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Sustainability Science pp 21–58Cite as

Sustaining Sustainability: Creating a Systems Science in a Fragmented Academy and Polarized World

Abstract

From climate change, deforestation, and depletion of fossil fuels to overexploited fisheries, species extinction, and poisons in our food and water, our society is unsustainable and it is getting worse fast. Many advocate that overcoming these problems requires the development of systems thinking. We have long been told that the unsustainability of our society arises because we treat the world as unlimited and problems unconnected when we live on a finite “spaceship Earth” in which “there is no away” and “everything is connected to everything else.” The challenge lies in moving from slogans to specific tools and processes that help us understand complexity, design better policies, facilitate individual and organizational learning, and catalyze the technical, economic, social, political, and personal changes we need to create a sustainable society. Here I outline a design for a systems science of sustainability that rises to this challenge. Where the dynamics of complex systems are conditioned by multiple feedbacks, time delays, accumulations, and nonlinearities, our mental models generally ignore these elements of dynamic complexity; where the consequences of our actions spill out across time and space and across disciplinary boundaries, our universities, corporations, and governments are organized in silos that focus on the short term and fragment knowledge. I describe how sustainability research, teaching, and engagement with the policy process can be organized to provide scientifically grounded, reliable knowledge that crosses disciplinary boundaries, that engages multiple stakeholders, that grapples with unavoidable issues of ethics, values, and purpose, and that leads to action.

Keywords

  • Sustainability
  • System dynamics
  • Limits to growth
  • Ecological footprint
  • Overconsumption
  • Mental models

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The scientific literature generally uses the terms “positive” and “negative” to denote self-reinforcing and self-correcting feedbacks. However, laypeople persistently conflate “positive feedback” with “good” and “negative feedback” with “bad,” as in “my boss gave me negative feedback on my performance.” However, either type of feedback can be good or bad, depending on how the loop is operating and on one’s values. The positive feedback of compound interest on credit card debt is “bad” if you are the debtor, but “good” for the card issuer. To avoid the confusion, I use the terms reinforcing and balancing rather than positive and negative.

  2. 2.

    http://www2.dupont.com/Our_Company/en_US/glance/sus_growth/sus_growth.html, http://www.clintonfoundation.org/what-we-do/clinton-giustra-sustainable-growth-initiative, http://www.world.org/weo/growth.

  3. 3.

    Huxley’s analysis was, for the day, rather nuanced, and he did not believe that all fisheries were inexhaustible. He considered oyster beds and riverine salmon fisheries to be exhaustible, and recognized the tragedy of the commons, concluding that in such cases “Man is the chief enemy, and we can deal with him by force of law. If the stock of a river is to be kept up, it must be treated upon just the same principles as the stock of a sheep farm.”

  4. 4.

    Consider any stock, S, with inflow I and outflow O. The stock at time T, S T  , is the integral of its net inflow from the initial time, t 0  , plus the initial stock, St0. Equivalently, the rate of change of the stock is the net inflow, I–O:

    $$ {S}_{T}={\displaystyle \underset{{t}_{0}}{\overset{T}{\int }}{Net Inflow d}t}+{S}_{{t}_{0}}={\displaystyle \underset{{t}_{0}}{\overset{T}{\int }}\left(I-O\right){d}t}+{S}_{{t}_{0}};\frac{{d}S}{{d}t}={Net Inflow}=I-O$$

    Note the units of measure: stocks are measured in units, e.g., liters of water in a tub or tons of CO2 in the atmosphere, while flows are measured in units/time period, e.g., liters/second or tons of CO2  /year.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. MIT Sloan School of Management, E62-436, 100 Main Street, Cambridge, MA, 02142, USA

    John D. Sterman

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. PSEG Institute for Sustainability Studie, Montclair State University, Montclair, 70803, New Jersey, USA

    Michael P. Weinstein

  2. Louisiana State University, Nicholson Extension, Baton Rouge, 70803, Louisiana, USA

    R. Eugene Turner

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Sterman, J.D. (2012). Sustaining Sustainability: Creating a Systems Science in a Fragmented Academy and Polarized World. In: Weinstein, M., Turner, R. (eds) Sustainability Science. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-3188-6_2

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