Connecting to Natural Energy Flows

Our “Green Sanctuary” book group at the Universalist Unitarian Church of Haverhill just finished reading and discussing Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things, a book with so many ideas focused on the concept of energonomics or energy management that I could write a month of entries on just this one book. But I wanted to make sure I made mention of it at least once. I’m calling this book THE most important book on the planet, because I think it provides a blueprint for moving forward in sustainable living. The book proposes the elimination of waste–or, rather, the transformation of all waste into food (waste = food), which simply uses nature as its model:

Most packaging (which makes up about 50% of the volume of the municipal solid waste stream) can be designed as biological nutrients, what we call *products of consumption.* The idea is to compose these products of materials that can be tossed on the ground or compost heap to safely biodegrade after use–literally to be consumed. (105)

The concept of “connecting to natural energy flows” is ultimately a kind of energy management–an issue of energonomics:

In the long run, connecting to natural energy flows is a matter of reestablishing our fundamental connection to the source of all good growth on the planet: the sun, that tremendous nuclear power plant 93 million miles away (exactly where we want it). Even at such distances, the sun’s heat can be devastating, and it commands a healthy respect for the delicate orchestration of circumstances that makes natural energy flows possible. Humans thrive on the earth under such intense emanations of heat and light only because billions of years of evolutionary processes have created the atmosphere and surface that support our existence–the soil, plant life, and cloud cover that cool the planet down and distribute water around it, keeping the atmosphere within a temperate range that we can live in. So reestablishing our connection to the sun by definition includes maintaining interdependence with all the other ecological circumstances that make natural energy flows possible in the first place. (131-132)

Humans have come to rely on fossil fuels rather than “harnessing and maximizing local natural energy flows” (31):

For the majority of our simple energy needs, humans could be accruing a great deal of current solar income, of which there is plenty: thousands of times the amount of energy needed to fuel human activities hits the surface of the planet every day in the form of sunlight.” (31, 32)

I am happy that human ingenuity is beginning to turn its attention to capturing, storing, and efficiently employing energy. Perhaps it is not too late for us.

Energy Cost Accounting in Economic History

I’m cleaning my desk and found a printout of Robert William Fogel’s Nobel Prize Lecture in Economics from 1993 titled “Economic Growth, Population Theory, and Physiology: The Bearing of Long-Term Processes on the Making of Economic Policy,” in which he considers how “thermodynamic and physiological aspects of economic growth are defined and their impact on growth rates is assessed.” He wants economic policy makers to learn from economic historians about the effects of advances in medicine etc. (”the synergism between technological and physiological improvements”) on mortality rates (thus overturning the Malthusian theory of population) and so be able to account for future demands on pension policies and health care, for example.

In the process of making his argument, he looks at the work of agricultural historians who consider average daily caloric consumption rates of European farmers in the 18th century in a way that made me think of my concept of energonomics (i.e. the management of energy), or the economics of energy flow. He notes the implication of their findings: “mature adults of the late eighteenth century must have been very small by current standards. Today the typical American male in his early thirties is about 69.7 inches tall and weighs 172 lbs. Such a male requires daily about 1,794 kcal required for basal metabolism (the energy required to keep the body functioning while at rest) and a total of 2,279 kcal for baseline maintenance (the 1,794 kal required for basal metabolism plus 485 kcal for digestion of food and vital hygiene). If either the British or the French had been that large during the eighteenth century, virtually all of the energy produced by their food supplies would have been required for maintenance and hardly any would have been available to sustain work. To have the energy necessary to produce the national products of these two countries c.1700, the typical adult male must have been quite short and very light” (76).

This also reminds me of articles published in the last few years about the “height gap” between Europeans (the Dutch in particular) and Americans–how they are growing taller, implying that the socialized health care they receive implies a higher overall standard of living, as indicated by caloric intake reflected in their greater average heights.

Cognitive Surplus

I found Clay Shirky’s address at the Web2.0 Expo today and found an intriguing argument for Web2.0 technologies (there’s an edited transcript version of it too).  It’s similar to what I’ve said about my haphazard and occasional attempts over the years to write novels:  “It’s better than watching TV.”  Shirky suggests that, even if kids are playing World of Warcraft or some other silly video game, they are at least not passively consuming the shows that he and I consumed as kids (for him–”Gilligan’s Island”, and I did watch my fair share of that as well!).  He suggests that it takes a while to figure out what to do with the “cognitive surplus” that results from economic changes that leave people with leisure time, and until we do, we waste our time getting drunk or watching mindless television (his blog post is titled “Gin, Television, and Social Surplus”):

Starting with the Second World War a whole series of things happened–rising GDP per capita, rising educational attainment, rising life expectancy and, critically, a rising number of people who were working five-day work weeks. For the first time, society forced onto an enormous number of its citizens the requirement to manage something they had never had to manage before–free time.

