Nature and Civilization

This post is another special surprise: the full Introduction from my book, The Physics of Capitalism, is copied below!

I called the Introduction of my book Nature and Society, a title meant to capture the fundamental dialectical dance between the natural world and human civilization that’s at the heart of the book. It’s a fairly lengthy introduction that summarizes many of the book’s main themes, including the core one: that nature and civilization are a chaotically interactive and integrated system linked together by dynamical feedback loops, bifurcations, tipping points, and critical transitions (see Figure 1). Global civilization is a vast thermodynamic system embedded in the planetary biosphere and is utterly dependent on the stability of that biosphere for its own survival. With the expansion of capitalism causing thermodynamic chaos throughout the planetary biosphere, the time has come to seriously reflect on the direction we’re going, and then to mobilize humanity to change course and chart a path for a better world.

Figure 1: Roughly 13 million hectares worldwide are used for terrace farming, a remarkable synergy between human engineering innovation and natural cycles in the biosphere. Terrace farming exploits the natural water cycle by preventing water runoff down steep slopes and increasing soil infiltration. Terrace farms also reinforce nutrient cycles by preventing topsoil erosion. And they promote biodiversity by integrating many plant species to ensure wall stability, attracting various insects and pollinators. Source for image is here.

Introduction: Nature and Society

Nature is embroiled in politics, often in the most unexpected ways. The Netherlands is the ultimate master of agricultural efficiency; it produces 6 percent of Europe’s food with just 1 percent of Europe’s farmland.¹ But not everything is rosy with the Dutch. In October 2019, farmers in the Netherlands made headlines around the world when they took to their tractors and started blocking roads and highways throughout the country.² They were outraged by recent court rulings and government proposals designed to reduce nitrogen emissions. The overabundance of nitrogen in Dutch ecosystems was sabotaging the country’s biodiversity, leading to the rapid growth of grasses and harmful weeds that could devastate insect and bird populations, in addition to the country’s pristine landscape. Even worse, many of the country’s shallow water systems had experienced horrible levels of pollution; some urban water areas in the Netherlands started to look like dumping grounds for hazardous waste. The government responded by mandating new standards for limiting the excessive nitrogen pollution being produced by farms and factories. But a Dutch court ruled in May 2019 that the government’s plans didn’t go far enough and violated European Union regulations; the decision immediately halted some 18,000 construction projects worth roughly 14 billion euros.³ All of a sudden, farmers could no longer make critical repairs, add more livestock, or expand their operations in any significant way. Their anger finally boiled over in the fall. Three years later, in the summer of 2022, Dutch farmers started protesting again by dumping garbage and manure all over national highways. Where did all this excess nitrogen come from, and why was it such a big deal, to the point where it brought a country like the Netherlands to a screeching halt on multiple occasions?

Modern agriculture relies heavily on artificial fertilizers, which usually contain large amounts of nitrogen and phosphorus. Plants need these critical nutrients to power their growth, especially since nitrogen and phosphorus are both essential components of many proteins and other biomolecules. But the fertilizers don’t always stay in the fields where they’re dumped; rain and seeping groundwater can carry them to other areas. And that’s where the challenges begin. The excessive concentration of nutrients in a particular environment is known as eutrophication.⁴ When fertilizer waste makes its way into rivers, estuaries, lakes, and oceans, bacteria and other tiny organisms use the nutrients to grow large colonies of algae, sometimes called algae blooms. These blooms block sunlight for aquatic organisms that live below the surface. And once the algae themselves die, the decomposition of their remains sucks out the rest of the oxygen in the water, turning the area into a “dead zone.” There are hundreds of dead zones around the world by now, with the largest ones reaching the size of small countries. Together, eutrophication and dead zones can harm fishing stocks, reduce tourism, and disrupt water supplies. In 2014, an algae bloom in Lake Erie disrupted the water supply of 500,000 people in the city of Toledo for several days.⁵ Algae blooms can look curiously harmless from a distance, but they’re not so innocent when they bring down entire ecosystems.

The effects of nature on human civilization are often gradual and cumulative, but the natural world can sometimes deliver a sudden blow that completely reshapes a particular society. In November 1970, the intense winds and storm surges of Cyclone Bhola struck East Pakistan, a large enclave of Pakistan created after the British partition of India in 1947. The brutal cyclone killed up to 500,000 people, making it one of the deadliest recorded natural disasters in human history.⁶ Entire villages were wiped out and large parts of the region were utterly devastated. Public anger boiled over, especially at the government’s lethargic response to a massive humanitarian tragedy. The political consequences were felt immediately. In December, the pro-autonomy Awami League won a landslide victory at the polls, but officials in West Pakistan refused to accept the results because they didn’t want to hand over the reins of power to a Bengali political party. The rising political instability among the various factions contributed to the outbreak of war in 1971. By the end of the conflict, East Pakistan was gone, and a new nation was born in its place: Bangladesh.

Cyclones and algae blooms can be massive systems stretching over vast distances, but nature can also impact humanity through much smaller biophysical vectors. The tsetse fly lives in sub-Saharan Africa and carries dangerous microbes capable of killing cattle and other livestock in large numbers. The disease produced by these microbes, characterized by fever and anemia, is known as nagana when it affects animals and “sleeping sickness” when it affects humans. It’s estimated that bites from tsetse flies kill at least three million cows and other livestock in sub-Saharan Africa every year, causing billions of dollars in financial damage along the way.⁷ It’s bad enough that some farmers have historically avoided large parts of sub-Saharan Africa where agriculture could otherwise thrive, simply so they don’t have to deal with tsetse flies. Many people have argued that the deadly flies are a major reason for Africa’s economic underdevelopment relative to other continents, though certainly other historical factors have also played a major role. Nagana is far from the only disease to impose devastating effects on humanity. From smallpox and cholera to typhus and Covid, epidemic diseases have always been some of the most decisive drivers of human history. In the twentieth century alone, smallpox may have killed up to 500 million people, about as many as have died in all the wars humanity has ever fought.⁸ The eradication of smallpox by the 1970s, following a massive global vaccination campaign, was by far the greatest public health victory in human history.

