Chapter 3. Energy, Entropy, and Information
When I decided in the late 1980s to focus my academic career on sustainable agriculture, I knew I would have to reeducate myself. I would need to learn as much about sustainability in a few months as I had learned about economics in four years of graduate school. I was expected to make significant progress on my USDA sustainable agriculture grant in a matter of months, not years. I began by seeking out and listening to people who had been working on sustainable agriculture and reading everything I could find on the subject. I visited with people from sustainability-related organizations, including the Missouri Rural Crisis Center, Center for Rural Affairs, Winthrop Rockefeller Institute, Ozark Organic Growers, Center for Appropriate Technology and Transfer for Rural Areas (ATTRA), Rodale Institute for Organic Agriculture, and others.
Virtually every organization I visited had ongoing projects related to energy, including energy efficiency, energy conservation, and renewable energy. During the early 1970s, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) imposed an embargo on petroleum exports to the U.S. The nation was reminded that our economy and way of life are dependent on energy, specifically imported, fossil energy at that time. Reducing fossil-energy dependence became a national priority. The petroleum industry focused on increasing domestic oil and natural gas production. However, fossil energy is finite and non-renewable, regardless of whether it is imported or domestic. Those working on sustainability were focused on energy conservation, energy efficiency, and renewable alternatives to fossil energy.
Energy
Over time, I came to realize that sustainability is ultimately a matter of energy. Everything of use to us, including everything of economic value, requires energy to make and energy to use. Our food, water, clothes, houses, automobiles, and cell phones all depend on energy. Even if we drink water from a stream or pick fruit from a tree, the drinking and picking require energy. It even takes energy to think, with the brain accounting for about 20% of the energy used by the human body. Life on Earth ultimately depends on energy.
The industrial revolution and the industrial era economic development that continues were made possible by abundant fossil energy, first coal and then oil and natural gas. However, in a matter of decades, we had depleted stocks of fossil energy that took millions of years for nature to create, which was not sustainable. Some petroleum experts had forecast that global oil production would reach peak production as early as 2000. After peak oil, the world would have to either find an alternative source of energy or be forced to live with less energy. (New oil extraction technologies, including fracking, have delayed the peak in fossil energy, but it is still inevitable.) The effect of the energy shortfall could be minimized by using energy more efficiently, including reducing and reusing wasted energy. However, the finite stocks of fossil energy would eventually be depleted with catastrophic consequences for energy-dependent societies, such as the U.S.
This is typically where the concept of entropy came into the conversation. Energy can neither be created nor destroyed: the first law of thermodynamics. No matter how efficiently energy is used and reused, each time it is used, some of its usefulness is lost: the second law of thermodynamics, commonly referred to as the law of entropy.[i] Energy can be changed in form, concentrated into matter or solid materials, and released from matter, but the total energy in the matter/energy system remains unchanged. This is what Einstein’s famous equation, E=MC2, is about. E is energy, M is matter, and C is the speed of light, which is a very big number. There is a lot of energy in matter.
The law of entropy states that whenever stable and concentrated forms of energy are disturbed or released, they change from more useful to less useful forms of energy. Energy has the potential to perform work or be useful as it disperses and expands. Energy is useful only because of its natural tendency to change from more useful to less useful forms of energy. But by using energy, we inevitably use up or deplete some of its usefulness. Ultimately, we must rely on the daily inflow of new solar energy to offset the loss of useful energy to entropy. The sustainability of life on Earth depends ultimately on solar energy.
One of my favorite everyday examples of entropy at work is the internal combustion engines in our automobiles. The gasoline we put in the tank is a highly concentrated and stable form of energy. The engine’s fuel injectors release pressurized gas into the combustion cylinder of the engine, where it is ignited by an electrical spark, causing the gas to explode and expand inside the cylinder, forcing the engine’s pistons to move, which moves the drive shaft of the engine, which propels the car down the road. The concentrated energy in a gallon of gasoline can move an automobile 30 to 40 miles down a road at 60 miles per hour. The energy in the gasoline isn’t destroyed; it simply changes from a more useful to less useful form of energy, mainly heat that is dissipated through the car’s radiator and exhaust.
