6 Planetary Boundaries & Doughnuts: Quotations
Systems thinking. “At the heart of systems thinking lie three deceptively simple concepts: stocks and flows, feedback loops, and delay. They sound straightforward enough but the mind-boggling business begins when they start to interact. Out of their interplay emerge many of the surprising, extraordinary and unpredictable events in the world. If you have ever been mesmerised by the sight of thousands of starlings flocking at sunset – in a spectacle poetically known as a murmuration – then you’ll know just how extraordinary such ‘emergent properties’ can be. Each bird twists and turns in flight, using phenomenal agility to stay a mere wingspan apart from its neighbours, while tilting as they tilt. But as tens of thousands of birds gather together, all following these same simple rules, the flock as a whole becomes an astonishing swooping, pulsing mass against the evening sky” (Raworth 2017).
Visibility. “[…] what’s interesting about recycling culture is that the mysterious curvature of social space-time, the curvature marked by the bend in the tube beneath the toilet bowl, disappears. We know where our shit goes. There are even some new pages about it in Richard Scarry’s popular children’s book Busy, Busy Town […] The lack of invisible places in our social space prevents us from separating public and private, local and global. […] This was already the case in Tibet, where in charnel grounds outside the village the sky butcher chopped up your corpse to be eaten by the vultures, the ultimate ecological funeral” (Morton 2010).
The circular economy means minimising waste by recycling, reusing, repurposing, refurbishing, repairing, remanufacturing, sharing, and often also renting and leasing. A circular economy is distinguished from a linear economy, where resources are extracted and processed into goods and waste. But the term circular economy is controversial, since it now has associations of green growth, techno-solutionism, and overly optimistic assumptions about potential efficiency gains. “As a reformist agenda, the circular economy has appeal to policy makers because it promises a win–win outcome, shifting attention away from ‘trade-offs and constraints’ to ‘synergies and opportunities’ under the guise of a suitable policy framework […] With a management and technocentric bias driving the circular economy agenda, a growing body of research has criticized the noticeable absence of socio-cultural and political issues” (Corvellec, Stowell, and Johansson 2022).
Cultivating viewpoint diversity. “The underlying irony of the climate pedagogy under discussion here is that it recruits objectivity in the service of activism. Instructors of environmental humanities, I want to say, ought to question this strategy on both counts, resisting scientization and abjuring explicit partiality. […] Students should be required to identify and engage with counter-positions, in their written work especially, to habituate them to the value of including ‘naysayers.’ Assessment criteria should explicitly value openness to viewpoint diversity as the foundation of originality. Instructors can of course declare their interest in hearing a range of views and demonstrating fairness in those they challenge, thereby modeling the “tone from the top.” At the same time, there is a danger that political identity, like any other vector of intersectionality, can be reified and thereby implicitly placed beyond rational challenge” (Garrard 2021).
The entombed poem. “Let us never forget: that the poem was entombed in a collapse of the earth.” Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation.
Policy and planning. “Taking the doughnut principles as the point of departure, the idea is not to provide a policy recipe but rather to help policymakers and planners identify and redesign networks, sectors, and economic activities that overshoot planetary boundaries or do not contribute to the social foundations” (Wahlund and Hansen 2022).
Interventions. “Places to Intervene in a System (in increasing order of effectiveness):
- Numbers: Constants and parameters such as subsidies, taxes, and standards
- Buffers: The sizes of stabilizing stocks relative to their flows
- Stock-and-Flow Structures: Physical systems and their nodes of intersection
- Delays: The lengths of time relative to the rates of system changes
