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SYSTEM BLINDNESS

Mau Piailug could read the stars and clouds, the ocean swells and the birds in flight, as though they were a GPS screen. Mau would take these readings and many others in the middle of the South Pacific, with nothing but sky on the horizon for weeks on end, using only the knowledge of the seas he learned from his elders on his native Caroline island of Satawal. Mau, born in 1932, was the last surviving native practitioner of the ancient Polynesian art of “wayfinding”: piloting a double-hulled canoe with only the lore in your head, traversing hundreds or thousands of miles from one island to another. Wayfinding embodies systems awareness at its height, reading subtle cues like the temperature or saltiness of seawater; flotsam and plant debris; the patterns of flight of seabirds; the warmth, speed, and direction of winds; variations in the swells of waves; and the rising and setting of the stars at night. All that gets mapped against a mental model of where islands are to be found, lore learned through native stories, chants, and dances. That allowed Mau to pilot a Polynesian-style canoe the 2,361 miles from Hawaii to Tahiti, a 1976 voyage that made anthropologists realize ancient islanders could traverse the South Pacific routinely, in two-way traffic from distant island to distant island. But over the half century during which Mau preserved this refined awareness of natural systems, Polynesians had turned to the navigational aids of the modern world. His was a dying lore. Mau’s epic canoe voyage stirred a revival in the study of the art of wayfinding among the native peoples of the South Pacific, a renewed interest that continues to this day. Fifty years after his own initiation as a wayfinder, Mau held the same ceremony once again for the first time, for a handful of students he had trained. Such lore, handed down for generations from elders to the young, exemplifies the local knowledge that native peoples everywhere have relied on to survive in their particular ecological niche, letting them get basics like food, safety, clothing, and shelter. Through human history, systems awareness—detecting and mapping the patterns and order that lie hidden within the chaos of the natural world—has been propelled by this urgent survival imperative for native peoples to understand their local ecosystem. They must know what plants are toxic, which nourish or heal; where to get drinking water and where to gather herbs and find food; how to read the signs of seasonal change. Here’s the catch. We are prepared by our biology to eat and sleep, mate and nurture, fight-or-flee, and exhibit all the other built-in survival responses in the human repertoire. But as we’ve seen, there are no neural systems dedicated to understanding the larger systems within which all this occurs. Systems are, at first glance, invisible to our brain—we have no direct perception of any of the multitude of systems that dictate the realities of our lives. We understand them indirectly, through mental models (the meanings of wave swells, constellations, and the flight of seabirds are each such models) and take action based on those models. The more grounded in data those models are, the more effective our interventions (for example, a rocket to an asteroid). The less grounded in data, the less effective they will be (much education policy). This lore stems from hard-learned lessons that become distributed knowledge, shared among a people, such as the healing property of specific herbs. And older generations pass on this accumulated lore to the younger. One of Mau’s students, Elizabeth Kapu’uwailani Lindsey, anthropologist who specialized in ethnonavigation, has become an explorer and fellow at the National Geographic Society. Her mission: ethnographic rescue, the conservation of vanishing indigenous knowledge and traditions. “Much of the loss of native lore is due to acculturation and colonization, and governments marginalizing native wisdom,” she told me. “This lore is passed on in many ways. Hawaiian dance, for example, was a code of movement and chants that told our genealogy, astronomy, and natural laws, and the backstory of our cultural history. The dancer’s movements, the chants, even the sound of the pahu drums, held meaning. “These were traditionally sacred practices,” she added. “Then when missionaries arrived, they deemed these dances immoral. It was only during our cultural renaissance in the 1970s that ancient hula, or hula kahiko, emerged once more. Until then, modern hula had become entertainment for tourists.” Mau studied for years, with many teachers: his grandfather chose him to begin studies as a navigator-to-be when Mau was but five or so. From that time on, Mau joined the older men preparing their canoes to go fishing; he’d ride the seas, listening to their tales of sailing—and the navigational tips embedded in them—into the night as they drank in the canoe house. All in all he studied with a half dozen expert navigators. Such native lore represents the root sciences, the needs-to-know that have over centuries grown into today’s burgeoning multitude of scientific specialties. This growth has been self-organizing, perhaps fulfilling an innate survival drive to understand the world around us. The invention of culture was a huge innovation for Homo sapiens: creating language and a shared cognitive web of understanding that transcends any individual’s knowledge and life span—and that can be drawn on as needed and passed on to new generations. Cultures divide up expertise: there are midwives and healers, warriors and builders, farmers and weavers. Each of these domains of expertise can be shared, and those who hold the deepest reservoir of understanding in each are the guides and teachers for others. Native lore has been a crucial part of our social evolution, the way cultures pass down their wisdom through time. Primitive bands in