Another example is the stable concentrated energy in the food we eat. First, we break down the structure of the food and release some of its molecules in our mouths by chewing and mixing it with saliva. From there, it goes to the stomach, where bacteria, acids, and enzymes digest the food and prepare it for the final energy extraction process in the intestines. We have about 100 trillion bacteria helping us to extract useful energy from food. The energy from food fuels us physically and mentally, allowing us not only to benefit from food energy but also to perform work or be useful to other living and nonliving things on Earth. Again, the digestive process does not destroy the energy in food but instead transforms it from more useful to less useful forms.
The available energy left in the biological waste produced by humans and other animals can be used as organic fertilizer to provide energy for other biological organisms, which may in turn provide food for humans and other animals with energy. Furthermore, some of these biological organisms, specifically green plants and algae, can sequester new energy from sunlight to offset the loss of useful energy as living systems otherwise tend toward entropy.
The ability of living systems to reuse, recycle, and replenish the usefulness of energy lost to entropy is critical to ecological, social, and economic sustainability. We humans are biological beings, and even if we could find alternative sources of energy for everything else we need, we would still be dependent on the sun for the biological energy we must have to nourish our bodies, minds, and souls. Years later, I wrote a blog piece on the importance of ensuring universal access to solar energy.
Don’t let them sell us the sun!
No one invented or created the sun. It came into being long before any living being walked upon the earth. It doesn’t belong to anyone. If anyone has a right to benefit from the sun, then everyone has an equal right to its benefits. No one has done anything to be more deserving than anyone else. In the foreseeable future, the sun will be the ultimate source of everything of economic value on Earth. We are rapidly using up the usefulness of the Earth’s non-renewable resources, including the solar energy sequestered and fossilized millions of years ago. As fossil energy becomes scarce, solar energy becomes more competitive and eventually will be the only economically valuable source of energy.
Whoever controls access to solar energy in the future will essentially control humanity. The usefulness of everything on earth, including everything of economic value, ultimately depends on the usefulness of energy. Whoever controls solar energy will be able to set whatever price they choose to charge for its use, because all other economic value will be dependent on access to solar energy. Humanity simply cannot afford to allow anyone to control solar energy. We all have equal rights to benefit from the sun, and rights should never be given away or taken away, and certainly should not be bought or sold. We can’t let them “sell us the sun.”
No one invented or created the Earth. Land was once recognized as a common good: something that didn’t belong to anyone but that everyone had an equal right to use to meet their basic needs. Land was never removed from the commons among many indigenous cultures, including Native Americans, and remains in the commons in some parts of the world. The Europeans began enclosing and converting land to private property during the 1600s. At that time, there was a provision that enough good land must be left in the commons to meet the needs of all who chose to use it.[i] Obviously, that provision was eventually abandoned and forgotten.
Wherever land was removed from the commons, a new kind of poverty and hunger was created. Poverty and hunger had existed before, but if anyone in a community had enough, all had enough, because they shared the bounty of the land in common. Only when the land was privatized and enclosed, so it could be bought and sold, was there poverty in the midst of plenty and hunger in the midst of gluttony. We are haunted still today by the mistake of “letting them sell us the Earth.” We can’t let it happen again.
Thomas Paine, the American Revolutionary, proposed that everyone be given a lump-sum payment upon reaching the age of maturity to compensate them for the deprivation of their “inherent right” to enough land to meet their basic needs.[ii] Obviously, Paine did not prevail, and poverty and hunger continued. In the early 1900s, Henry George gained widespread political attention by proposing a “single tax” on land as a means of alleviating poverty and hunger. Again, his argument was that no one in particular had created the land, so everyone in general should benefit from its use. Those who used the land had a legitimate right to claim compensation for “improvements” to the land, but should compensate society for the privilege of using the land, because it was common rather than private property.
George’s land tax would have replaced all other taxes and would be assessed in whatever amount deemed necessary to alleviate poverty and hunger. Obviously, George did not prevail, and poverty and hunger continued. The Georgist Society[iii] is still active and has since added fossil energy and the natural environment to its list of “land” or common property to be taxed. The taxes would be used for the benefit of society as a whole, but particularly to alleviate poverty. Unfortunately, the battle to reclaim the Earth as common property would be very difficult. For centuries now, we have been essentially “giving the earth” to whoever wanted to “develop” its resources, while ignoring our collective responsibilities as caretakers of the earth. We have not yet “given them the sun,” but we are leaning dangerously in that direction.
