Of Pipedreams, Science and the Wilderness

by R. F. Mueller

They've done it again! The technocrats have a new plan to reprogram our world. Consider the age-old dream of our species, the dream of control over nature without any drawbacks. Well, they think they finally have it and it's called "nanotechnology." This was revealed in an interview of MIT zealots on National Public Radio on June 24 of this year. The prefix "nano" means "very small" and in this case refers to ordering manipulations on the atomic scale. They're not just talking about the natural and spontaneous ordering or disordering of atoms in crystals as a response to temperature and pressure changes (a field in which I once did research) and which has numerous scientific and technological applications in its own right. What they mean is the deliberate multiscale ordering of the world from atoms on up! But there is a catch, the same catch that has plagued all technological megaprojects, yet is almost never mentioned. The catch is that to achieve some megatechnological result, certain scientific principles must be ignored as necessarily as others are assiduously applied. It will come as no surprise that one body of these ignored principles is the science of ecology, but curiously, another is that brainchild of the industrial revolution itself, classical thermodynamics. Of course, thermodynamics is not ignored entirely, because no significance technological device or process can be achieved without taking it into account. The rub is that our technologically optimistic friends always stop with the technology as such and don't include the " (read environment) with which the technology necessarily reacts-environmental thermodynamics if you will.

Environmentalists are deeply suspicious of science. But whether science is ultimately good or disastrous for the planet (and I am strongly tempted to believe the latter) isn't a useful question here because science appears to be an inevitable product of a species that the planet is stuck with temporarily. So we might as well make the best of a bad situation by at least insuring that critical rules of the game like those of ecology and thermodynamics aren't disregarded.

Thermodynamics, as represented by its first and second "laws," is the science of the possible and the impossible, a discipline that sets severe limits as well as serving indispensably in the development of technology. It is also well grounded in experience, so that we know that no proposed industrial chemical reaction or physical process for which unfavorable thermodynamic numbers are obtained is possible, unless it is driven by some external process; and these external processes are usually prohibitively costly in monetary and environmental terms. To illustrate, the frequently proposed use of water as a source of hydrogen chemical fuel would require a fearsome input of energy from another source, such as nuclear fission, to separate the hydrogen from oxygen-much more energy would be required than the hydrogen would could ever yield.

Some will recall the first law as the rather prosaic statement that energy can't be created or destroyed as long as its equivalence to mass is recognized. The second law, which is more mysterious and pertinent to our problem, states that the disorder or "entropy" of any isolated system always spontaneously increases. In practical terms this means that although we can create technological order in local parts of the environment (e.g. an industrial site), there will be created a concomitant greater quantity of disorder, inevitably not only at that site, but in external regions from which ordering elements such as energy and materials are drawn. This is a game that can't be won (as I have argued in past articles: Thermodynamics of Environmental Degradation, NASA document X-644-71-121; Science 196, 261, etc.). Similar conclusions were reached by Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen with respect to economics (The Entropy Law and the Economic Process, Cambridge, MA., 1971 and other publications). However, the whole topic of environmental thermodynamics has been shunned by the technocrats because they consider it a "Bad News Science." From this we can infer that thermodynamics can be as powerful an ally for us as is ecology. It is, in fact, the purely physical basis for the so-called "laws of ecology" and is equally applicable to every aspect of society in which energy is involved.

In a not too remote tomorrow the dreamers of nanotechnology would attempt to order large segments of our world from the atomic level on up, to create unprecedented control of chemical, mechanical and biologic systems by fitting every individual atom into a pre-designated framework to achieve a technological paradise. To get a feel for the magnitude of such a program consider our everyday experiences, in which the same thermodynamic forces are at work. We all know how difficult it is to order our lives, simply to keep our dwellings neat, our personal effects in place. Note that we're talking here of our familiar macroscopic world. Imagine then trying to reduce the underlying microscopic world, vibrant and nascent, to this same brand of preconceived anthropocentric order!

We've seen that by the second law every ordered region we create calls into being an even greater region of disorder as a result of the increased energy flux. In environmental terms this technological energy, no matter how benign its origin, is synonymous with pollution. Even the most advanced microelectronic and solar energy systems, which were once regarded as "pollution free", are subject to the same energy degradation as are the crudest factories and mines, except the degradation may take different forms (Mueller, Environmental Action 10,15, 1978). If then, by any chance-and this chance is small-the technocrats were able to order our entire planetary surface to create the wonder world of their dreams, the energy required and the resulting pollution might well be enough to disorder much of the solar system!

