How can the world community achieve a shared, new, understanding of the complex, interactive and non-linear nature of the Earth System, against the prevailing, misleading and policy-impeding assumption of a mechanistic ‘Newtonian’ world, amenable to reductionist technical fixes applied in incremental fashion?

Modern societies, and their governments, typically view the natural world in essentially mechanistic fashion — imagining that piecemeal technical solutions can be found for specific aspects of environmental disruption or depletion. Systems thinking and analysis, including an understanding of ecological processes, has not been part of our schooling, culture and world-view. We are thus failing to grasp the potential seriousness of exponential change functions, synergistic stressors, natural limits, critical thresholds and surprises.

Obstacles to achieving such change include the familiar difficulties in ‘re-educating’ existing adult generations, failure of imagination, resistance from those with vested interests in prevailing views/models (including conservative religious and schooling authorities), and the difficulties and diffidences that afflict scientists in their potential public role as communicators and educators. Governments’ (electoral) preoccupation with balancing the budget rather than the biosphere is a natural consequence of the above — and therefore a further major impediment.