A sad tale
This tale about the reductionist approach to the world leads us to some sense of systems thinking. Systems thinking looks at the whole, puts things into context and looks for pattern in relationships…
Once there was a man who wanted to understand an onion. ‘What was it?’… ‘What was it made of?’ he thought. He took off a layer to find out. Underneath, he found another layer, so he removed that too. And kept going… When he'd finished, he had no onion apart from the fragments on the table. He felt he still didn’t understand the onion, and maybe - he thought - he might have learnt more by looking at it whole.
And this is why we cry when we peel onions…!
Extracted from: Engaging people in Sustainability
Pictures: http://mildesa.blog.bg/photos/5056/onion.jpg
