The mechanistic paradigm is based on two assumptions: terra nullius, or dead earth; two, that life is made up of separable, immutable parts and can be understood through a fragmented and reductionist approach to each part, without recognising their mutual relationship and interaction. Each part can also be manipulated mechanically, without an adverse effect on the organism or the system, and without ecological consequence. Such a paradigm is based on separation, division, fragmentation, atomisation and the absolutism of fixed, unchanging properties.
The scientist and scholar Predrag B. Slijepc̆ević repeatedly reminds us in Biocivilisations: A New Look at the Science of Life that ‘life is neither mechanism nor thing. Instead, life is permanent change’, that ‘no organism is a machine’. He has called the mechanical philosophy ‘mechanophilia, a love for the machine’.
While the mechanistic view is based on mastery and conquest over nature, the quantum paradigm, the ecological paradigm and the traditional knowledge systems of Indigenous peoples and others share an underlying understanding of an interconnected universe. Non-separability, inter-being, interconnectedness through diversity are the reality of our being and of nature.
The ecological paradigm which guides my scientific work is informed by the ancient science of agroecology, people’s knowledge, as well as by my formal training in the non-mechanistic paradigm of quantum theory. Quantum theory shows us a world beyond the mechanistic assumptions of a natural world consisting of dead objects, immutable unchanging particles separated from each other with fully determined and determinable coordinates such as mass, position, velocity and action, limited by contact and application of a force. The quantum world is not constituted of fixed particles, but of potential. A quantum can be a wave or a particle. It is indeterminate, and therefore, uncertain. It is non-separable, non-local; consequently, action at a distance becomes possible, and contrary to the mechanistic ideal of nature-human separation, the observer ‘creates’ the observed. An interactive, interrelated world of participation becomes possible.
A mechanistic philosophy evolved hand in hand with empire-building. Itwas central to the project of establishing the ‘empire of man over inferior creatures of God’, as Robert Boyle, widely considered one of the founders of modern chemistry, argued, and over ‘lesser creatures’, including women, all non-western cultures and all non-human beings.
What is imposed as ‘science’, moulded by the mechanical mind, was based on the subjugation of nature, women, diverse cultures and ordinary human beings. The American philosopher Sandra Harding has called it a ‘Western, bourgeois, masculine’ project, and according to physicist Evelyn Fox Keller,
Science has been produced by a particular subset of the human race—that is, almost entirely by white, middle-class men.… For the founding fathers of modern science, the reliance on the language of gender was explicit: They sought a philosophy that deserved to be called ‘masculine’, that could be distinguished from its ineffective predecessors by its ‘virile’ powers, its capacity to bind nature to man’s service and make her his slave.1
The mechanical mind is a construct of capitalist patriarchy and an instrument of the colonising empire. It is an efficient tool for exploitation and extraction, for manipulation and control, but is clumsy and ignorant for maintaining, rejuvenating, nourishing and growing life.
This epistemic violence is now being combined with the violence of corporate interests to viciously attack all scientific traditions, including those that have evolved from within western science and have, through autopoietic epistemic evolution, transcended the mechanistic worldview.
Diversity, balance, resilience and symbiosis are missing in the mechanistic framework. So, the most important aspects of living systems and living processes, and their interconnectedness, find no place in the mechanistic science of industrial agriculture and industrial medicine. This pathology of epistemology, as stated by the anthropologist Gregory Bateson, eroded the ontology of a living, intelligent earth and living, autopoietic organisms.
Living systems maintain balance and harmony and have the intelligence to return to a stable state of balance after a disturbance that creates imbalance. A system is autopoietic when its function is geared towards self-renewal; an autopoietic system refers to itself. Living systems are organised and regulated from within—internally, not externally.
In contrast, an allopoietic system, such as a machine, is assembled from outside, with external inputs. A machine refers to a function given from the outside, such as the production of a specific output. Life is self-organised, unlike a machine which is assembled externally.
The capacity to self-organise is the distinctive feature of living systems. They are autonomous. This does not mean that they are isolated and non-interactive; rather, such organisms organise and regulate themselves by exchanging matter, energy and information with their surroundings. They interact with their environment but retain their autonomy, distinctiveness and uniqueness. The environment merely triggers the structural changes; it does not specify or direct them. The living system specifies its own structural changes and those patterns in the environment that will trigger them. A self-organising system knows what it needs to import and export in order to maintain itself.
Living systems are complex; the complexity in their structure allows for the emergence of new properties. One of the distinguishing properties of living systems is their ability to undergo continual structural change while preserving their form and pattern of organisation.
Living systems are also diverse; their diversity and unique attributes are maintained through spontaneous self-organisation. The components of a living system are continually renewed and recycled via structural interaction with the environment, yet the system maintains its organisation, as well as its distinctive form. Self-healing and repair are the other characteristics of living systems that derive from complexity and self-organisation.
