There is no Silver Bullet that will solve all the problems of the 21st century. To achieve a sustainable Earth we must address all the problems and deal with all the ways they interact. This requires looking at the world as a system of systems with many cross-connections and feedback paths. There are well developed procedures for doing the technical portion of the problem solving which are called Systems Engineering.
Teh figure above starts the process of identifying the problems and their cross connections graphically. The problems are blocks in a pyramid where each layer of blocks most strongly affects all the blocks in the layer below. The boxes are then robustly interconnected with arrows of various strengths. This type of graphic has been used successfully to start the process of dealing with complex systems from economics to weather.
One good example of the way the cross connections effect problem solutions is the relationship between the twin problems of global warming and transportation energy. These two problems are joined at the hip. America and Canada have huge reserves of tar sands. We could strip mine these deposits for the energy to run our cars and trucks for many decades. This process releases two and a half times as much CO2 into the atmosphere as burning oil. But no, we must drastically reduce our release of CO2; therefore the tar sands are useless in an overall systems approach.
We need to develop materials and exercises to teach world level problem solving from the systems approach starting at the middle school level. NASA is very good at this type of problem solving and could be a major national resource in this area.
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