I won't tire you with the familiar and dreary litany of technological failures-all of them touted as examples of our "control" over nature-that are devastating this beautiful planet. However, it's useful to note in passing a few familiar cases that may not strike everyone as offensive. Consider current attempts at supercontrol in the medical profession in which ever more "sophisticated technologies" such as organ transplants and complex life support systems, are being developed. Then be aware that burgeoning material requirements and costs of these technologies are driving up the costs of ordinary health care beyond the range of those people (externals!) who will never need the new technology. Or consider the practice of "advanced societies", and particularly the US, of keeping thousands of square miles of terrain in a technological straight jacket at enormous cost in labor, energy and materials. This applies not only to the monotonous monocultures of agribusiness, but particularly to the trimmed, herbicide and pesticide saturated yards, roadsides and other artificially vegetated areas that are being dedicated to nothing more than perverted esthetic ideal willed to us by English Lords. Add to these the inefficient estates of hobby agriculture that destructively enslave more thousands of square miles (Mueller, EF!, Litha, 1986) as well as the large expanses of public land devoted to deficit timber, grazing and mining operations by the federal government. Finally, wonder that even the most nature-alienated MIT technocrat, confronted seasonally by his own crabgrass, could consider nanotecnology seriously.

What we have here is luxury feeding on necessity, the long term consequences of which may be illustrated, according to Georgescu-Roegen, by the production of Cadillacs which will inevitably preclude the availability of plowshares to future generations (Southern Economic Journal 41, 347, 1975).

All this allows us to see wilderness in a new light. Wilderness, it appears, is the manifestation of harmony between order and disorder, both of which are necessary to maintain it. (Perhaps it is also nature's paradigm for the resolution of the contradiction between order and anarchy so frequently discussed in this journal!) The natural dispersal of seeds, for example, is a disordering process, as is the chemical diffusion of nutrients (positive change of entropy on mixing), but there is no better example of order than the adaptive survival of seedlings in specific sites. In this scheme without a schemer, the life order created spontaneously through evolution as a response to geologic conditions and the solar flux is always exceeded by the sum of the disordering effects of decay, heat dissipation etc.; and it is this surplus disorder which drives the entire process. Part of this spontaneously expressed scheme, which is inherent in the chemistry of the system, is the enormous biologic diversity, the place-identity mosaic, which confers stability to the biosphere. However, this stability is threatened when any species becomes dominant and attempts to exert its own form of order, usurping the environmental mosaic and decreasing diversity. In the case of our species, this usurpation, acting through both excessive numbers and high energy technology, creates disorder of the type which clashes with natural order. Consequently the interaction of technology and nature is only a vulgar parody of the pre-existing harmony.

It is obvious that pure wilderness terrain requires no inputs of technological energy or materials to maintain it. Using an analogy from physics, wilderness may be regarded as an energy "ground state." The technological energy required to deviate greatly from this state, even to accommodate existing human numbers under minimal living standards, let alone the flaunting of luxury, places in peril our long term survival and that of all other species.

Modern cities and agriculture necessarily displaced wilderness to accommodate the needs of excess population. However, it is becoming increasingly apparent that large tracts of wilderness-larger tan those presently existing-are themselves more necessary than ever as reservoirs of environmental amenities needed to support civilization's artifacts.

The foregoing is one of a number of possible "scientific" interpretations of the planetary dilemma, although one that is unlikely to be embraced by the scientific establishment with its demands for upbeat predictions of the conquest of nature. But, at best, science is only one facet of the real world-which is certainly mystical and poetic at its core. Yet, given the inevitability of its presence in our lives, our efforts must be directed toward elevating science to a new analytical level, to a systems approach that recognizes the great panorama of biology, the limits set by thermodynamics, and above all, the unity and parity of all life forms. At present wilderness is still regarded as basically inhospitable to the human intellect, the great chaos out of which we are elevating ourselves to unlimited heights of technological grandeur. Contrarily, central to the new level of scientific consciousness is the recognition of the wilderness source of our intellect and the continuing dependence of our intellect on wilderness, a dependency that all our high energy ordering schemes, our gleaming space ships, cannot supplant. Finally, the new scientific consciousness also recognizes that wilderness is the life-sustaining environment.

At this new level we give up the old pipedream of technological control over nature and see that what we now think of as control is only interaction and impact, and that for each impact we direct at nature we are impacted in return. Only by accepting as our standard of reference the natural regimen of harmony between order and disorder-as best represented by the wilderness-can catastrophe be avoided.

R. F. Mueller is a former NASA scientist who writes regularly for our journal.