Science is humanity’s way of discovering truth. And yet science is increasingly in the crosshairs of populist governments. DR HUGH HUNT reports on the launch of the International Science Council (ISC) to see if their mission to protect truth will prosper
KARIN NANSEN, chair of Friends of the Earth International, argues that a complete change to the economic system is necessary if we are ever to confront and transcend the environmental, climatic and social crises upon us
Systems thinking - and in particular game theory - can provide startling new insights into how and why liberal economics is leading to a fatal depletion of ecological landscapes. It can also provide 'an alternative pathway', writes DR ROBERT BIEL
Systems will decide our fate. How the system of capitalism continues to interact with natural systems - and whether this will cause irreversible change to the climate system - will determine the history of humanity. So can 'systems thinking' transform the way journalists understand and report this world of systems? BRENDAN MONTAGUE, editor of The Ecologist, argues it can and must
'Ecoliteracy' is urgent and necessary if we are going to build resilient and sustainable human communities that work with the patterns, structures and limitations of the natural environment. FRITJOF CAPRA, a physicist, argues that systems thinking is a crucial component of this new understanding
Adam Smith, the author of The Wealth of Nations, is sometimes credited as the first political economist and many of his followers today advocate free market, laissez-faire, policy. Here Dr ROBERT BIEL argues that Smith was also an early systems theorist - but also sets out why Smith's theory and the system he described are a threat to our ecology
The aim of the Resurgence Trust - owner and publisher of The Ecologist - is to change people's worldview so we can live in harmony with each other and with nature. Here NATALIE BENNETT, former Green party leader, explains why this aim is so vital today
Capitalism casts nature as a resource which is to be exploited, squeezed and discarded. This is in part because of a linear, reductive understanding of the world. But there is an alternative. Dialectical, systems thinking views nature and society through the lens of complexity, contradiction and phase transitions. DR ROBERT BIEL investigates
NICK BREEZE, co-founder of the Cambridge Climate Lecture Series, responds to Dr Robert Biel's article on systems theory to discuss climate change and the failure of one generation and the agency of the next
The Ecologist was an early adopter of systems theory after its launch in 1971. The way of thinking has come to influence a range of disciplines, from ecology to change management. In the first in a series of articles on systems theory, Dr ROBERT BIEL argues that its application can be effective in healing the rift between society and nature
