Global Systems Literacy
Global systems literacy refers to an understanding of the drivers behind current and historic global patterns and trends having the greatest influence on the structures of everyday life. Life on Earth is sustained by a network of highly complex, nonlinear systems.
The more we come to understand these systems and how we interact with them in space and time, the more proficient we become at anticipating trends and developing life supporting technologies that nurture and enhance nature’s regenerative systems and avoid unintended consequences like resource depletion, waste and pollution.
“World Society’s awareness and understanding of the problems accompanying these changes has not, however, kept pace with the changes themselves. The world's literacy regarding its major problems is still relatively inadequate. Historically accustomed to geographical remoteness and comparatively isolated autonomy, man still tends to think in these terms. His attention is most easily focused on local tensions and upheavals which are in themselves the surface manifestations of the larger problems rather than prime causes. Literacy regarding world problems lies initially with the understanding of their global nature, and with their underlying prime causes rather than local surface events.”
R. Buckminster Fuller | Design Science Decade | Document 4 | The Ten Year Program | 1963
“We face, thus, a crisis of global knowledge. Globalization is straining not only economic and environmental systems but also the basic American educational structures, from preschool to postdoc. We cannot understand what globalization entails if we lack fundamental knowledge of the globe on which it is played out. The ways in which the world was taught were never adequate; today they are dismally dysfunctional…Yet globalization is such a compelling topic that some form of coordinated inquiry is desirable.”
Global Ignorance | Martin W. Lewis | Geographical Review, Vol. 90 | No. 4 (Oct., 2000)
In just a few generations, man's world has shrunk from a vast planet, whose surface was still incompletely known and whose people were relatively remote strangers to one another, to a continuous neighborhood, in which no man is more than a few hours distance from all other men and on which communication between men may be instantaneous.
“Wartime needs put in motion a spectacularly broad effort to collect information about places that were considered unknowable.” The military was smart enough to realize it not only didn’t have all the answers, it didn’t even know what the questions were. So it turned to a broad array of civilian experts. “Academics who had traipsed across the world’s deserts to look for new species and adventurers who had spent months riding sledges in the Arctic,” we are told, “all found wartime homes in the research centers that were created to account for the unfamiliar.”
Col. Simon B. Buckner Jr., the head of the Alaska Defense Command, had similar questions about fighting and flying in extreme cold. According to Ms. Heefner, Buckner surveyed “trappers, dog-sled drivers, old settlers from the gold rush days, guides, prospectors, itinerant doctors, outfitters and members of the Interior Department’s Bureau of Native Arts and Crafts.” Puzzlingly, he didn’t consult Alaska Natives, who likely had “the most pronounced Arctic expertise.”
- ‘Sand, Snow, and Stardust’ Review: The Battlefield Fights Back
Earth's sloshing molten core generates electrical currents
The currents power Earth's field magentic field.
The magnetic field protects the Earth from harmful solar winds.
The moon's gravitational pull is the major force behind Earth's tides.
Global warming can increase the severity of storms and high tides.