Angry in the Great White North

Let me start by making a simple statement of fact:

At the heart of the environmental movement is the goal to reduce entropy.

It is not about saving whales or planting trees or riding bicycles, though these are manifestations of this goal. One of the basic principles of science, indeed, quite possible the most important principle ever written down, is the Second Law of Thermodynamics:

The entropy of an isolated system not in equilibrium will tend to increase over time, approaching a maximum value at equilibrium.

Human civilization has always been about applying energy to create local reductions in entropy. The invention of the car is an application of technology to lower entropy. Thousands of mechanical pieces working in unison to create a means to move material in an ordered and deliberate manner from one place to another. The car is just one application of the internal combustion engine, which works because it creates localized areas of order (high pressure inside a piston, low pressure outside) from which to extract useful energy to drive other processes that in turn generate order.

But the second law of thermodynamics tells us that once we pull back far enough, the overall system in which our technology operates is growing in disorder. Crude oil is an area of high entropy -- thousands of compounds mixed together. We apply petroleum cracking techniques to break the oil down in gasoline, kerosene, and so forth. But that process requires the use of energy. It must, because to create order in the chemical chaos that is crude oil, energy must be inserted into the system. Energy is injected into the crude oil, and an ordered collection of petroleum by-products is the result. But when you add up the useful energy in those by-products, it is less than the energy you expended to create them. The energy you used to create the by-products has been used up and is now exhaust from a smokestack. No surprise there -- entropy always increases. In turn, we consume those by-products to extract the energy we just put in. But we never all the energy out, and the level of disorder grows again.

The point is, no matter what you use -- fossil fuels, nuclear, wind power -- entropy will increase. Efficiency is part of the problem. Wind power is inefficient. In order to extract useful amounts of energy, I have to build huge wind farms, and that represents a lot of entropy. Remember too, that a wind turbine that is located behind another turbine is getting less wind power, and the amount of energy extracted starts to drop dramatically. In other words, for every wind turbine that is extracting wind energy, the entropy in the remaining wind is increasing, and radically reducing the amount of useful energy remaining. Soon the landscape would be groaning under the weight of wind farms struggling to eak out the tiniest fraction of remaining energy in the still air.

But what can we do? We need the energy. The amount of organization in modern human society is mindboggling. To maintain that order requires prodigious expenditures of energy, and that in turn increases entropy more and more. David Suzuki rides his bike to work, but that only works if someone expends the energy to build and maintain a smooth road. If we stop expending the energy to keep the road in good condition, soon he'd be forced to drive an offroad vehicle. But we still lose, because we've shifted the level of organization from the road to the offroad vehicle, and that is almost certainly represents a lot more energy expended, and a greater entropy hit to endure.

So we continue to maintain the roads and drive cars, because the alternative is far worse.

Well, that's not the only alternative. I'm assuming we still need to get to work, roads or no roads.

There is another alternative. Stop driving to work. Let the roads break down (that is, stop expending energy to maintain them). Don't bother travelling any longer. Subsist on what can be acquired in you local vicinity.

The massive devolution in societal organization comes with a massive reduction in energy expenditure, and with that, a massive reduction in entropy (which, if it isn't obvious, is just pollution in its many forms). Increase in order is now localized to whatever your biological processes are capable of doing.

In other words, you live like animals. The only engine for generating order and so improve your life is your muscles. If you can't subsist on your own, you die. Well, that's the consequence. But any other system in which humans store and transmit energy around is always doomed to create waste by-products as a consequence of the laws of thermodynamics. There are simply limits to how efficiently you can use energy. Faced with death, however, humans will resort to these inefficient uses of energy. We do it every day. How long would you survive without a car? Seriously think about it. Take away cars (either by making them prohibitively expensive to operate, or just by banning them altogether) and people will die. Of course they will. Cars and other means of expanding our usable living space are critical to the way we can live in densities far higher than the land would otherwise be capable of sustaining.

And that's the key. Environmentalists talk about sustainability, but sustainability is enhanced and multiplied by technology, which always has the consequence of increasing entropy. If you want to drive down entropy, you need to start drawing down energy usage. Energy in turn increases order that increases levels of sustainability. Take the energy out, and sustainability will drop below the levels required by the density of people. The density of people will start to drop as a result.

David Suzuki understands this:

How do you feed nine billion people? It's a daunting question, but one we really need to be asking ourselves if we hope to feed humanity without severely degrading the earth's natural systems.

It may be hard to believe, but when I was born in 1936, there were just over two billion people in the world. In my lifetime, that has more than doubled. Today, United Nations' population estimates show that between now and 2050, another 2.9 billion souls will be added to our little planet. That's a lot of mouths to feed. But feeding them is just part of the challenge. Current intensive agricultural practices have a number of unwanted side effects - from pesticide use and fertilizer run-off, for example - that can harm wildlife, pollute water and otherwise damage the natural systems that we ultimately rely on for our health and well-being too.

