The Interconnectedness of Sustainability & Seeing the Big Picture

Last week, in The Day it Began to Click , I told the story of what I realized the day that I put aside my assumptions and observed all that can be accomplished when teams with a goal work together across departments, in recognition of the importance of interconnectedness when trying to accomplish a goal. You may recall that I originally planned another topic (Climate Strange- trailer ) for this week, but when i sat down to write it, quickly realized that the topic may be lost on some without some sort of preface or explanation of where we are going with this newsletter. So in this post, i'm going to attempt to explain where I am coming from.

but first...

Welcome back to another week of Sustainable Communities Newsletter , where I share personal discoveries, ideas and projects related to community sustainability in a somewhat nontypical fashion.

Communities are systems within systems within a system (Earth). Everything effects everything else. There are observable changes happening right this moment in one system causing changes in other systems that we may not be aware of. Any system as a whole is just a sum of the parts -which at times we tend to confuse with the whole. Some systems are just parts for other systems which are parts for other systems. If we try to 'fix' a problem of any single part without considering the possible outcomes and results in other parts of the whole system, we not only miss seeing the big picture, we may not be seeing anything at all...sometimes just unconnected little pictures- unable to draw the connection- unable to see in all directions, including the future.

My land surveyor friends out there know all too well the horror of discovering 'adjustments' made to a job site, by someone lacking experience or without apparent understanding of the full picture. Or similarly spending days staking a construction lot, only to show up and find a bulldozer has knocked them all out of place. In this situation, we have systems working against one another. It exposes a lot of missed opportunities and lack of cohesion. It shows weakness within the system that is not necessarily operating in harmony. As previously discussed in Surveyors, Sustainability, Society and Social Satisfaction , if you look at the problems that surveying and sustainability share, you'd think they are related. The public knows very little if anything about what they do or why they are both necessary and important. In my opinion, this is not sustainable.

But what about systems which exist that work so well together that it isn't immediately apparent how they can be connected? Let's consider a wild example. Suppose I tell you that food waste in Arizona could both theoretically and practically electrify a small village in Uganda. Huh? It's entirely doable if you have a steady supply for food waste and can somehow get a boat of batteries to Africa. Wait a minute...what?

It's doable. And although this may be considered an extreme example (and might better be applied locally, where the food is collected), the notion that changes in one system can have an effect on another (even across the planet) should not be too much of a stretch of the imagination. If food waste is converted into a renewable energy, any community can experience less waste to landfill, a nutrient rich fertilizer, less carbon emissions, portable non-combustable fuel for cooking In other words, one man's output is another man's input, when we approach systems of sustainability in this manner. It is a system and systems have lifecycles.

Systems within Systems within Systems - Energy Possibilities with Garbage

The process (if you dare):?Consider all organic matter contains trapped sunlight, which can be accessed in the form of methane once the matter has been broken down, releasing the gas.?First, build a bio-digestor for your community and feed it food waste.?Next, you can gather the food waste from your community. Add the organic matter to the bio-digestor and let the anaerobic bacteria break it down to release methane.?Capture the methane in a bag then feed the gas through a generator to create and store the energy in batteries.?It's not rocket science but please do not allow my oversimplification of the process distract you from recognizing the complexity of this type of system.?It takes coordination, cooperation and patience for trial and error. My good friend and colleague Dr. TH Culhane has made biogas production and education his life's work and I encourage anyone who wants to learn more about the energy possibilities of garbage , learn more about the Food Energy Water (FEW) Nexus and to look into his amazing work at the Rosebud Continuum . Much of my inspiration for this post can be attributed to Dr. Culhane and all that he has taught me over the years. Here is an example of one of his brilliant explanations regarding the wonders of biogas...

Seeing the Big Picture

When you see the following image, do you think Chaos or Order?

I'm here to tell you that it is both and so much more. The chaos in my view would be the absence of the data required to generate this visualization of connectivity shared between nodes. So if you took away the order of this networked graph (the big picture) you are left with either chaos or many unconnected little mutually exclusive pieces. The little pieces are of course, systems in and of themselves. Think of them like a water management system and a waste management system, an energy system, transportation, cultural heritage, habitat protection, plastic reduction, disaster preparedness, seafood sustainability and more... For many, this may just look like a bunch of dots and lines, but when you consider what it actually represents, the picture should become clearer.

So, if we can agree that every community on the planet has a need to monitor water, waste, energy, food, transportation, clean marinas, etc., then we can agree that each of these systems are not detached nor mutually exclusive from one another and as such, changes in one can effect others. In other words, each system of sustainability is born from a chaos system and therefore has a sensitive dependence on initial conditions - ie those conditions which bind the systems together and those indicators which exist in multiple systems simultaneously. Small differences in the initial conditions, however small, are persistently magnified because of the dynamics of the system.

Since Covid (chaos system)19 broke out, isolation gave me a lot of extra time to work on my project with the Blue Community which is now in its 76th version. What i've been developing a holistic assessment system for collecting data across 20 systems establishing metrics for measuring and tracking sustainability efforts over time, while presenting the goals and progress for stakeholders in a transparent manner.

So in closing, no matter where you are in the world, your community is a system of systems which are all so interconnected and interdependent upon one another that is important to have a dedicated team in charge of collecting and assessing the most current data across many systems. Only when that data is broken out of silos and communicated can it become actionable. Cooperation and collaboration across all sectors is the key. Accountability and transparency is the path. Trust from stakeholders is the goal. If we are able to get all of these systems in sync, only then will we be in position to do more towards tackling the mountain of issues related to climate change, poverty, ocean acidification, or simply giving our communities the type of attention they deserve.

Thank you so much for taking a moment from your day to absorb another chapter in this unfolding story.. There will be much more about this entire system of systems in future newsletters so be sure to subscribe and while you are here, check out a few cool tools and resources to try below. See you next week!

I want to know all about your community and some of the sustainability best practices that are working in your area of the planet. I hope you will share them with me below in the comments or reach out. Also, from this issue forward, I plan to feature a community at the beginning of every issue with Cool Tools at the bottom so feel free to comment with this phrase [The name of my community is _________ and we share _____ with one another. Together, we make ___ better.] followed by a link and who knows.... you might be featured.

Do you have a website or blog that you wish had more traffic? Try RSS Ground

RSS Ground is my favorite go-to tool for getting content out into the world. If your website generates an RSS feed, you can pump new content into all of your social network profiles with the tools provided by RSS Ground. I use it for jobs boards, communities, forums, etc. You can even sync your social profiles on various platforms so that content shows up in more than one place. My favorite use of the tool is creating self- updating widgets that can be embedded into any website. They even have a RSS Reader which works in tandem with your widgets and feeds. See the boatload of tools they offer here .

Mapping the American Power Grid -(source )

Last month Rice University's Baker Institute for Public Policy released a new interactive map which provides America's energy infrastructure. The?Energy, Environment and Policy ?map shows the locations of the country's critical energy facilities.

For Surveyors and Geospatial Types

Next month will be 15 year anniversary for Land Surveyors United - a community that I built for land surveyors in attempts to unify and harmonize the oldest profession known to man to the best of my ability while providing tools and resources which bring surveyors together. For fun.. experiment converting our #Smarketplace mall into a 3D mall directory Check it out here: https://landsurveyorsunited.github.io/cssfiles/3D/directory.html…

The whole Smarketplace here: https://smarketplace.org