LifeItself

Yesterday, my wife and I went to see "One night with Janis Joplin" at the Zach Theater in Austin.  Kacee Claton looks and sings eerily like Joplin.  Janis Joplin was a bright comet that lit up the skies decades ago and combusted in front of our eyes wide-shut.  Fifty years later, we continue to bask in Joplin's light and wipe off tears when she touches us with her raw emotions and makes love to all of us.  The timeless Janis Joplin, who tragically died when she was barely 27, is the essence of what a human can give to others, including her loneliness and drug addiction.

For decades, Joplin's Cry Baby, has echoed in my head whenever I think about the wounds humans have been inflicting on this Earth of ours.  But why are we stumbling down a slippery path of environmental destruction that must lead to an inevitable collapse of modern civilization?  My explanation is that most people have a wrong frame of reference.  For example, what is the essence of agriculture? As Ma…

As I have argued in the previous three blogs, industrial agriculture is the largest human project that impacts the Earth more broadly than any other human activity.  One needs to keep in mind that compared with the global environmental impacts of industrial agriculture, a Macondo well-like blowout is a child's play.  I know it, because I co-wrote a book on this subject with the famous historian and archeologist, Joe Tainter.  For example, in the Amazon forest the underbrush fires set by humans affect 3 million square kilometers, an area of India.  See NASA for a summary of this global catastrophe.


From an ecological point of view, industrial agriculture creates open, permanently immature ecosystems, most of which are reset by humans each year. To make things worse, the simplified single-plant species agricultural ecosystems are doomed to fall prey to the ever-evolving pests and weeds.   One can prove this gaping vulnerability using thermodynamics, regardless of what Monsanto claim…

The proper mass balance of carbon fluxes in terrestrial ecosystems, described in Appendix B of my OECD paper (2007), confirms the compelling thermodynamic argument that sustainability of any ecosystem requires all mass to be conserved on the average. The larger the spatial scale of an ecosystem and the longer the time-averaging scale are, the stricter adherence to this rule must be. Such are the laws of nature. Physics, chemistry and biology say clearly that there can be no sustained net mass removal from any large ecosystem for more than a few decades.

A young forest in a temperate climate, shown in the previous blog, grows fast in a clear-cut area and transfers nutrients from soil to the young trees. The young trees grow very fast (there is a positive net primary productivity or NPP), but the amount of mass accumulated in the forest is small. When a tree burns or dies some or most of its nutrients go back to the soil. When this tree is logged and hauled away, almost no nutrients …

In the last bog, I told you how the law of mass conservation governs the large-scale behavior of Earth's households - ecosystems - that must recycle all mass on average and export only low quality heat into the cold universe.  Now, I will give you a few useful definitions of cyclic processes, sustainability, and ecosystem productivity.

Let me start from stating the obvious:  We live in a spaceship we cannot leave, a gorgeous blue, white and green planet Earth that takes us for a spin around her star, the Sun, each year.


But this statement is imprecise. We really live on a vanishingly thin skin of the Earth, her ecosphere.   Think of this skin as of a thin delicate membrane, teaming with life and beauty, but incredibly fragile. We trample on this membrane and poison it.  Then we act surprised when it brakes and shrivels.


Practically all life on the Earth exists between two concentric spheres defined by the mean Earth surface at the radial distance from the Earth's center of R …

In this blog and other blogs that will follow, I will show you how laws of nature limit human expectations borne from ignorance and arrogance.  First, I would like to remind those readers who might be scientifically-challenged that the laws of physics, chemistry, and biology are called "laws," because we, scientists, have found no exceptions to them in as many experiments as have been carried out for as long as these laws have been on the books.  I repeat: As opposed to legal laws, the laws of nature do not allow exceptions, do not listen to lobbyists, shrug off presidents, and dispatch ignorant scientists to the trash bin of history.

Just like ignorance of the law cannot be a legal excuse, ignorance of the laws of nature is a crime, not an oops. But, because most societies do not care much about nature, this crime generally goes unpunished by human laws.  In the long run, however, trespassing against the laws of nature has only one outcome: We perish by one means or anothe…

The essence of my unchanging argument is as follows: An exponential growth of human population can be supported for a while by a similarly exponential increase of production of power as primary energy per unit time and food we must eat each day. After a certain time interval, whose length depends on the rate of population growth and technology, both the population and the means of its survival must stabilize or collapse.  The elapsed time to collapse depends strongly on the rate of deterioration of environmental services of the Earth: abundance of clean air, water, good soil, large healthy forests, and biodiversity in general, as well as on the healthy oceans.

Please note the two key phrases: "for a while" and "a certain time interval."  My argument is generally  rejected, because most people focus on the here and now, and forget that a few decades are less than a blink of an eye in history of humanity.  In the more sophisticated circles of "main-stream"…

I am on a short vacation with my wife.  We are staying in my daughter boyfriend's family summer house in Casadero, 9 miles west from Guerneville, CA.  It is a very nice house in the middle of a majestic redwood forest, separated by a long forest driveway from the road.

In the house, I find five white document boxes that hold an archive of old LA Times newspapers.  I open the first box and pick up at random the business section for LA Times dated May 21, 1992.  In it, my eyes lock immediately on a report bemoaning President Bush's handling of the Savings and Loans debacle, and how the government loan pools favor big S&Ls relative to ordinary people.  Then I see an article stating that people will never again look the same at investing into houses. (In May 1992, we were in the second year of a major housing slump.)   Does this sound familiar, or what?   Why have we forgotten?  I take it back: Why have most people forgotten? I have not forgotten, and this is my curse.

We are …