As I stoke the boilers here at Beyond this Brief Anomaly after another (much) longer-than-anticipated intermission, it’s worth checking in on what this project has been all about to date. In a nutshell: I’ve attempted to make some modest in-roads into improving how we make sense of energy-related concepts, given the central role that I see for these in coordinating social action as we seek ways of living well together in the face of the increasingly urgent socio-ecological dilemmas confronting humanity. And in doing this, I’m drawing on principles from the field of inquiry known as systems thinking, or simply systems. If I were to try capturing what this means in essence, it would be along the lines of “considering the situations in which we’re interested as comprehensively as we’re able, by paying attention to their encompassing contexts.” The approach I’m taking extends this question of context to include considerations around cognition, language and meaning. Put simply, this implies treating the energy-related concepts that the inquiry deals with as sense-making “tools” and “artefacts” constructed by us. As such, they constitute important and influential parts of our shared culture. With them and through them, we bring our circumstances into being. What this implies is that the quality and coherence of our conceptual spaces “in here” affects the nature of our physical, social, economic, political etc. conditions “out there”. Attending to this “interior dimension” can have profound implications for the quality of the worlds that we bring about through the actions we engage in together. Continue reading →