If one analyses the challenges facing the world in systemic terms, the intelligence of implementing permaculture, micro lending, green taxes, ecological foot printing and fair trade becomes evident.
Conversely, if problems are viewed atomistically, the same strategies and solutions can be dismissed as idealistic and impractical. Creating genetically modified organisms to address hunger, building pebble bed nuclear reactors to address global warming, or waging opportunistic wars to establish democracies are all forms of downstream thinking that predicated today's dilemmas because none of them address the sources of the problems. In software, such fixes are called kludges, workarounds to repair bugs, expedient patches that may work for a time. Kludges do not address root causes but layer on Band-Aids to modify undesirable effects, ultimately forming a distressed whole. Fixing the intractable problems besetting the world will require a convergence of said intelligence and natural science, two qualities traditional politics lack.
Paul Hawken, Blessed Unrest
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