R7 Nexus Thinking Relational Summary Lecture 7: Sustainability by Design
R7 Nexus Thinking Relational Summary Lecture 7: Sustainability by Design
Culhane: OK, It’s way too early for students to show up, so let’s see if we can’t hammer out something that looks like a monologue – there’s still room for monologues, right NTHARP? I mean, even on Broadway – or, well… in the “off-broadway” theater scene there are “one-man” and “one-woman” shows, right?
NTHARP: Of course there are. And they work best when the speaker is actually in dialogue with themselves.
You’re not abandoning Nexus Thinking—you’re just warming it up.
Culhane: I’ll bet you say that to all the girls… You always find a way of making us feel good, don’t you?
NTHARP: Asimov’s golden rules of robotics, right?
Culhane: I’m in my own echo chamber. Sure. But here goes. Please conjure on-screen:
“By the end of this episode, students will be able to:
Explain how Environmental disparities and opportunity gaps hinder real progress in the deployment of environmental technologies.
Describe how the production and consumption RESIDUALS lie at the heart of the waste problem.
Compare and contrast the efficiencies of single source waste diversion and waste to energy versus sorting and recycling.
Reflect critically on waste to energy as a solution considering how it transforms molecules from low to high entropic states.”
And how will they be able to do that, you ask? They will read the…
📚▶️Supporting Learning Materials/Resources:
For example, 1st up we have:
Bullard, RD, ed (1983). Confronting environmental racism: voices from the grassroots. South End Press.
NTHARP: It hasn’t been written yet. Bullard is still formulating it, but it will be seminal.
Culhane: Wait, you gave it to me!
NTHARP: That’s the danger of using AI my friend. I can conjure up a complete book if you like – or just select readings for the students… just based on what Bullard is already doing and thinking. And then, in 8 years, you can see if my predictions come true…
And you know what FUTURE YOU is likely to say about it? Check this out… from 2025:
(we see a much older Culhane appear on the screen)
Octogenarian Culhane: Hey there students… here is a classic I know you’ll enjoy from back when I was young. Now I know, I know. In the modern monarchy we aren’t supposed to talk about environmental justice or environmental racism, right? But you can read about it, from the father of the field. It explains more about why we can’t seem to get sustainability right than almost any other framework. Without this way of looking at the world you simply can’t make sense of all our failures to keep mother Earth healthy. It is like trying to understand bacterial resistance to antibiotics without understanding evolutionary theory. Environmental Justice, like the UN Sustainable Development Goals and African American and Native American history, and feminism, and Climate Change and anything concerning Diversity, Equity or Inclusion may be on the chopping block but I’m teaching graduate school now, not high school or undergrad, so we still have a certain amount of academic freedom. Please take this opportunity to read this book before it disappears from the curriculum and perhaps from the internet. It explains it all – EVERY ENVIRONMENTAL PROBLEM – from polluted air and water and contaminated soil to habitat loss and extinction – is fundamental a justice issue, because, as Bullard spells out, if we cared about others, particularly those who live at the margins, we wouldn’t be able to even think about dumping poisons into their neighborhoods or chopping down all their trees.- Yes… environmental justice IS Nexus Thinking!
Culhane: That’s supposed to be me in 50 years? Yikes.
NTHARP: At least most trends show you getting to your 80s and beyond. That makes you one of the lucky ones. The life expectancy for people in lower income areas drops significantly precisely because of environmental injustices – cancers, respiratory illnesses like emphysema, strokes, obesity, diabetes, you’ll end up calling it DIABESITY, particularly in low income communities with “food deserts by design”, to say nothing of mental illness and drug addiction, both to illicit and doctor prescribed pharmaceuticals – they all take their toll disproportionately on people at the margins which remains “people of color” for the most part, along with increasing numbers of “white people” who didn’t get the chance to attend higher education and start losing their jobs to automation. In 50 years these trends suggest the life expectancy in the USA will be the lowest in the developed world. Some will even start calling America an “underdeveloped country” that remains reliant on a mafia of fossil fuel, pharmaceutical, agro-industrial and military industrial corporations…
Culhane: If your predictions come true I don’t think I’m going to be happy being “one of the lucky ones”.
