.com)
- The Cost of Auto Insurance for Young Drivers (articles.onlineautoinsurance.com)
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QuickThing15: dazzling wind map
The famed Columbia Gorge has seams of these turbines threading across its landscape.
Hasn’t our fascination with understanding and teaching about systems been connected to the dichotomy between the world we live in (a dynamic, always-moving ) and how we represent it to students (reduced, lineal, static)?
This map gives a sense of how winds move and behave as a single thing.
Here, then, from Google is a beautiful thing. Click. Watch. Zoom in all you want.
Click on OneThing39 to read about summer conferences.
QuickThing14: driving car companies crazy
Oregonians – and Americans – are car crazy no more
Here’s a surprising story . . .
Across the country, the generation coming up is driving less, owning fewer cars, and eschewing the idea of auto-mobility. Take in this graph of Oregon’s Vehicle Miles Traveled graph – it shows that present day VMT is at levels from the late 1980′s!
To be sure, some part of this results from the economic downturn starting in fall 2008. Nonetheless, this represents a dramatic turnabout in American culture.
Do you still need a hot car to score a hot date?
Almost half of 18-24 year olds would choose internet access over wheels. I recall, now, a faint memory from about 20 summers ago: beautiful day, a few kids out riding bicycles, running through the streets, being kids. But there on the curb, oblivious to nature’s gift of a day and the sheer joy of play, sat two boys playing with their Gameboys.
It’s new generation!
Of course, there are a few explanations for this. Increased density in the last 20 years has made mass transit a better deal. Owning a car IS an expensive proposition. Many young couples actually own a single car. My own children did not purchase a car until well into their 20′s, and only then when they had children.
The Portland Street Car routes have doubled, and are about to double again with the opening of the east side lines.
It’s taken a long time for all this feedback to take hold: rising fuel costs, increased density in urban centers, improved mass transit, more convenient and low cost housing along those mass transit throughways, and a generation whose values differ from those previous relative to social freedom.
Related articles
- Driving’s Long Decline in Oregon (streetsblog.net)
- Americans’ Growing Ride of Choice: Public Transit (newser.com)
- Mass transit use rises as gas prices soar (money.cnn.com)
- Commuter Commotion: 6 Futuristic Mass Transit Concepts (weburbanist.com)
OneThing39: a summer for Common Core, STEM & Sustainability
Stepping away to learn so that we can find our instructional stride
The Creative Learning Exchange (CLE) and the Sustainability Education Summer Institute (SESI) sponsor summer conferences and institutes that help us all do our jobs just a little bit better – reaching out to teachers to prepare them for teaching about systems and sustainability.
The CLE sponsors the national Systems Thinking & Dynamic Modeling Conference for K-12 Education in Wellesley, MA, June 30 – July 2. This conference features teachers and systems practitioners in a three-day Chautauqua of best practices from around the United States. This year’s focus is on the Common Core and STEM Standards, two profound threads of educational reform that have swept through school districts bringing change and new conversations. This 10th Biennial conference brings together the systems community’s preeminent voices – Peter Senge, George Richardson, and Dennis Meadows.
Over the last two decades, I have participated and presented at this conference as it has criss-crossed the United States: Arizona, New Hampshire, Washington, and Massachusetts. It’s the kind of conference where neophytes and experts gather to learn and share. There are many great things about this conference: teachers share best instructional practices in systems education, and system practitioners share their expertise with teachers. It’s akin to writing teachers attending a conference alongside the best novelists in the country.
The Learning Tree at Islandwood on Bainbridge Island, WA
Across the country, near the northwest tip of the Pacific Northwest, SESI 2012 gets underway on Bainbridge Island, at a sustainability enclave called Islandwood. This year’s event features three strands for sustainability educators: start up teachers wanting to learn, best practices among current teachers, and a deep learning path for experienced teachers. The first strand includes sessions in systems thinking. And Fritjof Capra’s Center for EcoLiteracy is a one of the co-sponsors.
If you to step away from modern society and our urban landscape, then come here. Islandwood will transport you into a sustainability dreamland where the rhetoric and hopes of environmentalism and sustainability are everyday practiced. You can see what’s possible. By the way, Washington state is one of the very states with requirements for sustainability education and systems thinking. I grateful for the real honor to present and participate in SESI 2009.
Get out there! Learn! Teach!
Related articles
- OneThing35: National Systems Thinking Weeks, 10/5 – 10/20 (itsallonething.com)
- OneThing37: Words to live by (itsallonething.com)
- What do YOU mean by ‘Systems Thinking’? (mdite.wordpress.com)
- Peter Senge – what schools need to focus on now! (annmic.wordpress.com)
OneThing38: type of feedback matters
Feedback keeps coming until you learn
The policeman's walk gives you a little time to rethink your actions - but it's a VERY infrequent piece of feedback
When I drive, feedback keeps coming at me, especially as related to speed.