The complex interactions between nature and human society do not just unfold on the surface of the planet. In many large cities around the world, people extract water from underground water reservoirs called aquifers. But some of these cities are at least partially built on soft soils like clay-rich lake beds, so when too much water is extracted, the soft sheets of land underneath start to compress and undergo a process known as subsidence, meaning that the ground literally sinks. Subsidence is a huge problem that’s currently affecting many places around the world, especially dominant metropolises like Mexico City and Jakarta. In Mexico City, differential rates of subsidence across various districts have led to broken pipes and roads along with collapsing houses and buildings.⁹ Neighborhoods that were once sitting on flat ground now look like they were built on gently rolling hills. In Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia, subsidence and rising sea levels have cleared out numerous coastal neighborhoods and contributed to massive flooding problems. Throw in excessive pollution levels and extreme traffic congestion and you get a situation where it’s becoming almost unbearable to live in certain parts of the city. Jakarta’s ecological problems have gotten so bad that the Indonesian government has decided to run away and build an entirely new capital, called Nusantara, on the island of Borneo.¹⁰ Indonesian officials claim that the new capital city will be “green” and environmentally sustainable, but its very construction has led to the devastation of pristine forests and other critical habitats, to say nothing of the harmful pollutants and greenhouse gases that are also being released into the atmosphere. This example nevertheless underscores a common pattern that repeats throughout human history: when people make a mess of things in one area, they either migrate to other areas or try to somehow shift the locus of ecological degradation. For example, rich countries are notorious for selling much of their trash to poor countries, in effect exporting some of their ecological problems away by taking advantage of desperate countries that need money or other resources.¹¹

Cyclones, epidemics, dead zones, and subsidence are just some of the many ways that the natural world intersects with human civilization. Even though we often think of our social lives as being somehow separate from nature, there’s a profound connection between the world “in here” and the one “out there.” We sometimes have this sense of the natural world as an obscure force swarming with uneventful distractions. We do not consider ourselves as physical systems guided by natural conditions; we see ourselves as independent agents doing whatever we want. We have a gut-level belief in the power of our infinite will, and the idea that other things can stop us or challenge us seems laughable. If we wish to “tame” nature, we build dams to control rivers. We blow holes through mountains and construct tunnels. We like to brag about the impact that our actions have on nature, by showing off our elegant skyscrapers, gorgeous bridges, and lengthy canals. When we wish to “protect” nature, we establish parks and start exploring them through hiking, climbing, and camping. In this frame of mind, we are active and nature is passive; we do things and nature just sits there. But if we are truly so detached from nature, there would be no reason to seek shelter from the heavy rain, no reason to flee from a hungry tiger, no reason to consume oxygen from the atmosphere, no reason to take long walks on the beach, and no reason to enjoy the comfort of shade from the soaring heat. Our collective humanity very much depends on the natural world, for joy, for comfort, and for sheer survival. Nature is full of complex and dynamic systems that are constantly interacting with our societies. The natural world is not simply active in some abstract sense; its collective physical interactions guide and forge many fundamental features of human societies and civilizations. Humanity does not exist on a magical pedestal above the rest of reality; we are just one slice in a grand continuum of physical systems that interact, combine, and transform over time. We too belong to the natural world, and we too experience its interactions and conditions, just like everything else. The wonders of the world are waltzing to the rhythm of restless atoms and oscillating fields.

The fact that we belong to nature means that understanding nature is the key to understanding ourselves, and the historical journey of humanity more broadly. One of the major curiosities about the development of our species is why it took so long for human beings to establish energy-intensive civilization. About 50,000 years ago, our ancestors had roughly the same anatomical features as we do today. Their skulls and bodies were similar to ours. They almost certainly had similar intellectual capacities; some human groups were probably speaking fully developed languages.¹² But for all these important similarities, they lived in a very different world than ours. They didn’t have agriculture, roads, writing, and large buildings. They didn’t have government bureaucracies. Why did they lack these things, even though they had the intellectual capacities to create them? To answer this question, it’s useful to know something about their natural environment. For the past two million years, the climate of planet Earth has been dominated by large temperature variations that have produced everything from warm and flourishing conditions to alarmingly frigid patterns in which massive glaciers engulfed much of Europe, Asia, and the Western Hemisphere. This climatic chaos came to an end roughly 15,000 years ago, with the conclusion of the last Ice Age. What followed was a period of remarkable and unusual climatic stability in which the world experienced not just warmer temperatures, but stable temperatures, stable rainfall patterns, and stable volcanic activity for prolonged stretches of time.¹³ Even this world had its share of sudden variations and cataclysmic natural disasters, of course, but at least people didn’t have to deal with most of Europe being buried under massive stacks of ice.