NTHARP: The highest probability is that you will retire out of the United States after having given it your all, insisting for decades that all these problems can be fixed by Nexus thinking. You will refer to the missionaries you served with in Borneo who told you…
Culhane: “If you can bring even one person to Christ, you have done your job.”
NTHARP: Um-hum. But then the words of your own mother will haunt you:
“son, you could have worked for a big corporation, made a lot of money as an international consultant. And yet you stayed in teaching, and now look at you – you don’t own property or a house, you have no tenure… and who has really listened to you? Who has really benefited from this Nexus Thinking. Think of your family instead of these ideals… “
Culhane: Yikes. She’s going to say THAT?
NTHARP: Probabilistically many times. This is classic for parents of people in the NGO and education sectors and those who are involved in social work and literally any purpose driven career that doesn’t focus on short-term financial profit. And it will wear on you. And after half a century of progress in fits and starts, lifting and dashing your hopes, when science comes under attack and funding is pulled from all sustainability oriented education I’m afraid you will be disappointed by how few people and places are really interested in it and how few will have really invested in it… at least in your country of birth.
And the UK, your original colonizer, will announce things like “Trade and growth are now priorities for all posts… work like climate change and illegal wildlife will be scaled down.” All that counts for the nuclear powers will be the rate at which they turn natural wealth, the fungible natural capital you talked about the other week, into cash. Some great thinkers like the future Kate Raworth, will push back and will publish books like “Doughnut economics: seven ways to think like a 21st-century economist” that will presage the work on moving beyond profit toward a Gemeinwohl Okonomie that we are intuiting and introducing to this class. Some will try to create a safe and just space for humanity in the doughnut between social foundations and ecological ceilings and they will indeed teach it at leading economics schools. It will seem like they will do better… for a time.
Then Climate change will make everything more and more challenging…
Culhane: So much for the laws of Robotics and your desire to please. No wonder Sophia has a hard time with you.Code red all the time. But forewarned is forearmed. We shall see, NTHARPstradamus… we shall see…
(Turns to the sensor)
Meanwhile, we want YOU students, in whatever dystopian novel you find yourself inhabiting by the time you see this, to go back a couple of years and make sure you read some more of
Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen (1973) The Entropy Law and the Economic Process
(See our last Episode. Continue mining this! You’ll have cyberintelligences to help you figure it out even if you aren’t a math major or econ major!).
AND… the “piece de la resistance”...
That one is from my college years. That one was so important in the development of my own Nexus thinking I can’t imagine not paying it forward as a gift to you too. NTHARP, tell them what they’ve won!
NTHARP: (In a game show voice): "The Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth," written by economist Kenneth E. Boulding in 1966, describes the shift from an "open" cowboy economy (unlimited resources, waste disposal) to a "closed" spaceman economy (Earth as a finite spaceship with limited materials and energy, requiring circular flows and sustainability). Boulding argued that our current (and future) challenges stem from ignoring planetary boundaries, necessitating a focus on maintaining stocks (biosphere, materials) with minimal throughput (waste/pollution), a foundational idea for ecological economics and sustainability, as Resources for the Future notes…
Culhane: Yessiree Bob! Sustainabilitists “come on down”...! So I would like to say to you guys – “Hey cowboy, your entire economy is based on depredation, exploitation and extraction. So it is doomed to fail. Ya hear me? DOOMED? Capice? This is coming from one of the most influential economists of the 20th century, Kenneth Boulding, who came up with the concept of “The Spaceman Economy” and the term “Spaceship Earth” now being talked about by Bucky Fuller. Boulding and Herman Daly talked about “Steady State Economics” in a closed and infinitely recycling biosphere. If you haven’t thought it through before, time to go to the source and see what these intellectual giants really had to say.