But back in the halcyon days of open teen life – I can drive my VW Bug like a sports car, not wear a seat belt, and yet live without a care! – speed had to do with how quickly I got to the make-out spot, or whether I got home before mom and dad freaked out. These are not very good sources of feedback that determine behavior. Safety? Public order?
Let me tell a different story of feedback for drivers.
I took this photo from the sidewalk, so this violation was not me!
On the way home from church on Sunday, we drove by a recently and temporarily installed electronic speed indicator suspended from the Speed Limit sign near our house. It’s at the bottom of a hill, just before a park to the left of the sign. What a thoughtful place for that sign! In the ten minutes I stood there watching people fly by, most slowed down once their speed exceeded the posted 25 mph. It’s highly effective, but also highly localized. Most other signs are not like this.
You really don't want to know how I took this picture
The most immediate source of continuous feedback relative to speed for a driver is the speedometer. People consult it all the time. How can you not? In some models (my brothers Honda Civic, for example), the mph displays is two inch very bright teal numerals above the main dashboard. Because it’s a digital display, the continuous movement of lighted segments keeps one’s eyes on the number. Clever.
The closer to the mall, the worse the traffic. You'd think I'd get that feedback through my thick skull.
Still another feedback mode is sheer traffic volume. Sometimes, the Speed Limit sign is flat out mockery. Near the Clackamas Town Center, the Speed Limit is 40 mph. I was stopped in this photo (I’m a good driver, really), but I rarely get over 20 mph on this road over the weekend. Traffic feedback varies by city, by hour of day, by location within the driving grid, you name it.
God only knows the mystic feedback looping through this head.
There are invisible feedbacks, of course, all in my head – like the amount I pay for driver’s insurance or the cost of an accident. Of course, all the feedback works, if everything remains under current, ordinary circumstances. Should something overrun the normal – an emergency, anger, late to work, daydreaming – the feedback loop reminding me to be safe, while still there, can not compete with such a shift in dominance.
In the end, all these feedback messages return to the same interpreter – me. Inside my head, all these signals dip and dither. I weigh all of it. For a long time, my car also carried children, so the feedback about speed had still another element, causing me to act the very opposite of the childless, spouseless, witless high school Tim. I was the epitome of a careful driver.
Continuous information flow, the threat of occasional traffic fine, the quasi-official shame of public real-time speed, the vagaries of moral and ethical judgment relative to speeding . . . all of these feedback loops in my brain keep me a pretty good driver. Maybe I need them all.
Related articles
- 47 per cent admit speeding on rural roads (confused.com
- Putting your foot down (blogs.confused.com)
OneThing37: Words to live by
Let the meaning choose the word
George Orwell
At a recent Republican Presidential Candidates Debate, the host asked each candidate to describe himself in a single word, and we got consistent, cheerful, to name a few. Back in 2000, Saturday Night Live played off this very idea with fake Al Gore declaring “Lock box” and fake George Bush proclaiming “Strategery.” To be sure, it’s a gimmicky kind of thing, but it can also be a good exercise in synthesis.
In his “Politics and the English Language,” George Orwell famously called on writers and thinkers to practice the linguistic discipline of letting “the meaning choose the word.” We do not need to think very broadly to cite examples of sloppy or exaggerated thinking where words seem to mean anything the writer or speaker wants. I also recall Jay Forrester once proclaiming that a hallmark of system dynamics was that it made one’s thinking plain.
It’s what caused me to ask recently what are the ten most important systems words a middle or high school student should know. So, over the last few weeks, I’ve read dozens of words people ascribe to Systems Thinking; and, while I disagree or am confounded by some of those words, I’ll leave it to others to check either the K-12 List Serve or Systems Thinking World to make their own judgments.
I thought here I’d go to renowned system dynamicist Donella Meadows (1941-2001). In Thinking In Systems (2008, posthumous), she lists 18 words/phrases:
- archetypes
- balancing feedback loop
- bounded rationality
- dynamic equilibrium
- dynamics
- feedback loop
- flow
- hierarchy
- limiting factor
- linear relationship
- nonlinear relationship
- reinforcing feedback loop
- resilience
- self-organization
- shifting dominance
- stock
- suboptimization
- system
Eighteen words and phrases. Learn them. Teach them. And, in a few generations, we’ll all live a different world.