And what did we do with that free time? Well, mostly we spent it watching TV.

I mentioned in a previous post the work of positive psychologist Mihaly Csikzentmihalyi, who speaks of those historical moments when “surplus attention” (a different way of conceiving “cognitive surplus”) allowed for explosive creativity in the culture (5th century Greece, 15th century Florence, 19th century Paris).  Fusing Shirky and Mihaly with my concept of energonomics, we see the way that this excess psychic energy is being channeled now into experimental communicative practices of collective intelligence.

Just a note about how I came upon the Shirky speech:  I “twitter” now and follow a number of educational technologists.  One of them mentioned this speech in a “tweet” and so I pursued the link.  In my presentation on “mnemonomics,” I suggest that by connecting in this way to other people via social networking I have linked to their minds which have become an extension of my own:  “social networking as collective intelligence.”

e=mc squared + information

I was reading Deleuzian Interrogations: A Conversation with Manuel DeLanda, John Protevi, and Torkild Thanem and bumped into this interesting quote:

Delanda:  “I cannot imagine a materialist philosophy which is not also realist. On the other hand, someone who believes that god and the devil exist independently of our minds is also a realist but clearly not a materialist. The only problem with the term ‘materialism’ is that not only matter but also energy and physical information are needed to account for self-organizing phenomena and the processes which fabricate physical entities” (3).

This reminded me of a book I read titled The Bit and the Pendulum: From Quantum Computing to M Theory–The New Physics of Information which left me with the same impression that DeLanda emphasizes here. As author Tom Siegfried writes, “Many scientists now conceive of information as something real, as real as space, time, energy, and matter” (7).    Siegfried speaks of how the study of biology benefits from this perspective as one example of how this new field is changing the sciences:

Information’s reality has reshaped the way biologists study and understand cells, the brain, and the mind. Cells are not merely vats of chemicals that turn food into energy, but sophisticated computers, translating messages from the outside world into the proper biological responses. True, the brain runs on currents of electrical energy through circuits of cellular wires. But the messages in those currents can be appreciated only by understanding the information they represent” (9)

This notion that “information is the foundation of reality” (59) made me consider creating a new neologism to capture this new sense of reality:  “infonomics” — the “management of information.”  Whatever word we use–whether it’s infonomics or energonomics–this book suggests that information must become part of what we consider when we speak of managing energy.

DeLanda points to how the term “materialism” falls short of capturing all that comes into play in the triad of energy-matter-information flows.  He draws attention to this phenomenon in his own book A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History when he concludes that

the flows of materials whose history we described involved more than just matter-energy. They also included *information*, understood not in static terms as mere physical patterns (measured in bits) but in dynamic terms, as patterns capable of self-replication and catalysis (259-60).

Economic Decision-Making as Energonomics

Read Montague’s 5th chapter of Why Choose This Book? is about “The Value Machine” and discusses the brain as a system that assigns value.  For Montague, “Once life has started, valuation mechanisms were an inevitable consequence. . .” and every decision becomes an economic decision.  He traces such valuation even back to E. coli, which he uses as a simplified example of the human capacity to care.

Even single-celled E. coli are capitalists; they follow the money.  They follow the asparate, a source of energy and raw materials. . . .E coli has committed a large number of its internal resources to build, value, and respond to a model of the “aspartate world” around it. (120-21)

He then posits a hypothetical dumber version of E. coli (playfully called D. coli) that just consumes aspartate whenever it comes upon it.  Which would survive?

If aspartate were always available in excess, D. coli might well be more adaptive than E. coli, since it doesn’t waste energy trying to build “aspartate models” and control its behavior to run toward gradients of this energy source. However, D. coli is “dumb” because the real world is simply not that accommodating. External energy sources aren’t uniformly distributed, nor are they always plentiful. E. coli’s energetic investment into model-building is sensible, and amounts to splitting the net energy from each aspartate molecule consumed into two separate streams:  one for fuel and one for information to be used to build a better model of its “aspartate world”–a modeling stream. (121-22)

Now if a little single-celled creature is doing all that, imagine the energy that big-brained humans are expending!  In fact, I recall reading that the complexity of human brains emerged as a result of the complexity of surviving among a social species.