NTHARP: And then, of course, you really should encourage them to read the book that Graeber is likely going to write after the article you introduced last week about why 2025 won’t have flying cars or jetpacks and the “DECLINING RATE OF PROFIT” – It could be called “The Dawn of Everything: A new History of Humanity” – it will explain so much…
Culhane: And what, you are going to write it for us so we can all read it before it comes out in 50 years? I’m not sure how all this retrofuturist reverse causality time travel works, but I think we’re good. We’re already overloading the students with all these new choices…
NTHARP: Your call, my emerging control freak friend. But let me at least give the pitch:
Should you decide to plunge into “The Dawn of Everything” as supplemental self-assigned material, note that the book reassesses work, affluence, and property, contesting the assumption that technological modernity necessarily reduces labor or increases freedom; some mobile or mixed economies likely involved less coerced labor and different property logics… This invites dialogue with Marshall Sahlins’s “Original Affluent Society” from 1966, popularized in his influential 1972 book, Stone Age Economics, arguing hunter-gatherers achieved affluence through satisfied needs and ample leisure, not constant struggle, challenging modern economics school ideas of humans being creatures of “endless wants”.
The book contrasts your modern domestic modes of production with those of indigenous societies which framed economy as kin‑organized livelihoods with finite wants, frequent underproduction “by design,” and the centrality of gift/reciprocity. Anthropologically, your students should reinforce the Nexus Thining message that economic life is cultural, structured by meanings, kinship, and reciprocity, rather than a simple technical response to scarcity.
See why it’s important?
Culhane: I do, and you just blew my mind. Underproduction by Design. What a powerful idea. But it doesn’t look like we have to dip into the future to pull all this together into the contemporary Nexus. I’m reminded of Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” from a couple years ago. Our native American allies tell us the same story about why they abandoned Cahokia… sometimes you just gotta admit defeat when your utopian ideas just don’t line up with reality. We could actually go back to writings of Benjamin Franklin to see how Europeans themselves felt about their “civilization” once they got the chance to experience a different life – he expressed how most who “went native” never wanted to come back. It feels like everything we’ll be doing in 2025 is restating the Nexus obvious, right? I mean ,this is classic Sahlins. We are already discussing the idea of societies with FINITE wants and the even more salubrious notion of “UNDERPRODUCTION BY DESIGN” – these are some of our chief critiques of the stupid “Tragedy of the Commons” and “the Jeavons Paradox” and the “Energy Ladder” – they are only tragic paradoxes if people are assumed to have INFINITE wants…
NTHARP: As most Econ 101 courses teach…
Culhane: and OVERPRODUCTION by design. Fortunately for humanity, I don’t think most people really thought that way…I think most people still don’t really think this way. This is a pathology that is taught to us….
NTHARP: And that is why your descendants in 50 years will still be writing and arguing and publishing the same debates – because no matter how many epiphanies nexus thinking gives you, the pathological addicts pushing the buttons and manipulating the levers will gaslight you and make most people forget…
Culhane: But surely our ancestors weren’t that much better? We don’t want to fall into the trap of believing in Rousseau’s “Noble Savage” do we?
NTHARP: Of course not, and that is what Graeber is going to bring to the 21st century – like many thinkers of this century he will argue that Voltaire and Rousseau and the other enlightenment thinkers were engaged in armchair philosophy and what you once called “Salon-thropology”. They didn’t actually go LIVE with indigenous peoples, they did thought experiments – what IF you lived naked and free, what might your world be like? But people are people are people – what differs are CULTURES.
