A Systems Approach Towards a (More) Sustainable Future: An Invitation to Academia

A keynote presentation to the Canadian Congress 2024

I’m often asked to give presentations and usually do 30-40 per year, mostly online. But almost always the hosting organization asks for a time limit – typically 45 minutes. As those of you deeply versed in the human predicament know, it is VERY hard to describe what is happening in our world AND offer some direction for response and personal agency, all in 45 minutes or even an hour. As followers of The Great Simplification are aware, I increasingly want to discuss and work on ‘responses’ but there are still vast sections of society – academia being one – that don’t yet integrate the magnitude and urgency of our systemic predicament.

So when Kira Cooper, of the Environmental Studies Association of Canada, invited me to do a talk ‘with no time constraint’, for 10,000 professors across Canada, I put something together that was reasonably comprehensive – and it ended up being about 1 hour and 45 minutes.

The talk is in four parts:
1) an explanation of the core drivers of the human ecosystem
2) a synthesis of how the emergent property of these is a (mindless) energy/material hungry economic superorganism
3) scenarios and implications for the future
4) suggested interventions and responses at various scales (global, community, academia and personal).

There are over 200 million college students in the world. What are we teaching them and what curriculum will be more appropriate for the world we're heading into? It is my hope that many professors, post-docs and university affiliates around the world experience this synthesis. And even if they may not fully agree (or if they fully agree!), that it may act as an Overton Window of expanding the conversations, research, curriculums and actions of the good people at universities around Canada, and the world. 

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In case you missed it…

Yesterday, I hosted a Reality Roundtable with Priscilla Trịhn, James Branagan, and Natasha Linhart, focusing on Generation Z’s perspective of the metacrisis, how learning the reality of the human predicament has affected their worldview, and what they see as viable future paths for themselves and the world. As the human predicament continues to accelerate, the conversations regarding the future are still dominated by older generations - yet it is their younger successors who will face the brunt of these issues throughout their lives. How might we approach intergenerational relationships to encourage the transfer of knowledge in both directions, without blame or resentment?'

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If you appreciate The Great Simplification podcast…

Be sure to leave a review on your preferred podcast platform! Leaving reviews helps the podcast grow, which helps spread awareness of our systemic situation from experts in ecology, energy, policy, economics, technology, and community building so that we can better understand - and respond to - the challenges of the coming decade.

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