It is that magical moment we live for: an unwieldy, unyielding data set is transformed into an image on the screen, and suddenly the user can perceive an unexpected pattern. As visualization designers we have witnessed and experienced many of those wondrous sparks. But in recent years, we have become acutely aware that the visualizations and the sparks they generate, take on new value in a social setting. Visualization is a catalyst for discussion and collective insight about data.

Try this for a fun introduction: http://manyeyes.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/visualizations/tragically-hip-wordle

The prompt: We wish to engage the intelligence, the passion, and the leadership of America’s young people to help restore and protect our physical wold. We especially seek projects that can help build the next generation of conservation leaders by engaging young people in protecting and conserving our natural world. We are looking for practical solutions. We will give preference to submissions that demonstrate how you would implement your idea and what its impact may be. We hope to build leaders. Presentation counts, too.
Submissions can offer an innovative vision, outline a creative new program, or propose a new twist on an old model of conservation.

Uncharacteristically, when I sat down to write, most of it just came spilling out.  It proposes a class on global civics with an emphasis on dialogue, systems thinking, and environmental awareness.  I had a higher opinion of Teach for America than I have now, and I gave my high school more credit than it really deserved, but otherwise I’m surprised how much I still agree with what I said.  I touched up a few minor things (like a typo in the title *smack*), but all the meaning – and most of the awkward phrasing – still stands.  I may go back to add hyperlinks later, since I now have that power.

Without further ado:

The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the

same level of thinking we were at when we created them

-Albert Einstein

It takes a child to raise a village. The opposite may also be true, but if a society is going to move forward it is the children who will make the change. As we grow up, we adapt to our environment and make do with what we have. When we become comfortable in our familiar ways, it becomes harder to break out of habit and do something new, even when we know it is for the best. Thankfully, the children from whom we borrow this earth are not bound by our limitations of imagination. They will be bound, however, to the state of the world we leave to them. We must give future generations a better education in caring for the systems which sustain us than was given to us by our parents.  In doing so, we must humbly recognize that our own ways of thinking are flawed. Within our current paradigm children are dying of hunger and malnutrition. Natural systems that we depend on like pollination by the honeybee are breaking down. Dangerous chemicals lay siege to our bodies through the food we eat, the water we drink, the air we breathe, and the products we buy. Thes, and many other serious problems get misconstrued and covered up in our political and civil debates which are dominated by narrow minded special interests. The scope of the problem we face today is greater than any humanity has ever had to face, and I do not say this merely to be dramatic. We now face the terrifying possibilities of global food shortages, natural disasters which turn thousands of people into refugees, and weapons which can cast a shadow over hundreds of miles and hundreds of generations. Something has to change.

Observers of human nature from the philosopher Socrates to the psychologist Abraham Maslow have said that evil is the result of ignorance more than malice, and I am inclined to agree. If our enemy is ignorance, then our weapon must be wisdom. If our solution is knowledge, then who must we educate? Business people, politicians, factory workers, children, adults, students, teachers, leaders, people who care about the environment and people who do not; in short: everyone. We need everyone to understand why it is so important to work with one another and with nature, not against it and each other. This is not just an environmental issue, or a political or economic or social issue, or a private or a public issue, or a religious or a secular issue. This is a human issue and we all have a stake in the outcome. If people are going to behave responsibly we need a community in which people want to do the right thing, where the right thing is the norm, and not the exception.

In order to pass on a valuable education we must allow the creative input of the younger generation to guide itself. In a sense, we must step out of the way to allow the whole of our efforts to be more than the sum of its parts. I propose a course on global civics: an education in what it means to be a citizen of the natural world, the political world, the economic world, and the world of information. We must learn to live in a world based on many layers of interacting human systems, sustained in turn by natural ones. Course units should be broken down along thematic lines, but each unit should relate to the other units and therefore to the greater theme of interconnected systems. The first unit would have to be an introduction to civil discussion: a lesson in expressing, and listening, to the many sides of an issue; and then finding some common ground even where people genuinely disagree. Later units should follow themes such as commerce, politics, and the environment, and take cues from local, state, national, and global levels.  Each unit should critically look at the issues, the major players, and the different perspectives. Contemporary issues should be addressed, but it is important not to lose an historical perspective as the situations we now find ourselves in cannot be divorced from the history which brought us to them.

