Chapter Three – Systems 3 (Environomics)

As we move away from the (dark ages) of categorical thinking and top-down modelling dominating our social decision making process, into the light of systemic thinking and lateralisation, we must pull some concepts from their categorically related roots to place them as they should be (systemically related). Two such concepts we will re-organise here are ‘environment’ and ‘economics’.

We have covered how there are two aspects to any system, there are the boundaries (the individual parts) and the function (how the parts relate, their connections, processing, etc). Environment is a term which describes the individual parts of the system; such as the physical parts that make up your body, or the parts the make up your local geographical region. While the term economics refers to the interactions between the parts of a system (usually with focus on the form those interactions take, the quality/quantity of that interaction). To define ‘economics’ we will say it is the study/theory of (or the philosophical inquiry into) the relationships between the parts of a system (economics is about much more than human fantasy money/financial systems).

So environment describes the boundaries of a system, while economics describes the function. From this systemic perspective we see that it is impossible to treat ‘environment’ and ‘economics’ as separate things (categories of information); because in reality these two concepts are halves of the same whole (they are both parts of the systems of existence).

In general terms, ‘sustainability’ is about the endurance of systems and processes. More importantly sustainability is about developing knowledge of systems and their processes so that we can make decisions to maintain (at least not destroy) their endurance. Because systems are comprised of (have boundaries and functions we describe in terms of) environment and economics, our analysis of sustainability (in decision making) must include both environmental and economic aspects. To only look at one aspect of systems, we will only see part of the systems overall sustainability, and as such the decisions we make will only be part as good (productive, fitting with reality, etc) as we could possible produce with the current information our species has gathered.

Environomics is a term we shall use to describe the study of systems with particular focus on sustainability (for the ultimate end of decision making). As systems are comprised of environmental and economic aspects, environomics provides us a more accurate model of the systems of existence than could be modelled by either studying environment or economics as discrete (separate) pools of information. And as we have talked about, we need more accurate models of (ways of organising) information because then we can make more accurate decisions (and this is as true in our own individual life as it is for the collective life of our society, or species).

One of the facts of existence, as described conceptually within Einstein’s theory of relativity, is that perspective matters. Because the form of (at least our informational) existence is basically system within system, within system, etc (having many layers of systems – from Universe to the systems that make up sub-atomic particles – and many systems within each layer), the particular point from which we choose to view this amazingly interconnected matrix will determine how the form (boundaries and function) of the systems appear to us (i.e. an individual human viewed as part of a social species looks rather different than a human seen from the perspective of collections of cells, which is again different to viewing a human in terms of information processing – yet all are the same, only the perspective (from where we view the information) changes).

For this reason the study of environomics, being designed to look toward (explore) the entirety of universal existence so as to develop an ever evolving ‘as complete a picture of existence as we can manage’ (given our current experiences), embraces analysis of multi-level system interaction (and our need to include various systemic perspectives from higher and lower levels, relating to whatever our subject is (its boundaries and function) at the time, so as to generate a more detailed picture for use in decision making). So when considering the overall human; environomics includes study of the physical aspect (what the physical system needs for relative health), the mental aspect (what the information processing system needs for relative health), the social aspects (what the social system needs for relative health), and also exploration of how the various aspects relate/associate (how changes to one aspect affects the other aspects).

As all of universal existence is systemically related, we could extend our environomic analysis of the individual human to include family/friend systems, the system of life, and even of the entirety of universal existence. We live in an informational world (more on this later); as there are so many parts of universal existence (many levels/layers of systems, and multitudes of systems within the levels/layers), and as humans beings are really good at creating (in this case stories, belief systems, fantasies, etc), it is rather easy to become ‘awash’ (lost adrift) in a sea of information.

To stay afloat in the sea of information we must choose our perspective, determine what we are looking at (or for). For this reason decision making is rather important for us. As the topic of decision making is rather large, we shall unravel it over a number of pieces of words organised to convey meaning (you will find the topic to be the underlying theme of this whole work).