Leverage Points
In order to craft a response to contemporary madness, you have to understand how ‘they’ see the world. And as General Systems Theory is well represented through Sustainable Development, the Ecosystem Approach, One Health, the Circular Economy, Planetary Health and - especially - the catch-all term, ‘Spaceship Earth’, consulting their own writings might be a good place to start.
And that’s where we encounter a work by Donella Meadows; ‘Leverage Points - Places to Intervene in a System‘1.
I’ve written a fair big on General Systems Theory in the past. Perhaps not quite enough, but it’s a fairly large, complex field -
What’s of more interest is the general term, used by many, popularised in the 1960s.
Why she’s important is because she was the partner of Dennis Meadows, both of whom were intimately involved with the Club of Rome2 and their early work, ‘The Limits to Growth’ on which she was the lead author3. She further worked with Jay Forrester4, the inventor of system dynamics5.
It’s an interesting document, which thankfully is also somewhat short; 21 pages, of which we can skip the first 2. She starts off, discussing the magic of what may more commonly be known as ‘silver bullets’ or ‘miracle cures’. However, in systems theory, these are kown as leverage points and they ultimately represent points of power.