Humans almost certainly knew about the basic patterns of agriculture long before the establishment of fully developed agricultural civilizations. But for tens of thousands of years, that knowledge didn’t really matter because we couldn’t do much with it. The transition to agriculture was messy, complex, and unfolded over thousands of years; most hunters and gatherers actually resisted such a massive societal change at different points in time.¹⁴ But shifting ecological dynamics provided the possible operating space for agriculture to develop in the first place. The Ice Age had deprived people of the resources and ecological conditions to generate the necessary food surpluses for a sedentary community, which is not to claim that sedentary communities are what people wanted. Many of them were perfectly happy being nomadic. But even if they had wanted something else, nature was not exactly cooperative. In a topsy-turvy world of radical climatic shifts, counting on a sedentary location for a reliable food supply was just wishful thinking. A promising settlement in one year could be obliterated the next year by a powerful blizzard or some other natural disaster. People needed to have something far more regular and reliable to survive, much less to establish a successful agricultural community. Before the dawn of agriculture and the domestication of animals, the chaotic climate forced people to rely on food sources that were often seasonal and sporadic. As a result, widespread climatic instability probably delayed the emergence of energy-intensive civilization by tens of thousands of years, even though humans had all the physical and intellectual capacities required for its realization. By contrast, the climatic stability of the last 10,000 years has served as the central ecological primer that allowed human beings to form complex societies and civilizations. A predictable climate allowed people to grow food surpluses from the same settlement. It allowed them to organize their lives and communities without the fear that everything would collapse in a few years. In short, it afforded them the first real opportunity to move away from their previous nomadic existence, although this process came with its own set of problems and complications.

Nature evidently imposes powerful limits on what societies can do. Our civilizations are complex biophysical systems that interact with the wider natural world, and none can be fully examined apart from their underlying material conditions. The main goal of this book is to develop a better theoretical framework for thinking about the links and relations between the natural world and human economies, in the hope that such knowledge can help us plan for a better future and wrestle with the complex problems of the intensifying ecological crisis in our own age. A secondary goal is to offer a specific and alternative worldview for how to construct the broader energetic, economic, and political parameters of future societies. The dynamic structure of economics rests on physical and social conditions. Economies are complex dynamic systems in which people exchange energy with their natural ecozones and interact with one another as they produce, consume, and distribute goods and services. Economic systems can expand or contract depending on underlying ecological conditions, class structures, labor relations, social conflicts, and technological adaptations. These material factors are all locked in a vast web of chaotic interdependence, meaning that changes in one factor can produce highly complex and non-linear effects on the other factors. Ecological conditions may retain their causal primacy in the long run, but social and economic factors can predominate over critical periods that constrain the distribution of financial wealth as well as the intensity of commercial and productive cycles.

I will call this basic summary the ecodynamic synthesis. It’s not meant to be a formal scientific theory with rigorously quantifiable predictions. The larger aim is instead to present a new worldview that is informed by various intellectual traditions, including scientific and economic sources. The ecodynamic synthesis borrows and combines insights from ecological science, network theory, complex systems theory, and various economic theories, chiefly Marxist and institutional theories. Underpinning the ecodynamic synthesis is a flow-cycle model involving nature and society. Nature is the flowing river and society is the rotating watermill. Dynamical flows are the collections of energy and materials that economies absorb from the natural world. Some portions of these flows are used for production and distribution, but others are lost as wasted energy that can lead to natural instabilities that are highly disruptive to the prevailing social order. Dynamical cycles, on the other hand, are the recurring collective modes of production and distribution facilitated by the flows. The flows constrain and facilitate the cycles by providing a resource base for energy extraction, but the cycles can also impact ecological flows through various chaotic feedback loops associated with the energy losses of our economic activities, and other non-linear perturbations.

Before getting into more details, I should add a few notes about the philosophical orientation of the book. First, it would be wrong to see the message of this work as anything approaching environmental determinism, a controversial term that’s difficult to define. It roughly means something like the belief that the economic, cultural, and political structures of human society are mostly, if not exclusively, caused by environmental factors and conditions, including the prevailing climate and the available resources in a particular place. Such a reductionist framework will inevitably leave out a lot of important details. The climatic conditions of the United States can never tell you why there are specifically 50 states in the country, or 435 members in the House of Representatives. The river systems and arable lands of the United States cannot explain why we need to file our tax returns with the Internal Revenue Service by April of every year, nor can they explain the specific tax rates, credits, and deductions that applied to us in those returns. There are many legal, institutional, and economic features of society that are simply emergent, that cannot be reduced to deeper scientific principles through naïve models of causation. However, it’s still true that the global ecosphere sets the broader constraints in which human societies and civilizations can successfully operate. And if these dynamical constraints experience profound and rapid disruptions, as they are in our age, then the natural world can indeed compel and pressure human civilization into reorganizing its emergent properties. Likewise, the emergent features of human society can also be helpful or disruptive to the rest of the natural world, depending on what we do. That’s the basic point of this book: nature and society can affect each other in highly complex ways, which means that we need to think carefully about what kind of society we want to have in the first place. To speak about “nature” and “society” might seem to imply that these two terms signify fundamentally different things. But isn’t society just a part of nature? Society is embedded in the natural world, as are all human bodies, feelings, thoughts, and ideas. In that case, why would we talk about them dialectically, as if they’re two separate things? The answer is simple. We need to distinguish between a system and its surroundings if we’re going to say anything empirically and scientifically useful about the system itself. Even though a car engine forms one part of a larger vehicle, and that vehicle is embedded in a particular environment, it’s still useful to distinguish between the engine as a system and the wider environment in which the engine needs to operate. Only then can we start making claims about the efficiency or the work output of the engine, among other things. If we want to understand the long-term evolution of human society, then we can only do so by exploring how society interacts with the rest of the natural world. Much of this exploration will be done from the perspective of physics, but it’s important to emphasize that this book is not just about physics. It’s also about the social, economic, political, and historical relations that inform the wider scientific discussions regarding humanity’s future on this planet. The goal is to aim for a holistic analysis that ties together different causal factors. Physics will be the centerpiece of this analysis, but the book will also relate these scientific ideas to other emergent features of human society.

