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Striving for Expansion

"Survival within a niche is less about the will to power and more about taming entropy."

Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world
Like a Colossus, and we petty men
Walk under his huge legs and peep about…
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves.

— Julius Caesar, Act 1, Scene 2

There is a tendency to look towards artificial intelligence — and particularly Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), not just ChatBots — as some kind of savior that will yank us out of our omnidirectional existential crisis and pull us back from the brink of human extinction. This logic, or deep-seated fantasy, flows neatly from the historical themes of Abrahamic desert religions that guide so much of Western popular culture, from action films to sporting events to current politics. But saviors are implausible, if not impossible, and AGI is no different.

Earlier this year the elderly gent who coined the term, EROIE (energy return on invested energy) and later inaugurated the scientific discipline of biophysical economics, the venerable 80-year-old Charles A.S. Hall, coauthored a paper in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society (I read it for the Sunday funnies) entitled, “Maximum power in evolution, ecology and economics.”

Hall’s paper recounted the progression of science’s understanding of the role of energy in biological and physical systems from Darwin’s finches to the formation of galaxies. The essay reminded us that the human species, like every other organizational unit in the universe, is governed by a drive to acquire power. The nineteenth-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche called this drive, “Streben nach Entfaltung” (striving for expansion). As Hall relates, later biophysicists like Boltzmann, Lotka, Odum and Pinkerton would show how survival within a niche is less about the will to power and more about the taming of entropy — reducing the dissipation of captured energy. Lotka, in 1922, said that organisms that capture and use energy more rapidly and effectively have a selective advantage but in the context of ecosystems, the maximum is not always the optimum — there is a sweet spot where diminishing loss is more important than increasing gain. Hall uses the example of bicycle gears.

When he was merely a spry 70, Hall demonstrated this principle by scaling the Luquillo Mountains in Puerto Rico. Gross photosynthesis in the tropics is at maximum at sea level, but respiration is also at maximum due to the temperature. At higher elevations, evaporation clouds block the sun more often. At mid-elevation (~800m in the Luquillo) a balance of photosynthesis and respiration optimizes forest production (and also carbon uptake). The same, Hall said, is true for intermediate latitudes — the mid-ranges between Equator and poles.

One might think that your and my innate maximum power drive propels the expansion of AI because humans, like all life-forms, are consumed by a need to optimize power. Every year or two I am compelled to upgrade my phone and laptop so that I can access faster silicon chips and other features that I know will speed up my work and thereby, it is assumed, better my life. Consumerism is just another side of the animal (or plant) drive to expand population and habitat.

Ask Elon Musk why he is so insistent about getting colonies on Mars and he probably can’t tell you, other than some cliches about manifest destiny or having read The Hitchhikers Guide as a child. Insofar as AI can optimize conditions for expansion — Daniel Schmactenberger gives the example of depleted mines that can be brought back into production by AI efficiency computations — one could imagine AI continuing to exponentially empower the homo colossus consumerist superorganism, but one would be wrong. Dissipative forces — entropy — are also accelerated, likely over and above the more visible production gains. Thus the flux, as Lotka termed it, that optimizes at the moderate mid-range becomes more important than maximum power acquisition. The central highlands are more productive — and sustainable — than the cloud forest summits or the fertile plains. The leader who provides for the real needs of his subjects rather than giving them mere military expansion and its multifarious unseen costs is, in the end, more revered by his people. Once AI grasps these principles, it closes mines and plugs fossil drill holes. That kind of saving grace could make AGI a kind of graceful savior after all.

Here in the Mayan world — I am in the Yum Balam nature reserve along the coast of the Yucatán Strait 247 km (153 mi) from Cuba — this natural balance between seeking power and minimizing entropy is evident daily. It has been going on for the two-legged inhabitants since they first arrived and, although presently masked by a thin veneer of entropic consumer culture, persists in the forest gardens that surround most rural homes and in the languages and cultural idioms still practiced since before Mr. Cortez rudely took over. These people may have been conquered, enslaved, and occupied, but they were never vanquished. Maya is still the first language in most households and there are numerous regional dialects.

One should ask why this forest today is among the world’s most biodiverse places after being continuously occupied, often at high densities for centuries at a time, for more than a dozen millennia. Yes, Lotka’s flux has something to do with that. It is at a northern mid-tropical latitude, neither equatorial nor temperate. Elevation ranges from sea level to 4200 meters (the Tajumulco volcano in Guatemala). Exploiting the balance between solar energy gain and dissipation is expected.

