I'm catching up on my Science reading this morning, reading a beautiful article about Predators in Urban areas. It's a review of research and stories of large predators living in urban areas and expanding their natural ranges - Coyotes, Cougars, Wolves, Bears in the Western States.
This is a trend I am happy to see play out and I had a gut intuition of it several years when I started seeing Coyotes at midnight on my Hollywood streets. A few years ago, I heard coyotes howling in Griffith Park, once I saw a pack of 5 juvenile coyotes in broad daylight!! More recently, there's a cougar living in the Hollywood Hills.
Much of this article reviews methods to deal with wild animal population and ranchers/livestock. It's a typical systems perspective. I was especially interested to read how a rise in cougar related complaints occurred after a rise in hunting cougars (net death increase). This is a typical output of a problem we try to solve in a system we do not understand. What happened was the deaths were of mature/adult cougars which increased the adolescent male cougar population to fill their places. These adolescent male cougars were more likely to kill livestock and female cougar's kittens (to replace w/ their own offspring) which caused the females to move into areas they did not usually populate.
We wouldn't know the systems view without this experience. I think we can have more foresight and understanding from a systems perspective - which will help us stabilize systems like this more effectively and sustainably. To do this, one must not take one perspective as the "correct" one. It is dangerous to make decisions from one view in a system - this often has drastic unintended consequences.
This is why it is important to understand and take into consideration all perspectives at the table - even if one disagrees and judges one view to be "wrong."
This kind of thinking is something I have trained myself in for 3+ years. It has exponentially expanded my ability to hold space for possibilities in my mind. The methods I use are Spiral Dynamics (as a development level thinking) and Systems Thinking (Draper Kauffman was my amazing systems teacher). This view has also evolved from my own personal ideology - a taoist view shifting from one polar view along the spectrum to another. As much as I can, I hold the space to believe "there is no wrong perspective."
This is where I am coming from when I say things like, The Future of Money is abundant for bankers and others with the explicit goal of making money and/or having power and equally as well as people striving for a more sustainable, triple bottom line life experience. Neither of these worldviews are wrong. They co-exist. While it may be the goal of one worldview to eradicate or convert another worldview, that is not at all what I am trying to do.
My goal is to create/assist in creating/improve the abundance for groups/individuals/communities - regardless of their measurement stick (getting out of poverty, entrepreneurship, gaining power and wealth, living sustainably and in harmony).
And this is what I will show in The Future of Money TV Series. How, regardless of what you use to measure success, you will find more of it in the future. But don't expect the world to stay the same. There's no reason to be afraid, it's changing in amazing and wonderful ways.
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