"The necessity of protecting the natural world"

By Sheila Newman

...Modern human societies are in fact quite different from those of pre-fossil-fuel human societies and those of other animals.

We modern humans no longer just produce animal waste that is 'biodegradable' in a normal ecological cycle. Through extractive technologies we have artificially extended our bodies and amplified our activities, so that we consume quite enormous quantities of material and energy. In the process of digging up the materials and burning the energy to make things with, we also clear almost every other living thing in our paths. The waste carbon, nitrogen, phosphates, sulphur and other products which our artificial system puts out largely overwhelm the services of the remaining (shrinking) natural eco-systems. Yet the natural eco-systems are the ONLY agents capable of saving us from being buried, suffocated and burned by the physical and chemical interactions of our industrial-society waste.

That is how the second law of thermodynamics can be used to explain why it is vital to allocate increasing space to natural processes. Returning land to wild grass and forests and giving animals their freedom to live naturally is the most positive thing that we humans can do about the accelerating rate of planetary entropy that consumer society multiplied by huge human populations is causing. Entropy comes in the form of increasingly unpredictable climate and in broken, dead and dying eco-systems.

Large serviceable ecosystems like the Amazon, the great grasslands, coastal waters, coral reefs, indigenous forests, and vast regional chains of animals and plants working in harmony are deteriorating and disappearing because human society and infrastructure are consuming, clearing, fragmenting and isolating them.

In their place man-made things simplify what existed before. Roads interrupt the living fabric of species interacting. Mines pulverize complex geological features and reduce them to their molecular components. Mines and wells extract, refine and simplify the geologically processed bodies of ancient plants and animacules (a microscopic animal such as an amoeba). From these rich sources factories mix the simplified components into soups, pastes and blocks for building and other materials or as fuel for heating, cooling, machines and transport. Factory-simplified engineered monocrops, cultivated with one-size-fits-all mass-produced fertilizers destroy living soil and the rich cloak it sustains on the planet's surface. Feedlot farming suppresses individuality by industrialized cruelty in the service of consumerism replacing the awe-inspiring herds and flocks of yore which had their own histories of migrations, navigations and evolutions. Cities have replaced the mysterious, nurturing and cooling forests, raising local temperatures without making rain. High-rise buildings burn huge amounts of energy and pollute the atmosphere just to keep their temperatures comfortable and their air breathable and to transport people within them by elevators.

These thermodynamic reasons justify the protection of wildlife and natural habitat as necessary for human survival.

People concerned about petroleum decline, pollution, poverty, homelessness, unemployment, etc., also worry that the survival-needs of vast human populations in an era of likely fossil fuel decline will be used to make life even more horrid for other species.

We can see though that there is a way that kindness to wildlife and the preservation of habitat is linked to the principles and laws of energy preservation.

As the natural world shrinks it becomes ever more vital to the survival of the human species.

Because humans use fossil and other non-biological fuels, overall entropy increases at a much greater rate than it would if we had continued to live without our synthetic infrastructure.

The only thing that can even temporarily recreate some degree of order is life, which creates orderly systems (albeit creatures with finite life-spans but who reproduce) whilst consuming energy. At the moment human beings are increasing entropy a great deal more than the other creatures on the planet, due to the rate at which they draw down upon and burn fossil fuels...