Why did the chemical companies fight so hard against Rachel Carson’s critique of  DDT? What stake did the companies, the politicians, the media, and Carson herself have in the issue? Were they moral, economic, political? How do we know? What role did the production of ethanol as a fuel play in prohibition? Can it be written off as a clear answer either way? Why have so many fuel efficient vehicles come and gone? Was their disappearance malicious or due to other conditions like safety, or cost, or maybe just aesthetics? When scientists say smoking poses no threat to health, should we look for ulterior motives? What if they support the theory of global warming? If a scientist who has supported eugenics in the past now promotes genetic engineering, is there a link worth investigating? Historical topics such as these can be used to put current events into perspective, but students also need to be reminded of the pitfalls of perspective. Even now, the issue of media conglomeration being rushed by the FCC is getting very little media attention – why is that? Are people really not interested, or is there something to be covered up? The only perspective we get is what media corporations want to tell us about their own inner workings. All of these are big, important questions, yet they are hardly ever brought up in the context of their discrete parts. Students today are not introduced to these subjects until much later, if at all, and are almost never shown the relationship of one to another. I am sure this idea will meet criticism that the students are not ready to deal with this level of thinking. I refute it thusly:

I will give an example of how I have been taught to think about the interrelatedness of things. In my high school we had a series of classes called Integrated Science. These were for students who had not ‘moved on’ to a specialized field of study.  Their goal was to integrate the different sciences into a larger understanding of scientific exploration. Instead of doing a disservice to the various branches of science by covering each more briefly than it deserved, it turned this different approach into a strength. The philosophy behind the class was to take a phenomenon and show how different branches of science each saw it. What does fire look like to a physicist? Physics sees fire as the redistribution of electrons in a system, which continues in a chain reaction until the source material is used up. What does it look like to a chemist? In chemistry, fire is the extra energy released as a byproduct of the rapid exothermic reaction, called oxidation, of a fuel. What about a biologist? Fire isn’t alive, so what is a biologist doing looking at fire? Well like an organism, fire consumes, excretes, breathes, and reproduces. So is fire alive? Well, no, but that doesn’t make it a useless question to ask. So who is correct: the physicist, the chemist, the biologist? Are they even looking at the same thing? How much do we have to know before we can safely say that we really understand fire? Does that point come before or after we can control and use it? At first this was a difficult concept to grasp, but over the semester the theme of the course became clear, and I believe most students left the class with a better understanding of how and why science works the way it does. Students asked to rise to a challenge will do so, I have seen it happen and I have done it myself. And if we can show them that they can rise to any challenge they face, we will have a whole generation of leaders ready to tackle even the most daunting of challenges – exactly the sort of challenges we find ourselves facing today.

Teaching things in a dramatically different way is never guaranteed to work. The ‘New Math’ revolution of the 1960’s is proof of that. To succeed, this class would require a teacher of high caliber and enthusiasm. However; the “problem” of securing such a teacher actually provides another level on which this program can succeed. Organizations like Teach for America are sending out top college graduates into low income communities to try and close the education gap where skills like reading and math are concerned. High achieving and energetic teachers like these would also provide an ideal corps to teach students of all abilities how to live with an awareness of the complex and delicate world we live in. I use Teach for America just as an example, since they already have their hands full with another important job. What we should use from their example is the concept of closing the loop on education by bringing people who have benefited most out of the education system back into the system, and using their energy and experience to foster that same enthusiasm in younger generations. If this sort of program were adopted by the federal government, it could also provide necessary funding as well as a  way for the best and brightest to give back to their communities, and serve their country in some other capacity than joining the military. We are then training not just one generation of leaders, but two generations simultaneously. It has been said that the best way to learn something is to teach it, and if this is the case, then the teachers who spend a few years inspiring the younger students are also learning to better navigate and affect this complicated world themselves.

Learning to understand the systems in which we live is not, and cannot be limited solely to the interaction between a student and a teacher. The ‘tabula raza’ theory, which says that knowledge passes from teacher to student like a photocopy was disproved long ago. Yet much of our educational structure still operates under that notion. Instead we must use our understanding of how knowledge grows in a student, influenced by experience and guided by many role models. With public education already stretched thin, and teachers being asked for more and more while barely making a living wage, I think it is high time we began tapping into the resources at our disposal. The influence of a role model is a powerful and under appreciated force. Younger students almost always look up to their elder peers, for better or worse. Bringing students back into the fold early on as teachers helps in many different ways. The elder students are forced to come to a better understanding of the subject they are trying to pass along. The younger students may be more inclined to listen and to learn what a peer has to say. Students would have a chance to become leaders early on, and begin to understand that they do not sit in school simply to be handed an education, but to be part of a whole group learning together. When students understand that they are part of a whole which depends on the success of the parts, and they benefit from the improvement of those around them, it will not be a big step to relate this to how we treat our environment, or our neighboring countries, or our business partners. If we are to foster ideals of leadership and responsibility, we need a majority who will vote for those leaders and fight for these values. If everyone is given access to a decent education we will have a solid base from which to grow.

