It is in this space of mastery over paradigms that people throw off addictions, live in constant joy, bring down empires, get locked up or burned at the stake or crucified or shot, and have impacts that last for millennia.

Glaciers are almost gone from Glacier National Park

Since the Earth is finite, and we will have to stop expanding sometime, should we do it before or after nature's diversity is gone?

A system is a set of things people, cells, molecules, or whatever interconnected in such a way that they produce their own pattern of behavior over time... The system, to a large extent, causes its own behavior.

There are no separate systems. The world is a continuum. Where to draw a boundary around a system depends on the purpose of the discussion.

No one can define or measure justice, democracy, security, freedom, truth, or love. No one can define or measure any value. But if no one speaks up for them, if systems aren’t designed to produce them, if we don’t speak about them and point toward their presence or absence, they will cease to exist.

The world is a complex, interconnected, finite, ecological - social - psychological - economic system. We treat it as if it were not, as if it were divisible, separable, simple, and infinite. Our persistent, intractable global problems arise directly from this mismatch.