By Graham Harris

This blog is continued from Thinking Systems #10

In the last three blogs we saw that management and restoration of the entities we call ecosystems is problematic and driven by assumptions, myths and values. This is particularly so at the level of species and populations. Conservation biology and restoration ecology have had their local successes, but overall, the response to major initiatives has been poor. Global biodiversity continues to decline and, while there are strong calls to restore landscapes, going back to a prior state seems very difficult. Continue reading →

By Graham Harris

This blog is continued from Thinking Systems #9

This is a good place to stop for a while and read William Wimsatt’s (2007) book Re-engineering philosophy for limited beings: piecewise approximations to reality. Wimsatt’s goal in writing that book was to provide a guide to bounded rationalism and heuristics for a messy world.  The book draws on a wide range of sources including Andreas Wagner and one of my favourite books, Daniel Dennett’s (1995) “Darwin’s dangerous idea: evolution and the meanings of life. Dennett pointed out anyone that takes a consequentialist view whilst living in the middle of a system can only ever have partial knowledge. Continue reading →