Guest blog:A Broader Spotlight on the SDGs
By Jessie Henshaw*
I’ve been observing the SDGs as a natural systems scientist since 2013 when I saw with some surprise that the one
topic both Country delegates and Civil Society groups could agree on was the
wording of the ideals for global development.
Even when the Co-Chairs,
Ambassadors Korosi, and Kamu, began
persistently asking for the discussion to turn to means and methods it never
did. Ideals
are wonderful, but the SDGs are responding to a still growing global disruption
of human and natural cultures, a problem not studied or discussed.
I find somewhat the same problem with this year’s otherwise
wonderful “Spotlight on
Sustainable Development 2018” (see www.2030spotlight.org). Its critiques seem excellent and
hard not to agree with, but also seemed to assume ideal purposes lead to ideal
results, as the drafting of the SDG’s did.
The real problem is that the
growing harm to human cultures and nature caused
by accelerating growth is a rapidly moving and expanding target.
As growth presses the limits of the earth and challenges the
world to ever faster rates of change, the damage to nature and human society is
more and more lasting. That’s a conclusion you can reach
from many directions I think. The
communities the SDGs aim to help seem mainly
deeply rooted old cultures that are now “failing
to thrive.” That is a living systems problem, not a
numbers problem, as the SDGs were designed to
solve. Failing to thrive is more
like a “lack of meaning in life” dilemma, requiring
a different approach. It’s also a
symptom that one can use to map the problem worldwide
and begin to look at its real dimensions.
The great secret worlds of human cultures
{ online at http://synapse9.com/sigimg/HiddenCulture.jpg
}
Failure to thrive seems to hit both indigenous cultures worldwide and
communities within economies where “creative destruction” is leaving lasting
scars, like rural flight or outsourcing that hollows out a region. One example is the deeply alienated culture giving support to Donald Trump in the
US, distressed by the world changing so much around them. There
are also non-thriving local cultures in North, Central, and South Africa, as well as in the Middle East and North, Central,
Southern and Eastern Asia, as well as in
Oceana, Australia, North and South America.
It’s not “the same old thing,” but
a truly accelerating global plight, seeming to be of all the cultures that
didn’t welcome or were disrupted by the intrusive growth of the world
powers.
Human cultures are truly the crown jewels of humanity, though, where most of our gifts come from and are on
display. They are the unique individual
species of the human ecology. If you
think about it, there is no other place
on earth for the safekeeping of all our ancient accumulated ways of knowing and
living. Each culture either crafts its
separate way of knowing and living or branches off from another. They are our most important gift, evidently
now absorbing a great deal of abuse.
With each culture being its own “knowledge system” it keeps
people from making sense of any other culture, or even our own. If you trace the evidence, it does check out.
We get the large part of our ways of understanding things during early
childhood, by what you might call ‘osmosis’. Some say it’s “too close for us to see,” or that our mental way of seeing is
functionally like a camera and its lens, that are never visible in the pictures
they take. Cultures also have a
deceptive “cellular design.” Their ways of knowing and living are internally shared, and not experienced from the outside. Even
with extended immersion, an outsider does not
develop a native feeling for another
culture’s roots.
The great challenge we face today is that growth is an ever faster process
of expansion and change, *doubling* its demands on the earth and humanity every
20-30 years. That radical rate of increasing
demands is what eventually overwhelms the adaptability and resilience of people
and the earth. Living things are being pushed
to keep mechanically doubling numerical returns for culture-blind
investors, as if the earth was unoccupied.
That’s how the English occupied North America, a hundred years after the
first settlements rapid expansion began with importing
slave labor then a wave of settlers swept across the rest of the continent,
as if it were unoccupied. Elsewhere the
economic powers built systems for globally
harvesting resources, placing overseers where needed to manage their access, as if there was no one else there. Today it continues with how global capitalism
still relates to the world, measuring its success in rates of accelerating
expansion alone, as if no one is here. What’s
most surprising perhaps, is how very effective our cultural blinders are in hiding our blindness to our own and other cultures from
us. That is, hidden until you have an indicator
like the glaring disruptiveness of ever more sudden change.
So what would relieve our fast growing societal
distress? There’s a new business model
expressly for responding to it, to use biomimicry for how nature builds thriving ecologies. If interested there’s a longer
discussion article on how healthy cultures are the foundations of healthy
economies and the business model for nourishing them that SDG interventions
could use ( Culture, Financing
for Development and tPPPs).
The new business model begins like any business, organism, or culture
does, with a period of innovating and vigorous growth, making
profits to expand its systems. When the environment
responds with increasing resistance or stiffening competition, the new strategy
is to choose when and how to switch from maximizing profits for growth to maximizing
long-term profitability to pay it forward.
That’s done by refining systems
to operate in smooth harmony with each other and their world. It’s a more gradual process but would produce
more integrated development and be more profitable in the end, to combine human
ingenuity and natural design.
________________________
[*] Jessie Henshaw consults as HDS
natural systems design science, sy@synapse9.com, offering insight into
nature’s processes of negotiating change.
She uses natural systems thinking strategies (NST) with “action
research” (AR) and architectural “pattern
language” (PL) methods of collaborative developmental design. The start is from recognizing that organizational processes in nature follow a familiar arc,
beginning with bursts of innovation,
and then refinement, leading to a final release
(IRR).
That is not unlike how we all do
home or office projects, in stages of immature then
maturing growth then release, also seen in
reproduction. The system produced is first “framed out” with
innovations then “filled in” with refinements and “delivered” as the release
when ready. Jessie began work
on the UN’s SDGs in 2013. Reading
Nature’s Signals is her journal of informal research notes, with links to her publications and other work.
Comments
Post a Comment