{"id":2439,"date":"2014-12-04T07:28:50","date_gmt":"2014-12-04T12:28:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=2439"},"modified":"2014-12-04T07:28:50","modified_gmt":"2014-12-04T12:28:50","slug":"sustainability-requires-that-we-learn-to-embrace-change-not-fight-it-ensia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=2439","title":{"rendered":"Sustainability requires that we learn to embrace change, not fight it | Ensia"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/ensia.com\/voices\/sustainability-requires-that-we-learn-to-embrace-change-not-fight-it\/\">Sustainability requires that we learn to embrace change, not fight it | Ensia<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p style=\"margin: 0px 0px 1.5em 0px;\"><span class=\"postDate\" style=\"font-style: italic;\">December 3, 2014 \u2014\u00a0<\/span>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\u00a0<a style=\"font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: underline; color: #1f589a;\" href=\"http:\/\/dx.doi.org\/10.1016\/0921-8009(95)00068-2\" target=\"_blank\">first noted<\/a>, limits make a terrible metaphor for sustainability. They don\u2019t inspire vision; they only require restraint. They highlight what we can\u2019t do \u2014 catch more than\u00a0<i>x<\/i>\u00a0fish or cut down more than\u00a0<i>y<\/i>\u00a0trees per year \u2014 but offer nothing in terms of how we might organize our lives such that sustainability isn\u2019t 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\u00a0<i>second\u00a0<\/i>law of sustainability.<\/p>\n<p style=\"margin: 0px 0px 1.5em 0px;\">The concept of limits derives from natural law \u2014 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 \u2014 about how we organize our systems for resource use such that they can be sustained \u2014 the second law of thermodynamics is particularly relevant.<\/p>\n<p style=\"margin: 0px 0px 1.5em 0px;\">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.<\/p>\n<p style=\"margin: 0px 0px 1.5em 0px;\">&#8230;click on the above link to read the rest of the article&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Sustainability requires that we learn to embrace change, not fight it | Ensia. December 3, 2014 \u2014\u00a0Limits 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\u00a0first noted, limits make a terrible metaphor for sustainability. They don\u2019t inspire [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[156,485,769],"class_list":["post-2439","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment","tag-conservation","tag-limits-to-growth","tag-sustainability"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2439","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2439"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2439\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2440,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2439\/revisions\/2440"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2439"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2439"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2439"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}