Thinking in Systems: A Primer

Donella H. Meadows was a sustainability advocate, environmental scientist, and writer. This book provides a concise introduction to the nature of systems. She paints a clear picture of theoretical concepts and their applications in the world, using examples drawn from everyday experience and history. Her approach is opinionated and humble, and I thought it was a wonderful book. In Chapter 7 of the text, she quotes Aldo Leopold from A Sand County Almanac:

We can, and some of us do, celebrate and encourage self-organization, disorder, variety, and diversity. Some of us even make a moral code of doing so, as Aldo Leopold did with his land ethic: "A thing is right when it tends o' to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.",

Several ideas mentioned in the book that I often find myself contemplating. One key idea is the notion that the boundaries of a system exist only as they pertain to a particular context; the universe is a continuum.

Another is the idea that everything we might claim to know about the state of the world is a model - though our understanding might be somewhat congruent with reality, it is at most a crude approximation.

System structure is the source of system behavior. System behavior reveals itself as a series of events over time.

The bounded rationality of each actor in a system may not lead to decisions that further the welfare of the system as a whole.

Everything we know about the world is a model