Introduction

A story of the globe

The first propositions that we live on a round spherical object trace back to ancient Greek philosophers, Eratosthenes, Pythagoras, and Aristotle. However, the first full-disk photographs of our Planet Earth were taken by US astronauts in the 1960s. At the time, the spherical shape of our world was already a well-established scientific fact, yet these powerful images of a globe surrounded by emptiness projected a new turning point for humankind. They were manifestations of global thinking – despite any differences in our social identities, we are all part of the same ecosystem, and the boundaries around us are more meaningful than the boundaries among us.

Around the same time period, a new cross-disciplinary scientific approach, general systems theory was coming together, which implied “a basic reorientation in scientific thinking” (Bertalanffy L. General Systems Theory, p. 5). In 1967, one of the founders of the general systems theory, prominent Austrian biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy, in his book “Robots, Men, and Minds: Psychology in the Modern World,” wrote that

“We are seeking another basic outlook: the world as an organization. This would profoundly change categories of our thinking and influence our practical attitudes. We must envision the biosphere as a whole with mutually reinforcing or mutually destructive inter-dependencies.”

Ecosystem

The term ecosystem was coined earlier in the 20th century by British botanist Arthur Tensley. As a botanist, Tensley focused on the exchanges between various organisms and their local environments. However, in the second half of the 20th century, technological breakthroughs, visual images of our isolated globe in the dark space, and the new systems approach forged a novel push for global thinking. In his book, “A vast machine: Computer Models, climate data and Politics of global warming,” Paul Edwards wrote that by 1969 environmentalist David Bower, allegedly for the first time, brought the famous slogan “Think globally, act locally” into environmental context. Edwards writes that thinking globally “meant grasping the planet as a dynamic system: intricately interconnected, articulated, evolving, but ultimately fragile and vulnerable” (page 2).

According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, ecosystem means “the complex of a community of organisms and its environment functioning as an ecological unit,” whereas ecological originates from the Greek oikos, which means “home, place to live.” While there is a complex nature of exchanges between our planet and the upper limits of the atmosphere, our macrohabitat is a closed ecosystem. Scientists at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), in their blog post “Systems Thinking About the Earth System”, write that the Earth is mostly a closed system, “other than some particles entering Earth’s Atmosphere (meteors) and a few atoms (mainly hydrogen) entering and leaving the top of the Atmosphere in relatively small amounts (with the exception of major impact events occurring every 100 million years or so).”

Climate Change

Systems thinking is an instructive approach for understanding and addressing the complex and interconnected nature of climate change. It enables us to recognize that climate change is not an isolated issue but rather a result of intricate interactions between human activities, natural processes, and socio-economic systems. By adopting a holistic perspective, systems thinking encourages us to identify the root causes and feedback loops that contribute to climate change and its diverse impacts on societies economies and our unified ecosystem.