[Fis] Ecological Economics and Information

I apologize, I have sent you a not definitive draft of my considerations
for the debate. Here follows the right version.

Best regards,
Enzo Tiezzi

FIS Debate, Some observations, by Enzo Tiezzi

1) Constraints, Carrying capacity

The system in which we live, the planet Earth, is a finite system, and
as such has constraints. Physical reality is therefore subject to
constraints which determine limits. The term "carrying capacity" refers
to the capacity of the planet to sustain a growing population. In these
last years, the verb "to carry" has been replaced most of times with "to
sustain" (implying duration in time) which gave rise to the idea of
sustainable development.
The difference between the fast tempos of technological growth and the
slower tempos of the biological sphere, is at the core of the
environmental crisis. To create a steady state of slow growth in the
society means maintaining the energy flux at a constant low level,
slowing the entropic process, favouring decentralization and the small
scale, using renewable resources.

Growth vs. development, Steady-state economics, Natural capital
To grow means "to increase naturally in size by the addition of material
through assimilation or accretion". To develop means "to expand or
realise the potentialities of; bring gradually to a full, greater or
better state". In short, growth is quantitative increase in physical
scale, while development is qualitative improvement or unfolding of
potentialities.
The integration of economics, ecology and thermodynamics gives rise to
the new theory of ecological economics, or sustainability, which has
nothing to do with that bad oxymoron "sustainable growth".
We should adopt the biological model of steady state: evolution with
minimum production of entropy and maximum thermodynamic efficiency. The
steady state in biology does not mean renouncing development. Natural
history is the history of biological evolution, of systems in continuous
dynamic variation. The steady state does not negate evolution (and
development), it guarantees it.
The two golden rules on which it is based are due to Herman Daly:
I) harvest rates should be equal to regeneration rates (sustainable
yield);
II) waste emission rates should be equal to the natural assimilative
capacities of the ecosystems into which the wastes are emitted.
Regenerative and assimilative capacities must be treated as natural
capital, and failure to maintain these capacities must be treated as
capital consumption and therefore not sustainable. Natural capital and
man-made capital are complementary and natural capital has become the
limiting factor.
Calculations on natural capital (Nature, 387, 253-60, 1997) indicate
that the wealth produced by humans from nature is far greater then the
global gross national product.

2) Thermodynamic foolishness: some considerations

Thermodynamics' second principle, one of nature's fundamental laws,
addresses the pathways we should avoid in order to keep life on Earth.
It shows the universal, inescapable tendency toward disorder (in
thermodynamics, the general trend toward a entropy maximum), which is
also a loss of information and of usable energy availability. This
tendency to the Clausius' "thermal death", takes to the thermodynamic
equilibrium, namely the death of biological systems and ecosystems,
through the destruction of diversities.
There are two ways to achieve such a condition:
a) when, through energy exchanges as heat fluxes, there are no more
differences in temperature and nothing more can be done, because any
exchange of usable energy is allowed;
b) when a system, becoming isolated, consumes its resources, reaching a
great increase in its internal entropy and, at the end, to
self-destruction.
For this reason living systems try to avoid the condition of
thermodynamic equilibrium, keeping themselves as far as possible from
that state, self-organizing due to material and energetic fluxes,
received from outside and from systems with different conditions of
temperature and energy.
Economics and our society cannot be unaware of thermodynamics' second
principle. As a consequence globalization, the destruction of both
biological and cultural diversities, homogenization and the unique
thought take inescapably to the thermal death (or to the "entropic
euthanasia", as we called it), to the final destruction.
In the same way a country, a nation, a system that makes a political
dogma of its isolation, of its refusing of cultural contamination
(better: of cross-fertilizations), of its castling on fundamentalist
positions of self-conservation, will go to the same end. An excessive
defence of one's diversity and a complete loss of diversity are two
faces of the same thermodynamic foolishness.

3) A new paradigm: from a space to a time culture

Sustainable development needs the reformulation of some fundamental
premises of the western thought. A critique of contemporary science must
look for a transdisciplinar perspective, and be able to seek the basic
elements of a multidimensional and multilfocused paradigm, in order to
fully describe the relations, quality and complexity of reality.
The relationship between thermodynamics and sustainability is mainly due
to the attention that thermodynamics gives to the biophysical boundaries
that represent a constraint for the global environment. More
specifically, sustainability finds a precious contribute in the
ecodynamic models, which represent a synthesis between environmental
physical chemistry and ecology.
Sustainability needs also to consider the anthropic presence as a
subsystem of the whole biosphere, which can be assumed as a
thermodynamic closed system, exchanging energy but not matter with the
external sink (except a minimum dust or meteorite). Regarding every
human activity as a part of a whole system is a basic step for the
evaluation of the carrying capacity of the Earth.
The most relevant scientific reference for sustainable development's
models is thermodynamics of far from equilibrium systems, studied by
Ilya Prigogine.
We can consider the whole biosphere as a closed system in steady-state,
far from equilibrium, in which a negentropic flow allows the creation of
dissipative structures, complexity, new information, biodiversity,
relationships.
The switch to a vision of the interactions between man and nature as a
complex and non-linear system is a fundamental step, in order to abandon
the scientific reductionism that leads to abstract the single elements
of the system from the context of its properties and that draws an
oversimplified picture of nature (at the basis of the environmental
crisis).
The analysis of the evolution of a complex system underlines the
essential role of the time's arrow, which becomes a basic point to be
understood in the description of irreversibility. The reintroduction of
the time dimension in the scientific understanding allows moreover the
passage "from a space to a time culture". Shifting our scientific
paradigm from being to becoming means to find the link between the human
and the natural sciences, as nature is considered no more like an
unchangeable reality, isolated, ruled by deterministic and absolute
laws, where human being is condemned to an always greater alienation,
once lost his original natural rootness.
So we can find a scientific way for the elaboration of an alternative to
the positivistic reductionism that has evicted all those perceptive
elements that contribute to the knowledge but are not characterized by
the repeatability and quantifiability claimed by the hard sciences. The
new paradigm for sciences should be an evolutive one. Dominant economic
theory, based as it is on mechanistic principles, remains ignorant of
the law of entropy and the role of the time variable. The classical
dynamic concept of time and its reversibility, has nothing to do with
reality and nature. Time is not without its preferred directions (it is
not isotropic) as is space. Time has a direction. Thermodynamics
introduces "knowledge of the unidirectional flow of time", traces the
limit between past reality and future uncertainty, indicates the
orientation of time in natural processes.

Prof. Enzo Tiezzi
Dip. di Scienze e Tecnologie chimiche e dei Biosistemi
Via della Diana 2/a
53100 Siena (Italia)
Tel: +39-0577-232012
Fax: +39-0577-232004
Studio: +39-0577-45207

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Received on Wed Nov 19 12:40:55 2003