1. Systemic view transforms grave problems into vast opportunities
When problems (both those large, global or wicked ones related to the environment, economy, poverty or war, and the most mundane personal ones such as being too busy to... or not having enough money to...) are seen as related to systems (institutions, professions...) that either produce them or fail to solve them, then the problems turn into opportunities — for not only solutions, but indeed for systemic, and hence sweeping and lasting and growing improvement, of all facets of our condition. This view—of a sweeping change in politics, economy, religion, academic work... as a natural next stage in our evolution— is absorbing and shocking, and moving. Its federation (this word is explained below) is the theme of a large and separate field of action, described in its own executive summary.
We offer here only this tiny taste bit: Within the issue that is sometimes named ‘sustainability,’ the focus shifts radically—from trying to make diseased or even deceased systems solve the problems they themselves have created, to making those systems halthy and alive (capable of performing and evolving as it suits the health of the larger social organs and organism). Ethics and (its academic derivative) epistemology change as a result of this insight— to design epistemology, characterized by the kind of reasonableness one manifests when stopping the car one is driving to change a wheel that has a flat tire.