Let’s get real about the stories we tell ourselves.
I think that we need a new story about the world we live in. The old story about progress, growth, GDP, and profit seems to benefit fewer and fewer people; the pandemic and the political polarization of the last year persist; deficiencies in our current story continue to become apparent as rational talk gives way to emotional reaction; we are less and less able to face the future as we see our civilized life-style threatened by breakdown not only in social, economic, and political life but also in the physical world. A “New Normal” is not likely to be a version of “the Good Life.” Instead, it is increasingly filled with human-caused changes to climate, plant and animal extinctions, ocean acidification and pollution, and other symptoms of the distress in the natural world. I suggest that the new story must recognize that humans are not the masters of the Earth, but are, indeed, merely a small segment of the great evolutionary and ecological systems that is Nature and that the physical world has existed and will continue to exist whatever stories we may tell ourselves. Our new story must recognize this fact.
Most important in all new stories is the recognition that humans are animals and thus a part of the world of Nature. As such the human animal is bound in the extraordinary intricacies of ecological webs and fully participates in the processes of biological evolution. We are linked, as are all organisms, with the complexities of unique and ever-changing environments. And as with all organisms, the human animal reproduces and grows until it is limited by environmental restrictions. That we humans are animals and that we, like all organisms, grow and reproduce until we reach environmental limits must be fundamental to every new story that is based in reality. Our cultural, social, economic, and political stories are simply human creations if they are not also based in reality.
For most of the lifetime of the human species, this uniquely conscious creature recognized its place within Nature. With greater technology, such as language, fire, plant and animal domestication, writing, and a vast array of other tools, it concocted myths, and supernatural tales, including the great, world religions, and still confronted environmental limits only on a local or regional scale. As long as there were new lands to occupy, less technologically advanced peoples to conquer, or new technologies invented, the major stories did not need to recognize natural, environmental limits to the expansion of the human race.
Even with the invention of science and technologies based on the flows of air and water, which expanded impacts on and areas of dominance over nature, stories that disregarded the realities of Nature could, for all extents and purposes, not press humankind realize its environmental limits. Populations could grow gradually but not exceed the carrying capacity of the agricultural production of the Earth and new lands were available to conquer. Malthus, who introduced the concept of carrying capacity, correctly questioned that premise. But technological changes in agriculture kept altering the facts of production and Malthusian ideas were relegated to the dust bin for decades.
The combination of science, technology and industry in the early nineteenth century combined with new sources of energy, first of coal and then of other fossil fuels, set the stage for emphasizing human controls of life on earth and a near complete disregard of environmental limits. The existing stories of humanity’s relations with nature– increasingly dominated by the monotheistic religions–began to change from the supernatural to the secular, from the eternal to the present. Increasingly unfettered by the limitations imposed by solar energy, the ideas of growth, progress, and unlimited sources of energy made it possible to create the modern stories that humans have lived by until very recently. Within these stories of progress, growth, and expansion of resources for humans, the Earth seemed limitless within new, emerging economic and political systems.
But of course, resources are cultural evaluations rather than natural creations. As cultural ideas, resources became divorced from the realities of the natural world. The ecological systems, of which fossil fuels are a part, are millions of years duration. But the ecological systems of geologically based cultural resources are merely decades old. Not only are the formation of geological systems disrupted by human extractions; the rapid release of energy in their use by humans has radically altered all other large-scale ecosystems: i. e. oceans, atmosphere, water cycles, and organic ecosystems. As humans are increasingly becoming aware of these disruptions in the form of polluted air, water, and soil, as well as with plant and animal extinction, and, recently, with the letting loose of viruses lethal to humans, seeds of a new story have been planted. Nevertheless the secular stories of modern culture are overwhelmingly dominant, today. As long as humans speak of economic growth and development as fundamental to life, the modern story continues.
The use of fossil fuel resources has temporarily allowed technology to extend human lives, create a rich, global economy, make travel and both physical and artificial communication easy and common, produce goods and services beyond the wildest dreams of anyone born before the 20th century. These cultural accomplishments are basic to the stories we tell ourselves today. They are cultural stories, not stories based in the real world of nature. Today’s dominant stories no longer explain the world in which we live because they ignore the ecological networks in which we human animal are embedded.
As much as we would like to believe that the Earth’s resources are limitless and that human ingenuity can continue to expand the uses of these resource, we are unable to face the reality that the rising human population has decreased the quality of the atmosphere, the oceans, the soils, the forests, and water to the point that the biological carrying capacity of the Earth for humans was reached over 50 years ago. Malthus basically had the right idea; but It has taken over 200 years for us to realize it.
A new story that recognizes the real world in which we live could not have been told until recent decades. And even now very few people have been able to assemble the ideas that make it explicit. Only with the rise of physical and natural science in the 19th century and its great expansion in the 20th century have the elements of the new story been available. Science and technology that underlie the great economic, cultural, and political growth and the story of the modern age, with a lag of one hundred years or so, have provided the basic elements of a new story based on physical realities. An understanding of energy and entropy, of ecology and evolution, of environment and exponential growth have had to come together to form the bases of a new story.
Energy is basic to understanding life on Earth. “ Energy is the measure of everything. It measures the amount of stored capability for future processes and the rate at which processes go. The total amount of an accomplished process is measured by the energy used.”[1] As the First Law of Energy states: All energy entering a system is neither created nor destroyed and must by accounted for.
The degradation or dissipation of any form of energy is called entropy and is a measure of disorder. Theoretically, all energy is degraded and flows towards a heat sink of motionless molecules and atoms (absolute zero.) This is the basis for the Second Law of Energy which states that the quality of energy is degraded as it flows through a system. Most potential energy–the ability to do work–is degraded and lost in the form of heat.[2] The Second Law applies primarily to closed systems that are in equilibrium.