I believe that solar energy should be declared the common property of the Earth’s community, using international law. All solar energy in the future — including photovoltaics, wind, and water — would then be developed as public utilities. The utilities could be owned and operated by governments or privately, with public oversight. Existing solar energy facilities could be claimed under “eminent domain,” with current owners compensated from taxes on solar energy. Contrary to popular belief, exorbitant profits are not necessary to motivate research and development whenever there is a public commitment. The public sector is quite capable of developing an efficient solar energy system, with a strong public mandate and the necessary funding provided by taxes on solar energy.
Public utilities commissions would set commercial energy prices at levels deemed necessary to operate the public utilities, including reasonable returns to investors, with “profits” collected as taxes to meet societal needs. The top priority in pricing solar energy would be to generate taxes to alleviate poverty and hunger, as everyone has an equal right to benefit from “taxing the sun.” The right of individuals to sequester enough solar energy to meet their personal needs would be proclaimed as a basic human right. Individuals could collect energy for personal use at their homes or through participation in collectively owned, community-based utilities. Those who choose not to participate in such enterprises, or who want additional energy, could buy energy in commercial markets. Communities would provide individual access to energy networks.
The details of developing and implementing such programs obviously would be a major national and global undertaking. My intent here is not to propose a program that I can defend in every detail. Instead, I am simply trying to explain the reason for my urgent plea: “Don’t let them sell us the sun.”
[i] Lockean Proviso, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockean_proviso .
[ii] Agrarian Justice http://xroads.virginia.edu/~hyper/Paine/agrarian.html .
[iii] Georgist Philosophy http://www.cgocouncil.org/cwho.html .
Entropy
I’m not one to accept things at face value, even a fundamental law of physics. The idea of entropy was not intuitively obvious to me, and I didn’t understand the jargon in the scientific explanations. For example, Merriam-Webster defines entropy as “a measure of the unavailable energy in a closed thermodynamic system that is also usually considered to be a measure of the system's disorder… [Entropy] varies inversely with the temperature of the system.”[ii] The Encyclopedia Britannica definition seems a bit clearer: “the measure of a system’s thermal energy per unit temperature that is unavailable for doing useful work. Because work is obtained from ordered molecular motion, the amount of entropy is also a measure of the molecular disorder, or randomness, of a system. The concept of entropy provides deep insight into the direction of spontaneous change for many everyday phenomena.”[iii]
The term thermodynamics is related to the relationship between heat and energy. The molecules that make up materials and all forms of matter are made up of hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, and other chemical elements. The elements are bound together by energy and are constantly in motion, even in solid materials. So molecular systems, or matter, that are hotter or at lower levels of entropy are releasing more potentially useful energy.
The reference to “the direction of spontaneous change” in the definition refers to the natural tendency of systems to move from lower levels to higher levels of entropy, meaning to become less able to perform work and thus less useful. For example, water never spontaneously heats, but hot water naturally cools to the temperature of its surrounding environment. As it cools, water can perform work or be useful, as when heat released from steam drives a steam engine or hot-water heating systems spread heat from a single source throughout a building. In steam engines, the energy in coal and then diesel fuel was used to reheat water and create new steam. In heating systems, an external source of energy, usually electricity or natural gas, is required to reheat the water and restore the useful energy lost to entropy. Once the water is reheated, the heat is dispersed by its natural tendency toward entropy.
The concept of entropy became much clearer to me when I understood that the entropy of liquids and gases is related to their concentration or pressure as well as temperature. “The entropy of a substance is influenced by two features of its molecular structure: (1) How confined atoms and molecules can move within a structure; the less restricted the movement, the higher the entropy. (2) The mass of the molecules and atoms that are in motion; the more mass, the more entropy.”[iv] The movement of molecules in more highly concentrated liquids and pressurized gases is more restricted. They have fewer molecules in motion that are less likely to collide and release their energy. Thus, highly pressurized or concentrated substances are at lower levels of entropy because they have greater potential to perform work. When released, concentrated liquids and gases spontaneously expand as they disperse. This allows them to be of use or perform work as they disperse or expand. It then takes another source of energy to reconcentrate and repressurize liquids and gases and restore their usefulness.
It may be easier to think of entropy in terms of usefulness. Energy sources are useful when they are at entropy levels different from their environment, which scientists refer to as being “out of equilibrium.” The natural tendency is for the entropy levels or useful energy in different sources of energy to equalize or move toward an equilibrium. When an automobile tire is punctured, the pressure in the tire spontaneously equalizes with the outside air pressure, and the tire goes flat. A block of ice exposed to normal room temperature spontaneously melts, and the water warms until it equalizes with the room’s temperature. The heat energy absorbed from the air by melting ice cools a warm room—an early form of air conditioning. In this case, entropy increases as the ice changes to water. The molecules of water are less orderly or freer to move in water than in ice.