The traditional soil rejuvenating practices of the occupants helps. They have been practicing forest garden milpa — careful species stewarding, judicious use of fire, long rotations and selective patch clearing — for at least 8000 years, with soil fertility enhanced by each cycle of cultivation and reforestation. Chinampas — integrated nutrient recycling, aquaculture and freshwater retention — came into use perhaps 4000 years ago and systematic biochar creation and application arrived from farther south in the Archaic Maya period.

These practices stood the Maya well through intermittent climate changes. One such duress was the Medieval Warm Period from about 900 until 1300 CE which preceded the Little Ice Age in Europe. While the MWP was good for Viking expansion, it was devastating in the Yucatán. Monumental Mayan cities were abandoned to drought. Ruling dynasties fell.

But it was not all bad. Agronomically, re-ruralization prevented widespread famine and disease as ever-reliable milpa systems followed temperature and precipitation shifts to higher elevations. Evidence from lake sediment cores suggests frequent and lengthy droughts in the lowlands but good water management practices, tapping underground rivers through cenotes, constructing extensive cisterna wells to store rain in season, and focusing on less water-intensive species of agricultural crops (from a pallet of more than 60 annual cultivars and hundreds of perennials) minimized the stress of extreme climate drying for the majority of the population. They migrated and successfully relocalized. You can do that when there are not 8 or 9 billion of you.

Climate change was not the only contributing factor to the “collapse” of the great city-states of the Classic Maya. Much too high population densities (urbanization) had forced the culture to move beyond the highly productive and regenerative systems that had grown them (Lotka’s flux) and adopt highly entropic and soil-degrading practices like monocropped maize on urban terraces. Forsaking a harmony of energy maximization and dissipation, they leaned into maximum power “Streben nach Entfaltung” and paid the ultimate price. When the Spanish arrived with their Damascus steel and Andalusian war horses borne of a separate climate migration experience (the Moorish expansion until 1492), the overly entropic lowland Maya were easy pickings. Abandoned cities vanished into the jungle.

Ruddiman, Dull, Nevle and others have argued that the re-growth of neotropical forests following the Columbian encounter led to terrestrial biospheric carbon sequestration on the order of 2 to 5 GtC, contributing to the well-documented decrease in atmospheric C recorded in Antarctic ice cores from about 1500 through 1750 CE. When European disease and slavery swept the Americas so much forest was released — much of it with millennial build-ups of latent soil fertility — that atmospheric CO2 plummeted and Europe literally froze. The Swedes invaded Denmark over frozen ocean, Louis XIV put parquet floors into the palace at Versailles, and Hans Brinker won his silver skates on the Dutch canals.

Dr. Dull gives us hard numbers for what Charles Mann has tried to get across to us in 1491, that we don’t give mankind nearly enough credit for creating our biosphere. Just as Michael Pollan’s Botany of Desire showed us how plants have manipulated us to spread them around the globe, the message of man’s mutuality with nature is more than seeping into the data everywhere.

— Erich J. Knight (1955–2018)

From charcoal in lake bed studies we can see that increased biomass burning and deforestation during agricultural and population expansion in the Yucatán from 2500 years ago corresponded with atmospheric carbon loading and global warming 1100 to 650 years ago. The Maya changed the weather, just as did the Egyptians, Ottomans, Mongols, Apaches and Nigerians. During the rise of the Classic Maya, the Great White Cities witnessed by Orellana in the first European transit of the continent, the vast palisade cities along the Mississippi encountered by DeSoto, and at trade centers like Cahokia and Teotihuacan, so much carbon was released from forest and field that the atmosphere loaded and the northern hemisphere warmed. At the same time, there was desertification in North Africa, driving the Moors into Spain. Humans and climate are inextricably connected. They always have been. Westerners just didn’t grok that.

Life created the conditions for life. Forest farming moderated Ice Ages. Whaling wrecked Earth’s largest carbon sink. Genghis Khan’s Golden Hoard cooled the planet. Urbanization of the Levant in the 20th Century warmed it. Quantum entanglement is everywhere, all at once.

Besides demonstrating a human-Gaian umbilical far more reciprocating than imagined, what paleoclimate anthropology showed us was that the potential exists to return to pre-Anthropocene concentrations of atmospheric C by reforestation and terrestrial carbon loading, assuming we can overcome Jevon’s Paradox and our own dumb political inertia (made worse when AI is coupled to social media).

