DOOM

Heavily plagiarised from extracts of OUR ECOLOGICAL FOOTPRINT, Wackernagel and Rees 1996 & VALUING THE EARTH, Daly and Townsend. 1993. Found on the dieoff.org website. Any inaccuracies are my own.

The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that the entropy of an isolated system always increases. The system runs down. All energy is used up, all concentrations of matter are evenly dissipated, all gradients disappear. There is no potential for further work. The system completely degrades.

Systems that are not isolated, such as the human body or the economy, are subject to the same forces of entropic decay. This means that to maintain life, stability and growth, they must import high-grade energy and material from the outside and export back degraded energy and material.

Nothing can live in a capsule of its own shit.

The human economy is complex and dynamic and although you would not believe it from the endogenous obfuscations of the economists, it is an open system dependent on a materially closed, non-growing ecosphere. The economy needs the ecosphere for its production of high grade energy and matter and its capacity to assimilate waste.

After a certain point, the continuous expansion of the economy, can be purchased only by increasing decay in the ecosphere. When and where consumption by the economy exceeds production in nature the depletion of the natural capital will become obvious. There will be reduced biodiversity. There will be air, water, and land pollution, atmospheric change, melting ice caps, disappearing glaciers, increasing desertification, moving monsoons, rising tides etc.

It will begin to feel as if you are living in your own shit and the only escape is to leave the planet.

Zolan Quobble