EPH 1024: Healthy Environments and Sustainability in the EU
Course Rational Part 1:
Task 1: The Era of the Great Acceleration and the Anthropocene. A systemic view on our
times.
Official Learning Goals:
1. What are (Complex Adaptive) Systems, what are their key
elements/features, and how do they function?
2. What is exponential growth?
3. When does a system change/collapse and how does that work? How does
system change relate to exponential growth?
4. What is the Anthropocene?
5. What is the Great Acceleration?
6. (How) is SARS-COV-2 an Earth-systemic crisis. How does it relate to other
crises?
7. What is Resilience?
8. Why is knowledge of the complexity of systems important for sustainability
and health? (e.g. what does it mean for public health measures/
strategies/sustainable development ?)
9. How can we deal with the uncertainty that is inherent in complex systems?
10. Try to use the task text to make the theory of this task more concrete.
Course Text
Reasons for societal collapse include:
1. Climatic Change: Dramatic change in climate causing crop failure, starvation and
desertification. Collapse of the Anasazi, Akkadian, Mayan and Roman Empires all
coincided with abrupt climatic changes, usually droughts.
2. Environmental degradation: Societies overshoot the carrying capacity of the
environment. Excessive deforestation, water pollution, soil degradation and loss of
biodiversity precipitate ecological collapse.
3. Inequality and Oligarchy: Wealth and political inequality, along with centralisation of
power (oligarchy), causes social distress and a society’s inability to respond to
ecological, social and economic problems.
4. Complexity: Collapse under the weight of a society’s own complexity and
bureaucracy. Complexity breed problem-solving, but returns from complexity
eventually reach a point of diminishing returns and collapse ensues.
5. External shocks: The “four horseman”: war, natural disasters, famine and plagues.
Foreign invaders (the Spanish invasion of the Aztec empire) or concentration of
humans and cattle in walled settlements with poor hygiene breeding disease are
common examples.
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, 6. Randomness/Bad Luck: Evolution and competition between species; the “Red
Queen Effect” that as species constantly fight for survival in a changing environment
extinctions is a consistent possibility.
Collapse is a tipping point phenomena, when compounding stressors overrun societal
coping capacity. Indicators of this tipping point include:
1. Climate change
2. Inequality
3. Environmental impact
4. Complexity
Collapse can be prevented by societal resilience. Economic diversity (e.g. globalisation)
prevents collapse as societies are less reliant on a single export (such as agriculture which is
vulnerable to ecological impacts) to sustain an economy. More skilled populations also
prevent collapse. Knowledge allows us to address threats: emissions can be reduced,
inequalities levelled, environmental degradation reversed, and economies diversified.
Thinking in Systems (Donella, 2008)
Introduction: The System Lens
The slinky drops and bounces not because you remove your hand from beneath it, but
because of what is within the slinky itself. (“The hands that manipulate the slinky suppress
or release some behaviour that is latent within the structure of the spring” – that is a central
insight of systems theory).
“A system is a set of things – people, cells, molecules, or whatever – interconnected in such
a way that they produce their own pattern of behaviour over time.”
The system, to a large extent, causes its own behaviour! An outside event may unleash that
behaviour, but the same outside event applied to a different system is likely to produce a
different result.
“The Blind Men and the Matter of the Elephant” – each blind person felt a different part of
the elephant, and all had perceived it incorrectly.
Chapter 1: System Structure and Behaviour
More than the sum of its parts
3 elements of a system: elements, interconnections, and a function or purpose (E.g. A
football team has elements: players, coach, field, and ball; interconnections: rules of the
game, the coach’s strategy, the player’s communications, and laws of physics that govern
the motions of ball and players; and purpose: win games, have fun, get exercise, make
millions of dollars or all of the above)
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,Something that’s not a system? Yes, sand on the road. If you add or take away sand you still
just have sand on the road. But if you take the coach out of a football team, you quickly no
longer have the same system.
Intangibles can be part of a system (e.g. school pride or academic prowess at an academic
institution – it is not a physical thing but is an important element in the system)
The importance of a system’s parts by imagining changing them one by one.
1. Elements usually has the least effect (changing players on a football team means it’s
still a football team); all of a system’s elements can change but it will generally go on
being itself as long as interconnections and purposes remain intact.
2. Interconnection changes can greatly alter a system. It may even become
unrecognisable (e.g. change the rules of football for basketball but keep the players).
3. Function or purpose changes can also be drastic (e.g. the football team’s purpose
goes from winning to losing). A change in purpose is profound, even if every element
and interaction stays the same.
However, all are essential! All have their roles, but the function or purpose is often the most
crucial determinant of the system’s behaviour. Interconnections are also important, as
changing relationships changes behaviour. The elements, although easiest to notice, are
often least important (unless changing an element changes the purpose).
A new President doesn’t change the land, factories, or millions of people, but can make
these elements play a different game with new rules or direct the play to a new purpose.
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, A stock is the foundation of any system (elements that you can see, feel, count, or
measure): a population, the books in a bookstore, wood in a tree, money in a bank, your
own self-confidence, your reserve of good will to others.
Stocks change over time through a flow. Flows are filling and draining, births and deaths,
purchases and sales, deposits and withdrawals, successes and failures.
If the inflow and outflow are equal the stock is at a dynamic equilibrium.
Examples:
Understanding stocks and flows you can understand a good deal about complex systems.
We tend to overfocus on stocks and inflows without appreciating outflows (e.g. you can
discover a new oil field to increase inflows, but what about reduce the rate of oil burning to
reduce outflows?)
A stock takes time to change because a flow takes time to flow.
The slow response of stocks can be the source of problems in systems, but also grant
stability. This lag can allow room to manoeuvre, to experiment, and to revise policies.
Stocks inflows and outflows and decoupled (independent). Stock can be maintained, such as
oil in barrels; We don’t produce oil at the exact rate cars burn it. A warehouse of stock
allows the inflows of production and outflows of customer demand to vary.
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