Above are 23 geese on a hillside in central France, marching downhill together. But they could just as well be 23 environmental classic activists, all marching in the same direction to the tune of the same dogmatic promise that if they just keep following the process of Classic Activism, they will be able to achieve their goals somehow.

Classic Activism is the standard problem solving process used by activists for centuries. It relies on four standard, intuitive, highly appealing steps to solve all problems. It has worked extraordinarily well around the world on problems such as slavery, discrimination, women's suffrage, labor rights, and many more, which explains its perennial popularity. If national activism succeeds, then that government assumes solution responsibility to the problem. If international activism succeeds, then international organizations and governments in agreement assume solution responsibility.

But Classic Activism suffers from a fatal, well hidden flaw, just as fatal and flawed as the short and well fed life of a farm goose. It is a one-size-fits-all process, because it only handles problems that can be solved by its standard four steps. If a problem falls outside these steps it is insolvable.

This can happen frequently, because Classic Activism has no analysis step. It also lacks awareness of the change resistance or social side of problems. If a problem is so difficult that it requires analysis, or if the problem involves large amounts of change resistance, then it cannot be solved by Classic Activism. For more on change resistance, please see What is the "social side" of the problem?

Classic Activism works fine on simple problems, such as local air and water pollution. It sometimes works on medium difficulty problems, such as the stratospheric ozone hole. But it fails disastrously on difficult global problems, such as climate change, topsoil loss, natural resource depletion, deforestation, and abnormally high rates of species extinction.

This is because most of the global environmental sustainability problem, as well as other global problems like poverty, inequality of wealth distribution, and conflict, are all so difficult they require a deep, penetrating analysis. They also involve substantial amounts of change resistance. Thus these problems are totally insolvable by the process of Classic Activism. Unfortunately, because that is the process used by nearly all environmentalists and environmental organizations today, civilization has been baffled for over thirty years now on how to solve the global environmental sustainability problem, ever since the problem was identified by Limits to Growth in 1972.

There is, however, a better way.

Analytical Activism is the antidote to Classic Activism. As you might expect, it includes an analysis of the problem. It also includes consideration of the change resistance or social side of problems. And it includes a much more mature problem solving process. In fact, while Classic Activism has 4 steps, Analytical Activism has 9. The first step is identify the problem to solve. The second step is choose an appropriate process for solving the problem. For complex social system problems like the global environmental sustainability problem, the System Improvement Process or one like it is recommended. This has 10 steps, which gives analytical activists a total of 19 steps to solve problems. These 19 steps not only include an analysis and the social side of the problem, but also a complete and rigorous application of the Scientific Method.

Is it any wonder then that Analytical Activism is fully capable of turning that flock of geese around and marching them all uphill?

At the top of that hill, the flock would find a pleasant surprise. Not only is Analytical Activism a better way to solve the difficult problems the environmental movement now faces, it is the only way. This is because difficult problems require analysis, and analysis requires reliable knowledge, and the only known way to produce reliable knowledge is the Scientific Method. If you are skeptical about this proposition, then please see I don't believe an analytical approach is the only way that could work. Can you prove this?

Now let's define exactly what Analytical Activism is: Analytical Activism is the use of the Analytical Method to achieve activist goals. The Analytical Method is a 9 step process derived from the 5 steps of the Scientific Method. For a quick look at these steps, please see What is Analytical Activism?

Analytical Activism is also the title of a book in progress. The central premise of the book is that it is possible to take an analytical approach to solving the global environmental sustainability problem and solve it.

Analysis is breaking a problem down into smaller problems and solving them individually, using a repeatable process. Small problems are much easier to solve than big ones because they are less complex, which makes a path to a solution much easier to find. A repeatable process can be improved over time, while an intuitive one cannot. For these reasons and more scientists switched en masse in the 17th century from ad hoc, common sense oriented problem solving methods to the Scientific Method, because it was fully capable of solving the increasingly difficult problems they faced.

It is time for environmentalists to raise the bar and do the same.