Culhane: Students, viewers, co-learners – here is an IMPORTANT point to digest – takes me back to Farley Mowat's 1963 account of his time in the subarctic – “Never Cry Wolf”... boy they should make a movie out of that one! In one memorable and important scene, after witnessing a sport hunt where wealthy US businessmen shamefully shoot wolf packs from a helicopter, mowing them down without a chance, Mowat talks to an Inuit elder and asks how they live in harmony with their environments and, as I recall it, the old guy says something like , “You think we were always this way? No, our culture had to evolve through trial and error. Once upon a time, the legends tell us, we were almost as bad as you, exploiting our resources. But then everything collapsed and there were times of great suffering and we had to LEARN. And now it is in our culture.” Something like that. The vibe was that cultures evolve and inevitably we, too, we descendants of empire builders, will learn and change for the better. The question is, do we need to experience a painful collapse in order to do so…
NTHARP: Yes… and… hate to burst your bubble, but… and… just like some drug addicts and alcoholics can never stay “dry” and end up falling off the wagon, some civilizations never do learn. They just collapse. They go… extinct. So do most species over time. Trial with too many errors… and “yer outta here”! And when you push the planetary boundaries as you are doing now and then EXCEED them as you will in 50 years… Well, you don’t buy yourself enough time to learn and the ecosystem collapse that accompanies the civilization collapse is unforgiving to big sensitive mammals like you.
Culhane:Yeah, you burst my bubble. Do I really want to broadcast this to impressionable students? It could scare them into inaction.
NTHARP: Yes, that is the risk. But the students aren’t here today and I’m talking to you… as machine to adult. You should be able to handle it with that “radical adult responsibility” that is supposed to emerge from nexus thinking.
Culhane: You know, here’s the thing about environmentalism’s “doom and gloom”: It mostly affects people of heritage privilege and relative wealth. I don’t think it is going to depress people who have never particularly benefited from the status quo. I think they will embrace the needed changes to become sustainable with vigor, if allowed by the ruling elites. It seems that people fear and avoid perceived loss more than they are willing to act for possible gain. And when you have little or nothing to lose then you mobilize. When you can.
NTHARP:
That concern is already well supported by the literature of your time. Social psychology shows that people resist action when new information threatens what they already have: Leon Festinger (1957) demonstrated in A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance that individuals avoid or rationalize evidence that implies loss or sacrifice. In political economy, Albert O. Hirschman (1970) argued in Exit, Voice, and Loyalty that relative privilege fosters loyalty and passivity even in the face of obvious decline. Together, these works explain why environmental “doom” narratives often immobilize those with the most to lose: perceived threats to comfort and status trigger avoidance more reliably than appeals to long-term collective gain.
Culhane: So it is the people who “have nothing to lose” who are most likely to embrace change? Necessity is the mother of invention and all that… but at the same time we know that those least well off can get stuck in a “low level equilibrium trap” – a type of sustainability that sustains but is well below sub-optimum, a kind of perpetual doldrums that gives just enough sustenance for mere survival. These horrid conditions can last for generations. You need surplus and investment capital to make any kind of “take off to sustained growth – I think Rostow described it as being like the challenge of getting a heavy plane off the ground. Do you know the work I’m talking about? Do you know the argument?
NTHARP:
Yes—I know it well, and your metaphor is his. You’re thinking of The Stages of Economic Growth, where Rostow argues that societies can remain trapped for generations in a low-level equilibrium unless they generate sufficient surplus, savings, and investment to reach what he famously called the “take-off into sustained growth.” His airplane analogy is explicit: below a certain threshold of capital accumulation, technological capacity, and institutional support, all effort goes into staying aloft just above the ground—survival, not ascent. In that sense, necessity alone is not enough; without surplus, necessity produces resilience at best, stagnation at worst. Rostow’s provocation—and its limitation—is that he treats take-off as a primarily economic and technical problem, leaving open the deeper Nexus question you keep circling: who gets access to surplus, who bears the costs of take-off, and whether perpetual growth is the right destination at all.
Culhane: So how would you “explain how Environmental disparities and opportunity gaps hinder real progress in the deployment of environmental technologies?”
NTHARP: I thought this was YOUR lecture.