Energy

The fate of all economic systems is written in their energy flows. The exchange of energy between different systems has a decisive influence on the order, phase, and stability of physical matter. Energy is typically defined as the ability to do work, but this definition is not ideal when considering things like radiation or quantum physics, so one can better think of it as any conserved state of motion, such as work or heat, that can be exchanged among different systems.¹⁵ Kinetic energy and potential energy are two of the most important forms of energy storage. The sum of these two quantities is known as mechanical energy.¹⁶ A truck speeding down the highway packs a good amount of kinetic energy, which is energy associated with motion. A boulder teetering at the edge of a cliff has great potential energy, or energy associated with position. If given a slight push, its potential energy transforms into kinetic energy under the influence of gravity, and off it goes. When physical systems interact, energy is converted into many different forms, but its total quantity always remains constant. The conservation of energy implies that the total output of all energy flows and transformations must equal the total input.

Energy flows among different systems represent the engine of the cosmos, and they happen everywhere, so often that we hardly notice them. Heat naturally flows from warmer to colder regions, hence our coffee cools in the morning. Particles move from high-pressure areas to low-pressure areas, and so the wind starts to howl. Water travels from regions of high potential energy to regions of low potential energy, making rivers flow. Electric charges journey from regions of high voltage to regions of low voltage, and thus currents are unleashed through conductors. The flow of energy through physical systems is one of the most common features of nature. As these examples show, energy flows require gradients, which are differences in temperature, pressure, density, or other factors. Without these gradients, nature would never deliver any net flows, all physical systems would remain in equilibrium, and the world would be very boring. Energy flows are also important because they can generate mechanical work, which is any macroscopic displacement in response to a force.¹⁷ Lifting a weight and kicking a ball are both examples of performing mechanical work on another system.

Energy flows are central to the existence of life. For example, living organisms rely on the conversion of chemical energy into thermal and mechanical energy for survival. Living things usually store chemical energy in large biomolecules called adenosine triphosphates. Every single day, life is hard at work producing vast quantities of ATP molecules from proton pumps powered by electrochemical gradients across cell membranes, a fancy way of saying that energy flows in our cells produce the things we need to survive. Proteins and enzymes then break down these biomolecules and exploit the resulting energy to perform vital biological tasks, such as the contraction of muscles or the replication of DNA. Another example is the radiation zooming out from the Sun, which is generally responsible for some of the most important energy flows in the circle of life. A long time ago, the ancestors of many special organisms learned how to harness the power of sunlight and other basic substances for survival. Today these organisms include plants and algae; biologists call them autotrophs.

In the energy pyramid of life, the autotrophs are the base because they sustain all other living things. Part of the energy they process and absorb makes its way to heterotrophs, the organisms that need the nutrients provided by autotrophs to function and survive. Herbivores, carnivores, and omnivores are all heterotrophs, ultimately reliant on plants and other autotrophs for their basic needs. Herbivores consume plants directly while carnivores evolved to consume herbivores as a way of acquiring the substances they need from plants. Nuclear fusion inside the Sun is what keeps the whole system going. A byproduct of nuclear fusion is radiation, packets of photons that wend their way through the Sun before being released into space. These photons carry tiny amounts of energy individually, but vast quantities collectively. As they strike the Earth, they excite electrons and other particles to higher energy states, setting off a series of reactions and energy flows that help to sustain the chemical and biological features of life. The Sun is the chief sustainer of all the relevant energy flows in the biosphere.

Entropy and Dissipation

Although energy flows can produce work, they rarely do so efficiently. Large macroscopic systems, like trucks or planets, lose or gain mechanical energy through their interactions with the external world. The lead actor in this grand drama is dissipation, defined as any process that partially reduces or entirely eliminates the available mechanical energy of a physical system, converting it into heat or other products.¹⁸ As they interact with the external environment, physical systems often lose mechanical energy over time through friction, diffusion, turbulence, vibrations, collisions, and other similar dissipative effects, all of which prevent any energy source from being converted entirely into mechanical work. The presence of dissipation makes it necessary for dynamical systems to regularly absorb energy from the external world, as a way of overcoming the energy losses associated with dissipative interactions. Car engines burn through gasoline to sustain the motion of the wheels, which need periodic bursts of energy to overcome the dissipative effects of friction. Another simple example of dissipation is the heat produced when we rapidly rub our hands together.

Dissipation is not limited to things like cars and machines. It can have stunning and profound effects on planetary and cosmic scales. For example, the friction between the tides and the surface of the Earth is gradually slowing down the rate of rotation of the entire planet. Around 600 million years ago, a day on Earth lasted about 22 hours, and 300 million years later it had gone to almost 23 hours. As the tides move across the crust, the resulting friction produces heat. Over the eons, the ultimate effect of this process has been to slow down the rotation of the planet, which loses rotational kinetic energy as it produces more heat. In the natural world, macroscopic energy flows are often accompanied by dissipative losses of one kind or another. Physical systems that can dissipate energy are capable of rich and complex interactions, making dissipation a central feature of the natural order. A world without dissipation, and without the interactions that make it possible, is difficult to imagine. Think about what would happen if friction suddenly disappeared from the world. People would be slipping and sliding everywhere. Our cars would be useless, as would the very idea of transportation, because wheels and other mechanical devices would lack any traction with the ground and other surfaces. You would never be able to hold hands with your loved ones. You could never rock your baby back and forth. Our bodies would rapidly deteriorate and lose their internal structure. There would be no basic concept of time and place, not in a traditional sense anyway. The world would be very alien and unrecognizable.

