World Migratory Bird Day

October 12, 2024

October 12th is, if you believe it, World Migratory Bird Day. If you’ve been reading Dave’s blogs for a while, you’ll know birds are an occasional source of inspiration. It’s got us all thinking here at the Cynefin Co. about the role of complexity thinking in our relationship with the natural world.

Now of course, we are primarily concerned with human beings. After all, our thing is anthro-complexity and the 3 things that characterise humans: identity, intelligence, intention (with a couple more contenders, like ideology and imagination.)

I caused a fair bit of consternation among some of the team when I suggested that perhaps we need to revisit whether humans and non-human animals are as different as we thought and gasp whether perhaps we need to extend some rights previously limited to humans to the natural world.

Now what started this perhaps fairly radical train of thought – I’m thinking of a much loved colleague accusing me of going ‘bonkers’ – was an article I read several years ago while studying environmental law on the successful campaign to get the UN to protect the right to drinking water.

Well what could be wrong with that? Well as Neimanis pointed out, there is no corresponding requirement to protect bodies of water themselves. Take for example a company that leaks sewage into the waterways, an all-too topical example for the Brits reading. The law is currently so anthropocentric that, while for example a company can be a legal ‘person’, the bodies of water themselves have no independent standing at all. They may be somebody’s property, somebody may be able to prove the damage to water extends to them (no mean feat in a court of law) but the idea that it deserves protection itself independently of infringement of property rights and human rights? Still not a reality. The closest we get is piecemeal environmental regulations that fail to address the huge imbalance created by treating a company as a being with rights ( a legal ‘person’) while a body of water is not.

Now you may be thinking, what does this have to do with World Migratory Bird day? Well if you don’t like streams of consciousness then I’m afraid you’re in the wrong place! I see complexity and our methods increasingly in terms of re-ordering our ways of patterning the world and our place within it and in particular, through a process of decomposing and recomposing our thoughts, to make unconscious assumptions conscious.

I’ll ask you to consider these two quotes which for me sum up what anthro-complexity adds to the “debate” (ugh!) on climate change:

“It matters what stories tell stories, it matters what thoughts think thoughts”
-Donna Haraway

“Every question conditions its possible answers”
-Raimon Panikkar

Now when it comes to climate protection and habitat protection I don’t think we’ve been asking the right questions. I think in part it’s because we’re not conscious of what stories tell our stories. At least in the mainstream in the West, human development has always been pitted against the taming and the control of the natural world. Human advancement can coexist with environmental destruction. Human advancement requires the destruction of what is wild. It’s the story that tells our stories, it makes us ask questions that condition our answers. “Sustainable development” we say in response to the now under-developed state of so many habitats for the non-human. Under-developed doesn’t quite do it justice. Truly alarming, more like.

Not everyone might know about our climate change programme but we have built up a steady caseload since 2019. The programme was pioneered by Dave Snowden and was further developed by my colleague Anna Pangioutou. The climate programme very often works on the human/nature intersection, exploring questions such as people’s relationship with the natural environment that surrounds them. Our work has included looking at intersectional inequalities among marginalised farmers feeling the impact of climate change, and how people perceive our changing agrifood systems. One of our publicly available pieces is a project by National Parks UK ran a piece on human relationship to green spaces. If you’re interested in what the results of a project might look like, you can take a look at the interactive dashboard and their story wall.

Well seriously, what does this have to do with World Migratory Bird day? In our work we are confronted again and again with the realisation that, just like those birds, we are part of a complex web that we absolutely depend on – we cannot rise above it, and we disturb it to our peril. Our neglect of their habitats, and the ways in which they are struggling, are indicative of both our own biases and our own impending jeopardy. Our collaborations with indigenous communities remind us that some cultures have stories that emphasise interconnectivity of people and land in ways Western mainstream thinking has not. So much of our work is around epistemic justice (fairness when collecting knowledge). Our work and collaborations aim to broaden horizons beyond the powerful and to re-capture what is already known, especially by those who have been silenced. (See the indigenous yarns series, the final episode is particularly pertinent). Today is another time to reflect on what we do and don’t think of as worthy of consideration.

Please, next time you see a flock of birds in formation, remember they helped inspire our thinking on anthro-complexity – not to mention the entire field of complexity science. We hope you raise awareness of the World Migratory Bird Day 2024 campaign and support our climate change programme where you can. Time for complexity thinking to pay it forward to the natural world.

With thanks to Anna Panagiotou for her contributions and Dave Snowden for his review. All views author’s own.

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About the Cynefin Company

The Cynefin Company (formerly known as Cognitive Edge) was founded in 2005 by Dave Snowden. We believe in praxis and focus on building methods, tools and capability that apply the wisdom from Complex Adaptive Systems theory and other scientific disciplines in social systems. We are the world leader in developing management approaches (in society, government and industry) that empower organisations to absorb uncertainty, detect weak signals to enable sense-making in complex systems, act on the rich data, create resilience and, ultimately, thrive in a complex world.
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Cognitive Edge Ltd. & Cognitive Edge Pte. trading as The Cynefin Company and The Cynefin Centre.

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