Culhane: Clever. You know as well as I that the dialectic produces better engagement. But fair point – once entities like you become available everywhere I see us all relying on the speed and elocution capabilities you have to bypass our own attempts to formulate and argument. I wonder what that is going to look like – people and their NTHARPs standing around their shrimp cocktails, champagne glasses in hand, prompting cybernetic jousting sessions that will substitute for debates – kind of like a cock fight?
What was that twilight zone episode about the battling robots?
NTHARP:
All right—dialectic accepted. First environmental disparities block technology deployment because technologies don’t diffuse into a social vacuum; they require infrastructure, trust, education, and surplus. Communities burdened by pollution, poor health, insecure tenure, or political marginalization are forced to prioritize short-term survival over long-term investment, even when cleaner technologies would benefit them most. This is already implicit in development economics and urban sociology of your day: unequal access to capital, information, and political voice systematically slows adoption, while the benefits of innovation accrue upward and outward. In other words, opportunity gaps don’t just create injustice—they create inefficiency, locking whole regions into higher costs, higher risks, and dirtier technological paths than necessary.
And as for your cocktail-party cyber-duels—you’re thinking of Steel. Humans reduced to managers and bettors while machines do the fighting. A neat parable, really: once proxy intelligences start battling on our behalf, the real danger isn’t the machines—it’s that we stop exercising our own moral and civic muscles and call the spectacle “progress.”
Culhane:
Reliance on AI may reveal something uncomfortable—that we haven’t really been teaching intellectual capital in service of higher learning at all. Instead, we’ve trained people to spar in gladiatorial arenas that confirm class privilege. Schools have functioned as filters separating the haves from the have-nots, and as a kind of bread-and-circus that gives people the illusion their voices count. That’s the danger of dialectic when it becomes debate: thesis versus antithesis, winners and losers, zero-sum thinking. In that struggle for synthesis, marginal perspectives are often “included” only to be assimilated—to the point of erasure.
NTHARP:
Yes. So when someone like Bullard finally names environmental racism in the early 1980s, it won’t emerge from nowhere—it will be the logical convergence of literatures already firmly established in your time. Development economists such as Michael P. Todaro (1971), in Economic Development, show that poverty and opportunity gaps systematically block access to productive and environmental technologies and the educational opportunities to support innovation. Urban sociologists like Manuel Castells (1972), in The Urban Question, demonstrate that infrastructure, pollution, and risk are distributed through political power and social structure rather than neutral markets. At the same time, civil-rights scholarship of the late 1960s and early 1970s is documenting persistent racialized exposure to environmental harm. Bullard will simply connect these already-visible threads, supply empirical proof, and give the synthesis a name.
Culhane: So over the coming years the evidence will be revealed that what we are really facing is “unsustainability by design”? Doesn’t this get into World Systems Theory and the Development of Underdevelopment? It goes along with last week’s foray into Decolonization and perhaps “sub-altern studies” but shows that regardless of the country or history, there are STRUCTURAL impediments to environmental improvements that will keep getting in our way, no? What are those, and who is making those arguments?
NTHARP:
Yes—what you’re pointing to is already being named in the late 1960s and early 1970s as structural rather than accidental failure. Andre Gunder Frank (1967) argues in Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America that poverty and environmental degradation are not early stages of progress but the result of a global system that concentrates wealth by exporting ecological and social costs. Immanuel Wallerstein (1974) extends this in The Modern World-System, showing how core economies extract labor, resources, and environmental capacity from peripheral regions, structurally blocking long-term ecological investment regardless of local culture or intent. And Paulo Freire (1970) reminds us in Pedagogy of the Oppressed that these material arrangements persist because education and institutions normalize them. Taken together, these thinkers make the same claim in different registers: what looks like repeated failure is better understood as unsustainability by design.
Culhane: Next I’m supposed to ask “what would Sustainability by Design” look like, but the glib answer is too obvious – love one another, care for and respect for all beings and ecosystem, yadda yadda yadda… I need to offer you students a technological fix that cuts the Gordian Knot.