Once melted, however, the water continues to be useful by cooling the air in the room. The water spontaneously cools the air because the molecules in the air are less orderly or freer to move than in water. Even though the water is changing to a lower level of entropy, the air in the room is changing to a higher level of entropy. The water spontaneously warms as the air spontaneously cools. Once the water and the room temperatures are equalized, the water and air combined are left with less available energy, meaning at a higher level of entropy. In this case, cooling and heating processes both may be useful because the water modifies the air temperature in the room until the water temperature and air temperature are equal. New energy is required to either reheat or refreeze the water to restore its usefulness.
Heat pumps, which are used to both cool and heat buildings, are a prime example of the potential usefulness of the energy in pressurized gases and the tendency of the available energy or entropy in systems to equalize with the available energy in their environments. An electric heat pump uses electricity to pressurize freon gas. Heat is produced as the gas is pressurized, reducing its entropy. The heat is released inside the house during wintertime to raise the inside air temperature as it releases its energy. When the pressure on the freon is released, it spontaneously cools and increases its entropy level.
During the summertime, a heat pump reverses the flow of useful energy and functions as an ordinary air conditioner. The pressurized and heated gas is pumped out of the house, and the cooling process takes place outside. The direction of compression and decompression, of heating and cooling, is simply reversed between winter and summer. Cold air is released inside the house until the air mixes and equalizes at a comfortable room temperature. The energy created by compression heats homes in the winter, and the energy released by decompression cools homes in the summer.
The concept of entropy first began to fall into place for me when I found a different definition in a 1993 edition of Webster’s New International Dictionary. I was in Palo Alto, California, for a speaking engagement and at my host’s house for dinner when I saw a large dictionary on a stand in the corner of the room. It reminded me of dictionaries I had seen in libraries, so I decided to take a closer look. This dictionary defines entropy as “the ultimate state reached in degradation of matter and energy; a state of inert uniformity of component elements; absence of form, pattern, hierarchy, or differentiation.[v]” In short, a lack of structure and order. This made more sense to me than any other formal definition I had found at the time, and it seems to bring together the definitions I have found since.
The absence of form, pattern, hierarchy, or differentiation means there are no differences in temperature, pressure, concentration, or structure. Nothing is hotter or colder, more or less concentrated, under more or less pressure, or materially different in structure from anything else. Everything is uniform, inert, the same. Nothing can release energy by changing its temperature, pressure, concentration, or structure. There is no available energy left anywhere in the system. It is utterly useless. The surfaces of the Moon and Mars came to mind as ecosystems close to entropy, although they are still changing. If the living things on Earth fail to sequester enough solar energy to offset the inevitable effect of entropy, this is where everything on Earth is headed.
This definition helped me to understand that the natural tendency of all phenomena toward entropy is the reason that eggs and dishes break but never unbreak, steel rusts but never unrusts, food spoils or rots but never unspoils, cars break down and eventually wear out but never fix or remake themselves, and roads, bridges, and buildings crumble but never uncrumble. Everything on Earth and the Earth itself has a natural tendency to return to the basic chemical elements from which they were made—without form, pattern, hierarchy, or differentiation—without structure or order. No matter how efficiently we use and reuse the available energy in solids, liquids, and gases, they eventually and inevitably lose their usefulness. It takes new energy to make new dishes, steel, food, cars, houses, roads, and bridges—to replace useful energy lost to entropy. The sustainability of human life on Earth depends on our willingness and ability to live with the reality of entropy.
The concept of entropy is relevant to social and economic sustainability as well as ecological sustainability. I, as well as many others, have concluded that quantum physics, entropy, and other principles that relate to the physical world can also provide valuable insights into the functioning of societies and economies. In quantum physics, reality exists as potentials and probabilities. Phenomena don’t become real until they are observed or experienced. In our everyday experiences, the potentials of absolute reality become real to us as we observe or experience them, as I explained in the previous chapter. The potential of stable, concentrated, and pressurized solids, liquids, and gases also becomes real when we disturb or release them to perform work.
