Foreword

This work was completed very briefly in a few weeks time, in late November of 2001, between other manuscripts on Natural Systems  and Cosmology, and constituted the first organized effort on my part to formulate a working model of a meta-systems framework. It was begun as the first effort on my part to formulate in a systematic manner an applied general systems framework that would be truly comprehensive in scope. It was written as a research proposal to a foreign university, and it was directly antecedent and anticipatory to a later set of research proposals I wrote to the Nasa Institute of Advanced Concepts in the early Spring of the following year, during which I crystallized the model and framework of the applied meta-system and formulated its long-term mission for alternative global development. I see this set of documents as an interesting and formative step in the development of a cohesive set of ideas that was a long time in germination, and this set represents an intermediate step in this developmental process.

This set of documents is also interesting for another reason. Reading back through them, editing them and adding to them, rearranging them for web-presentation, I realize that they are fairly stand-alone in their central conception of a global meta-systems approach. The inherent problem of integration and articulation of applied systems, especially alternative systems that have no precedent, was a theoretical and methodological insight and intellectual challenge that extended logically from the development of natural systems theory and meta-systems science. The general outline had been grasped in an intuitive manner, but without a sense of the detail that comes with first-hand familiarity with things. Anything that is new in the world is formulated in the same inchoate manner.

Since that time, I have become familiar with the publications of Ludwig von Bertalanffy on General Systems, and this body of work has provided a theoretical frame of reference for reformulating and the reconceptualization in a clearer manner many of the ideas that were first hashed in this set of writings. I have subsequently pursue the framework of the meta-system in a number of different directions, yet never quite to completion as it is the kind of open-ended problem set where one thing leads to many others. But it has been productive, and has lead to a hitherto unexplored part of the forest of knowledge.

Of late, I have decided to render this work into a central prospectus for the framework of alternative development that I have been attempting to promulgate through my web-system and to articulate in terms of my business involvements. I have therefore decided to revise this document substantively in order to render it a central statement about the problem of alternative development, and the question of applied meta-systems, as this centrally concerns the question of human adaptation on earth.

With the Worldwide Web, we live now in a global information economy--the fail to grasp this central point is to fail to learn our lessons from both the past and the future. It is becoming increasingly imperative that we are able to adopt alternative systems of design and adaptation on earth, that we are tardy and inappropriate in our contemporary responses, upon largely any collective level or even upon many individual levels. People need to be brought together at all levels, and from all areas, to work together to accomplish the kinds of frameworks that are needed to improve humankind's situation on earth, and to improve the relationship of the global environment to human systems.

The problem represented by this work, and by my efforts of the last five years, has centrally been the problem of global, systems-wide, comprehensive integration of human knowledge and action. Without such integration, action lacks the coordination and efforts undertaken in separate quarters in an uncoordinated way may risk overall, long-term failure due to lack of integration or inappropriate integration.