When “Holistic” Really Means Something

By | December 28, 2008

Tim O’Reilly wrote a post today about Wendell Berry’s “In Distrust of Movements,” about the need to think holistically about our problems, and it inspired a comment, which I thought I’d share here, too. I started it with a line from Tim’s post.

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“. . . that just maybe, we are getting the first signs that our society as a whole (and not just our financial system) is a kind of gigantic Ponzi scheme that will one day run out of room for growth, with disastrous consequences.”

This is a real concern. We’ve been treating the environment as badly as our financial system – indeed, in the end, they ARE one and the same – and so why would we think that the result would be any different?

Yesterday, I read “Cod” (http://snipurl.com/978rf), a little history of “the fish that changed the world.” Cod was so abundant for centuries that you could “scoop them up in baskets.”

It last made a big comeback during WWII because countries were focused on that fight.

But WWII also brought technology – i.e., processing done right on the ship decks, sonar, and “ground fishing” (large nets that pick up everything that lives on the bottom of the ocean) – that, after the war over a few decades, caused the collapse of huge Atlantic cod schools from New England and Canada to Iceland and the UK.

So that’s an example of how new technology put to use for our economy in the pursuit of food didn’t work out so well for the natural environment.

But we could take our pick, couldn’t we?

And now, of course, the fisherman of Gloucester, and their families, and their communities, suffer right along with the Cod, a pretty good proof, I’d say, that when you don’t think holistically you still get holistic results.

It’s just more obvious now, as we hit limits to growth, than it ever has been.

I do believe that current and coming technology will be a big part of the solution, but a big enough crowd of us are going to have to wake-up in order to use that technology to match the need.

And the need is off the charts, so we have a lot of waking-up to do.