“Social entropy” leans on the physical law of entropy to explain the nature of relationships within and among human societies.[vi] Advocates suggest that continuing conflicts and divisiveness within societies, and wars among societies, are inevitable consequences of social entropy—a natural tendency toward dissolution or abandonment of human relationships. In the absence of positive intervention, the useful social energy within and among societies is depleted as they inevitably tend from civility toward hostility.
However, most of the studies of social entropy seem to focus on the effects of population density on the quality of relationships within communities and societies. People living in more densely populated communities would be expected to have lower levels of social entropy than people living alone or in sparsely populated areas. People living in total isolation would be forced to produce their food, make their clothes, and build their own homes. To be self-sufficient. They also must be able to protect themselves from threats to their health or safety.
When people congregate in families and communities, they can rely on others for things they can’t do well for themselves and can cooperate with others on tasks that require more than one person. They can join forces to protect themselves in times of peril. Humans are also social beings and need personal relationships for psychological as well as physical well-being. As communities of people come together to form towns, cities, and societies, they can create impersonal economies and public institutions that afford them still more opportunities to meet their economic and social needs.
However, at some level, increasing population density increases competition for living space and concentrates too much waste and pollutants to accommodate in the local environment. People in densely populated environments also lose their privacy and their sense of self-reliance. At some point, increasing population density tends to lead to increased personal conflicts, diminished economic efficiency, and threats to social civility. These are symptoms of social entropy that disperse and dissipate social energy, resulting in dysfunctional communities and societies. Civil unrest may erupt into lawlessness, riots, looting, or an explosion of social energy, much like a fire raging through a forest or the explosion of a tank of gas. However, people are not powerless to rebuild and sustain their communities and societies. However, it takes energy, in this case, human energy, to restore the usefulness of relationships lost to social entropy. This is analogous to the energy required to restore and sustain the usefulness of physical energy lost to entropy. However, most proponents readily admit that social entropy is not equivalent to physical entropy. The mathematical laws of physics cannot be applied to the unpredictable human actions and reactions of relationships. Regardless, social entropy seems an interesting idea worthy of further exploration.
“Economic entropy” is based on the same basic ideas as social entropy, except it is applied to economic rather than social relationships. For example, one theory of economic value links low entropy (high available energy) to scarcity and thus to economic value.[vii] Food tends to spoil, and clothes tend to wear out, as they move from lower to higher levels of entropy. People prefer to eat unspoiled food and clothes that aren’t worn out, so the economic value of lower-entropy products is higher and declines as products lose their usefulness and move to higher levels of entropy. It takes energy to replace or restore the usefulness of high-entropy products. As a result, the economic value of low-entropy products is higher.
The law of entropy can also be linked to the most fundamental law of economics, the law of diminishing returns. As increasing amounts of a low-entropy input, like fertilizer, are used to increase the production of a high-value product, like corn or wheat, beyond some level of application, each unit of input, or pound of fertilizer, will increase total production, or crop yields, by less than did the previous unit of input, or pound of fertilizer. Thus, each additional unit of fertilizer applied increases the available energy in and reduces the entropy level by less than the previous unit.
The increasing quantity of inputs required to increase a given output is analogous to the energy required to increase the pressure and usefulness of energy embodied in gases or liquids under pressure. In the case of increasing pressure, the rate at which useful energy is lost to heat increases as the pressure increases. In the case of crop production, the rate at which fertilizer is lost to leaching and volatilization, rather than utilized by crops, increases as more fertilizer is applied to a given crop.
The law of diminishing returns also applies to consumption. Beyond some point, each additional low-entropy product consumed, like a hamburger, will provide less useful energy than did the previous unit of consumption. As foods are digested, the useful energy is distributed to the various organs of the body. However, these organs have limited energy needs and limited capacities to store energy. As these needs are met, increasing quantities of food are dispersed into the environment in the form of human waste. The same principle applies to clothes, housing, or any necessity of life. Once we have all we need, each additional unit of consumption will be less useful, provide less useful energy, and increase entropy more than the previous unit. Things we consume, use, or occupy that we don’t need are wasted or lost to entropy. The more excesses we have, the more we waste, and the more is lost to economic entropy.
Unlike the laws of thermodynamics, however, the law of diminishing social and economic energy or entropy cannot be defined as precise mathematical relationships. We humans are all different, with different needs and abilities to realize the potential usefulness of embodied energy. Each region, farm, and field is different from the others, with different productive capacities. While beyond some level of consumption or production, the marginal benefits always decrease and entropy levels increase, but there is no mathematical formula for precisely when or how much.
