Physics not Philosophy

Bad Religion, a favorite band of mine since I was 16, has a line in the song Entropy about entropy: “it’s the natural outcome of our ordered lives”. I’ve heard that line thousands of times but the profundity of it really kicked in recently. As an ecologist and botanist I’ve marveled at nature’s ability to create order. It is what succession is (a non-concept to many, unfortunately). It is how a damaged system goes from chaotic nutrient-driven competition to ordered nutrient-starved cooperation. It is the dominant force ever playing out on any given patch of living earth all the time.

I learned about, and got really excited about, the concept of thermodynamic ecological stability several years ago. I soon learned that no one else in my professional life wanted to hear about it, lol. Too heady or too laden with cultural inuendo perhaps because it somehow instantly turns people off. Which is too bad because it is everything there is to know.

Anyway, not one to give up on a great concept, I’m putting it out there in a different context: society. Modern techno-societies, unlike plant-driven ecosystems, make order by creating unused disorder (pollution, trash, crime, etc.). It isn’t that we have to find a cleaner way to live, but we have to give up order (or find alternative uses for our disorder) in order to coexist better. We all know this, but I think it helps to know that the reason is the first and second laws of thermodynamics. It isn’t a philosophical reason, it is literally physics. I never see this angle addressed, yet I find it the most compelling.

Jumping scale, now think about the ecological restoration community. To what degree is “inducing” order to damaged systems actually increasing entropy/waste/disorder against a system that has evolved to order itself without creating entropy/waste/disorder? To what extent do the laws of physics deny the scales of order we push onto damaged landscapes? Again, this will be met with crickets and a lone coyote howl in the distance, perhaps a tumbleweed rolling by, but I’m compelled to make this concept stick somehow, lol.