The challenge in studying human decision-making is in understanding how the economic decisions we make “follow the energy” in the same way that E. coli does.  A further challenge–the ultimate challenge?–is in getting people to make the right decisions, ones that lead to optimal physical and mental health.  An article in today’s Boston Globe addresses this challenge among the poor.

The Energonomics of Memes

I have picked up Why Choose This Book? again (which I first mentioned in “Energonomics of the Brain“). Chapter 4, titled “Sharks Don’t Go On Hunger Strikes,” speaks of the power of memes, of abstract ideas, to circumvent our instincts for survival. He starts with the Heaven’s Gate cult tragedy as a way to introduce the chapter:

The amazing part of the Heaven’s Gate story is that the cult members used an abstract idea–going to the “next level”–to veto their powerful instincts to survive. This act defines a behavioral superpower–the capacity to veto survival instincts to the point of death. . . . A mere idea hijacked the controls of these people’s brains and drove their bodies off a cliff (88-89).

Montague then explains how abstract goals become substituted for fundamental instincts like eating and procreating:

Ideas gain the power of rewards and become instantly meaningful to the rest of the brain. . . . Now, this kind of trick provides for an extremely creative learning machine. It can choose to ignore its instincts momentarily and pursue a thought to the exclusion of everything else. It is easy to see how such a power could be useful for generating cognitive innovations. An idea with the beckoning power of ice cream can control a succession of thoughts for some time. The effect is just like foraging for food hidden under rocks and behind bushes in a field. . . . Cool trick. Redeploy foraging in the pursuit of cognitive innovation. Foraging fields for food becomes foraging a mental storehouse for new ideas. (111)

Now anyone associated with academia will recognize this process: how one can go for hours without eating and without thinking about it as one pursues an idea to its limits. Here, ideas become equivalent to the goals of basic instincts: finding food, or having sex.

Memes, then, become a way of channeling brain energy toward particular goals which may or may not be in the best interests of one’s survival, as in the case of the Heaven’s Gate cult members. Montague’s work goes a long way toward understanding the process of how such a system can evolve, as well as what makes us as humans so different from other animals.

Psychoenergonomics

The March/April 2008 issue of Psychology Today had a number of stimulating articles, many of which might fall under this sub-category of energonomics I’m calling “psychoenergonomics.” (See my previous posts on this meme under a new tag by the same name). One titled “Second Nature” is about how we can change habits of personality (i.e. manage the energy in our brains) to make us more optimistic, passionate, joyful and courageous. I recently posted on this emergent field of “Eudaimonics.” There is the act of what Loyola University psychologist Fred Bryant calls in his new book (Savoring: A New Model of Positive Experience) “savoring”: “the art of managing positive feelings. Whereas coping well means dealing successfully with problems and setbacks, savoring–glorying in what goes right–is an equally crucial emotional competence” (78).

A different article, titled “The Making of a Perfectionist,” is about how the way children are praised can affect their emotional stability, their ability to be satisfied. As a reformed perfectionist (haven’t quite got the reform part down perfectly just yet, though…), I recognize myself in this article and the kind of familial dynamics that produces a perfectionist. We have to learn how to be parents, learn what to say and how to say to our children, to avoid causing major problems in the way energy flows through their brains.

A third article, titled “Consuming Passions,” is also about managing mental energy–the evolutionary tendency to overeat and binge. The ultimate form of energonomics for each of us is managing caloric intake–how much energy do we take into our bodies? Is there a balance between what we take in and what we burn off? Evolution has also pre-disposed us to enjoy and reward gluttonous behavior with the use of dopamine such that “obesity, eating disorders, and even the ordinary urges of appetite might resemble addiction” (100).  In fact, “brain hunger” (when we want food but don’t need food) has some of the same neural pathways as orgasm!  One doctor says, “Now we’re not just talking about energy balance… We’re talking about human psychology” (100).

So the ultimate point here is that personal energonomics becomes psychoenergonomics:  in order to manage the influx of calories, we have to learn how to manage the energy in our minds.