Dissipation is closely related to entropy, one of the most important concepts in thermodynamics. While energy measures the motion produced by physical systems, entropy tracks the way that energy is distributed in the natural world. Entropy has several standard definitions in physics, all of them essentially equivalent. One popular definition from classical thermodynamics states that entropy is the amount of heat energy per unit of temperature that becomes unavailable for mechanical work during a thermodynamic process.¹⁹ Another important definition comes from statistical physics, which looks at how the microscopic parts of nature can join to produce big, macroscopic results. In this statistical version, entropy is a measure of the various ways that the microscopic states of a larger system can be rearranged without changing that system.²⁰ For a concrete example, think of a typical gas and a typical solid at equilibrium. Energy is distributed very differently in these two phases of matter. The gas has a higher entropy than the solid, because the former’s particles have far more possible energy configurations than the fixed atomic sites in solids and crystals, which have only a small range of energy configurations that will preserve their fundamental order.²¹ We should emphasize that the concept of entropy does not apply to a specific configuration of macroscopic matter, but rather applies as a constraint on the number of possible configurations that a macroscopic system can have at equilibrium.

Entropy has a profound connection to dissipation through one of the most important laws of thermodynamics, which states that heat flows can never be fully converted into work.²² Dissipative interactions ensure that physical systems always lose some energy as heat in any natural thermodynamic process, where friction and other similar effects are present. Real-world examples of these thermodynamic losses include emissions from car engines, electric currents encountering resistance, and interacting fluid layers experiencing viscosity. In thermodynamics, these phenomena are often considered irreversible. The continuous production of heat energy from irreversible phenomena gradually depletes the stock of mechanical energy that physical systems can exploit. According to the definition of entropy, depleting useful mechanical energy generally implies that entropy increases. Formally stated, the most important consequence of any irreversible process is to increase the combined entropy of a physical system and its surroundings. For an isolated system, entropy continues to rise until it reaches some maximum value, at which point the system settles into equilibrium. To clarify this last concept, imagine a red gas and a blue gas separated by a partition inside a sealed container. Removing the partition allows the two gases to mix together. The result would be a gas that looks purple, and that equilibrium configuration would represent the state of maximum entropy. We can also relate dissipation to the concept of entropy in statistical physics. The proliferation of heat energy through physical systems changes the motion of their molecules into something more random and dispersed, increasing the number of microstates that can represent the macroscopic properties of the system. In a broad sense, entropy can be seen as the tendency of nature to reconfigure energy states into distributions that dissipate mechanical energy.

The traditional description of entropy given above applies in the regime of equilibrium thermodynamics. But in the real world, physical systems rarely exist at fixed temperatures, in perfect states of equilibrium, or in total isolation from the rest of the universe. The field of non-equilibrium thermodynamics examines the properties of thermodynamic systems that operate sufficiently far from equilibrium, such as living organisms or exploding bombs. Non-equilibrium systems are the lifeblood of the universe; they make the world dynamic and unpredictable. Modern thermodynamics remains a work in progress, but it has been used successfully to study a broad spectrum of phenomena, including heat flows, interacting quantum gases, dissipative structures, and even the global climate.²³ There is no universally accepted meaning of entropy in non-equilibrium conditions, but physicists have offered several proposals.²⁴ All of them include time when analyzing thermodynamic interactions, allowing us to determine not just whether entropy goes up or down, but also how quickly or slowly physical systems can change on their path to equilibrium. The principles of modern thermodynamics are therefore essential in helping us understand the behavior of real-world systems, including life itself.

All life forms are engaged in the physical process of avoiding thermodynamic equilibrium with the rest of their environment by continuously dissipating energy. This was one of the key insights that the physicist Erwin Schrödinger suggested in the 1940s, when he used non-equilibrium thermodynamics to study the central features of biology.²⁵ We may call this vital process the entropic imperative. All living organisms consume energy from an external environment, use it to fuel vital biochemical processes and interactions, and then dissipate most of the energy consumed back to the environment. The dissipation of energy to an external environment allows organisms to conserve the order and stability of their own biochemical systems. The essential functions of life critically depend on this entropic stability, including functions like digestion, respiration, cell division, and protein synthesis. What makes life unique as a physical system is the sheer variety of dissipation methods that it has developed, including the production of heat, the emission of gases, and the expulsion of waste. This sweeping capacity to dissipate energy is what helps life to sustain the entropic imperative. Indeed, the physicist Jeremy England has argued that physical systems in a heat bath flooded with large amounts of energy can tend to dissipate more energy.²⁶ This “dissipation-driven adaptation” can lead to the spontaneous emergence of order, replication, and self-assembly among microscopic units of matter, providing a potential clue to the very dynamics of the origin of life.

Organisms also use the energy they consume to perform mechanical work by, for example, walking, running, climbing, or typing on a keyboard. Those organisms with access to many energy sources can do more work and dissipate more energy, satisfying the central conditions of life. Like all other biological organisms, humans consume resources from some external environment in order to survive, reproduce, and expand. The consumption of energy is crucial because it allows animals to perform mechanical work, which means that they can run away from predators, move to other areas in search of food, or build tools to solve different problems. In addition, the biological mechanisms that are central to life, like protein synthesis and cell division, all require energy conversions in order to unfold at a regular pace. And the energy that we consume from the external world is precisely what allows our cellular components to perform all of these critical tasks. Energy and work are measured in the same units, the standard one being the joule. One joule is roughly the amount of energy your hand uses to lift an ordinary apple up to your mouth. A food calorie, also known as a kilocalorie, is equal to about 4,184 joules. A central empirical focus of our future analysis will be the rate of energy use, mostly because we want to track how the exchange of energy between different systems can change over time, and how those changes then affect the structural organization of the systems themselves. The rate of energy use is known as power, but to avoid any confusion with the more familiar understanding of the word, we shall use terms like “power output” or “rate of energy conversion” whenever we talk about power. In addition, we want to remove population effects in our analysis by using the term “energy conversion” to mean per capita conversion, unless otherwise indicated.

