Knowing Systems and the Environment 37focusing so attentively on knowing systems ‘out there’ we scientists have come to ignore
the nature, significance and development of the knowing systems by which they can
become known to us all and can be collectively and sustainably managed. We have
also managed to alienate a significant proportion of our fellow citizens through their
perceptions of the epistemic limitations of our own learning systems (though they
would probably not phrase it exactly in those terms) and our unwillingness to either
appreciate or to accommodate other systems of knowing (Leach et al, 2005).
The introduction of the idea of ‘system’ here is deliberate and timely, for the
systems idea will be the cognitive principle around which the arguments that fol-
low, will be organized.
The Systems Idea
It is difficult these days to browse any article or book about the science, manage-
ment or politics of the environment that is free of any explicit reference to ‘systems’
or ‘systemics’ or, at least, implicit embrace of ‘holism’ as an essential perspective.
These range in their scale of reference from expositions of the panarchy theory of
ecosystem organization (Gunderson and Holling, 2002) through the significance of
knowledge systems for sustainable development (Cash et al, 2003) to the character-
istics of emerging sciences themselves as with systems ecology and, most recently
perhaps, in systems biology (Kitano, 2002). The ideas that unite these disparate
endeavours include wholeness, comprehensiveness, interconnectedness, embed-
dedness and emergence.
In this manner, environmental science well exemplifies the claim of Ackoff
(1974) that ‘the systems age’ has come to replace ‘the machine age’ of the industrial
revolution, with holism coming to challenge the previously dominant epistemologies
of ‘reductionism’ and ‘positivism’ of pre-systemic science. As Jackson (2000) has
argued, this new-age dawning is a response to the ‘complexity and turbulence’ that
we are all experiencing in our everyday lives, as well as by the additional confusion
brought by the ‘multiplicity of viewpoints about the direction we should be taking’
and by the multitude of concerns about how we should be handling the difficulties
that we face. The adoption of systems (= systemic) perspectives allows a cognitive
coherence to be brought to bear on our considerations of these circumstances.
All acts of cognition start with a distinction between a thing (or a being or an
entity) and its background or its environment, and each time we explicitly refer to
anything, therefore we specify ‘a criterion of distinction’ which indicates what we
are talking about (Maturana and Varela, 1987). Cognition thus depends on our
abilities to distinguish between an ‘it’ and the ‘other’. In its simplest formulation
then, the systems idea makes the distinction between the system as a coherent
bounded entity (the ‘it’) and the environment (the ‘other’) from which it can be
distinguished, but with which is structurally coupled through recurrent interac-
tions between the two (Maturana and Varela, 1987). Therefore the unit of interest