Sustainability requires that we learn to embrace change, not fight it | Ensia.
December 3, 2014 — Limits to growth are a fundamental and widely accepted principle of sustainability. You might even call them the first law of sustainability. Nevertheless, as ecological economist Richard Norgaard first noted, limits make a terrible metaphor for sustainability. They don’t inspire vision; they only require restraint. They highlight what we can’t do — catch more than x fish or cut down more than y trees per year — but offer nothing in terms of how we might organize our lives such that sustainability isn’t a constant struggle. Limits are unavoidable, and their recognition is requisite to sustainability, but I believe that if people and communities are to develop new and transformative ways of living sustainably they need a metaphor that inspires not just restraint but creativity and innovation. The basis for such a vision, I submit, is found in a second basic principle of sustainability, one that requires us to allow, and even embrace, change. I call this principle the conservation of change, and propose it as the second law of sustainability.
The concept of limits derives from natural law — the first law of thermodynamics, also known as the conservation of energy. There is also a second law of thermodynamics, and whereas the first law is concerned with physical phenomena, the second law is organizational. Given that sustainability is fundamentally an organizational question — about how we organize our systems for resource use such that they can be sustained — the second law of thermodynamics is particularly relevant.
The second law of thermodynamics states all systems move toward maximum entropy, which is often described as potential or disorder. At first blush this law would seem to relegate the notion of sustainability to wishful thinking: If all systems move toward lower organizational complexity, then stability in any complex natural system, whether of a population or ecosystem or biome, would be short-lived. Yet, through cycles, nature has developed a solution to this tendency toward disorder. Cycles are the mechanism by which high levels of biological and ecological organization are sustained despite the fact that the matter and energy therein are inclined toward lower degrees of organization.
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