Physics and Economics

The thermodynamic relationships among energy, entropy, and dissipation impose powerful constraints on the behavior and evolution of economic systems.²⁷ From a thermodynamic perspective, economies function as non-equilibrium systems capable of rapidly dissipating energy to some external environment. All dynamical systems gain strength from some energy reservoir, reach peak intensity by absorbing a regular supply of energy, then unravel from internal and external changes that either disrupt vital energy flows or make it impossible to keep dissipating more energy. They can even experience long-term undulations by growing for some time, then shrinking, then growing again, before finally collapsing. Interactions between dynamical systems can produce highly chaotic results, but energy expansions and contractions are the core features of all dynamical systems. The energy consumed by all economic systems is either converted into electricity and mechanical work, along with the physical products derived from that work, or it’s simply wasted and dissipated to the environment. Economies that increase the amount of electricity and mechanical work they generate can usually produce more goods and services. Historically, electricity and mechanical work have comprised a relatively small fraction of total energy use in any economy; the vast majority of the energy consumed by all economies is routinely squandered to the environment as waste, dissipation, and other kinds of energy losses.

Throughout history, economic growth has depended heavily on people converting more energy from their natural environments and concentrating the resulting energy flows for the completion of specific tasks.²⁸ When humans were hunters and foragers, the primary asset that performed mechanical work was the human muscle.²⁹ Our muscles were great for running, walking, collecting fruits, and hunting animals, but they did not generate enough mechanical work for energy-intensive production. This nomadic way of life lasted for some 200,000 years before undergoing significant disruptions after the Ice Age. Over the next few millennia, new lakes and rivers were born from the receding glaciers. Flora and fauna rapidly multiplied; this bonanza of wild crops and animals made it possible for some groups of people to settle down on specific plots of land, leading to numerous pastoralist and agricultural strategies that would come to define much of our history. Agrarian economies relied heavily on cultivated plants and domesticated animals to help generate surpluses of food and other goods and resources. These agrarian modes of production and consumption dominated human societies for almost ten thousand years but were eventually replaced by a new economic system: capitalism.

Capitalism emerged and spread from a complex set of converging conditions: the extraction and development of energy-dense natural resources, waves of colonial expansion, intensive periods of industrialization and technological innovation, the proliferation of epidemic diseases, and genocidal campaigns against Indigenous populations accompanied by massive land theft. It was the most chaotic and violent transformation in human history. The global economy has since become an interconnected system of finance, computers, factories, vehicles, machines, wage labor, and much more. Creating and sustaining this system required a major upward transition in the rate of energy throughput from our natural environments. In our nomadic days, the daily rate of per capita energy consumption was around 5,000 kilocalories, perhaps even less.³⁰ By 1850, per capita consumption in Britain had risen to roughly 80,000 kilocalories per day, and the rate has since ballooned to about 200,000 kilocalories a day among the most advanced energy-intensive economies, such as the United States.³¹ From a scientific perspective, the fundamental feature of all capitalist economies is a high rate of energy use focused on boosting productivity and economic growth. The collective deployment of machines, vehicles, and electronic devices requires the production of vast amounts of useful energy, which in turn allows people to make more stuff, travel farther distances, and lift heavier objects, among other tasks. Capitalism is far more energy-intensive than any previous economic system, and it has wrought unprecedented ecological consequences that may threaten its very existence.

We can think of capitalism, from a biophysical perspective, as a supercharged entroplex, a mega-dissipative system dumping massive amounts of gases, liquids, and solid waste into our natural environments. The biggest effect of this spasmic energetic release has been the degradation of the planetary ecosphere to a more entropic and chaotic state, with profound implications for the future of humanity. In 2004, a group of research scientists with the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme summarized these enormous changes and the great acceleration that started in the middle of the twentieth century:

A profound transformation of Earth’s environment is now apparent, owing not to the great forces of nature or to extraterrestrial sources but to the numbers and activities of people—the phenomenon of global change. Begun centuries ago, this transformation has undergone a profound acceleration during the second half of the 20th century. During the last 100 years human population soared from little more than one to six billion and economic activity increased nearly 10-fold between 1950 and 2000. The world’s population is more tightly connected than ever before via globalization of economies and information flows. Half of Earth’s land surface has been domesticated for direct human use. Most of the world’s fisheries are fully or overexploited. The composition of the atmosphere—greenhouse gases, reactive gases, aerosol particles—is now significantly different than it was a century ago. The Earth is now in the midst of its sixth great extinction event. The evidence that these changes are affecting the basic functioning of the Earth System, particularly the climate, grows stronger every year. The magnitude and rates of human-driven changes to the global environment are in many cases unprecedented for at least the last half-million years.³²

The increasing order of human civilization is producing increasing disorder in the broader ecosphere, and this growing imbalance, if allowed to continue, will inevitably cripple the stability of global civilization itself. The huge energy losses of our modern economies have become an energy reservoir for other dynamical systems in nature, such as viruses, bacteria, hurricanes, storms, wildfires, and algae blooms, among others.³³ Paradoxically, the “useless” energy that human civilization dumps into the natural world powers the formation of other physical systems, and these systems collectively are forming a new ecological order that will be incompatible with the necessary conditions for sustainable human development. It remains uncertain how long we can sustain such an energy-intensive path, but there is no doubt that the fantasy of endless growth and easy profits cannot continue. Our main goal is to chart a new path that will allow humanity to thrive within the natural constraints and parameters of the planetary ecosphere.