Related articles
- Orwell’s Six Rules of Clear English (aplusedits.com)
- OneThing35: National Systems Thinking Weeks, 10/5 – 10/20 (itsallonething.com)
- OneThing36: knowing “throughput” fundamentally changes how you see (itsallonething.com)
QuickThing13: it’s the closed systems that may ruin you
Some cities’ drains do things we’d rather not talk about
I’m happy to acknowledge this small metal sign that my city epoxied to the curb above the street drain in front of my house. It tells me – and everyone in our neighborhood – that anything dumped here is part of a closed system. Water, chemicals, pesticides, herbicides, lawn care products, detergents from car wash . . . all of it drains to the watershed.
And that’s not the only thing . . .
There are some cities that do not separate sewer from storm water; it’s called a Combined Sewer Overflow (CSO). Under usual conditions, runoff goes into the sewer system that flows to the treatment facilities. This works OK when the city is small and there’s no rain, but it rains a bit in the Pacific Northwest.
As Portland grew and when storms came calling, the runoff overwhelmed the CSO system, with the overflow running directly into the streams and the Willamette River.
Fortunately, Portland started working on this in 1991 and it’s finally done – Portland’s Big Pipe will help. That little metal sign is all part of that grand vision from two decades ago.
I love that little sign.
Related articles
- Saving Puget Sound: the battle between good intentions and science (seattletimes.nwsource.com)
- Last sewer-outflow pollution worth $1B to stop? (seattletimes.nwsource.com)
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QuickThing12: 40 Years since Limits to Growth
The Smithsonian and The Club of Rome commemorate the publication of Limits to Growth 40 years ago.
This book sparked a rabid debate on growth, on limits, on sustainability, and the environment. At its heart was a system dynamics model that was the first computer model to go broadly public. People really weren’t ready for it.
This link takes you to speeches.
Get the book Limits to Growth.
Related articles
- More reasons why we are reaching limits to growth (energybulletin.net)
- Forty years of Limits to Growth (rs.resalliance.org)
- Dennis Meadows: “it is too late for sustainable development” (3eintelligence.wordpress.com)
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QuickThing11: carbon sources and sinks
Look what all that throughput gets us . . .
Both sides of THROUGHPUT - the pictures and numbers paint a very clear picture of SOURCES and SINKS
Modernization has catalyzed the release of carbon from its SOURCES – stored in the earth, for example, as coal or trees which we burn for fuel or to clear land for agriculture – and that release is currently overwhelming the Earth’s exquisite SINKS – our oceans, our forests, and our air.
So, let’s go back a single post to OneThing36, to that slightly geeky word throughput, what Donella Meadows describes as a kind of speed limit – the flow rates at which the Earth can meet our acquisitive demands. At some point, the sources will run low or the sinks will overflow (or both) . . . and that will reduce the throughput either by “human choice or by . . . unpleasant natural feedbacks.”
Consider the Canadian tar sands and the Keystone Pipeline . . . an exceedingly clear illustration of SOURCE – THROUGHPUT – SINK.
Related articles
- OneThing36: knowing “throughput” fundamentally changes how you see (itsallonething.com)
- Sink to source – the loss of biodiversity’s greatest ecosystem service (conservationbytes.com)
- Blue Carbon: The Role of Oceans in Climate Change (thinkprogress.org)
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OneThing36: knowing “throughput” fundamentally changes how you see
Let’s start teaching a systems lexicon
Throughput is a slightly geeky word that ought to live in the everyday language of our middle and high school students in the same way that multiplayer or sustainable do – both common and fairly well understood by any ten year old. Just ask any of them how many pancakes they might eat at a sitting or how much of a history lecture they can listen to and remember. They can get throughput. Totally, dude.
As the idea appears in Beyond The Limits
Here, Donella Meadows tells us that throughput is simply all the capacity a system has, first, to take stuff from sources, use it, and, second, to put it in sinks. In other words, we use raw materials and then put them somewhere – toss it in a pile, bury it in a landfill, pour it in a stream or ocean, or put in the atmosphere. It all goes somewhere.
In a system dynamics model using STELLA, throughput looks like this.
Using STELLA iconography, two CLOUDS identify the source and sink, an INFLOW and OUTFLOW identify the throughput, and a STOCK identifies the accumulated or level of stuff. Of course, one might use stocks to specify the source and the sink.
Certainly, there’s much more to this than what’s rather simply illustrated here, but the concept of throughput is key to everything relative to sustainability. Can we keep taking stuff from the earth at the current rate, expecting that the earth can also absorb the rate of waste from that use? Seems like an obvious “No,” doesn’t it?
As Meadows clearly put it, “many crucial sources are declining and degrading and many sinks are overflowing. The throughput flows that maintain the human economy cannot be maintained at their current rates indefinitely, or even for very much longer.”
Related articles
- Defining Characteristics of Wicked Problems (mcgeesmusings.net)
