Also I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the work finally getting the attention it deserves, which is practitioners with backgrounds in traditional ecological knowledge re-examining the ways we look at systems.
And I phrased it so weirdly because I’m still learning it, and haven’t dove into the topic enough to know more than the fact that I still need to listen to others. Anyway- this is the most fascinating part of systems engineering in the western field imo
Environment, Power, and Society by H.T. Odum is my number one favorite book for environmental systems engineering and looks at society through the same lens of power structures built around control of power flow. It’s literally the book that made my brain understand the basis of power and how it’s utilized. It has plenty of citations, and Odum and his colleague William Mitsch have a wealth of papers l, largely related to energy flow in wetland systems, but they worked on some of the foundational writing on the topic. It’s somewhat hard to track down a copy, so if you’re interested, but unable to find info, I’ll try and scan my copy to a pdf. I’ll try and dig up some papers today too if I can.
Oh helllllll yeah. Gonna download that for sure