How to be a Slime Mold: Sneak Peek into System Studies

This post was modified from the original article published on February 11th, 2016 on Sustainable by Design, a blog exploring sustainability and environmental issues through the lens of design.

John Thackara sees things differently. Wise from his years in the design community and publishing industry, Thackara – the storyteller, the philosopher, and the designer – is all about systems thinking.

In simple (and probably oversimplified) terms, systems thinking is the idea of interconnectedness between resources and stakeholders, the environment and the people. Our problems today exist at the systems level, which is big, multi-disciplinary, and messy.

Yellow slime mold can teach us a thing or two about systems thinking. Source: Norbert Hulsmann/Flickr. 

 “Is it too big to change?” Thackara posed the question to the audience of aspiring sustainability citizens in a tone of careful optimism.

In his talk, titled “How to Be a Slime Mold”, Thackara sheds light on his vision of a scalable solution that starts small, and that leverages the complexity of systems. Like a slime mold spreading its spores, his talk and his latest book “How to Thrive in the Next Economy” are parts of his effort to raise awareness of systems design to the next generation of changemakers and entrepreneurs. One of the key ideas that struck a chord was that the forces of growth and sustainability oppose each other. The drive to grow corporations and create monetary value for shareholders fly in the face of sustaining the health of our natural systems through the considerate use of resources.

Sustainability vs. Capitalism

To illustrate, he brought up the example of IKEA, a company that profits from ever-increasing consumption from over 700 million visits to 360 stores in 47 countries in 2014. Considering that, in the same year, IKEA made over $32 billion in sales, it is not difficult to imagine the pressure on natural resources such as wood and petrochemicals (for plastics) - both of which can, and will, eventually be depleted without proper care. Luckily, IKEA’s sustainability chief recognizes that the Western world may have hit ‘peak home furnishings’, a realization that prompted a move towards a more circular model for IKEA and encouraging customers to 'repair and recycle’. Although they were aiming to double sales by 2020, they may be abandoning their plans, citing the move as ‘too aggressive’.

Belgium customers are invited to recycle their catalogues for IKEA's cushion stuffing. Source: Dezeen

If successful, I believe IKEA could be a role model for businesses everywhere to uphold environmental stewardship to realize long-term gains for shareholders. But for now, we are stuck in a complex system where institutions and individuals still view the world through a linearly polarized lens. The tragedy of the commons is yet another example from his talk, where we collectively over-consume shared resources for personal benefits (Donella Meadows’ Thinking in Systems has an excellent section on the tragedy of the commons and possible mitigation methods). 

A Bioregional Approach

One solution Thackara proposed is to enact ‘bioregions’ that tie ecological to societal health. According to the Curriculum for the Bioregion Initiative, bioregions are ‘interrelated natural and social systems upon which we rely for our well-being’; for example, cities, in Thackara’s view, ‘do not exist separately from the land they are built on, and the resources that feed them’. In basic terms, defining bioregions help us reimagine growth as a function of a system’s health – our resources’ carrying capacity – instead of pure economic gains for individuals.

Are bioregions our solution to messy, system-level problems? Photo by Paricha Duangtaweesub

Take the agricultural industry, where food commons have evolved into a bioregional solution to providing access to affordable food while maintaining long-term health of the land. In his piece Food As A Commons for The Design Observer Group, Thackara showcased an aptly named organization called The Food Commons which aims to provide fresh food to ‘Fresno’s 500,000 poorest citizens’. It is ironic that 45 percent of farmworkers in Fresno County – the ‘country’s most productive agricultural region’ – is food insecure. Large-scale farming activities, while seemingly necessary to feed the growing population, turn out to be rather harmful for the workers and local environment.

The Food Commons links the well-being of local communities and the environment. Source: The Food Commons 

Instead of following the footsteps of corporate farming, if you will, The Food Commons has created a regional food system that is financed, owned, and managed by the local community – thus ensuring accessibility for all, and profitability while keeping sustainability on the table. Because the health of the land directly correlates with its ability to produce and sustain production in the long-term, the local community only benefits from practicing ecologically friendly solutions to farming. In other words, bioregional approaches like a food commons offer a shared common ground between benefits to the individuals and preservation of the environment. I encourage you to explore The Food Commons and their philosophy further on their website.

As a thinker of design, we’re reminded to curiously peer into the corners of our everyday lives, and once in a while zoom out to observe our complex, interconnected system that is our Spaceship Earth. But for those aspiring actors of system practices amongst us, the question that hangs in the air is: Where? Where do we intervene? Where would our work make the necessary impact to set us on a path of sustainability? It’s an open-ended query that, perhaps, we can only solve when we stop thinking and start acting.

 Amongst many other hats, John Thackara is a writer, speaker, thought leader and Director of Doors of Perception, an organization that promotes systems thinking and communes people from all walks of life on this idea for a sustainable future. He gave his talk “How to Be a Slime Mold” at Stanford University d.school on February 4th, on which this commentary is based. Written by Paricha Duangtaweesub, edited by Kaitlyn Menghini and posted on Sustainable by Design under the title "How to Be a Slime Mold": Sneak Peek into System Studies.