ABSTRACT

This chapter outlines a vision of progress and sustainability encapsulated by a process approach to reality as elucidated by Heraclitus and bolstered by contemporary scientific understanding around irreducible complexity and ineliminable uncertainty. It seeks to demonstrate that a process-informed approach to progress and sustainability is required, one encapsulating a transdisciplinary approach and ethos, as a prerequisite for addressing issues emanating from an unsustainable societal construct. Popular conceptions of sustainability typically envisage it in terms of competing or overlapping requirements of respective economic, social and ecological domains. Dominant models and conceptions of sustainability emanate from and cohere with the dominant societal paradigm. Robert Ulanowicz, a systems ecologist with a background in chemical engineering has developed a quantitative model for ecological networks. This model represents a radical departure from the tradition of ecosystems modelling based on simulation. While Ulanowicz's quantitative model has been developed for and successfully applied to systems ecology, it carries far broader resonance.