Primitive Legend:

Grocery Store Inventory is a stock that represents the amount of perishable food units available for sale to consumers. This stock is directly affected by the forces of economics as grocers can only sell at the level that their produce is demanded. As a result, once this stock exceeds demand, it will rise as food no longer sold.

Overstock Waste is a stock that is designed to model the overstock display assumption which states that consumers have more incentive to purchase foods from fully stocked piles rather than empty ones. This stock exists and accumulates over time because grocers purchase excess produce to give buyers incentive.

Ugly Food Stock is the stock that represent the amount of perfectly nutritious ugly produce neglected by consumers as they only buy the prettiest clusters from the display. This stock includes foods such as brown bananas, dented apples, and so forth. These ugly foods are left behind in addition to the overstock waste.

Education Programs is the stock that contains the amount of ugly foods delivered to local school districts for educating students on the significance of ugly food discrimination. These foods are utilized in various forms of comparative demonstrations to illustrate to students that ugly foods are just as nutritious as prettier alternatives.

Compost Alternatives is the stock that depicts the efforts of grocery stores trying to implement a method that allows them to reduce the amount of waste they send to the landfill. These compost methods may be in the form on enriched manure given back to the farmers that supply the produce.

10 Food Units/Resale Output is the variable that illustrates the amount of food units required to make a product for resale. For example, it takes 10 units of melons to make an assorted melon platter. Likewise, a single smoothie for resale will require 5 units of assorted fruits.

Modern industrial civilisation has created massive interdependencies which define it and without which it could not function. We all depend on industrial farming to produce the food we eat, we depend on gasoline being available at the gas station,  on the availability of electricity and even on the bread supplied by the local baker. Naturally, we tend to support the institutions that supply the amenities and goods to which we have become accustomed: if we get our food from the local supermarket, it is likely that we would be opposed to it’s closure. This means that the economic system that relies on continuous growth enjoys implicit societal support and that nothing short of environmental disaster or a shortage of essential raw materials will impede it’s growing indefinitely. It is not hard to work out the consequences of this situation!

The term 'work' has been  used in this model in the sense of economic activity to include not only work done by people but also by machines. The model shows 8 positive feedback loops that reinforce work and the need to work. From the perspective of physics, civilisation can be described as a MECHANISM FOR USING ENERGY AND DOING WORK.  

Work, however, has some unavoidable consequences. The second law of thermodynamics tells us that any ‘work’ requires the use of energy and that DOING WORK entails the generation of WASTE HEAT. The laws of physics also tell us that CO2 emissions from burning fossil fuels will cause global warming. These unintended and unavoidable consequences are highlighted in the model by prominent arrows.

Can the structure of this system be changed to avoid a foreseeable collapse of civilisation?

A clone of the Goodwin cycle IM-2010 with debt and taxes added, modified from Steve Keen's illustration of Hyman Minsky's Financial Instability Hypothesis "stability begets instability". This can be extended by adding the Ponzi effect of borrowing for speculative investment: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/4538470.

This model requires development and testing. Please contact the author if you are able to help.

Based on G.P. Cimellaro et al. Framework for analytical quantification of disaster resilience Engineering Structures 32 (2010) 3639–3649 paper