Emily Cunningham

You measure a fever and then you take some ibuprofen. You are hungry so you eat. The room is cool and you close a window.

What we need, what we so very badly need, is to actually respond to the gap with corrective actions.

Systems cannot operate for long without balancing feedback loops, at least not healthy ones. A thermostat that doesn't turn on the furnace when the room cools is...broken. A pancreas that doesn't release insulin in response to a rise in blood glucose is an indication of illness.

When a performer doesn't read the room and adjust her performance we say she falls flat. When a government doesn't respond to the will of the people, we say it is a failed state.

All of those broken, non-responsive, out-of -relationship systems feel like pretty good metaphors, to me, for our planetary moment. The level of awareness in the CNN article relative to the level of action at significant scale, it's just such a tragic mismatch.

Some of the balancing loops we've relied on for the past few hundred years in western societies - democracy, the free press - haven't been up the challenge so far, corrupted by vested interests that push against any balancing loop we might muster up.

Systems are adaptive of course and new beautiful waves of balancing action are arising. #climatestrikes and #GND enthusiasm and blockades of fossil infrastructure and voter registration and new media channels of the people and by the people. Artists, calling us to action.

Most of you, participants in one, or many, such efforts probably don't think of yourselves as part of a giant, planetary scale balancing loop, but, to me with my #systemsthinking hat on, that's what you are, and I find it beautiful.