Diving the Iceberg
" We usually only think about what we can see in front of us. " The immediate, lived experiences of individuals affected by climate change are profound, as are the lived experiences of those experimenting with social change. My fellow explorers and I have been addressing and occasionally guiding this shift for the past 50 years, and sometimes we’re called Sherpas, which means that over the years, even though our role was to stay in the background and cook their breakfasts, we had more actual summit experience than the world’s celebrated alpinists. For every Al Gore there was a Roger Revelle, or several. This past week, I recalled a more fitting analogy that traces back to the emergence of systems theory in the 60s and 70s: icebergs. Return with me now to the thrilling yesteryears of Donella (“Dana” to her friends) Meadows in the halcyon Sixties. After a year of backpacking from England to Sri Lanka and back, young hippy chick Dana became a research fellow at t...
