More Power...

[GliderGuider]

I’m currently pondering why humans can’t seem to stop eating the world, and it has occurred to me that there may be something deeper at work than simply “human nature” in all its diverse glory.

Start from today, with 397 ppm CO2 in the air, the Arctic ice melting, the trees dying, and the fish stocks in the ocean pretty much gone. From today, go back through the beginning of the Industrial Age 200 years ago; through the discovery of agriculture 10,000 years ago; through the discovery of fire 250,000 years ago, through the development of language 500,000 years ago; back to the first time our ancestors gained an evolutionary advantage by eating meat 3.5 million years ago

Through those 3.5 million years, the march of human progress has been a steady curve of growth. Rising slowly and unevenly at first, then faster and faster as we gained access to sources of ever higher quality energy and learned how to manipulate them to our advantage.

Why have so few human societies in all that time ever said “Enough”? The few societies that have gone that route have not been able to propagate their cultural memetic material across the planet. That privilege has gone to those "winning" cultures that have not restrained their consumption or growth.

My suspicion is that an unrecognized natural principle has been driving us along this path, variously helped and hindered by human cultural developments and the physical conditions that spawned them, but always with an urge toward the use of more and more power – more energy transformed into useful work in the interests of ensuring our survival.

All life from bacteria to global civilizations is structured by single fundamental underlying natural principle: to turn energy into useful work. This principle is the measure by which self-organizing systems either prevail or fail: turn as much energy as is available into useful work as effectively as possible.

It’s an organizational rule of the universe, much like gravity. It’s the reasson capitalism prevailed over communism for example. It's also why we can’t seem to address either social injustice or atmospheric CO2 levels – or growth itself. This principle is the very source of the growth imperative. Most people can’t even imagine such a rule. But there it is, working silently within all of us. To some extent it shapes every human thought, feeling and action.

It has been named by the ecologist H. T. Odum: “The Maximum Power Principle can be stated: During self-organization, system designs develop and prevail that maximize power intake, energy transformation, and those uses that reinforce production and efficiency.“

This power-seeking principle that drives us on lies beneath our biology, below our genetics, underneath our socioeconomic structures, and far below the thoughts, values and beliefs that we believe are what move us. The entire human edifice from biology to belief has sprung up to implement, support and rationalize the continuous search for more energy to transform into useful work and waste heat.

The global dominance of Western industrial, producer/consumer culture that we are now experiencing is exactly what Odum's Maximum Power Principle predicts. Energy-seeking is the fitness criterion that the natural selection mechanism uses to sort out the self-organizing complex adaptive systems of human societies. The cultures that maximize their ability to turn energy into useful work prevail. Those that have the good sense to say "Enough!" are shunted aside, marginalized or worse.

This principle that only Odum has explicitly recognized pervades the human experience. It is encoded at the base of Abraham Maslow’s "Hierarchy of Needs"; it is Karl Marx’s “infrastructure”; and it is the simple human desire that our children might have a better life than we did.

It has been intuitively recognized by writers as divergent as Friedrich Nietzsche:

(Anything which) is a living and not a dying body… will have to be an incarnate will to power, it will strive to grow, spread, seize, become predominant – not from any morality or immorality but because it is living and because life simply is will to power… ‘Exploitation’… belongs to the essence of what lives, as a basic organic function; it is a consequence of the will to power, which is after all the will to life. (Nietzsche)

and Ralph Waldo Emerson:

Things are in the saddle,
And ride mankind. (Emerson)

Looking around at the parlous state of this party planet and feeling the building global hangover, it appears to be about time to pay the piper. Unfortunately, we’re not being asked for payment. Like the girl in the red shoes from the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale, our only option is to continue dancing until, one way or another, we drop.

And so all our precious human illusions of control are revealed as the quaint pretensions they are, as our dreams of glory, self-perfection and eventual transcendence crumble into dust.

Humanity is little but an enormously elaborated entropy engine – but one that is very, very impressed with itself.

[center]“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”[/center]

[salib]

1. Isn't something missing from that principle?

I.e., the Maximum Power Principle. (Poor name, by the way, as it assumes the conclusion in the name).

Wouldn't the ultimately most successful life forms be those which exploit in the most renewable way? Exploitation of energy is not, in itself, life. And certainly, it is not continuation of living things. It is not even continuation of living action.

It is a characteristic of it, but not all. Thus, by beginning with a conclusion (again, already in the name) that it IS energy, or at least exploitation of energy, then "there is no there there".

[GliderGuider]

2. In nature it's systems that make energy renewable, not individual organisms.

Most natural organisms are constrained by the low energy/resource density of their environments as well as high levels of resource competition, so this isn't a problem for them. Humans have access to very high levels of energy density, with no competition except from other humans. It's a problem for us. The ability to exploit energy is the fundamental requirement for life to exist - from a bacterium swimming up a glucose gradient all the way up to us and our global industrial civilization. No energy exploitation - no life.

The principle is not an assumption in a logical argument - it's a name for an observed and well-understood natural process. Odum did try and call it the "Maximum Empower Principle", but that was a bit too arcane for most people, since it requires an understanding of emergy analysis. So the MPP was the name that stuck. It describes the principle perfectly.