Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Cohousing and The Economic Crisis

[Sharon Villines (sharon]

On Mar 18, 2009, at 11:28 AM, John Faust wrote:

> Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite  
> world
> is either a madman or an economist.

From a 1997 essay by systems analyst Donella Meadows who founded the  
Sustainability institute:
> The systems community has a lot of lore about leverage points. Those  
> of us who were trained by the great Jay Forrester at MIT have  
> absorbed one of his favorite stories: “People know intuitively where  
> leverage points are. Time after time, I’ve done an analysis of a  
> company, and I’ve figured out a leverage point. Then I’ve gone to  
> the company and discovered that everyone is pushing it in the wrong  
> direction!”
>
> The classic example of that backward intuition was Forrester’s first  
> world model. Asked by the Club of Rome to show how major global  
> problems—poverty and hunger, environmental destruction, resource  
> depletion, urban deterioration, unemployment—are related and how  
> they might be solved, Forrester came out with a clear leverage  
> point: Growth. Both population and economic growth. Growth has costs— 
> among which are poverty and hunger, environmental destruction—the  
> whole list of problems we are trying to solve with growth!
A .pdf of a 1999 version of the whole article, Places to Intervene in  
a System, is here;

http://www.sustainer.org/pubs/Leverage_Points.pdf

Sharon
----
Sharon Villines in Washington DC
Where all roads lead to Casablanca