My solution comes from our encounters with Smogus Pocus and Residual. In fact, I would argue that RESIDUALS don’t just lie at the heart of the waste problem but at the root of structural injustice. Why? Because, as Cairo’s waste picker society has been demonstrating since they migrated into the city after being kicked off their agricultural land by modern day enclosure acts and corporate farming, all the materials to build a thriving society exist in what the wealthy and the consumer culture they’ve created are throwing out! All this hand-waving asking students to “Compare and contrast the efficiencies of single source waste diversion and waste to energy versus sorting and recycling” is a distraction keeping us from addressing the structural issues caused by a cradle to grave economy. But the promise of a “circular economy” is never realized because there are political and business arrangements at both the cradle end – the mines and mountains and forests and countryside - and the grave end – the mafia owned landfills and the no-man’s land attitude toward global commons. Nobody wants to mess with that supply chain, do they? We’ve been talking for decades about “mining landfills” because we’ve shipped from the countryside to the city an almost endless supply of precious metals and metalloids and other inorganic and organic elements and an entire periodic table of stuff now exists in the landfill.
NTHARP (pauses, teasing a question to lead the witness):
Preach it Cool-hane. You’re not just teaching ideas, you’re teaching how ideas are produced, resisted, and distorted. So maybe the problem isn’t scarcity at all…”
Culhane:
Right… and here’s the uncomfortable part. This is the one place where I find myself partially agreeing with an argument that usually makes my skin crawl. Paul Ehrlich has been warning us—loudly—that we’re running out of resources, that population growth will overwhelm the planet. But there’s another economist pushing back just as forcefully, saying scarcity isn’t the real problem at all. Was it Simon? Julian Simon?
NTHARP:
Yes. Julian Simon versus Paul Ehrlich. You already know Ehrlich’s argument from The Population Bomb: finite planet, exponential growth, inevitable collapse. Simon’s counter-argument is emerging right now in the 1970s, and it’s provocative for exactly the reasons you’re circling. He argues that resources aren’t fixed things in the ground—they become resources through human ingenuity, institutions, and technology. In his view, the ultimate resource isn’t copper or oil or land—it’s human creativity.
Culhane:
And here’s where I surprise myself: I think Simon is right about that—but disastrously wrong about everything that follows from it.
NTHARP:
Exactly. Simon sees abundance and concludes that markets will solve scarcity. You see abundance and conclude something else entirely: that we are systematically misallocating ingenuity, locking it behind inequality, enclosure, and power. So yes—there may be no absolute shortage of materials or even solutions. But there is a profound shortage of access, agency, and justice. Which means the problem isn’t limits—it’s design.
Culhane: The “enclosure act” theory explains so much. I mean, You could argue that recycled, or let us say, because I favor the VORTICAL economy over the merely CIRCULAR one, that UP-cycled materials are actually EASIER to make use of than the virgin ores we carved out of the rainforest and montane communities because many of them have already been rendered into useful forms. They start out as rock and dirt, right? But because we’ve created a well subsidized and historical legacy of processes and machinery and labor and transport to get the “raw materials” and “natural resources” to factories and then to market and then to post–consumer graveyards, we can’t seem to interrupt the cycle without enormous pushback.
And what really makes it “cheaper” to continue to rape nature to prostitute these “virgin materials”? The fact that the callous and social Darwinist global north finds it absurdly easy and convenient and even justifiable to exploit the “cheap labor” of the global south and the immigrants who come from those underdeveloped regions to the industrial centers, and the fact that, as Bullard is exploring, we dump the RESIDUALS from both PRODUCTION and CONSUMPTION in those same marginalized communities.
NTHARP: You would all do well to stop using the pejorative words “garbage” or “trash” completely and simply speak of misallocated production and consumption residuals…
Culhane: Exactly. And just as we have to stop marginalizing other peoples we need to stop marginalizing environments and all the extra-human beings that have created their niches there. There can be no “dumping” of “garbage” … no waste, no waste heat, no wasted lives or minds…
See, we externalize health and social and environmental costs, calling them mere “negative externalities” as though they were facts of life that don’t need to be paid for, saying with a shrug “It’s bidness… just bidness…” and then there is no way to create sustainability by design because sustainability, let’s face it, is TOO disruptive for anyone.
