ENVIRONMENTAL SYSTEMS ANALYSIS
AND CONTROL SEMINAR
Purpose
Systems analysis is about spotting what is common among problems and problem-solving procedures whose appearances on the surface would seem to have nothing in common. Understanding how a building might respond to seismic disturbances would appear to be quite unlike the problem of corroborating or refuting the constituent hypotheses in a mathematical model of an environmental system. Underneath the surface, in abstract and conceptual terms, they may have much in common. Systems analysis is also supposed, par excellence, to be about the conduct of inter-disciplinary thinking. The purpose of this seminar is to demonstrate just one possible style of approaching this ideal. In particular, an important goal will be to encourage discussion of significant, contemporary and essentially open-ended problems currently lacking tidy or elegant solutions.Outline
The format of the seminar is usually that of a discussion group, with each participant taking his/her turn to lead the discussion of an assigned topic/paper. Illustrative of the guises in which the Seminar has been offered in the past are the following:Design #1. A set of readings rotating through the following clusters of themes: (i) The Environment: For Its Sake and Our Sake; (ii) Technology: Life Cycles; Metabolism; Intelligence; and Ecology; (iii) Global Material Cycles and the Sustainable City: Clean Technology and Clean Households; (iv) Resilience and Control in Ecology and Engineering; (v) Land-use Change and Ecological Integrity; (vi) Models, Predictability and the Community's Fears for the Future; (vii) Finding the Generic Among the Specifics.
Design #2. Implementing an inter-disciplinary research project, i.e., shaping while implementing the concept of Adaptive Community Learning on a case study (in an intensively developing watershed, Lake Lanier), with associated readings from the contemporary literature on the subjects and disciplines keyed into the project.
Design #3. A set of readings gathered around the central spine of the book "Natural Capitalism: The Next Industrial Revolution" (Hawken, P, Lovins, A, and Lovins, H).