However, organisms are part of Non-Equilibrium Thermodynamic (NET) systems, seemingly in contradiction to the Second Law of thermodynamics, these systems create order rather than simply degrade energy as in closed systems. They are open systems in that they depend on external sources of energy that changes as it operates through time. .
A third principle of energy, the Maximum-Power Principle (MPP), applies to open systems of which all organisms are a part. The MPP explains that a system that receives and manages energy most effectively, survives in competition with other systems. When external energy is added to a system, some will be used to process materials in the making of goods and services, some energy will be made more concentrated and become available to other systems, some energy will be fed back to maintain the system, and most energy will be lost in the form of heat.To survive in competition with other systems, a system must (1) develop storages of high-quality energy, (2) use some of that stored energy as feedback to increase the inflow of energy, (3) recycle materials when needed, (4) organize control mechanisms to keep the system adapted and stable, (5) set up exchanges with other systems to supply special energy needs, and (6) contribute useful work to the surrounding environmental systems that helps maintain favorable conditions.
All systems that survive contain (1) places of energy storage and (2) pathways of both degrading energy and feedback loops. Through energy feedback, the maintenance of the system will be reinforced. Stability of an organic system may be maintained if adequate energy and materials are imported from beyond the system boundary to equal the energy used in storage, feedback, and dissipation in the form of heat loss. Only when the potential energy of a system approaches equality between the work done by the system and the loss through degradation (entropy) , and, in the process, become more efficient, can the system reach a long-term steady state.
Increased sources of energy to a system may be used to process more materials in the production of new goods or services and may also be stored in more concentrated form.[3] However, as the availability of external sources of energy to a system increases, the efficiency, and thus the stability, of the system decreases. But some systems that are far from being in equilibrium may become more stable by exporting their excess entropy to surrounding systems–creating heat in their environment in the process.
Life is an open system that imports energy in excess of that lost by entropy. By maintaining its self through positive feedback loops and through the processes of growth and reproduction, all organisms act in temporary opposition to the Second law of Energy. Extremely stable organisms such as simple cells–bacteria, Archaea– and primitive forms of multiple celled plants and animals, have been able to reproduce, grow and die without great change for billions of years. Eukaryotic cells have evolved and become parts of new energy systems. Throughout the existence of organisms, solar energy has provided almost all of the energy that has driven the open systems of which all life is a part.[4] Every life form from single cells to humans and ecosystems are dependent on energy flows in systems that both counter and support the the Second Law of Thermodynamics[5]
Ecology is the study of the intricate networks of energy and materials that make up the interconnected systems of multiple organisms and their surroundings in a particular location. These systems are known as ecosystems. Originally, ecosystem analysis was applied by biologists to studies of plant communities. Ecosystems were usually defined by geographical boundaries where steep environmental changes occur–where energy flows change rapidly.The concept has subsequently been applied to widely differing communities, from individual cells to large social organizations of humans.
Each component organism of an ecosystem is, itself, an open living system that has inflows and outflows of energy and matter and has unique surroundings or environments. In Nature, over time, many organism and environments that are the components of ecosystems are relatively stable and efficient processors of energy. Long established ecosystems are more species diverse,
However, when the flow of energy or the availability of materials in an ecosystem is disturbed for whatever reason, its components must adjust to the new environment or die. A new or greatly altered system that is transitional to greater efficiency will replace the old ecosystem. If the disturbance is minor, the system will recover stability quickly. However when radical changes occur, the initial replacement ecosystem will be less efficient and stable as new energy pathways will be required to dissipate energy to increase efficiency. New forms of energy will be concentrated and new products formed from material matter as well as energy is degraded and lost to the system as entropy. Within ecosystems, this may take the form of a stages of plant and animal “succession.”
Evolution. With organisms, the processes of adjustment to a new environment may be evolutionary if novel growth and reproductive systems can survive. Over millennia, many new organisms have evolved into stable systems because they have developed an efficient inflow of energy and matter that both 1.) maintains their form in the process of growth and reproduction and 2.) eliminates degraded energy to their surroundings, which absorbs it. With radical changes in environments, both organic and material, that surround every open system, the very survival of individual species may be involved. Mass extinctions may occur if either or both the growth and reproductive systems that maintain a species are eliminated by
- Odum. 1981. ↑
- Odum .Entropy measures an irreversible process, a natural decrease in the quality of energy (at the level of atoms and molecule) as matter reaches evermore probable distributions that are no longer able to be turned into work or structures. In the transformation of energy from its source, entropy occurs at each stage of its transformation. The remaining available energy is sometimes called exergy. However exergy in one system is not necessarily the same as exergy in another system. To compare exergies from one system and another, the exergy of one kind previously used up directly and indirectly to make a product or service must be known. This new measure is called emergy by Odum ↑
- Materials are transformed as they cycle through a system. Unlike energy, they do not flow. Note that some materials may also contain energy embedded internally. ↑
- Some sources of energy that are not ultimately derived from solar radiation. Energy from volcanic vents in the ocean floor may have been the earliest source of energy for organic life. ↑
- Schneider and Sagan. Into the Cool. Systems of energy and matter other than organisms, such as ocean currents, whirlpools, atmospheric flows, hurricanes, cyclones, and even galaxies, and planetary systems follow the laws of thermodynamics that are basic to all physical systems. They all are energy flows that follow the dissipation of heat gradients towards absolute zero until new energy sources become available to maintain them. Organisms, ultimately from the capture of photons of solar energy through photosynthesis, practically reverse the 2nd Law. Given long enough time–eternities–the 2nd Law wins out. ↑