Following is the lesson from this week's class in Armed Conflict and the Environment. I will make the same offer to you, my enormous audience of global faithful weblog followers, that I made to the class. If you guys do the two-page exercise described here, I'll get you credited as a contributor to the book. So rock the hell on, all!!!!!!!!!!!!
A Field Guide to the Week’s Lesson
Systems: Past and Present. And…?
A “system” is “a group of interacting, interrelated, or interdependent elements forming a complex whole” [1]. If you say it fast and don’t think deep, it sounds compact and profound. Not much to argue with. In fact, it sounds a whole hell of a lot like “a”, if not “the”, truth.
From my perspective, the concept is, for starters, something of a tautology. If things interact (and often we don’t define “interact” in any useful or applicable way), they’re in our system. Vice versa, they’re not. I’m not sure we’ve learned a whole hell of a lot in getting to that point. Extraplanetary String Theory physicists and the hair-wired biota of the planet from the movie Avatar are all are cranking away in the same academic field of investigation.
However. The fact that I can manufacture arcane intellectual impediments is, to me anyway, more of an opportunity than anything else. Because it suggests we have our hands on a tool that we can use to shovel more stuff in more directions than come immediately to mind.
Let’s start with an obvious one. In the first 50 years of the twentieth century, we developed the technology to identify, compile, and apply the vast amounts of energy otherwise minding its own business at the submolecular borders of space and time in the physical universe. On December 2, 1942, in the chilly concrete hallway under Stagg Field at the University of Chicago, Enrico Fermi sat with a slide rule (a SLIDE RULE!) and told the physicists how to adjust the cadmium rods to keep the pile of carbon and uranium from slipping into a neutron-generating heap of radioactive goo. When the pile achieved critical mass and was doubling neutron production every two minutes, they shut it down.
Now turn your mind back to earlier lessons where we discussed industrially important chemicals like DDT and PCBs. We needed these, lots of these, to do everything from keeping planes in the air to malaria out of mosquito salivary glands. And some of these chemicals—DDT is a good example—are tractably friendly. We can extract them from the environment, purify them, quantify them, and so figure out what the hell they were doing in the interim.
But not all chemicals are like that. Many of the most important chemicals of life itself aren’t that easy. They exist in tiny amounts for tiny moments of time, and they are so enormously complicated that it is the work of more than one chemists career to even figure out what the hell they are. And then they hand the whole file to biologists and toxicologists to now have to put it in the context of the zillions of other chemicals kicking around in cells, organisms, the ecosphere.
In other words, if you give me just a century to play with, here’s what happened:
• Charles Darwin figured out that chemicals and climates mattered to life and could be used to categorize life in meaningful ways
• Albert Einstein realized that chemical matter and climate energy were not different things
• Taxonomists realized that how “meaningful” something was depended on which of Charles Darwin’s categories you put things in and why you put them there
• Eugene P. and Howard T. Odum realized that not only COULD we track chemicals from organism to organism and environment to environment, but that we absolutely needed to if we were to survive as a species [for those of you I can already hear complaining about Rachel Carson not getting a bullet here, I offer in my defense a) Carson had very specific issues in mind and without the Odums was unlikely to go anywhere, and b) this is MY list. See the last paragraph of this essay and the Field Guide to the week’s lesson for how you are going to fix that!]
You can make a rational case for systems analysis—the ability to “do” systems analysis, to solve problems via systems analytic methodologies—as the bright line separating humanity from…well, from everything else. On the other hand, it is clear from the essay above that what we define as a “system” and how we treat its components—and, in fact, why we decided we needed to conceptualize a system in the first place—means this “tool” can yield a loose cannon—oh, say, a high megetonnage fusion warhead—as readily as an eternally benign source of technological power.
OK. Those of you who are willing are about to become part of an experiment and contributing authors to a publication. The exercise played out in the essay above is one I have used in different ways for many different purposes.
This week, I propose to give you NO reading assignments or suggestions. I would like you to take one sheet of paper and title it “Nanotechnology Systems”. On that paper, now start listing ideas, concepts, things, materials, thoughts, anything and everything that comes to your mind regarding “nanotechnology”. Please then for each item on your list which is now a series of one- or-two sentence bullet points regarding each nanotechnology “thing”, write the word “good” or “bad”, then describe in as few words as possible WHY that particular nanotechnology “thing” is “good” or “bad”. Do no be afraid to include the same concept on both the “good” and the “bad” list.
Now take a second sheet of paper. I must warn you that at this point when I have done this as both a classroom and an online exercise, this is the precise moment when catch hell from students. Because what I want you to do now is title your second sheet of paper “Nanotechnology Systems and Armed Conflict”. And then repeat the precise exercise you just completed with sheet one. At this point the students rise up as one to complain about redundancy, stupidity (I encourage the most open and informal communication in my classes) and time wastancy (which, do not not bother to look it up, is not a word).
But I make them go through this exercise with as much intellectual honesty and rigor as I can get them to muster at that point (their hormones tend to be a little out of balance about now). And do you know what? The lists are never the same. And we all—the students as well as me—learn a lot from this exercise.
If you will turn your sheets in to Anina by the middle of next week, I’ll go through them and provide you with detailed comments back and we can discuss. If it works out and you guys like the outcome, I’d like to use the exercise as a chapter in the book I’m working on which will hopefully be useful for future editions of this class. If so, you will each be credited as a contributor and we’ll discuss it in detail. Thanks, and have fun!
Anybody out there with a little time and a little interest, surf on over to
http://endoftheworldpartdeux.blogspot.com/
http://docviper.livejournal.com/
http://sustainablebiospheredotnet.blogspot.com/
http://theresaturtleinmysoup.blogspot.com/
Thanks!
Notes
[1] American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Third Edition, 1992, Houghton Mifflin Company.
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