Tim Allen, professor of Botany, finished his 2008-2009 term as President of the International Society for the Systems Sciences (ISSS). Past Presidents include Margaret Mead, Ilya Prigogine and Sir Charles Geoffrey Vickers.
Allen finished his term by presiding over the 51st Annual Meeting in Brisbane, Australia.
The ISSS is synthetic and interdisciplinary with regard to systems, spanning scholars and practitioners from academe, business, government and non-government organizations. His address at the annual meeting was “Making livable sustainable systems unremarkable.”
- Eucalyptus over the Southern Beeches in Australia.
He contrasted short term action in human resource use with long term planning for survival, attempting to make the interdisciplinarity of the issues commonplace and mainstream, not remarkable.
Allen also gave talks at the National University of Australia in Canberra (“Keeping ecology straight in a complex world”) and at Monash University in Melbourne (“Ecological economics of ants, termites, beavers and people”).