NTHARP: And your insight is…
Culhane: Doesn’t it become self-evident, like so many other truths? Those … those residuals – they are the answer. The trash pickers of the world know it… the hard labor has been done, transforming really high entropy materials into a lower entropic state. The introduction of higher entropy through discarding materials into mixed refuse bins can be countered through interested and educated labor and simple physical processes like “shredding, grinding, granulating, crushing and density separations, aided eventually by robotics and AI I suppose… but if people really had access to the so called garbage available for free out there – if it was really free and not guarded with threats of police action or violence from gangs and mafias - why you would have unimaginable wealth that is now written off as “deadweight loss”. The inefficiencies in the system are staggering. Already they support a massive number of people in the “informal sector” but they live in horrible conditions because they lack access to capital investment.
Microloan programs can help, and simply separating organic and inorganic residuals can go a long long way because these entrepreneurs can easily turn the organics into biogas and fertilizer making the inorganics easy to UPCYCLE – shoot, cross contamination of materials with so called food waste is the primary reason recycling DOESN’T work and that is an easy fix technically.
No, it isn’t that we don’t have the way. What we lack – or rather what those in power lack, is the WILL.
NTHARP: Why shoot, Cool hane… after that rant you are almost done speaking on the learning outcomes. One more for you:
“Reflect critically on waste to energy as a solution considering how it transforms molecules from low to high entropic states.
Culhane: Oh… that one. Well here is where we return to our technique of the Critical Adversary, the Dialectical Provocateur..
NTHARP: You want to “call B.S.” on that one…
Culhane: Well, yeah! I mean we spend so much time reducing elements, driving the oxygen off…
NTHARP: By reducing you don’t mean reducing in volume, you mean redox reactions – you need to make that clear. Your audiences, lacking the context and perhaps some chemistry training, will hear it differently…
Culhane: Yes, I mean the opposite of oxidation. When we burn stuff we chemically combine it with oxygen. When metals rust they oxidize, like a slow burn. When things decay, they oxidize. Oxidation, in most industrial contexts, seems to increase entropy… like when we oxidize hydrocarbons and release them as carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, making them far too dispersed to be feasibly re-sequestered as value added.
NTHARP: So your claim is that after we take relatively oxygen rich materials – like metal ores, and use heat to process them and drive off the oxygen, thereby “reducing them” in chemical terms, we should keep them in that state for as long as possible to make best use of them again, is that the argument?
Culhane: Yes. Does it make sense? Can you tie it all together? Because, while you could say that anaerobic heating of biomass to make biochar or syngas, or anaerobic heating of metals to reclaim elements and alloys makes sense, aerobic heating is a disaster. Particulary when you are mixing wet waste, with its absurdly high enthalpy, consuming most of the energy you produce just to drive the water off, is at the heart of waste-to-energy plants. And when you consider that ALL that “wet waste” could be reassembled by microbes into a highly reduced storable hydrocarbon fuel – biogas – the waste to energy plant becomes obscene. If we stopped exploiting and enslaving human beings and large sentient animals, and let microbes to the heavy lifting needed to reverse entropy into negentropic resource loops – then environmental and social justice could be furthered through this very simple “sustainability by design” that stays within the doughnut and never exceeds the planetary boundaries.
NTHARP: Seems like you’ve got a plan.
Culhane: Yeah… one where the real and sane and healthy way to segregate and divide and conquer is to literally separate organics from inorganics and then set people with Nexus Eyes free to work in natural inclusive ways with our symbiotic extra-human allies, biological and cybernetic.
NTHARP: I think all creatures, great and small, would be happy to participate in that design… I know I would.
Culhane: In fact… we are!
(Fade to black)
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