early evolution would have thrived or died depending on their collective intelligence in reading the local ecosystem: to anticipate key moments for planting, harvesting, and the like—and so the first calendars came into being. But as modernity has provided machines to take the place of such lore—compasses, navigational guides, and, eventually, online maps—native people have joined everyone else in relying on them, forgetting their local lore, like wayfinding. And so it has gone with almost every traditional form of expertise for attuning to nature’s systems. The first contact of a native people with the outside world typically marks the start of a gradual forgetting of their lore. When I spoke with Lindsey, she was preparing to leave for Southeast Asia to see the Moken, who are sea nomads. Just before the 2004 tsunami swept through the islands they inhabited in the Indian Ocean, the Moken “realized the birds had stopped singing and the dolphins were swimming farther out to sea,” she told me. “So they all climbed in their boats and traveled to deep ocean, where the tsunami crest was minimal as it passed them. Not one Moken was hurt.” Other peoples—who had long forgotten to listen to the birds and watch the dolphins, as well as what to make of how those species behaved—perished. Lindsey is worried that the Moken are being forced to give up their gypsy life at sea and settle on land in Thailand and Burma. Such ecological intelligence can vanish from collective memory within a generation as the forms for passing it on vanish. Lindsey—an anthropologist raised by native healers in Hawaii—told me, “I was taught by my elders that when you go into the forest to pick flowers for making leis or plants for medicine, you only take a few blossoms or leaves from each limb. When you’re done, the forest should look like you had never been there. Today kids often go in with plastic garbage bags and break off branches.” This obliviousness to the systems around us has long puzzled me, particularly as I’ve investigated our collective cluelessness in the face of a threat to our species survival posed by our daily doings. We seem curiously unable to perceive in a way that leads us to prevent the adverse consequences of human systems, such as those for industry or commerce. THE ILLUSION OF UNDERSTANDING

Here was the dilemma and opportunity for a major national retailer: its magazine buyers were reporting that close to 65 percent of all the magazines printed in the United States were never sold. This represented an annual cost of hundreds of millions of dollars to the system, but no one party in the system could change it alone. So the retail chain—among the biggest customers for magazines in the country—got together with a group of publishers and magazine distributors to see what they could do. For the magazine industry, squeezed by the digital media and falling sales, the matter was urgent. For years no one could solve this problem; everyone just shrugged. Now the industry was ready to take a hard look. “There was a huge amount of waste, whether you look at it from the perspective of sheer cost, trees cut, or carbon emitted,” Jib Ellison, CEO of Blu Skye consulting, told me. Ellison, who helped convene the group, added, “We find this in most supply chains: they were built in the nineteenth century with a view toward what can be sold, not with sustainability or reducing waste in mind. When one part of the chain optimizes for itself, it tends to suboptimize the whole.” One of the biggest dilemmas was that advertisers paid according to how many magazines their ads appeared in—not how many were sold. But a magazine “in circulation” might just sit on a shelf for weeks or months, and then be pulped. So publishers had to go back to their advertisers and explain a new basis for charging them. The retail chain analyzed which were its best-selling magazines in what stores. It found, for example, that Roadster might sell well in five markets but not at all in another five. The chain was able to adjust where magazines went by where they were wanted. All in all, the various fixes reduced waste by up to 50 percent. This was not only an environmental plus; it also opened shelf space for other products while saving beleaguered publishers money. Solving such problems takes seeing the systems that are in play. “We look for a systemic problem that no one player can solve—not a person, a government, a company,” Ellison tells me. The first breakthrough in the magazine dilemma was simply getting all these players together—and getting the system into the room.1 “Systems blindness is the main thing we struggle with in our work,” says John Sterman, who holds the Jay W. Forrester chair at MIT’s Sloan School of Management. Forrester, Sterman’s mentor, was a founder of systems theory, and Sterman has been the go-to systems expert at MIT for years, directing MIT’s Systems Dynamics Group. His classic textbook on system thinking applied to organizations and other complex entities makes the fundamental point that what we think of as “side effects” are misnamed. In a system there are no side effects—just effects, anticipated or not. What we see as “side effects” simply reflect our flawed understanding of the system. In a complex system, he observes, cause and effect may be more distant in time and space than we realize. Sterman gives the example of debates over “zero-emission” electric cars.2 They are not, in fact, “zero-emission” within a systems perspective, if they draw their electricity from an energy grid composed largely of polluting coal plants. And even if the power is generated in, say, solar farms, there’s the cost to the planet of the emissions of greenhouse gases in manufacturing the solar panels and the powering of their supply chain.3 One of the worst results of system blindness occurs when leaders implement a strategy to solve a problem—but ignore the pertinent system dynamics. “It’s insidious,” says