So the question really is, how do we sustainably feed nine billion people? A new report recently published in the journal Science provides us with some indication. As part of a comprehensive study, researchers with the University of Reading in the UK looked at bird population trends to develop a threat-based risk assessment model that will predict the impact of agricultural practices on biodiversity and ecosystem services.

In the rest of the piece, Suzuki talks about birds, but he doesn't revisit the core problem he quite clearly articulated in the opening paragraphs. There are nine billion people that need to be fed. Suzuki is far more explicit in another interview:

Oh, well I don't say we're super species meaning we're super. I just mean that we are a new kind of force on the planet. There's never been, in the four billion years that life has existed, a single species able to alter the biological, chemical and physical features of the earth as we are doing now. Never a single species that did that. And now we are doing it with the power of our science and our technology and our absolutely insatiable, consumptive demand. We now are transforming the earth.

Now, we've always been a tribal, local species. We've never had to worry about what that tribe [is] doing on the other side of that lake, or the other side of the mountain or the ocean. We're a local animal. We may have known 200 people in a lifetime and travelled over a few dozens kilometres and if we trashed our areas, we just moved somewhere else. Well, it's different now. We've filled up the planet. We can't move somewhere else. And now for the first time in history, we have to consider what is the collective impact of 6.5 billion people.

He and other environmentalists tend to compare man as the wandering hunter-gatherer versus the civilized man, as if that is the choice before us. In a sense, he is right. The laws of physics simply don't allow the amount of energy required to organize and sustain populations of billions without paying a price in entropy. Pick any energy source you want, and the price will be paid in one way or another.

Suzuki puts the blame on technology:

If you look at human beings the way biologists do, over the entire history of our species existence on our planet, 600,000 to 800,000 years, for 99 per cent of our existence on earth we lived in small groups of hunter-gatherers with very simple technology. For most of our existence, human beings were a tiny factor in our environment. Nature was, it seemed, infinite and endlessly selfrenewing. You could pitch your tent or your camp, live there for a year or two, go away, come back 10 years later and it was as if no one had been there. Nature was vast and resilient. It could absorb what we did.

Even after we invented agriculture 10,000 or 12,000 years ago, for most of our time as farmers, we still lived in a state of nature. Nature was the dominant element determining the quality of our lives. It's only been in the last two centuries that you see a radical shift in the equation of humans in relation to the earth. It took all of human history, 99.9 per cent of our history, to reach one billion people on this planet (about 1830). And yet in the next 150 years, we doubled twice to reach four billion. We're at five now and we'll hit 10 within another 50 years. Now every new increase in numbers means that many more lungs to feed with air. That many more stomachs to fill with food, bodies to clothe and shelter.

We now are the most numerous, ubiquitous large mammal on the planet. But we are like no other animal that ever existed, because we are armed with the incredible muscle power of science and technology. Armed with that kind of muscle power, and our numbers and demands, we now assault the environment. And the environment can no longer take it and bounce back.

But what is technology except a means of extracting useful energy as a means of creating some measure of order, at the expense of generating a net increase in entropy. According to Suzuki and people like him, there is no choice but to give up the technology. But the technology is why we can sustain a population of billions, so poof! there goes the population.

David Suzuki lives on an island estate, easily large enough to host three large homes, but he prefers instead to own all that land and keep it from being used to house other families. I think it represents an ideal for him. On Quadra Island, there are 6 persons per square kilometer. Excluding the oceans and unihabitable areas like Antarctica, there are about 120 million square kilometers of land on this planet. Extrapolating from population density of David Suzuki's ideal retreat, that means a total global population of about 700 million people, or a die off of 90% of the current population. In terms of energy usage, that would certainly allow the planet's population to reach the goal of a reduction in energy usage by 50% within twenty years, as demanded by the Sustainability Within a Generation project promoted by the Suzuki Foundation. Besides slashing energy usage (which I maintain inevitably lowers sustainability) the project demands that Canada take action on "reproductive health services and family planning" programs for the Third World, which of course means population control by any means necessary, leading to population reduction.

To be fair, Suzuki also wants the spread of AIDS reversed and reducing child mortality by two-thirds. What is less obvious is that if people with AIDS die, and you reduce the number of children by two-thirds, these goals are essentially reached automatically.

And that is the point. If you kill off 90% of the population so that everyone enjoys the equivalent of life of Suzuki's Quadra Island estate of Tangwyn, environmental goals are reached. That small remaining vestige of humanity could not possibly use that much energy. Heck, that pitiful remnant of humanity, if spread more or less evenly across the planet, couldn't maintain the power grid and would be forced to live off the land. Humanity's production of entropy drops to nil. Of course it does -- there would be little left to do:

In the little free time he has, David Suzuki still enjoys fishing, camping and exploring the world of insects and tidal pools.

I suspect the planet has a great deal of resilience to the increase in entropy that is the inevitable result of our civilization. The alternative offered, though never in so many words, is to reduce entropy by reducing population. Organizing for all those people is using a lot more energy than just puttering about tidal pools.