Economic Growth and Sustainability: Systems Thinking for a Complex World
The Rotary Club of China Lake is proud to be hosting Dr. Karen Higgins as the speaker at our lunch meeting next week. Dr. Karen Higgins has written a book that was inspired by her grandkids. She realizes that they will inherit the world and they will have to deal with the consequences of choices today. She has read a lot of literature on specific problems and used system theory to tie them all together. And the result was her second published book, "Economic Growth and Sustainability: Systems Thinking for a Complex World," that was released in November. Her goal is that the book will help build a conversation and get us to work together to create a more sustainable, interconnected planet.
Club members will remember that Dr. Karen Higgins was the Executive Director of Naval Air Warfare Center Weapons Division prior to her retirement. Dr. Higgins looked at various resources and the impact they have on each other. She examined the individual elements of national economies, economic growth, the global economy, population, pollution, fuel consumption and many more and tied them together with system theory. Dr. Higgins was interviewed about her new book In a January 2015 article in the Daily Independent. According to the article, "Higgins applied systems thinking to the problems of the world. 'Systems thinking theory says that if you draw a map or a diagram you can find places where there's leverage, where little actions have big results and that's what I'm looking for,' she said. 'So I tried to put together a map that sort of expresses that big picture look so that you can actually find little points at which you can make a difference,' she said. Higgins said her book contains data substantiating 'why things are tied together, and then at the end I made suggestions about what could we do, both as individuals and as collectives.'”