Sustainable Systems as Organism?

21 years ago

ISIS Press Release 25/05/05

Announcing an Important Scientific Publication

Sustainable Systems as Organisms?

The authors Mae-Wan Ho and Robert Ulanowicz present a new conceptual model for understanding sustainable systems as organisms that is opposed to the dominant model of unlimited growth. It is a breakthrough to understanding energy relationships in living systems that updates the ecological approach of Eugene and Howard Odum.

"It is the most important scientific paper I have written in my life so far," says Dr. Mae-Wan Ho, " and I owe it to my co-author Robert Ulanowicz."

Abstract

SchrÃ¶dinger (1944) marvelled at how the organism is able to use metabolic energy to maintain and even increase its organisation, which could not be understood in terms of classical statistical thermodynamics. Ho (1993, 1998a) outlined a novel "thermodynamics of organized complexity" based on a nested dynamical structure that enables the organism to maintain its organisation and simultaneously achieve non-equilibrium and equilibrium energy transfer at maximum efficiency. This thermodynamic model of the organism is reminiscent of the dynamical structure of steady state ecosystems identified by Ulanowicz (1983, 2003).

The healthy organism excels in maintaining its organisation and keeping away from thermodynamic equilibrium - death by another name - and in reproducing and providing for future generations. In those respects, it is the ideal sustainable system. We propose therefore to explore the common features between organisms and ecosystems, to see how far we can analyse sustainable systems in agriculture, ecology and economics as organisms, and to extract indicators of the system's health or sustainability.

We find that looking at sustainable systems as organisms provides fresh insights on sustainability, and offers diagnostic criteria for sustainability that reflect the system's health.

In the case of ecosystems, those diagnostic criteria of health translate into properties such as biodiversity and productivity, the richness of cycles, the efficiency of energy use and minimum dissipation. In the case of economic systems, they translate into space-time differentiation or organised heterogeneity, local autonomy and sufficiency at appropriate levels, reciprocity and equality of exchange, and most of all, balancing the exploitation of natural resources - real input into the system - against the ability of the ecosystem to regenerate itself.

Get the full paper here: http://www.i-sis.org.uk/onlinestore/papers1.php#229

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Comments (3)

althea_gw
21 years ago
Thanks for the interesting topic Marshall. It seems intriguing, but I don't understand this passage in particular at all -

"a novel "thermodynamics of organized complexity" based on a nested dynamical structure that enables the organism to maintain its organisation and simultaneously achieve non-equilibrium and equilibrium energy transfer at maximum efficiency. This thermodynamic model of the organism is reminiscent of the dynamical structure of steady state ecosystems identified by Ulanowicz (1983, 2003)."

Are there any background resources you can recommend to help formulate an intelligent question regarding this new paper? For now the best I can come up with is this. If ecosystems are organisms, does that meant the Earth is an organism too?
kingturtle
21 years ago
This is interesting Marshall but I have to confess surprise that such a paradigm is new particularly in economics. This reminds me alittle of the "adaptive fitness" approaches that some anthropologists use to study various societal economies - an effort to understand culture in terms of sustainable productivity at various levels of a groups organization and the survival fitness and well-being afforded members of various adaptations.

I'm alittle confused by the statement about using the concept of organisms to study ecology since they both seem to me to be related models that could be used to study human complex systems. I particularly like the idea of diagnostic criteria of health which allows gauging fitness of sustainable systems at various levels. Have you run across any other examples or discussions of this approach?
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marshallz10
Original Author
21 years ago
Just a few quick remarks for now...

Althea, at the moment I don't have an easy online reference for you. I haven't gotten to read the full article and so am waiting before deeper conversations.

KT, I agree that sustainability in reference to natural communities or human ones is not particularly new. What is unique is the focus on sustainability within organisms, a newish field of molecular ecology.

Dr. Ho and most colleagues at ISSI are geneticists and other molecular scientists and biochemists. Other writings by her and others have criticized biotechnological research as both excessively reductive and simplistic in that the structure and function of genes and their byproducts have large ecological components. In other words, genes operate within an ecosystem. The biotech promoters would rather have us believe that a single gene inserted in a host organisms will generate a single protein product faithfully. In reality there is much uncertainty as geneticists discover insertion of rDNA is neither precise, so predictable, or stable. The ecology of cells tend to rearrange components is ways and for reasons not yet fully understood.