Creating a Unified Perspective of Life on Earth

so much for joining us here. When you when you write about natural laws defining human life, what do you mean, Well, it's basically looking at some of the fundamental constraints that the planet has on us. So, you know, when we talk about markets, markets are ultimately dependent on some aspect of natural resource constraints. And uh so we're going back to the basic laws of nature essentially and making sure that we align our economic and social systems in congruence

with those constraints. You know. It's I've talked about this before on air, so listeners will be familiar with it. But I grew up in California and I had a professor in college. I went to college in Maine, a professor in college, you said California is a place where nobody should ever have lived because of the lack of water and the wildfires. And I'm wondering, professor, if if the market is failing in that sense, because you see

California home prices still just out of control. And I say to myself, wait a second, and this is somebody who has family in California. Why are people living in a place where there is no water? Yeah, I mean if you go back to that classic Hollywood film Chinatown, you know, it goes to that kind of the heart of that challenge in California in terms of water security.

And one could say the same of Phoenix, Arizona. I mean, so many places where we have designed human habitation without really considering, um, the natural constraints there, and especially the number of people who lived there. I mean, perhaps you could have some level of population. But that's that's a good example pull of that. And engineers have given us this illusion that we can basically uh use technology to

construct all these systems. And for the short term, yes, they work fine, and but in the long term, the stress is going to build up eventually, and and that's what we have to be conscious of. Well, and I do wonder about, you know, as you think about this order and the things that are so connected, and maybe and how we teach it to our younger generation, like

how do we need to be rethinking things? Because you know, I'm listening to you speak and I've been thinking about is it time for us to tell the world back off, stop consuming so much because earth can handle it? Like I've really been thinking about or such a consumption lead society, but it's really being brought uh down as a result. But tell us a bit about how everything kind of connects with one another, natural social systems, you know, and and how it can maybe you know, give us heads

up on where we're going good or bad? Ad? Yeah, you know, I am very much. Um. You know, approaching this from a practical point of view, we we are going to need to consume in order to uh sustain livelihoods, but we need to move towards constructive consumption rather than having consumption which is not considering some of those natural constraints. So I'm all for green growth. I mean, there are many ways in which you can use the capitalist system

in a very constructive way. Um, But what we have done is we have not really considered some of those fundamental constraints that physics puts on us. I mean, for example, many years ago, you know, in the nineteen six seventies, there was an economist who wrote a book. You know, it was published by Harvard University Press, was called The Entropy Law and Economics. His name was Nicholas georgesco Rogin Romanian immigrant who wrote this, and you know, it was

a wonderful book. But and what it tried to do was to link some of those physical constraints to economics. But unfortunately we have we we lost our way at some point and we could have great growth, we could have markets functioning, but we just need to do them within those constraints. All right. So if we did that, I mean, how would how would markets react? How would our world change? Well, we would just have different kinds

of products. And we I mean we're seeing that now, but to some degree we're seeing you know, the growth of of green products, but it has happened as a reaction. Uh and it's still very neat. Rather than can I can I jump in for a second. So then do you think when we're seeing the constraints of energy supplies as a result of the Russian warranty Ukraine, that we shouldn't necessarily release supplies produce more because ultimately it's a fixed commodity. At some point it's going to run out.

But let innovation disruption happen all the energy. I guess I'm saying, yeah, I mean, I mean with regard to part of it is that we are also very knee jerk in our approach to looking at even environmental problems. And so it's not just I don't want to just put all the blame on the markets. I think environmentalists share the blame that they don't make science based decisions. So for example, with the war and Ukraine. You know, three weeks ago, Europe had to pass new legislation to

basically classify nuclear energy as clean energy. And that's because they completely had this panic attack after Fukushima and they didn't consider that actually, from a natural science perspective, nuclear power, especially existing nuclear power plants which were already operating, made a lot of sense to provide baseload power. And now they have no baseload power, so they have to either be important gas from Russia or they have to reclassify nuclear.

So the environmentalists share this blame that we do not have science based decision making. We have what I call environmental awareness, but we don't have environmental literacy. And so that's the real challenge we have, and that's what Earthly Order tries to do. I don't want to be, you know, just a bleeding heart environmentalist in the book, I really

want to make the connection between practicism and consumerism. So then come back again, because we would love to continue with this and there's certainly a topic that comes up a lot. Salimali, Professor of Energy in the Environment at the University of Delaware. His book Earthly Order, How Natural Laws define Human Life