Hello!
Welcome (or welcome back) to this blog — my attempt to find some hope in these unsettling times. Thank you for all your wonderful responses to the last email I sent, and an especially big thank you to those of you who forwarded it on to friends and family. I hope you’ve all had a good week.
Last time, I sent you this poem by Emily Dickinson. This week I wanted to show an article by Donella Meadows about how to change the very systems by which the world works.
The article is about finding and using ‘Leverage Points’ — places “within a complex system (a corporation, an economy, a living body, a city, an ecosystem) where a small shift in one thing can produce big changes in everything.”
Meadows is better known as the author of Limits to Growth — a report that woke up millions to the dangers of climate change back in the early 70s. Here she ranks 12 places to intervene in a system from least-to-most impact, giving real world examples as well as ideas and practical tips for making change.
I’ve copied a couple of random paragraphs below (from “Leverage Point 6: Information Flows”) and then a link to the full thing. The article is quite long (70 minutes-ish) but personally I loved reading it.
Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System By Donella Meadows
6. The structure of information flows (who does and does not have access to information).
There was this row of identical houses, the story goes, except that for some reason the electric meter in some of the houses was installed in the basement and in others it was installed in the front hall, where the residents could see it constantly, going round faster or slower as they used more or less electricity. With no other change, with identical prices, electricity consumption was 30 percent lower in the houses where the meter was in the front hall.
We systems-heads love that story because it’s an example of a high leverage point in the information structure of the system. It’s not a parameter adjustment, not a strengthening or weakening of an existing loop. It’s a NEW LOOP, delivering feedback to a place where it wasn’t going before.
A more recent example is the Toxic Release Inventory — the U.S. government’s requirement, instituted in 1986, that every factory releasing hazardous air pollutants report those emissions publicly every year. Suddenly every community could find out precisely what was coming out of the smokestacks in town. There was no law against those emissions, no fines, no determination of “safe” levels, just information. But by 1990 emissions dropped 40 percent. They’ve continued to go down since, not so much because of citizen outrage as because of corporate shame. One chemical company that found itself on the Top Ten Polluters list reduced its emissions by 90 percent, just to “get off that list.”
There’s been some debate in the past about whether ‘individual action’ or ‘system change’ is needed to stop climate change. Historically, the climate movement has talked a lot about ‘individuals actions’ — reuse, reduce, recycle, etc. Big corporations have encouraged this, because it places the burden of responsibility on us instead of them. For this reason, BP popularised the concept of ‘carbon footprints’.
Today we know that ‘individual action’ isn’t going to cut it: the IPCC warned back in 2018 that we need “rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented change in all aspects of our society” in order to avoid climate breakdown. Still, if you talk to policymakers about climate change, many feel as trapped as we do — they’re paralysed by the will of their voters or their shareholders or their customers. The result is a lot of finger-pointing and helplessness.
I’m glad the climate movement has realised 1) that we need ‘system change’, and 2) that policymakers need to be of it. At the same time, I’m worried that putting more and more of the burden of responsibility on policymakers might make us blind to our own power. Meadows’ article is targeted at both policymakers and normal people. It shows that ‘individual action’ doesn’t need to just be mean ‘reuse, reduce, recycle’; it gives us the knowledge to reclaim, reform and redesign the systems in which we live.
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This is a semi-regular newsletter by Matt Sowerby, a storyteller and poet. Subscribe to start receiving little parcels of hope (in the form of stories, thoughts, tools and tips) delivered to your inbox, drawing on history, literature, art, and politics. 🙂
Matt Sowerby 