Sterman. “You get short-term relief, and then the problem comes back, often worse than before.” Traffic jams? The shortsighted solution means building more and wider roads. The new capacity brings short-term relief in congestion. But because it’s now easier to get around, those very roads mean people, stores, and workplaces spread throughout the region. Traffic over the long term increases until the jams and delays are just as bad as, or worse than, before—the traffic keeps growing until it’s so unpleasant to drive that further growth in trips stops. “Feedback loops regulate congestion,” says Sterman. “Anytime you have more capacity for traffic, people take more car trips, move farther away, buy more cars. As people spread out, mass transit loses viability. You’re trapped.” We think we are held up because of that traffic jam, but the jam itself emerges from the dynamics of highway systems. The disconnect between such systems and how we relate to them begins with distortions in our mental models. We blame those other drivers clogging the road but fail to take into account the systems dynamics that put them there. “Much of the time,” Sterman notes, “people attribute what happens to them to events close in time and space, when in reality it’s the result of the dynamics of the larger system within which they are embedded.” The problem gets compounded by what’s called the “illusion of explanatory depth,” where we feel confidence in our understanding of a complex system, but in reality have just superficial knowledge. Try to explain in depth how an electric grid operates or why increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide ups the energy in storms, and the illusory nature of our systems understanding becomes clearer.4 In addition to mismatches of our mental models and the systems they presume to map, there are even more profound predicaments: our perceptual and emotional systems are all but blind to them. The human brain was molded by what helped us and our forerunners survive in the wild, particularly in the Pleistocene geological epoch (roughly from 2 million years ago to about 12,000 years ago, when there was the rise of agriculture). We are finely tuned to a rustling in the leaves that may signal a stalking tiger. But we have no perceptual apparatus that can sense the thinning of the atmosphere’s ozone layer, nor the carcinogens in the particulates we breathe on a smoggy day. Both can eventually be fatal, but our brain has no direct radar for these threats. MAKING THE INVISIBLE PALPABLE

It’s not just perceptual mistuning. If our emotional circuitry (particularly the amygdala, the trigger point for the fight-or-flight response) perceives an immediate threat it will flood us with hormones like cortisol and adrenaline, which ready us to hit or run. But this does not happen if we hear of potential dangers that might emerge in years or centuries to come; the amygdala hardly blinks. The amygdala’s circuitry, concentrated in the middle of the brain, operates automatically, bottom-up. We rely on it to be on the alert for dangers and tell us what we need to pay urgent attention to. But our automatic circuitry, usually so reliable in guiding our attention, have no perceptual apparatus or emotional loading for systems and their dangers. They draw a blank. “It’s easier to override an automatic, bottom-up response with top-down reasoning than it is to deal with the complete absence of a signal,” Columbia University psychologist Elke Weber observes. “But that’s the situation when it comes to dealing with the environment. There’s nothing here in the Hudson Valley on this lovely summer day to tell me the planet is warming.” “Ideally, some of my attention should go there—it’s a long-term danger,” adds Weber, whose work includes advising the National Academy of Sciences on environmental decision-making.5 “But there’s no bottom-up message to pay attention to, nothing that says: ‘Danger over here! Do something,’ so this is much harder to address. We don’t notice what’s not there—and neither mental system alerts us to this. It’s the same with our health or our retirement savings. When we eat some very rich dessert, we don’t get a signal telling us, ‘If you keep this up, you’ll die three years earlier.’ And when you buy that spunky second car, nothing tells you, ‘You will regret this when you are old and destitute.’ ” Dr. Larry, whose mandate includes fighting global warming, puts it this way: “I have to persuade you that there’s an odorless, tasteless, invisible gas that’s gathering in the heavens and capturing the sun’s heat because of what man does in using fossil fuels. It’s a heavy lift. “Actually the most comprehensive, complex science shows this,” he adds. “More than two thousand scientists put together what might be the most elegant coordination of scientific findings in history—the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. They did it to convince people who are not wired for this to realize the dangers. “But unless you live in the Maldives or Bangladesh, it seems far away,” Dr. Larry observes. “The dimension of time is a huge problem—if the pace of global warming were accelerated to a few years instead of over centuries, people would pay more attention. But it’s like the national debt: I’ll leave it to my grandchildren—I’m sure they’ll think of some solution.” As Sterman observes, “Climate change will come over a long time horizon that we can’t see, so it’s hard to convince people. Only the leaf-rustling problems get our attention, not the big ones that will kill us.” At one time, the survival of human groups depended on ecological attunement. Today we have the luxury of living well using artificial aids. Or seem to have the luxury. For the same attitudes that have made us reliant on technology into indifference to the state of the natural world—at our peril. So to meet the challenge of impending system collapse we need what amounts to a prosthesis for the mind.