Staring down the rabbit hole
I've recently been granted a glimpse of the bottom of the rabbit hole - a long, clear look at the big "Why?" behind planetary change, including climate change, resource exhaustion and overpopulation. These are the Cliff's Notes, for anyone else who is interested in digging down to root causes.
My view of the current human situation on this planet (not to mention my pessimism about the outcome) stands on the following tripod:
1. The “Law of Maximum Entropy Production” (LMEP) - the "Fourth Law of Thermodynamics" articulated in 1989 by Rod Swenson: "A system will select the path or assemblage of paths out of available paths that minimizes the potential or maximizes the entropy at the fastest rate given the constraints."
It states that the emergence of order, structure and self-organization in the universe is inevitable due to the laws of thermodynamics. All ordered structures are dissipative (i.e. the “goal” of order is to degrade energy gradients as fast as possible). This applies fractally at all scales from sub-atomic particles to human culture.
The referenced paper is a moderately tough scientific slog, but it's worth it (note that it contains no math).
Reference: http://rodswenson.com/humaneco.pdf
Here's what another internet friend had to say about it:
2. The “Maximum Power Principle” (MPP) of H.T. Odum: “During self-organization, system designs develop and prevail that maximize power intake, energy transformation, and those uses that reinforce production and efficiency.”
This principle essentially a re-statement of Swenson's LMEP, and is similarly applicable to all systems from thunderstorms to human institutions like economics. It clarifies the reasons for the observed growth in all human activities from energy use and general consumption to population. It also explains the succession of empires, why the USA and Russia won WWII, and why the USA defeated the Soviet Union in the Cold War.
Reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maximum_power_principle
3. The Principle of “Infrastructural Determinism” by Marvin Harris. In the tripartite framework of human culture (i.e. the “infrastructure” of resource-manipulation technologies, the “structure” of human social institutions, and the “superstructure” of values and beliefs), cultural influences flow probabilistically up from the infrastructure. This means that all our social institutions values and beliefs exist mainly to support and explain our resource-directed activities rather than to control or constrain them.
Reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_materialism_(anthropology)
It should be noted that the work of Harris and Odum preceded that of Swenson. As a result, their work did not have a solid rule-based, scientific foundation until Swenson came along. Their work can best be seen as domain-specific illustrations of LMEP. It is also worth noting that Swenson’s work shows that Darwinian evolution is probably a special case of Swenson's LMEP - that is, it is thermodynamics at work.
The upshot is that the whole of human culture is oriented towards executing, supporting and justifying the thermodynamic imperative of degrading energy sources as fast as possible. Population growth and material consumption are intrinsic parts of this process. We don’t recognize that most of our values and beliefs are responses to this invisible, universal pressure. As a result our behavior is remarkably sensitive to education directed towards enhancing this growth activity, and remarkably insensitive to any education directed at counteracting it. In fact our culture as a whole acts defensively towards such education, which is generally regarded as a threat.
The combination I've outlined above is not easy to assimilate and integrate. But if you do, I promise you will experience a flash of clarity about WTF is going on in the world, the likes of which you've never experienced before. Or your money back.