Our Great Challenge

In the 1980s, the world had a major ecological problem. The emission of gases like chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), widely used as coolants in refrigeration, had punched a giant hole in the ozone layer. If that hole continued to get bigger, it would mean that dangerous levels of ultraviolet radiation from the Sun would reach the surface of the Earth and wreak havoc on human health worldwide. The world’s nations got together and passed the Montreal Protocol in 1987, which gradually phased out the use of CFCs in refrigeration and other commercial or industrial uses. Even though it still hasn’t fully gone away, the hole in the ozone layer gradually became smaller over the next few decades. Overall, this episode is often cited as prime evidence of humanity’s collective ability to solve hard problems. Here were the countries of the world all coming together in the face of adversity and doing something for the common good. What’s often neglected in this feel-good story is that CFCs were then immediately replaced by substances like hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), which are extremely potent greenhouse gases. Humanity essentially traded one problem for another: it got rid of CFCs and saved the ozone layer, but only at the cost of dumping vast amounts of HFCs into the atmosphere and causing a rapid acceleration in global warming.

The most dangerous recurring theme of human history is civilizational collapse and dysfunction caused by widespread ecological disruption. We are now entering an age of profound and unprecedented ecological crisis, a bionomic disruption that threatens not just the viability of our economic systems, but large portions of the planet’s biological fabric. Although global warming is a major long-term challenge, it’s just one of many fundamental problems that have been caused by the capitalist acceleration of the past two centuries. For just one notable example, recent studies have suggested that roughly 8 to 10 million people die prematurely every year from air pollution caused specifically by the combustion of fossil fuels.³⁴ In addition to global warming, humanity has adversely affected the planetary ecosphere by polluting the world’s oceans and atmosphere, starting the sixth mass extinction event in our planet’s history, causing massive disruptions to the nitrogen and phosphorous cycles that sustain all plant growth, boosting the incidence of global pandemics through agricultural expansion, and expediting the shortage of critical natural resources, including drinking water, for much of the world’s population. To the extent that human civilization will buckle and bend over the next few centuries, it will be from the cumulative pressure of all these factors, not from any single factor by itself. But since our problems are largely framed in the context of climate change, the corresponding solutions are narrow and technical, amounting to little more than hoping for rapid technological change to replace fossil fuels with renewables like wind and solar. For this school of thought, the goal is simply to decarbonize the global economy and continue as if nothing else matters. This approach is misguided precisely because our ecological problems don’t boil down to one simple thing. Substituting fossil fuels with renewable energy sources is an important and admirable objective, but not if it’s done without thinking about the broader context of our ecological challenges.

The dominant narrative in this entire debate is the idea that humanity can overcome the ecological problems of late-stage capitalism through technological innovation.³⁵ In this book I will make a very different argument. Technological innovation has produced more energy-intensive societies with destructive ecological consequences. Improving energy efficiency tends to lead to more energy use over time, not less. Having a good understanding of the physics of capitalism will provide a better foundation for radically changing the politics of capitalism. Instead of advocating for technological change, we should advocate for social and political transformation. We should change how power is wielded in society, how decisions are made, how labor is organized, how wealth is distributed. Revolutionary transformation is what we need to secure our future. The main thesis of this work can be stated as follows: if modern civilization is going to survive the upcoming millennium, then we need to thoroughly reconstitute and revolutionize the social and economic relations that currently govern our lives. There are no quick technological “fixes” for what we’re facing; technological changes can supplement a comprehensive solution to our bionomic dilemma, but the only realistic way to save civilization in the long run is to radically change how we organize our societies.

In the first four chapters, I will lay out some of the concepts, problems, and narratives that have been used to understand the interconnections between human economies and the natural world. In chapters 5 through 9, I’ll unveil a new theoretical framework for better understanding economics and our place in the natural world. In the last three chapters, I’ll use this framework to identify some of the possibilities that are worth pursuing in our future efforts to construct a genuinely post-capitalist world.

Among all the living organisms that have called this blue marble home, humans are a very recent species. In that short period of time, we have managed to become one of the most dominant life forms in the history of the planet, creating powerful civilizations with elaborate cultures, large populations, and extensive trade networks. We have been nomads and farmers, scientists and lawyers, nurses and doctors, welders and blacksmiths. Our achievements are both astonishing and unprecedented, but they also carry great risks. The economic and demographic growth of human civilization over the last ten thousand years has profoundly impacted natural ecosystems throughout the planet. Global civilization now stands at a critical tipping point that deserves closer scrutiny. The goal of this work is to explore the deep ecology of human life and existence: to develop a fundamental sense of how human society relates to the wider natural world and then to thoroughly examine the possible scenarios for the future of human civilization. If we are to have any hope of addressing the difficult challenges we face, we must begin by understanding them and appreciating their complexity. And then, we must act.

1. Kenny Torrella, “How will we feed Earth’s rising population? Ask the Dutch,” Vox, March 23, 2023, https://www.vox.com/.

2. Merrit Kennedy, “Tractor Trails of Protesting Dutch Farmers Snarl Traffic for Hundreds of Miles,” NPR, October 1, 2019, https://www.npr. org/.

3. Reuters, “Dutch shelve billion-euro projects as EU nitrogen rules bite,” September 13, 2019, https://www.reuters.com/.

4. Water Resources Mission Area, “Nutrients and Eutrophication,” United States Geological Survey, March 3, 2019. https://www.usgs.gov/.

5. George Tanber, “Toxin leaves 500,000 in northwest Ohio without drinking water,” Reuters, August 2, 2014. https://www.reuters.com/.

6. For a gripping account of the tragedy and its aftermath, see Scott Carney and Jason Miklian, The Vortex: A True Story of History’s Deadliest Storm, An Unspeakable War, and Liberation (New York: Ecco Press, 2022).

