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From SAMISDAT, volume 28, #1, 109th release, 1981:
Come now a new Jeremiah, Jeremy Rifkin, restating the old gospel in terms of Entropy, sel-proclaimed as "A new world-view."
The first Jeremiah summarized it thusly some 3,000 years ago: "They have sown wheat and have reaped thorns, they have tired themselves out but profit nothing. They shall be ashamed of their harvests because of the fierce anger of the Lord."
In Rifkin's cosmology, the angry Lord is thermodynamic principle. The first law of thermodynamics holds that all energy is finite, ever changing form. The second law holds that energy always moves toward equilibrium.
As Rifkin points out, water flows toward a common level, at which point it can no longer fall through a turbine. On the universal scale, there presumably are no tides to keep the level seas in potentially useful motion, nor any evaporation to keep hot air rising and shit gushing downward in perpetuity.
The universe is not run by the plumber's maxim at all. Every time energy is used, a certain amount is lost as heat. Heat cools and is gone forever, the ultimate fate of everything, since everything is but wstored energy in one form or another.
Tracing entropy back to the Big Bang where it apparently all began, Rifkin deduces that both biology and physics are purely entropic processes. Everything that happens, regardless of how and why it happens, contributes somehow to the ultimate universal dissolution.
Entropy does not occur at a constant rate, however. Some of us, especially North Americans, accelerate entropy through needless energy consumption. Plants, on the other hand, slow entropy by storing a great deal of absorbed energy while actually "burning" very little.
At this point Rifkin breaks from theoretical physics into the here and now. Entropy is rather obviously the primal cause of our energy crisis: we are burning fossil fuels we cannot replace, while the so-called nuclear solution will require more energy to construct and maintain than it can ever be expected to return to us.
Entropy, Rifkin also argues, is generally responsible for not only social and economic problems obviously resulting from the energy crisis, but also for problems felt long before fossil fuels ran scarce. Problems of scale, for instance: a crime rate multiplying geometrically as cities increase in size. A school system deteriorating qualitatively, even as it quantitatively grows.
Here entropy becomes not a recognizable, immediately visible physical principle, but instead a metaphor for what happens when institutions grow so large that, as with some portions of the interstate highway system, more resources most be spent on maintenance than upon actually doing whatever they were supposed to do in the first place. The arms race, the population explosion, and our current cancer epidemic, Rifkin claims, are all entropy exemplified.
Perhaps, to an extent, since some entropy is inevitable. But the link between how much information our schools impart and how much energy their physical maintenance expends is tenuous, to say the least. We might take the same resources and hire an individual tutor for every child on a part-time basis. Education might well be improved thereby, without our slowing down physical entropy one whit.
[As to the over-costly, under-utilized highway links, Rifkin is silent on the subject of how entropy is responsible for pork barrel politics. Entropic dissolution, meanwhile, would seem to be more a problem for those links that are used most efficiently, by the greatest volume of traffic.]
Undaunted, Rifkin continues on ever shakier ground. Correct, our present energy-consumptive lifestyles do tend toward self-destruction. Correct, neither conservation nor renewable energy sources can save us from ultimate entropic dissolution. Even renewable energy will be exhausted, at least in this solar system, when the sun burns out.
But Rifkin adds these undeniables up to only one alternative to imminent extinction: we must return, he says, to an enlightened variant of medieval living. We must abandon technology, because technological advancement inevitably means accelerating entropy. Our population must be leveled. We must learn to accept and dwell within our earthly limitations.
Over the past decade, no environmental/investigative journalist has been more aware than I of the impact of runaway technology upon Planet Earth. I reported about the first Earth Day demonstration against the automobile, helped to found a pioneering community recycling center at San Jose State University, and have helped to lead local environmental struggles on a dozen different fronts.
But despite holding a world view almost identical to Rifkin's 10 years ago, circa 1970-1971, I have gradually recognized certain technological innovations as counter-entropic, and postulate that our recent surge of entropic acceleration, the Industrial Revolution, was a sort of self-induced catastrophic evolutionary phase: a means of developing more efficient counter-evolutionary mechanisms.
We are doing technologically, quickly, what might have taken biology much, much longer. This developmental surge might not have been absolutely necessary, but once taken, can still be used by nature to constructive effect.
While adopting conservation and renewable energy as basis for our terrestrial lifestyle, we are no longer bound to the earth. Many of us may counter entropy, eventually, by traveling through space, or by standing still against the rush of matter and energy from the primordial Big Bang.
This strategy too must ultimately fail, pending unimagined discovery, yet it should succeed at least as well as Rifkin's recommended cowering before doom, and might meanwhile lead somehow to some far side of entropy.
