A Short Course in Comprehensive Thinking – Part 28 – Surplus Energy and Resilience
They measure of the health of organisms, ecosystems, and societies.
Two key energetic concepts are those of efficiency and resilience. Increasing efficiency is about getting more output from the same input (or the same output with reduced input). The efficiency of aerobic respiration allowed for food chains to develop. But the longer the food chain, the more parts that are vulnerable to disruption. Take out any link in the chain, and the entire chain can collapse. That can mean ecosystem collapse and mass extinctions. A complementary idea to efficiency is resilience. Life’s resilience is its ability to weather the vagaries of earthly existence. Resilience is rooted in surplus energy. With enough surplus energy, life can survive most of Earth’s events. Some events are predictable, such as the seasons, while bolide impacts are not, at least until the rise of asteroid tracking.
The most successful organisms are those that can generate the most surplus energy. Think of it as money in the bank. Life cannot reproduce without surplus energy, which is why both sexes have reduced libido when starving and women cease menstruating.
Societies are a kind of superorganism, and they possess many of the same qualities that organisms and ecosystems do. As Bucky Fuller said, energy is wealth, and if oil was priced at the benefit that it provided humanity, it would cost a million dollars a barrel. Societies with high energy surpluses are healthy, while those without it are vulnerable. In the hunter-gather and agrarian Epochs of the human journey, there was rarely much surplus energy, those societies were always vulnerable, and they had daily brutalities that industrialized peoples can scarcely comprehend.
When organisms, ecosystems, or civilizations run out of energy, they die. A relatively new idea is that of energy return on investment (EROI). High EROIs mean healthy organisms, ecosystems, or civilizations, and low and declining EROIs mean that death or collapse is near. Our fossil fuel age has had continually declining EROI. The easy oil is long gone, and industrial societies are increasingly mining the dregs. Understanding that fact goes a long way toward understanding the West’s meddling in the Middle East, as oil politics has dominated the region for more than a century.
Needless to say, in the Fifth Epoch, running out of energy will never again be a concern.