Once these ideas and ideals are fostered in enough young people, it will start a chain reaction. A tipping point will be reached where it becomes part of the general discourse, and everyone will begin to think about the effects their actions have on different systems without even making a conscious effort. Small actions like recycling, researching political candidates, and conscientious shopping will emerge naturally out of the new paradigm as common sense instead of being retrofitted as an afterthought. There is no limit to the total impact this can have, and no way to fully predict it.

When thinking in terms of whole systems, many problems seem to solve themselves.  Architect William McDonough does not try to eliminate waste in his designs. That is impossible. Instead he sees that waste for one is food for another and the whole concept of waste goes away. “When I’m working on a problem, I never think about beauty. I think only how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.” Is beauty the same as truth? I can’t say for certain, but like the Socratic idea of evil, I can’t help but agree here with R. Buckminster Fuller.

What future generations will understand, and we must learn today, is that every action creates ripples of repercussions, both good and bad, through the many systems of the world. Contemporary understandings of the world are still divided into discrete fields of research with their own limited scopes, and these fields only communicate with one another when absolutely necessary. However reality does not color neatly within the academic lines that we draw; it was there first and will draw as it pleases. If we think of the world as made up of disconnected units, then our only understanding of a problem is limited to the immediate visible effects. As great a thing as recycling, or minimum wage, or campaign finance reform, or anti-discrimination laws, or renewable energy initiatives can be – and I do think each is vital – without a context to put them in, they become like a patchwork bandage on a wound which has cut us to the bone. If we are to treat the wound, heal, and move forward, we must see how everything is interconnected.

Imagine a lunchroom where children ask for the healthy, local, organic produce because they understand the difference that it makes for their health. Imagine a corporation that designs with the whole lifecycle of their products in mind because they understand that they are accountable to more than just their shareholders. Imagine a nation proud to produce all the basic necessities for their people instead of being reduced to stealing it from a neighbor or going hungry. Imagine a generation of world leaders whose instinctual reaction to conflict is not to head for the war room, but to sit down with all parties and evaluate the situation and the options. I do not presume to be able to solve these problems, and I do not claim to be able to cure all the ills of the world.  I do believe, however, that if we are to survive long in a complicated global society with billions of people and growing energy and food demands, then we will need world leaders who can think at a higher level than we currently work with today.

In the world of ideas, disagreement is more common, more involved, and almost always more interesting than agreement.  The key is to recognize that disagreement is a process, not a game of winners and losers.  The goal is understanding.  The ‘winners’ are those who can engage best with a new idea and reconcile it with their own map of the world – then share that with others. This is the holy grail of politics as I understand it: raising the level of debate.  This is community in action.  People shaping destiny.  Ok, maybe that’s getting a little optimistic, but how about this: if someone’s comment makes enough of an impression for you to respond, why not reckon with what made the comment interesting in the first place.  You have the chance of getting an honest reply, and maybe gaining a new perspective on your view or someone else’s.  So in the hopes of encouraging honest dialogue, I would like to propose a few rules of engagement:

1.  Appreciate that someone expresses their thoughts in the hope of better understanding.  They might do so in an awkward or insensitive way sometimes (I know I do), but nothing is ever gained by attacking the person  …except perhaps a quick ‘your mom’ joke.

2.  Make an effort to understand what a person is really saying or asking before responding.  This might mean looking through an irritating tone, or a defensive attitude.  Strive for clarity before judgment.  If you start pulling apart someones fundamental idea, you have forced them into a far tighter corner than if you question their sexual orientation.

3. Recognize that people have fundamentally different views.  Here is the rub.  If any argument can bring to light the basic issues about which people disagree, we have found something worth knowing.  If a civilized discussion can be had about abortion, or gay rights, or white privilege, or the military, or religion, or political-economic system, or any of the other fences that shape our ideological landscape, then perhaps there is hope for moving past them.

4. If you break these rules, you suck.  (There is often more truth in humor than we like to admit.)

Tinker