Information
The concept of entropy has also been applied in the fields of statistics and information.[viii] Statistical and information entropy can be expressed mathematically and more closely parallel physical entropy than social and economic entropy. However, physicists are quick to point out that other concepts of entropy are fundamentally different from the concept defined by the second law of thermodynamics.
Information entropy relates to the value of information and the loss of information in the process of communication.[ix] A central idea of information theory is that the value of information in a message, written or verbal, depends on the degree to which the content of the message is surprising or adds to what is already known.[x] Information that describes inventions, innovations, and revolutionary changes that increase the value of processes or products is more valuable than information concerning incremental improvements in existing processes or products. As inventions and innovations become more widely used, known, and accepted, the value of additional information becomes less valuable. The information is at a higher level of information entropy because it adds less to what is already known. As with physical entropy, a continual infusion of new and useful information is required to offset information entropy.
Information entropy also relates to the loss of information when messages become unintelligible or garbled during transmission. The more times an original message is reinterpreted and recommunicated, the greater will be the loss of information value. A useful example is the principles of classical economics, as expressed by Smith, Malthus, Ricardo, and Mill. Countless repetitions and interpretations have distorted and degraded the usefulness of their ideas in guiding today’s political economy. The value of their wisdom has been diminished by information entropy. As in the case of energy, each time information is used and reused, some of its usefulness is lost to entropy. The greater the probability of miscommunication, the less valuable the information, and the greater the information entropy.
The basic ideas of physical entropy, social entropy, economic entropy, and information entropy come together in a coherent whole in the worldview of deep sustainability. Everything around us—in our world, the world, and the universe—is constantly in the process of degradation, decomposition, rusting, rotting, or wearing out. Our roads, bridges, airports, homes, furniture, automobiles, clothes, and food are tending inevitably toward entropy and uselessness. Those in the living world of organisms, plants, animals, and humans are capable of slowing the processes of entropy by using new energy to regenerate our bodies and rejuvenate our minds. However, every living thing on Earth is slowly losing its usefulness and dying.
Individual lives are not sustainable, but individuals can reproduce and create new living beings to replace those lost to entropy. Communities of individual humans can also rebuild roads, bridges, and homes, make new automobiles and clothing, and grow more food to offset the effects of entropy. The processes of rebuilding, renewing, and reproducing require energy, materials, and information. The energy for a particular renewal process can come from any external source. However, the only source of energy new to the Earth is the daily inflow of solar energy. The basic building materials for renewal are the same electrons, atoms, molecules, and chemical elements that have always made up the Earth. The information for renewal forms the knowledge of how to utilize new solar energy to recreate the diversity of forms, structures, and hierarchies needed to restore the usefulness of energy lost to entropy. In summary, things that degrade, decompose, rust, rot, or wear out are composites or fusions of energy, matter, and information that can be restored by recombining energy, matter, and information.
The other living things on Earth are programmed by nature to continually fuse information and matter into useful energy. The information needed to build and rebuild the cells that comprise the physical structures of living organisms is encoded in their DNA and communicated through their RNA. Once constructed, they can continue to renew their physical structures and reproduce before the degradation of their genetic information allows them to succumb to physical entropy. Green plants and algae sequester new solar energy to fuel their regeneration and reproductive processes. Other terrestrial and aquatic organisms rely on green plants and algae as a source of new energy to sustain renewal, regeneration, and reproduction until they too succumb to entropy. However, living beings can sustain their ecosystems, communities, and species through reproduction and regeneration—despite the inevitability of entropy.
Humans are biological beings, and human life on Earth ultimately depends on the Earth’s other biological beings for the food energy essential for renewal, regeneration, and reproduction. The ability of humans to function at levels beyond self-sufficiency depends on their ability to form and sustain relationships with other people. By working together, people can acquire the materials and information needed to build roads, bridges, and buildings, make automobiles, furniture, and clothes, grow food, and do other things far beyond anything they can do for themselves. Families, communities, and organizations allow people to synthesize more materials, information, and energy than they can as collections of isolated individuals. Economies allow people to expand materials and information sharing beyond families and local communities to their larger societies and the global community. Humans are capable of moving away from the inert uniformity of entropy and toward the diversity and differentiation of form, structure, and hierarchy of sustainability if they are willing to do so.
