"I learned recently of a project by SEED to “End poverty one person at a time”—and thought, oh my… why did they ever think that poverty could be anything less than communal, cross-cultural, international, trans-contextual? Millions went into that project, and it was a disaster, of course.
"None of what we are faced with can be tackled in isolation. I am learning from the work I have been doing with Warm Data about the nature of interdependency. I have found that culture, society, economy industry are inextricably saturated into one another. Working with parts and wholes is not so useful in this case. Zooming in and zooming out is insufficient, we have to do both at once. I think of the systemic combining as a kind of broth, instead of linked pieces. The difference is akin to the contrast between that which is interconnected, and that which is interdependent. Interconnected things can be taken apart and fiddled with, fixed and replaced. Interdependency requires another sort of approach. You cannot take the salt out of the broth, or the grapes out of the wine."
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Despite her protestations to the contrary, Nora Bateson quite poetically discusses the pressing need to understand interdependency when addressing the most difficult and complex problems faced by humanity. She quotes a proverb from Haida Gawaii, "Everything depends on everything else," which is reminiscent of what Carl Sagan had to say about our world and its systems, "If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe." In a very real sense, we are all one.