Sowing
and Tending Seeds of Change in a Field of Stone
This
paper reviews our experience using visual system dynamics-based scenarios to
invite, encourage, and support community dialogue about how Western Lake
Michigan’s Door County, Wisconsin might cope with its experience of the
intense development pressures confronting accessible and attractive communities
everywhere. Recent efforts reported here seek to adapt or develop
workable and cost-effective approaches to limiting and mitigating culturally,
ecologically and economically degrading impacts on a community challenged by a
worrisome combination of attractiveness, accessibility, and ecological
fragility. The paper outlines our experience with a continuing process of
pragmatic, and sometimes clumsy, use of dialogue, system dynamics modeling and
state-of-the art spatial visualization tools to encourage and support community
planning. This preliminary report
on the evolving experience is offered both as perspective for other community
applications and to lend intriguing context for advancement and application of
methods and tools to further the, still under-supported, community application
of systems modeling.
The
paper was presented at The 19th
International Conference of The System Dynamics Society, Atlanta, GA, July
23-27, 2001 and is available below and from http://www.albany.edu/cpr/sds/sdconf2001/index.html
and was also presented on request at the International
Association of Great Lakes Research Conference: Great Lakes Science: Making
it Relevant Green Bay, WI, June 10-14, 2001
This landsat image of Western Lake Michigan's Door County,
Wisconsin as seen from space demonstrates the spatial visualization capability
provided by our partnerships with the Prescott College NASA program. This
imaging capacity in conjunction with the scenario spinning capacity of system
dynamic modeling are the principal tools we use to seed community dialogue about
the County's future.
The
document is linked below in two formats: the original Word 2000 document and a
web page.