The Energonomics of Leadership

I read an op-ed piece in the Boston Globe today titled “The Power of Charisma” which introduces the work of Joseph Nye, who invented the concept of “soft power” and has a new book out called The Powers to Lead  This is an area that I wish to investigate further.  It is a question of where the manifestations of physical energy (that trajectory from our sun to plants to calories to human brain) go after entering the brain.  I have suggested in previous posts that concepts or memes are transmitted via language, which acts as a form of energy storage (in the case of written language) or serves as a kind of catalyst (in the case of spoken language) to concentrate the brain-energy in the mind-brain of another on a certain subject or meme.  I have wondered about the sociology of mass movements, whether for the good (MLK) or for evil (Hitler) and how it is that leaders are able to focus the energies of many to make things happen in the world.

And so I wonder:  what is the psychology of charisma?  How does one become charismatic (assuming they have the “good looks” required of the charismatic)?  Perhaps Abraham Maslow’s “hierarchy of needs” could point the way to answering this.

I bet there was an evolutionary advantage to certain people being leaders and most others being followers.  Obviously, the well-organized band of pre-humans was able to get more work done more effectively; they were able to manage the collective energy of the group so as to maximize its potential.

The Evolution of Evolution

 In his book Energy and the Evolution of Life, Ronald F. Fox writes of the energonomics of evolution.  I wrote about this book a couple of years ago (see Energy and the Evolution of Life), when I first got the book.  It’s quite technical and elaborate, complete with scary math-equations and what-not.  But those with a general education and curious nature can get a sense of the ideas he presents.  I jus recently picked it up again and peaked at the end, where he speaks of the evolution of evolution–that is, the evolution of what he calls “energy coupling,” the evolution of energy flow.   As he writes, “The mechanism of evolution is evolving as a natural consequence of the continuing evolution of energy coupling” (165).  The book is a survey of this evolution, which starts from the origins of life on this planet and walks the reader through the chemistry and physics of energy flow, through to the development of nervous systems.  In this passage Fox emphasizes the radical nature of how evolution has evolved:

*the biological advantage of this advanced nervous system system is to rapidly simulate the prediction of nonlinear events.* This step in the long history of biological evolution has critically altered the mechanism of evolution itself and transcends the genetic mechanism of Darwinian selection (156).

This is where we launch into the significance of sociology (or social psychology) as the next phase of energonomic study and as an indication of how energonomics is a form of “consilience.”  Fox’s book ends with a section called “Social Evolution” where he mentions that, “With brain, a new kind of life has emerged: multiindividual organisms. Humans are among them…. The emergent behavior of these metazoan collectives is predicated on the types of energy that the collective processes” (166).  I would add to this how it processes the energy (e.g. do we channel our brain energy away from the amygdala and toward the pre-frontal lobes?).

Fox ends the book with a question of whether or not we will survive the latest evolution of energy production.  Are we physiologically capable of making the necessary cultural adaptions at this stage of the game?  I will quote the last paragraph in its entirety:

A refinement in cultural mechanisms has occurred with every refinement of energy flux coupling. Some steps have led to dramatic, emergent behavior.  The practice of collective agriculture made an enormous impact, as did the advent of metallurgy and the bronze and iron ages. Recently, the nuclear age has followed the electricity age, closely and intimately. Suddenly, a new source of energy flux is available.  Is it possible that the energy flux parameter has now increased to a point that could drive the nonlinear, dynamical process called civilization to chaos? Or is man’s nervous system sufficiently advanced to predict future events and establish effective control mechanisms? (166)

I remain hopeful that the answer to the last question is YES.

The Energy in Poetry

I recently read the YA “verse novel” Your Own, Silvia by Stephanie Hemphill, an excellent introduction to the life of Sylvia Plath, which got me into her poetry as well as the poetry of Ted Hughes, her husband.  I checked out the Modern Critical Views (edited by Harold Bloom) on Sylvia Plath and found an essay in there titled “Aspects of Energy in the Poetry of Dylan Thomas and Sylvia Plath” by D.F. McKay.  McKay introduces a conception of literary criticism which can be aligned with my concept of energonomics:  his goal is to discover/uncover the energy at the heart of the poem as a speech-act of meaning.  He writes in the introduction that

most modern experimental poets have been preoccupied with the charge of language, the energy with which meaning is conveyed.  In extreme instances, to extend the generalization, energy consumes meaning the way fire feeds on matter… (17).

Some poetry, according to McKay, “concentrates upon energy–its generation, control and unleashing,” and he suggests that we “keep another metaphor uppermost in mind:  meaning as a conductor of energy, serving to deliver it as a wire conducts electricity” (18).

 In my conception of energonomics, as in Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy, this process is not a metaphor but a literal, ontological fact.