7. Sue C. Grady, Joseph P. Messina, and Paul F. McCord, “Population Vulnerability and Disability in Kenya’s Tsetse Fly Habitats,” PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases 5 (2011): e957.

8. Jeremy Youde, Biopolitical Surveillance and Public Health in International Politics (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 1, 67.

9. Carrie Kahn, “Mexico City Keeps Sinking as Its Water Supply Wastes Away,” NPR, September 14, 2018. https://www.npr.org/.

10. Hannah Beech, “How to Move a Sinking Capital City,” New York Times, May 16, 2023.

11. Joseph Winters, “Rich countries are illegally exporting plastic trash to poor countries, data suggests,” Grist, April 15, 2022, https://grist.org/.

12. Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner, The Way We Think (New York: Basic Books, 2002), 187.

13. Sebastian Wagner and Eduardo Zorita, “High-Resolution Climate Reconstruction of the Last 2,000 Years,” in Climate Changes in the Holocene, ed. Eustathios Chiotis (Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, 2019), 122.

14. See James Scott, Against the Grain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017).

15. Robert L. Lehrman, “Energy Is Not the Ability to Do Work.” The Physics Teacher 11/1 (1973).

16. Larry Kirkpatrick and Gregory E. Francis, Physics: A Conceptual Worldview (Boston: Cengage Learning, 2009), 124.

17. Peter Atkins, Four Laws That Drive the Universe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 23.

18. William Thomson, “On a Universal Tendency in Nature to the Dissipation of Mechanical Energy,” Proceedings of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, vol. 3 (Edinburgh: Neill and Company, 1857), 139–42.

19. Douglas C. Giancoli, Physics for Scientists and Engineers (London: Pearson Education, 2008), 545.

20. John M. Seddon and Julian D. Gale, Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics (London: Royal Society of Chemistry, 2001), 60–65.

21. Seddon and Gale, Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics, 65.

22. Atkins, Four Laws That Drive the Universe, 53.

23. For the famous reciprocal relations that describe heat flows, see Lars Onsager, “Reciprocal Relations in Irreversible Processes I,” Physical Review Journals 37 (1931): 405–26. This work was the main reason why Onsager won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. For a study of bosonic quantum gases in a one-dimensional trap, see Miguel Ángel García-March et al., “Non-equilibrium thermodynamics of harmonically trapped bosons,” New Journal of Physics 18 (2016): 103035. For an exhaustive review of modern thermodynamics and an explanation of dissipative structures, which earned Ilya Prigogine his Nobel Prize, refer to Dilip Kondepudi and Ilya Prigogine, Modern Thermodynamics: From Heat Engines to Dissipative Structures (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2014), 421–41. In 2009, Alex Kleidon wrote an important theoretical study and review of the climate system using non-equilibrium thermodynamics. See Alex Kleidon, “Non-equilibrium thermodynamics and maximum entropy production in the Earth system,” Science of Nature 96 (2009): 1–25.

24. A notable idea from the physicist Phil Attard looks at entropy as the number of particle configurations associated with a physical transition in a given period of time. See Phil Attard, “The second entropy: A general theory for non-equilibrium thermodynamics and statistical mechanics,” Physical Chemistry 105 (2009): 63–173. Perhaps the most technically rigorous model of entropy imagines it to be a collection of two functions that describe the changes happening among a restricted class of non-equilibrium systems. See Elliott H. Lieb and Jakob Yngvason, “The entropy concept for non-equilibrium states,” Proceedings of the Royal Society 469 (2013): 1–15. The physicist Karo Michaelian provided an intuitive definition of entropy, viewing it as the rate at which physical systems explore available energy microstates. See K. Michaelian, “Thermodynamic dissipation theory for the origin of life,” Earth System Dynamics (2011): 37–51.

25. Erwin Schrödinger, What Is Life? The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1945), 35–65.

26. Natalie Wolchover, “A New Physics Theory of Life,” Quanta Magazine, January 22, 2014.

27. Carsten Hermann-Pillath, “Energy, growth, and evolution: Towards a naturalistic ontology of economics,” Ecological Economics 119 (2015): 432–42.

28. Numerous studies from around the world have revealed a powerful relationship between energy use and economic growth. For a review of the statistical relationship between energy use and GDP growth worldwide, see Rögnvaldur Hannesson, “Energy and GDP growth,” International Journal of Energy Management, vol. 3 (2009): 157–70. For a major study on the causality between energy and income in certain Asian countries, see John Asafu-Adjaye, “The relationship between energy consumption, energy prices, and economic growth: Time series evidence from Asian developing countries,” Energy Economics 22 (2000): 615–25. For a general overview of how energy use has shaped human history, see Vaclav Smil, Energy and Civilization (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017).

29. Vaclav Smil, Energy in Nature and Society: General Energetics of Complex Systems (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 147–49.

30. Jerry H. Bentley, “Environmental Crises in World History,” Social and Behavioral Sciences 77 (2013): 108–15.

31. Ibid., 113.

32. Will Steffen et al., “Global Change and the Earth System: A Planet Under Pressure,” International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (Stockholm: Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, 2004), 2.

33. To pick just one of these, for an example of how global warming is increasing the odds of wildfires in the United States, see John T. Abatzoglou and A. Park Williams, “Impact of anthropogenic climate change on wildfire across western US forests,” Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences 113 (2016): 11770–11775.

34. Karn Vohra et al., “Global mortality from outdoor fine particle pollution generated by fossil fuel combustion: Results from GEOSChem,” Environmental Research 195 (2021): 110754.

35. An insightful explanation of these debates can be found in Carey King, The Economic Superorganism (New York: Springer International Publishing, 2020).