I want to start out with an apology for rushing away from lawn-class last Thursday. I had to get to work and participate in that big system that is leading to human kind’s untimely demise. Such is life.
Anywho, let’s talk about systemic thinking. Admittedly, I am new to this type of thinking. In my academic and budding professional life, I have always focused on exceedingly small policy details—pass through corporate tax rates, comparative palliative care delivery, electoral formulae (shout-out to D’Hont), that kind of thing. I have been so in the trees that I’ve failed to see the forest. I hope that metaphor makes sense; I’ve never been very poetic.
I worry that my obsession with minutia will distract from the lessons of this class. On the flip side, maybe that is the point of it in the first place: to develop a different manner of thinking for an entirely new and cross disciplinary problem.
That said, I am adamant in thinking that details add up over time. Perhaps not on the level I talk about above, but organs in the system—compartmentalizing public policy issues. For instance, if we didn’t have the Electoral College the United States would almost certainly still accept the Paris Climate Accord. As it is, we do and we aren’t. To that point, I think there is a type of futility in trying to change the system. Going by the previous example, it is easier to change the Electoral College than the media environment and public sentiments with regards to racism, sexism and demagoguery. The lever of the system is much harder to pull than the lever of a specific aspect therein.
Hopefully I can change my approach given the material of this class. I am partial to the idea of shared and not individual ecological footprints. The onus is on me—or, rather, us—to change the approach to overcoming the seemingly insurmountable. However, given recent history, coalition building seems impossible in and of itself. Until then, I guess we’ll just kick the can down the road some more (that’s a recycling pun and metaphor all in one).