permaculture

[Toby Hemenway <toby@patternliteracy.com>]

On 9/22/04 10:29 AM, <robscott@freeshell.org> wrote:

> Though I've appreciated the stories about Emelia Hazelip, I have not seen
> much response to the initial quote regarding entropy. I've seen
> connections, but no one has addressed it specifically.
> 
> I say:
> Thermodynamic Law 1 (in closed system, entropy always increases) doesn't
> hold for living systems because they aren't closed -- they are open to
> solar radiation (ie photosynthetic cells) or other energy source inputs
> (consuming plant tissue for instance).
That's the gist of it. The original question, by Paul Park, was:

>This relates to my previous post about exporting things from the land.  My
>question is, is there any way to stop entropy, or can we merely slow it
>down?  It seems that I remember from physics classes years ago that entropy
>is inevitable. 

Entropy is a measure of disorder, or the unavailable energy, in a closed
system. Things fall apart. Put a drop of ink into a glass of water, it
diffuses, and it will never form a drop again on its own. Even if work is
applied to construct something, the heat and other "pollution" lost in the
process is always greater than the order created. Living systems are a bit
different, because the boundary around them is arbitrary; they are not
really closed. An organism uses energy from outside itself to create order
(tissue, structures, etc), but at the same time gives off heat and gas and
waste that more than makes up for the order it creates. There are times when
the system that an organism resides within is so big that it never sees the
consequences of its entropy, or when the larger system is able to use those
wastes as fuels. We've been getting away with neglecting our own entropy
since the industrial age began, but now we're reaching the end of that game.
Eventually, you have to back up until you get to a larger system in which
entropy is increasing; it's always increasing somewhere (which is why the
sun and this universe will eventually cool down to somewhere around absolute
zero).

In agriculture, as long as you harvest and export crops, you'll need
imports. Emilia's system seems superb at maintaining soil fertility by
adding atmospheric carbon and nitrogen, and getting other elements from
weathering rocks and the air via plants. It seems to have slowed entropy
down a lot by using solar energy via green things. Tapping into a much
larger system.

Another way to slow down nutrient loss is to only sell things that, as the
saying goes, can walk, fly, or swim off your land. Animals return nearly all
the food they consume to the land as manure (the other side of the it takes
10 lbs of food to make 1 lb of beef; more than 9 lbs go back to the land).

Another option is deep-rooted perennials. Jerome Osentowski was a market
farmer selling greens, but was appalled at the his huge imports to make it
work. He converted to forest gardening, so the tree roots could tap all the
fertility that had leached deep into his soil from previous years. Cut his
imports way, way down.


Toby
www.patternliteracy.com