Leverage Points

http://www.math.nyu.edu/~crorres/Archimedes/Lever/LeverIntro.html

As some of you may know I am currently taking my permaculture design certification course. As part of the course pre-work, we were asked to read "Leverage Points, Places to Intervene in a system" by Donella Meadows. Meadows wrote this article in response to things she heard while attending a conference on the new world trade system. A system by the way, which should scare the pants off you. It is a meaty article but well worth the read.  I have excerpt a few bits here that I felt summarize the heart of the issue.  

"There was this subdivision of identical houses, the story goes, except that for some reason the electric meter in some of the houses was installed in the basement and in others it was installed in the front hall, where the residents could see it constantly, going round faster or slower as they used more or less electricity. With no other change, with identical prices, electricity consumption was 30 percent lower in the houses where the meter was in the front hall...

A more recent example is the Toxic Release Inventory — the U.S. government’s requirement, instituted in 1986, that every factory releasing hazardous air pollutants report those emissions publicly every year. Suddenly every community could find out precisely what was coming out of the smokestacks in town. There was no law against those emissions, no fines, no determination of “safe” levels, just information. But by 1990 emissions dropped 40 percent. They’ve continued to go down since, not so much because of citizen outrage as because of corporate shame. One chemical company that found itself on the Top Ten Polluters list reduced its emissions by 90 percent, just to “get off that list.”

Both of these examples demonstrate the power of information feedback. We live in what has been called the "information age". Let's take advantage of the power that information gives us in order to affect positive change. What are some ways that we can establish information feedback loops in our own lives? Are there information feedback loops missing from our neighborhoods, communities and schools that could help improve how those institutions relate to each other and to the environment?

Meadows goes on to say,  "Missing feedback is one of the most common causes of system malfunction. Adding or restoring information can be a powerful intervention, usually much easier and cheaper than rebuilding physical infrastructure...It’s important that the missing feedback be restored to the right place and in compelling form. To take another tragedy of the commons, it’s not enough to inform all the users of an aquifer that the groundwater level is dropping. That could initiate a race to the bottom. It would be more effective to set a water price that rises steeply as the pumping rate begins to exceed the recharge rate. Compelling feedback... Suppose any town or company that puts a water intake pipe in a river had to put it immediately DOWNSTREAM from its own outflow pipe. Suppose any public or private official who made the decision to invest in a nuclear power plant got the waste from that plant stored on his/her lawn. Suppose (this is an old one) the politicians who declare war were required to spend that war in the front lines."

And here's the rub: "There is a systematic tendency on the part of human beings to avoid accountability for their own decisions. That’s why there are so many missing feedback loops — and why this kind of leverage point is so often popular with the masses, unpopular with the powers that be, and effective, if you can get the powers that be to permit it to happen (or go around them and make it happen anyway)."

And here we come to the crux of the issue. The rules of the system, the strength of those rules,  who defines them and how they impact our lives and environment.   

 "The rules of the system define its scope, its boundaries, its degrees of freedom. Thou shalt not kill. Everyone has the right of free speech... If you get caught robbing a bank, you go to jail. Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in the USSR and opened information flows (glasnost) and changed the economic rules (perestroika), and look what happened. Constitutions are the strongest examples of social rules. Physical laws such as the second law of thermodynamics are absolute rules, whether we understand them or not or like them or not. Laws, punishments, incentives, and informal social agreements are progressively weaker rules.
To demonstrate the power of rules, I like to ask my students to imagine different ones for a college. Suppose the students graded the teachers, or each other. Suppose there were no degrees: you come to college when you want to learn something, and you leave when you’ve learned it. Suppose tenure were awarded to professors according to their ability to solve real-world problems, rather than to publish academic papers. Suppose a class got graded as a group, instead of as individuals.
As we try to imagine restructured rules like that and what our behavior would be under them, we come to understand the power of rules. They are high leverage points. Power over the rules is real power. That’s why lobbyists congregate when Congress writes laws, and why the Supreme Court, which interprets and delineates the Constitution — the rules for writing the rules — has even more power than Congress. If you want to understand the deepest malfunctions of systems, pay attention to the rules, and to who has power over them.
That’s why my systems intuition was sending off alarm bells as the new world trade system was explained to me. It is a system with rules designed by corporations, run by corporations, for the benefit of corporations. Its rules exclude almost any feedback from any other sector of society. Most of its meetings are closed even to the press (no information flow, no feedback). It forces nations into positive loops “racing to the bottom,” competing with each other to weaken environmental and social safeguards in order to attract corporate investment. It’s a recipe for unleashing “success to the successful” loops, until they generate enormous accumulations of power and huge centralized planning systems that will destroy themselves, just as the Soviet Union destroyed itself, and for similar systemic reasons.

Sadly, I believe, many of us feel powerless in the face of these rules.  I want you to remember that we are not powerless. One person can make a difference. Many people can make a great difference. It is clear that the rules need to change. It is clear that the time for change is NOW.