Contrary to Rifkin's Jeremiad against computers, automobiles, aircraft, and mass communication devices, we see these as essentially counter-entropic in their eventual evolved form. A microcomputer storing information on silicon chips can replace a reference library whose every shelf of books required as much energy to assemble and takes more to use, counting transportation to get there. A computer in every home would pay for itself soon through saving transportation energy.
I agree with Rifkin that future society will again consist of decentralized, autonomous, self-sufficient villages, where residents enjoy a great deal more human contact than most urbanites do presently. But these villages shall not exist in social or intellectual isolation from one another. Computers shall likely replace many of the more high-energy usage devices of today than we imagine, while data files pass from generation to generation as family Bibles do now.
Automobiles must be made to last as long as houses, in addition to running more efficiently on renewable hydrogen and electricity. Aircraft powered by sun and wind shall become increasingly important, since air travel is the path of least entropic resistance when moving objects for great distance.
Rifkin projects little movement in a microbiotic world where all needs are met locally. Living on a self-sufficient farm, I agree that the macrobiotic approach is the healthiest for both people and the environment, day in and day out. But some travel is vital, both materially and spiritually, even among barnacles, as time-lapse photography reveals.
Adopting environmentally appropriate, counter-entropic technology undoubtedly means changing our lifestyles away from long-distance commutes and the vicious cycle of mass production and planned obsolescence. It need not, however, mean lowering our standard of living. We could well accomplish far more with far less energy input that Rifkin's medieval peasants ever did.
Rifkin will argue, as in his questionable case against thought forming a counter-entropic force, that we are fooling ourselves. Perhaps, but then he is at times simply obtuse, for instance in claiming that the rubber worn off of our tires is lost forever and will never become rubber again. "Never" is a very big word in the long run of time. That worn rubber becomes dust, whch becomes dirt, which could well become rubber again, or something else useful.
Death of anything is not the absolute end, outside of theoretical physics, where entropy yet holds sway. As the Welsh folk song goes, "then shall coom the twerms an' et thee oop. Then shall coom the fish an' et th' twerms," the only visible entropic loss being to the king's artificial dense of dignity.
Though I am not a physicist, I am even skeptical of entropy itself as immutable law. Rifkin's very positive insistence that entropic theory provides all answers to everything reminds me much of past religious and scientific doctrines that similarly proved false when our perception grew to encompass the hitherto unthought and unobserved.
I wonder if either Rifkin or anyone else can explain just what happened within the exploding nucleus of the postulated original Big Bang. Obviously heat flew outward in all directions at first, carried by molecules of matter. The farther it travels, the more the remnants dissipate into the void. Heat is therefore most intense in the sphere most immediately surrounding the nucleus. But eventually the nucleus must be empty, a cooling hole. Since heat always moves toward equilibrium, part of the explosion much reverse directions and begin imploding. The resulting collision of molecules at the speed of light must inevitably cause fusion, a renewed Big Bang.
A pulsating Big Bang, perhaps declining into heat loss, since not all heat thrown outward could return to the center each time; but perhaps also an expanding and enlarging Big Bang each time, since such successive explosions would logically create rippling waves of heat-energy with cooler spaces between, and since these waves would eternally split, collide, and regenerate themselves in attempting to bring themselves into uniformity.
I would not spend so much space on one book if it had not been touted as the end-all and be-all of ecological science and philosophy by some of the leading individuals and organizations in the so-called counterculture to which most of us belong. This is not a time for embracing absolutes. Nothing is absolute in an authentically ecological world view, including ivory-tower assumptions most emphatically .
Merritt Clifton was editor/publisher and completely inept printer of the outlaw literary/political magazine & chapbook series SAMISDAT, which lasted for 242 monthly editions, 1973-1992. In this inkstained capacity, Clifton authored The SAMISDAT Method: A Do-It-Yourself Guide to Printing, read and used the world over by those who realize that freedom of the press belongs to those who own one. Also a prolific noosepaper hack & muckrake in California, Quebec, and Vermont, beginning in 1968, Clifton was a regular correspondent for more than 10 years each for the Small Press Review, the Townships Sun, the Vermont Vanguard Press, the Enosburg Falls County Courier, and the Sherbrooke Record, best known at the latter as the sports columnist Jackass Clifton. From 1988 to 1992 Clifton was news editor for the defunct Animals' Agenda magazine; in 1990 became a charter member of the Society of Environmental Journalists; and in 1992, with Kim Bartlett, cofounded ANIMAL PEOPLE: News For People Who Care About Animals. He allegedly took himself seriously once upon a time.
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