--- id: articles/bogucki-incrementalism-complexity about: label: >- The green movement's incrementalism is not just ecologically inadequate. It is scientifically wrong. description: >- Wlodek Bogucki's LinkedIn essay arguing that green programmes treat complex, threshold-prone systems as if they were merely complicated engineering problems. tags: - complexity - systems thinking - leverage points - wicked problems - tipping points - governance article: url: >- https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/green-movements-incrementalism-just-ecologically-wrong-wlodek-bogucki-eldue/ published: '2026-10-24' publisher: LinkedIn authors: - Wlodek Bogucki domains: - climate - ecology provenance: origin: agent sources: - title: >- The Green Movement's Incrementalism Is Not Just Ecologically Inadequate. It Is Scientifically Wrong. - Wlodek Bogucki, LinkedIn url: >- https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/green-movements-incrementalism-just-ecologically-wrong-wlodek-bogucki-eldue/ - title: >- Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System - The Donella Meadows Project url: >- https://donellameadows.org/archives/leverage-points-places-to-intervene-in-a-system/ - title: >- Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning - Rittel and Webber, Policy Sciences 4 (1973), 155-169 url: >- https://archive.epa.gov/reg3esd1/data/web/pdf/rittel%2bwebber%2bdilemmas%2bgeneral_theory_of_planning.pdf - title: 'Amazon Tipping Point - Lovejoy and Nobre, Science Advances, 2018' url: 'https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5821491/' created: '2026-10-24' reviewed: '2026-10-24' reviewed_by: 'Claude, from the sources listed' status: draft --- Bogucki argues that small, scattered environmental projects fail on method as well as scale. They treat complex problems as if they were complicated ones.[^1] A complicated problem has many parts, but it can be defined, designed for and checked against the design. A hospital, a bridge and a moon rocket are his examples.[^1] A complex system such as a climate or an economy behaves differently, he says. Cause and effect show up only in hindsight, and the parts adapt to each intervention.[^1] He counts climate destabilisation, biodiversity collapse, soil degradation, ocean acidification and freshwater depletion as complex problems.[^1] Such systems have emergent behaviour: it comes from how the parts interact, not from the parts. So, he says, many correct small actions will not add up to the outcome wanted.[^1] The feature he dwells on is the threshold. A system can look stable over a wide range of conditions, then shift suddenly and for good once a line is crossed.[^1] His example is the Amazon, which he says makes about half of its own rainfall. Clearing forest cuts that rainfall and stresses the forest that remains.[^1] The loop ends in savannification, the forest turning to degraded grassland, and past the threshold the fixes that once worked no longer do.[^1] Thomas Lovejoy and Carlos Nobre give the same half in a 2018 editorial. They trace it to Eneas Salati's measurements of oxygen isotopes in rainwater across the basin.[^4] They add that the first model of the question put the [tipping point](/terms/tipping-points/) at about 40 percent deforestation.[^4] For where to act, he turns to Donella Meadows and her leverage points. These are places in a system where a small shift produces large changes.[^2] He says she published twelve of them in 1999, ranked from weakest to strongest.[^1] Her list starts with constants and parameters and ends with the power to transcend paradigms.[^2] Bogucki reads most environmental programmes as sitting at the weak end. Planting trees, cutting emissions and protecting hectares adjust stocks and flows.[^1] The strong end, as he puts it, is the information, rules, goals and paradigms that govern a system.[^1] He calls a mandatory charge on ecological damage in every transaction high leverage. A voluntary biodiversity credit scheme he calls low.[^1] Meadows herself puts taxes and subsidies among the parameters at the bottom of her list, though pollution taxes that internalise costs appear higher, as a way of strengthening negative feedback loops. Incentives she puts under the rules of the system, higher still.[^2] Her book [Thinking in Systems](/media/thinking-in-systems/) covers the same ground at length. He also draws on Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber's 1973 paper, which separated tame problems from wicked ones.[^1] In his summary, a wicked problem has no definitive formulation, no stopping rule and no test of correctness. Every attempted solution has consequences that become part of the problem.[^1] The paper itself gives at least ten properties of wicked problems.[^3] Its tame examples are solving an equation, analysing an unknown compound and a chess mate in five moves.[^3] Rittel and Webber wrote about public policy, such as where to put a freeway or how to set a tax rate.[^3] Bogucki applies the term to climate change, biodiversity collapse and the food system.[^1] He ends with four properties he says the current approach lacks.[^1] The first is to change the architecture of a system, its rules and incentives, not its flows.[^1] The second is to run many different experiments at once. System-level feedback then decides which to grow and which to drop. Scattered projects, he says, lack that feedback.[^1] The third is to monitor how a system behaves: its feedback loops, its distance from a threshold, its direction. Single numbers such as hectares protected are not enough.[^1] The fourth is to aim for resilience, keeping diversity and redundancy, over efficiency.[^1] He notes that Jay Forrester's system dynamics dates to the 1950s. [The Limits to Growth](/media/the-limits-to-growth/) used it in 1972.[^1] Two of those four properties describe what a model of a place can do. Tracking feedback loops and the distance to a threshold, not one indicator at a time, is the work of a running simulation of a watershed or a forest. Comparing many local experiments needs one shared model of the whole system to set their results side by side.