Societies and economies have the same natural tendencies toward degradation, decay, and uselessness. Absent a continual inflow of “social energy,” personal relationships degenerate into economic transactions, and civility tends toward hostility. Human relationships are sustained by trust, fairness, responsibility, compassion, and respect. Replacing personal relationships with impersonal transactions increases the probabilities of distrust, unfairness, irresponsibility, indifference, and disrespect and accelerates the tendency toward social entropy. Unrestrained by the shared ethical values of people in societies, economies maximize the extraction of useful energy from both nature and humanity, accelerating the tendency toward economic entropy.
The good news is that we humans can also rejuvenate our communities and regenerate our economies. Honesty, fairness, responsibility, compassion, and respect not only are the keys to sustaining our societies and economies they are also keys to a more desirable and rewarding quality of life. And when we treat the other beings of the Earth with the same trust and kindness that we show for our fellow humans, we move away from entropy and toward ecological, social, and economic sustainability. We just need to understand and accept the challenges and opportunities of offsetting entropy using materials, energy, and information.
Alternatively stated, the opposite of entropy is called negentropy. Life in general has the potential to be negentropic because living things can convert energy from less useful to more useful forms. Healthy natural ecosystems organize and concentrate solar energy into organisms of progressively higher levels of structure, order, and potential usefulness. Humans also transform solar energy into more useful electrical energy by using sunlight, wind, or water. However, neither humans nor other animals can transform and concentrate sunlight into food. Life on Earth, including human life, ultimately depends on the ability of plants, algae, and a few other life forms to collect and store solar energy.
The entropic tendencies of energy are continually working against the negentropic tendencies of living systems. Living things inevitably lose energy to heat or entropy as they grow and renew their physical structures. They also devote a significant portion of their energy to renew, reproduce, and regenerate their species. The living ecosystems humans depend on for food will ultimately collapse if we fail to leave other life forms sufficient energy to renew, reproduce, and sustain their negentropic capacity. In reality, we humans are a part of the Earth’s living ecosystem, and our survival as a species depends on its sustainability.
Healthy natural ecosystems have a natural tendency to evolve toward higher levels of energy efficiency and negentropy. However, humans have intentionality and agency, which means they can choose to move toward higher or lower levels of energy efficiency and negentropy. They can choose how they relate to other people and other living and nonliving elements of their environment. Individual relationships can also at least influence how other people and other elements of the natural environment relate to each other. Human interventions and relationships affect the efficiency and regenerative capacity not only of natural ecosystems but also of human organizations, including farms, businesses, communities, and societies. Like other living ecosystems, these organizations can be organized and managed in ways that realize their negentropic potential or can be managed in ways that accelerate the natural tendency toward entropy.
Industrial farming systems are classic examples of human-organized and -managed entropic organizations. They mine and deplete the useful energy collected and stored by negentropic living systems over centuries, not only in fossil fuels but also in fertile living soils. This useful energy is marketed in the form of agricultural commodities to maximize profits for the farm owners and managers. The reinvestments essential for energy regeneration might provide an economic return in some future decade, but economic value is inherently short-run. In an uncertain market economy, investments that promise future payoffs even a decade in the future have very little economic value today. As long as there is enough topsoil left to provide an inert growing medium and enough fossil energy to produce fertilizers and irrigate crops, industrial farming will continue and will accelerate the tendency toward entropy. The sustainability of human life on Earth depends on the willingness and ability of human societies to replace entropic with negentropic systems of food production. The information and knowledge gained in the process of transforming agri-food systems can then be used as the DNA or genetic code for transforming other extractive and exploitative systems of production into resilient systems capable of renewal, regeneration, and sustainability.
I realize the information in this chapter, at least to this point, has been fairly dense. I have attempted to explain the basic ideas in different ways—in ways I would have understood better than the ways they were explained to me. I have attempted to compress the essence of books and journal articles into single pages and paragraphs. The citations provide additional references for those who choose to dig more deeply into specific subjects. Honestly, I don’t understand most of the scientific jargon or mathematical expressions in the references, but I feel I understand, and hopefully have communicated, the basic ideas. I realize by condensing the information that I risk losing some of its value to energy, entropy, and information. However, I have come to believe the basic ideas in this chapter are critical to understanding how the world works and our place within it, and thus to deciding how we want to live our lives.