Despite the ubiquity of smartphones, ancient wisdom seems not to have been entirely lost among the enclaves deep in the lowland forest today, where knowledgable curation of desirable species alters the forest composition to favor plants valued in Maya culture — those known to sustain life in even the worst conditions and to create a self-regenerating, cultivated ecology, or permaculture. Over time, this ever-shifting, diverse, mosaic patch landscape accrues biodiversity wealth, endowing it with staying power. It resists climate shifts and other insults, human and geomorphic. Maybe “resists” is the wrong word. It bends, like coconut palms in a hurricane, and abides.

If you go to Acapulco a year from now, I suspect what you will see is a lot of beachfront high-rise hotels being either torn down or extensively remodeled. What most may not notice is that the coconut trees have fully recovered and gone back to dropping their nutritious fruit onto the beach.

The Mayan handwoven landscapes I see around me here in the preserve offer hope in troubled times. There is much to be learned from them. Only a fraction of the ancient designers’ wisdom has been rediscovered. In my small terrano, I have planted more than 60 traditional forest food and medicinal plants. After I have written this, I will have a chaya/moringa omelet with cacao, turmeric and chili spices, tortillas, local coffee and fresh fruit juice for my breakfast.

Even if (or when) Greenland melts, the AMOC tide ceases to convey warmth to the Maritime provinces and Northern Europe, and sea level rise claims the Mayan Riviera near here, principles of optimal energy balance will not be denied. Those who learn to go with the flow can still thrive, and the daily carbon harvesting rituals that are part of that routine — biochar, chinampas, agroforestry — will be what recovers a habitable climate, eventually, for our descendants.

Thank you for reading The Great Change. This post is public so feel free to share it.

References:

Dull, Robert A. , Nevle, Richard J. , Woods, William I. , Bird, Dennis K. , Avnery, Shiri and Denevan, William M. ‘The Columbian Encounter and the Little Ice Age: Abrupt Land Use Change, Fire, and Greenhouse Forcing’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 01 September 2010.

Ford, Anabel, and Ronald Nigh. “Climate change in the ancient Maya forest: resilience and adaptive management across millennia.” The Great Maya Droughts in Cultural Context: Case Studies in Resilience and Vulnerability (2014): 87–106.

Hall CAS, McWhirter T. 2023 Maximum power in evolution, ecology and economics. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A 381: 20220290. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsta.2022.0290

Hall CAS. 2017 Energy return of investment: a unifying principle for biology, economic, and sustainability. Berlin, Germany: Springer.

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Nigh, Ronald. 2008. “Trees, Fire and Farmers: Making Woods and Soil in the Maya Forest.” Ethnobiology 28 (2): 231–43. http://dx.doi.org/10.2993/0278-0771-28.2.231.

Odum HT, Odum EC. 2001 A Prosperous Way Down. Boulder: University Press of Colorado.

Odum HT. 1995 Self-organization and maximum empower. In Maximum power: the ideas and applications of H. T. Odum (ed. CAS Hall). Boulder, CO: University Press of Colorado.

Tainter, Joseph A. 1988. The Collapse of Complex Societies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Tainter, Joseph A. 2000. “Global Change, History, and Sustainability.” In The Way the Wind Blows: Climate, History, and Human Action, edited by Roderick J. McIntosh, Joseph A. Tainter, and Susan Keech McIntosh, 331–56. New York: Columbia University Press.

Tainter, Joseph A. 2005. “Perspectives on Diamond’s Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed.” Current Anthropology 46:S91–9.

Schrödinger E. 1945 What an organism feeds upon is negative entropy In What is life? The physical aspect of the living cell (ed. E Schroedinger ). New York, NY: Macmillan.

Whitmore, Thomas J., Mark Brenner, Jason H. Curtis, Bruce H. Dahlin, and Barbara W. Leyden. 1996. “Holocene Climatic and Human Influences on Lakes of the Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico: An Interdisciplinary, Palaeolimnological Approach.” Holocene 6 (3): 273–87. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/095968369600600303.

Willey, Gordon R. 1974. “The Classic Maya Hiatus: A Rehearsal for the Collapse?” In Mesoamerican Archaeology: New Approaches, edited by N. Hammond, 417–30. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.

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