Howard Silverman

I work with the tools of systems, scenarios, resilience, and design thinking and practice.

For many years, I was senior writer and analyst at Portland, Oregon-based Ecotrust, where my projects included SectionZ, Salmon Nation, Vivid Picture, Resilience and Transformation, and People and Place. I led the development of publications large and small, for dozens of partners and clients, in a wide range of media. And I thought about social change, with “environmental outcomes” and “ecosystem services” as ultimate metrics of success.

Along the way, I gained experience in food systems, fisheries and forestry, climate and energy, green building, and restorative finance. I learned about approaches to spatial planning, market design, event design, life cycle assessment, online-offline engagement, and developmental evaluation. I began to see this work as a practice of boundary bridging, institutional entrepreneurship, and community support. Increasingly, I developed a systemic view.

Now I teach systems thinking in the Collaborative Design MFA program at Pacific Northwest College of Art.

Society

No resilience without transformation

In ways both scientific and pragmatic, there can be no resilience without transformation.

May 6, 2013

Thinking about “The Green Mind”

“Let’s start with the fact that climate change is anthropogenic,” says psychologist Elke Weber …
“That means it’s caused by human behavior. That’s not to say that engineering solutions aren’t important. But if it’s caused by human behavior, then the solution probably also lies in changing human behavior.”

May 8, 2009

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