Introduction: Tackling the Environmental Challenges of the 21st Century
Lesson 2: Additional Resources
Resources for Systems Analysis & Mapping:
- Whole Systems Design: Introduction to Life Cycle Thinking offers some practical examples of how this approach is used in designing interventions
- Resilience Thinking (Review here, Introduction here)
- A Leverage Points Perspective on Sustainability
- Conservation Standards is a Systems Thinking framework used within the conservation field
- Guides for mapping systems:
- Miradi is an adaptive management software built for the conservation field; it allows you to create systems and situation diagrams.
- Further reading on Causal Loops:
- Causal Loop Construction: The Basics
- Feedback Loops: How Nature Gets its Rhythms
- Fishery Causal Loop Diagrams: provides an in-depth example in fisheries.
Resources that explore the overlap between Systems Change & Environmental Justice:
- Wicked conflict: Using wicked problem thinking for holistic management of conservation conflict
- In Chile, Indigenous Management of Coastal Areas Improves Marine Conservation: a real world example of environmental justice in action and successful Indigenous conservation
- A spatial overview of the global importance of Indigenous lands for conservation: This article highlights the vast amount of remaining biodiversity within Indigenous lands and emphasizes the importance of including and centering Indigenous communities in this work.
- Greening the Ghetto: Majora Carter speaks to her environmental justice efforts in the South Bronx
- “Pollution is segregated” says the father of Environmental Justice: Robert Bullard speaks about the creation of an environmental equity framework and his work since the 1970s
- The Economic Injustice of Plastic
- The 17 principles of EJ laid out at the 1991 People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit
- Cornered by Protected Areas: A collection of case studies detailing the injustices and other impacts of Fortress Conservation, wherein people are excluded from areas to protect the natural resources, even if they’ve always been there.
Community-based monitoring resources:
- From hope to crisis and back again? A critical history of the global CBNRM narrative.
- Adaptive Management and Social Learning in Collaborative and Community-Based Monitoring: a Study of Five Community-Based Forestry Organizations in the Western USA
Lesson 2: Extra Resources for Educators
- Systems Change Education has a number of resources for educators, such as the Impact Gaps Canvas. There are also great activities available in The Climate Change Playbook: 22 Systems Thinking Games for More Effective Communication about Climate Change.
- Alternate teaching materials:
- A more complex example of systems change gone wrong: Palm Oil Was Supposed to Help Save the Planet. Instead It Unleashed a Catastrophe. For more advanced students (e.g. upper-level graduate), this is a nuanced case which could be analyzed in lieu of the more straightforward examples in the slides. It underscores the importance of understanding the thresholds and uncertainty in systems through a “green” intervention gone horribly wrong.
- Alternate options for the role play include:
- This collection of Environmental Justice Case Studies
- The recent Environmental Justice failure in Flint.
- This activity around land use in Tambopata, Peru
- As a simpler alternative to the Iceberg Model, the 5 Why’s Activity helps students practice digging beyond the superficial, for shorter classes or less experienced audiences.
- Soure: Social-ecological traps hinder rural development in Southwestern Madagascar is a more complex example of Causal Loops in conservation. For advanced students, this could be a pre-reading with an in-depth conversation about leverage points for intervention.