Worldviews of Sustainability
The perspectives of energy, entropy, and information are different for those with worldviews of conventional, shallow, and deep sustainability. Those who hold the conventional worldview of sustainability see the Earth as an endless supply of potentially useful energy to be extracted and exploited to support economic development. They believe economic growth can be sustained indefinitely by new scientific and technological information that will allow us humans to use the Earth’s materials and energy to replace anything we use up or wear out, and rebuild anything that rusts, erodes, or corrodes.
Entropy, to the extent that it is considered, is seen as a challenge that can be overcome through continual investments in science and technology. They see promise in freeing humans from dependence on the other living things on Earth by producing foods from inert chemical materials rather than relying on the regenerative capacity of agroecosystems. To the extent that global climate change is being fueled by humans, they feel it can be mitigated and reversed by humans, through science and technology. If perchance it can’t be reversed, it can still be accommodated without sacrificing economic growth or human well-being. The laws of physics are tools to facilitate the economic extraction of energy of use by humans, specifically the extraction of energy that has economic value. The fusion of materials, energy, and information is seen as a means of sustaining economic prosperity and growth.
Those who hold the shallow worldview of sustainability recognize the ultimate dependence of humanity on renewable energy. They understand the necessity to end our dependence on fossil energy. Entropy is generally treated as an abstract concept that has little relevance to the environmental and social problems confronting society today. They accept that we are biological beings and recognize the need for biological diversity. However, they value biological life in service to human life, rather than biological life in service to the Earth—and to the Universe.
They may claim to view the Earth as a complex living organism of which humans are a part. But they tend to act as if we humans are independent actors who are morally or ethically entitled to manipulate the other living and nonliving things of the Earth for our benefit. Among those with a shallow worldview, there is little apparent realization that when we manipulate or reengineer other life on Earth, we are manipulating the living organism of which we are a part and risk destroying the ability of the Earth to sustain itself—and us. The laws of physics are generally treated as restraints or challenges to human domination of the Earth rather than as principles that can guide humans in living in harmony with the Earth. The fusion of materials, energy, and information is seen as a means of meeting the needs and wants of humans.
The worldview of deep sustainability sees the whole of the biosphere as a continually renewing and regenerative living system. Life on Earth is ultimately dependent on the energy released by the Sun as it tends toward entropy to replenish the Earth’s supply of useful energy. The Earth’s atmosphere regulates the flow of solar energy from outer space to the Earth’s surface and the release of heat, the product of entropy, back into outer space. The sustainability of life on Earth depends on the ability of its living systems to sequester enough of this new solar energy and offset the useful energy lost to entropy.
The sustainability of human life on Earth is dependent on the health and well-being of other life on Earth. We humans can sequester new solar energy to offset entropy by using falling water, windmills, and photovoltaic cells. We can have the mental and physical capacity to restore the usefulness of social and economic energy that is inevitably lost to entropy. We can fuse matter, energy, and information into regenerative, sustainable sources of energy to fuel our societies and economies.
However, we are biological beings, and we must and can depend on other living organisms as a sustainable source of new energy to fuel our bodies and minds. Likewise, other living things on Earth depend on us humans to help sustain them, or at least not to destroy them. The laws of nature, including the law of entropy, give us guidance in sustaining mutually beneficial relationships with the whole of the Earth, of which we are a part. The fusion of material, energy, and information into useful forms of energy is a means of realizing the rewards and fulfilling our responsibilities as both members and caretakers of the Earth’s integral community.
Endnotes:
[i] Wikipedia contributors, "Entropy," Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Entropy&oldid=1180359854
[ii] Merriam-Webster, “entropy,” https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/entropy .
[iii] Britannica, “entropy,” written by Gordon W. F. Drake, https://www.britannica.com/science/entropy-physics
[iv] Nikhilesh Mukherjee, “Entropy and Molecular structure: A short review,” LinkedIn, https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/entropy-molecular-structure-short-review-nikhilesh-mukherjee/ .
[v] Webster’s New International Dictionary, Unabridged, 1993 edition, “Entropy.”
[vi] Sean Carroll, Social Entropy, S-K. Log W, Blog, https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2013/01/29/social-entropy/
[vii] Jing Chen An entropy theory of value, Structural Change and Economic Dynamics, Volume 47, December 2018, Pages 73-81, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.strueco.2018.07.008
[viii] Wikipedia, “entropy,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy
[ix] Entropy (information theory). (2023, October 22). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_(information_theory)
[x] Entropy (information theory). (2023, October 22). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_(information_theory)