{"id":25840,"date":"2025-11-13T14:16:39","date_gmt":"2025-11-13T19:16:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.clarku.edu\/news\/?post_type=story&p=25840"},"modified":"2025-11-18T10:52:28","modified_gmt":"2025-11-18T15:52:28","slug":"were-getting-exactly-what-we-designed-for","status":"publish","type":"story","link":"https:\/\/www.clarku.edu\/news\/2025\/11\/13\/were-getting-exactly-what-we-designed-for\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018We\u2019re getting exactly what we designed for\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n\n

Strategist Ken Coulson applies systems thinking to sustainability challenges<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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To begin his talk on securing a sustainable future in the face of climate change, Ken Coulson<\/a> took his Tilton Hall audience back in time \u2014 4.5 billion years, in fact \u2014 to the birth of the moon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cPicture it with me,\u201d he says. \u201cA planet roughly the size of Mars slamming into a young molten Earth. The cataclysm wasn\u2019t an explosion. It was a merger.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The collision \u201ccreated the basis for all of our future wealth and prosperity,\u201d gave the Earth its spin, and tilted the planet off its axis to create \u201cthe gift of seasons.\u201d The new moon\u2019s gravitational pull created a global tidal bulge in the Earth\u2019s primordial seas, which contained the early building blocks of life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Coulson\u2019s talk, \u201cLife, Climate Volatility, and What Comes After the Final No,\u201d was sponsored by the School of Climate, Environment, and Society<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Ken
Ken Coulson, Trustee Vickie Riccardo, P \u201917, and President David Fithian<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Coulson is a former managing director at Goldman Sachs and UBS turned sustainability strategist, musician, and novelist. He said the story of the Earth\u2019s violent beginnings is a reminder of the balance and beauty born from chaos, and the inheritance that humanity continues to squander.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Coulson\u2019s career in quantitative finance took him from the Chicago Board of Options to trading floors in London and Hong Kong, helping to build global derivatives markets that would eventually double and quadruple in volume. But he recognized that the systems were \u201coptimized for speed and profit \u2014 but not for resilience, not for people.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The 2008 financial crisis shattered his belief that markets were inherently self-correcting. \u201cOvernight, the externalities were glaringly obvious,\u201d he explained. \u201cAnd our crisis responses always exacerbate inequality. They fix markets, not people.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That realization set him on a journey to understand how the same systems thinking that drives markets could be applied to hedge climate volatility and build a sustainable, equitable economy, rather than an extractive one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWarmer worlds are more volatile worlds,\u201d he says. \u201cRainfall is becoming bimodal; all at once or nothing at all. The Texas grid freezes and Europe bakes. Thousand-year storms happen weekly.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Drawing on his trading background, Coulson reimagined familiar financial concepts like equilibrium and volatility in planetary terms. In markets, equilibrium represents a balance between supply and demand; in nature, it\u2019s a state that maintains biological carrying capacity and diversity. Volatility measures the difference between the expected value and the actual outcome. When volatility rises, systems \u2014 financial or ecological \u2014 start to break.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Lou
Lou Leonard, D.J.A. Spencer Dean of the School of Climate, Environment, and Society<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

\u201cOur climate problem,\u201d he says, \u201cis a volatility problem.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Coulson began translating sustainability into formulas. He built models that treat renewable energy assets as stable bonds based on resilience, and adapted financial equations to add variables like future waste liabilities and resource risk adjustments.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cOur system prices extraction, not restoration,\u201d he said. \u201cBut the true cost of capital is the restoration rate, the rate at which nature can replenish what we take.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe\u2019re getting exactly what we designed for,\u201d Coulson warned. \u201cA society that doesn\u2019t value people gets inequality. A society that doesn\u2019t value ecosystems gets floods.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Coulson\u2019s consulting firm, Future Bright, LLC, works with investors and entrepreneurs to design sustainability projects that \u201cmimic nature,\u201d or circular, waste-free systems that turn byproducts into resources.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The goal is not just efficiency, but resilience, he said. \u201cOur world is optimized for a past that no longer exists. We need systems that can withstand shocks \u2014 pandemics, floods, market crashes.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n