“’Beauty is truth, truth beauty,’—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” Keats
But what kind of beauty? And how much of it? Moreover, what is the energy/emergy involved, and what effect does it have on symbioses/“nature”/creation?
The clear-cutting of forest can result in beautiful open meadows. The contours of agricultural beds prepared for planting of domesticated seeds are beautiful. Ordered white-fenced, red-barned, neatly-painted clap-boarded and shuttered rural communities of flower and vegetable garden landscapes can be very, very beautiful. Ecological communities set back in productivity by disturbances of bulldozing, plowing, mowing, burning or other perturbations, are often transformed into beautiful displays of native wildflowers. All 7 billion humans, their zygotes and embryos, and their ova and spermatozoa are beautiful. Domesticated breeds of, for example, horses, cattle, cats, dogs (and even the show animals) possess beauty. Frank Lloyd Wright-type architectural feats in the built environment are structures of beauty. There is beauty in the skylines of major metropolises. Beauty can be schematic illustrations of all the crazy lines of communication across the globe, the flyways of migratory birds, or the migratory patterns of Homo erectus, Homo neanderthalensis, and Homo sapiens. Fires can be very beautiful. The immense explosions of nuclear bombs are awesomely beautiful. The blasted sands out from Los Alamos exhibit beauty.
Beauty is a function of mindset. A yard of “weeds” struggling through secondary succession can be beautiful and should perhaps be considered more beautiful than mowed and trimmed lawns of non-native bermudagrass, zoysia, or centipede grasses. However, advertising, traditions, actions which are for realization of safety and security, and human evolution have generally led to most humans preferring the manicured landscapes over “natural” secondary successional ecological communities or even “climax” ecological communities.
Beauty can be clearly destructive and even evil, as is definitely the case for some of the examples in the second paragraph herein. Moreover, beauty can result from or be utilized by propaganda machines with evil intentions and/or with very negative results. Finally, too much of anything on an Earth which has limits in its natural resource base and amounts of net primary productivity, … is destructive to symbioses (“nature”)
With an Eaarth population of seven billion humans which will reach perhaps ten billion, consuming in some instances more than 300,000 kilocalories/capita/day (among the Haves), and appropriating much more than a lion’s share of net primary productivity, beautification via rampant artificialization has gotten out of hand! We need to slow down as humans and begin to truly appreciate the beauty of symbioses.
You can’t beat “natural” fractals for true beauty. The beauty of homeostatic symbioses is Truth. And Truth is natural beauty. That’s the Truth! Therefore, that is all you need to know to begin the process of transforming Eaarth to Earth.
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The deep and real “natural” beauty of dynamic homeostatic symbioses has everything to do with energetics. If the beauty is not capable of being sustained, restored or regenerated through daily “natural” solar-generated photosynthate or with relatively little embodied human appropriated net primary productivity, or if the ecological footprint involved in producing the beauty is too large, or if the technology employed is inappropriate, … then “the beauty” isn’t innately and profoundly beautiful.
A discussion of energetics is complex and confounding. In terms of sustainable payoffs from energy inputs, throughputs, and outputs, one must consider: diffuse and concentrated energy and negative externalities in the processes of transformation, embodied energy, what increased inputs in a subsystem might do to homeostatic symbioses which coevolved for millions of years, and if particular human uses of the energy result in overall good.
My appetite for at least a minimal understanding of energetics was first whetted in 1971 by the gracious, knowledgeable, persistent, and wise ecologist, David Pimentel of Cornell, who had kindly sent me numerous reprints of publications on population dynamics and biological control of the lepidopteran herbivores on which my doctoral research was focused. Later, triggered by the energy crises of the 1970s, Dr. Pimentel became involved as a pioneer in studies of energetics of agricultural systems and was always ready to patiently explain some aspect of this important agroecological topic when I called or wrote him with a related conundrum. Then in that same time period in the community ecology classes of turtle-migration expert Archie Carr, I learned of and began to truly appreciate the Silver Springs research and systems modeling investigations of Dr. Howard T. Odum involving energy/emergy transformation and flux.
In one of the Odum short-films which I presented to my principles of biology and environmental biology classes at St. Philip’s College, toward the end the interviewer puts H.T. on the spot about using a car to travel to the location where the interview and filming was done versus more appropriately walking or bicycling. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6I7zcYyomyA In addition to H.T., I have read that object-oriented philosopher/”ecologist”, Timothy Morton, and environmentalist, Bill McKibben, have been criticized for using heavily fossil energy-dependent and “unsustainable” modes of transportation such as flying to research sustainability, and disseminate information and knowledge related to this topic and advocate for sustainable livelihoods. And I have been criticized by students for using a motor vehicle to a drive 33 miles to St. Philip’s College in order to make the case in classes about how inappropriate automobiles are in transport systems.
We are all sinners; no one is perfect. But above and beyond this is the fact that Truth and processes toward Truth are messy. And at times we must create chaos in time-space subsets of symbioses in order to get to a more symbiotic order holistically and to realize sustainable livelihoods for all.
Dr. H.T. Odum’s films and other works were things of deep beauty in terms of contributing to our knowledge. Nevertheless, in his process of developing that ordered knowledge and in disseminating it toward knowledge, wisdom, and prudence for all, energy was transformed, and some entropy and chaos resulted per the Second Law of Thermodynamics. And despite the entropy created as a result of their beautiful creation of ordered knowledge, the works like those of Helmut Haberl and colleagues at the Institute of Social Ecology, Vienna, Austria toward consilience and a better undertaking of applications in healthy social ecology will help us toward realizing more Truth even while it is a very messy process and will result in some messy outcomes.
7Ss / VV->^^
pbm
