As we are all aware, we are living in astonishing times. The pace of change, for better or worse, seems to be ever increasing. Advances and the potential for advances seem to be presenting themselves daily, as do disasters and the potential for disasters.  One of the glaring hallmarks of recent ecological and economic disasters is the failure to recognize that our actions, either individual or collective, do not occur in a vacuum. It is impossible to isolate actions from the systems within which they are undertaken. As Chief Seattle is credited with saying "All things are connected like the blood that unites us all. Man did not weave the web of life; he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself." As we have seen, a relative handful of people making bad trades of credit default swaps has disastrous consequences to the economic systems of the whole world. The blowout of a single regulator valve on a drilling platform can cause ecologic disasters that last generations. We are constantly seeing proof -- large and small, local and global -- that all of our planetary systems are intertwined. The worldview based on separation has reached the limits of workability.

Nicholas A. Christakis, social scientist and physician, points out "for the last few centuries, the Cartesian project in science has been attempting to break matter down into ever smaller bits, in the pursuit of understanding. And this works, to some extent... but putting things back together in order to understand them is harder, and typically comes later in the development of a scientist or in the development of science." The universe, however, is holistic -- that is, it is a whole, and its functioning cannot be fully understood just in terms of its component parts.  Human systems -- biological, technological, economic, environmental, social -- must be understood to be relational. Holding a collective worldview of relatedness, of holism, presents the increased need for synergy as we strive to resolve the challenges that face the world today. When a worldview of relatedness is held, that change provides the fertile soil from which synergy arises. The term synergy comes from the Greek word synergia meaning working together to create something greater than the sum of the parts.  It is time to focus upon thinking and asking questions in a more synergetic mode.

For example, let us explore the problem of planetary sustainability in the future using a synergetic approach. We will view three key elements of that problem involving energy, the environment, and economics. These elements tend to be addressed separately. However, as Einstein famously said, "problems cannot be solved at the same level of thinking at which they were created." Observe these two drawings.