From: lessgovt@gmail.com   
      
   What you should know – but didn’t know to ask – about overshoot and the   
   ‘population question’   
   By William Rees, Aug 29, 2023, The Overpopulation Project   
      
   What would you think if someone called you out as a ‘dissipative   
   structure’? Or better, claimed that you were a ‘thermodynamically   
   far-from-equilibrium dissipative structure’? Chances are, you wouldn’t   
   know whether to be offended or to ready    
   yourself to accept congratulations—not many people have ever heard the term   
   ‘dissipative structure.’   
      
   This is unfortunate because you actually are a dissipative structure—in   
   fact, the entire human enterprise acts as a single massive dissipative   
   structure. And, it turns out, understanding the workings of dissipative   
   structures shines a whole new light    
   on human ecological overshoot including global heating.   
      
   This is just one of the novel arguments in a new paper on the human ecology of   
   overshoot in which I explain why a major population ‘correction’ in this   
   century is inevitable. Simply put, overshoot means that there are too many   
   people consuming and    
   polluting too much; we are using the living Earth faster than ecosystems can   
   regenerate. Thus, the purpose of the article was to make the case, on novel   
   grounds, that: a) the sheer number of humans and the scale of economic   
   activity are undermining the    
   functional integrity of the ecosphere and; b) left unattended, this reality   
   will precipitate a global economic and population contraction – i.e.,   
   civilizational collapse—later in this century. The following outlines the   
   core of my argument.   
      
   A rather unsettling premise of the piece is that the human eco-predicament is,   
   in many respects, wholly ‘natural’, the product of human evolutionary   
   success gone awry. Innate expansionist behaviours that were advantageous in   
   Paleolithic (pre-   
   agricultural) environments have become maladaptive in today’s globalized   
   industrialized environment. Why is this significant? Because society seems   
   unwilling to recognize that H. sapiens is a still-evolving species subject to   
   the same natural laws and    
   forces affecting the evolution of all living organisms. It is entirely   
   conceivable for modern civilization to be ‘selected out’ by an   
   increasingly hostile environment of our own making. Policies and programs that   
   attempt to ‘fix’ overshoot    
   without attempting to override humanity’s now destructive expansionist   
   tendencies are doomed to fail.   
      
   Which brings us back to ‘dissipative structures’—just what are they and   
   where do they fit in? A dissipative structure is a self-producing system that   
   develops and grows by extracting useful energy/matter from its environment and   
   ‘dissipating’    
   it back into that environment as useless waste. (Isn’t that what your body   
   does?) Dissipative structures form spontaneously in the natural world in   
   response to concentrations or steep gradients of energy/matter. Indeed (and   
   this is important), a    
   dissipative structure can persist only as long as the energy gra   
   ient/concentration exists.   
      
   I now have to introduce a somewhat peculiar characteristic of human beings.   
   People tend to ‘socially construct’ their own realities—religious   
   doctrines, economic models, political ideologies, scientific theories,   
   etc.—and then live out of their    
   constructs as if they were real. Obviously, a social construct is valid or   
   true only to the extent that it faithfully reflects any aspect of biophysical   
   reality that it purports to represent.   
      
   From this perspective, neoliberal economics—the brand of economics currently   
   running the world—is a problematically quirky social construct. Neoliberal   
   models start from the assumptions that the economy and ‘the environment’   
   are separate systems    
   and that human ingenuity (i.e., technology) can substitute for any product or   
   process of nature. (They certainly make no reference to dissipative   
   structures.) It is an easy leap from the neoliberal paradigm for the world to   
   believe in the perpetual    
   growth of the human enterprise abetted by continuously advancing technology.   
      
   But what if the neoliberal construct is totally wrong-headed? What if the   
   human enterprise, far from floating in splendid isolation, is actually a   
   fully-contained, wholly-dependent, growing subsystem of the non-growing   
   ecosphere, as ecological economist    
   Herman Daly consistently argued? Suddenly, the concept of dissipative   
   structures takes on ominous meaning.   
      
   Ecologists recognize that living systems exist in nested hierarchies of   
   dissipative structures (picture Russian Matryoshka dolls). Each sub-system in   
   the hierarchy self-organizes and grows by extracting available energy and   
   matter from concentrations in    
   its host ‘environment’ one level up. It processes this useful   
   energy/matter internally to produce and maintain its own complex   
   structure/function and exports—dissipates—useless, degraded energy and   
   material wastes back into its host.   
      
   If something is fully dissipated, it is completely disordered; there are no   
   concentrations or gradients, nothing can happen. Physicists refer to this as a   
   state of maximum entropy. All things in nature tend to become more randomly   
   ordered (increase in    
   entropy) unless a source of energy is used to reverse this trend. But this   
   energy always comes from the dissipation of another thing, such as the sun   
   gradually burning itself out, or the food we digest. If the degree of disorder   
   is referred to as entropy,   
    then ‘negentropy’ denotes the degree of order. In effect, living entities   
   (cells, individuals, species, ecosystems) raise themselves from static,   
   disordered near equilibrium states to highly-ordered, functional   
   far-from-equilibrium states but can do    
   so only at the expense of increasing ‘global’ entropy, particularly the   
   entropy of their immediate host systems.   
      
      
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    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)