Self-organising systems can heal themselves and adapt to changing environmental conditions; mechanical systems do not heal or adapt—they break down. When an organism or a system is mechanically manipulated to improve a one-dimensional function, either the organism’s immunity decreases or becomes vulnerable to disease, or it becomes dominant in an ecosystem.
Self-regulating systems have the metabolic potential to return to a homeostatic state of balance. This is why living systems—the earth as a living being and the human body—can be healed. This requires negative feedback loops, which send feedback to the system to neutralise the harm and restore balance, that retain the conditions of living systems within the boundaries that support life. Destroying the negative feedback loop leads to tipping points and collapse. A negative feedback loop is a system-generated message that prevents it from continuing on a destructive path.
Thus, there are two paradigms for thinking of ourselves in the world and of our relationship with the earth. We can either think of ourselves as being separate from nature, or as being a part of it; and we can either think of nature as alive, self-organised, self-regulated, or as dead matter, raw material for industrial production. These two paradigms shape the two systems of agriculture—the ecological and the industrial—and they also shape the discourse around climate, food and health.
The first paradigm is ecological, based on interrelationships within nature and within our bodies, and between nature and humans. This ecological paradigm is shared by the ancient science of agroecology as well as by newer sciences like quantum theory and new findings in biological sciences about living systems—soil, plants, food, nutrition and health. This paradigm recognises intelligence in all life at all levels, from microbes and cells to our bodies and the planet earth. It sees ecological degradation and disease as impairment in the capacity for self-organisation and self-regulation, for healing and renewal. In the ecological paradigm, agriculture, food production and health are internal input systems with the capacity and potential to produce what they need to heal and repair. The earth is a living system. Food is a living system. Our bodies are living systems.
Interconnectedness and non-separability, self-organisation and self-regulation, potential and process, and complex systems causality are the basis of transformation and change in living systems. The ecological paradigm is based on potential and process, not on immutable, unchanging entities.
The second paradigm is mechanistic and reductionist, based on seeing nature and our bodies as constituted of separate and disconnected parts and dead or inert matter. Nature, food, even our bodies are viewed as ‘machines’, managed externally with external inputs, external control and external regulation. Biodiversity and living beings are seen as ‘objects’ to be controlled and manipulated for extraction. Blindness to interconnectedness and symbiotic relationships leads to being blind to living processes and to ‘action at a distance’.
In the reductionist paradigm, transformation and change require external force, and causality is Newtonian—linear, mechanical and reducible to mass and force. Thus, in the mechanistic paradigm, industrial agriculture is conceived as an external input system, based on buying expensive patented seeds and toxic agrichemicals; health is viewed as an external input system based on the purchase of expensive patented pharmaceuticals, additives and ‘fortification’; and food is seen as ‘mass’, which can be manufactured, manipulated, substituted and engineered.
Goethe emphasises, ‘Life as a whole expresses itself as a force that is not to be contained within any one part.… The things we call the parts in every living being are so inseparable from the whole that they may be understood only in and with the whole.’
In the first phase of the industrialisation of our food system, the complex soil web was substituted by nitrogen fertilisers made from fossil fuels. The slogan coined was ‘bread from air’. Synthetic fertilisers destroyed the living soil, exhausted and polluted the waters, emitted a GHG three times more damaging to climate systems than carbon dioxide, replaced biodiversity with monocultures and destroyed the nutrition in food. The industrialising of agriculture and its output reduced the system to measuring the yields of monocultured commodities, discounting the quality of food, biodiverse outputs, the cost of external inputs and the ecological health of the system.
Mechanistic nutrition reduces food to its nutrient and biochemical constituent parts, which Gyorgy Scrinis, Associate Professor of Food Politics and Policy at the University of Melbourne, and Marion Nestle, molecular biologist and nutritionist, have referred to as ‘nutritionism’, a mere listing of constituents, ignoring the quality, the source and the process through which food is produced. This is nutritional reductionism. Scrinis says,
I refer to this nutritionally reductive approach to food as the ideology or paradigm of nutritionism. This focus on nutrients has come to dominate, to undermine, and to replace other ways of engaging with food and of contextualising the relationship between food and the body.2
In the second phase of industrialisation, seeds were genetically engineered in order to patent them. While claiming patents, genetically modified organisms (GMOs) were defined as ‘novel’, as not having existed before; and while trying to escape responsibility for biosafety, they were unscientifically defined as ‘substantially equivalent’ to non-GMO seeds and food, leading to ‘don’t look, don’t see, don’t find the impacts and declare safe’.
In the current phase, fake food is being promoted as equivalent to real food, as a false solution to the climate crisis. When food is seen through the lens of nutritional reductionism or genetic reductionism, causation is artificially reduced to one cause and one effect, with both cause and effect being decontextualised.
In living systems, causality is systems causality, process causality and contextual causality. Properties and behaviours are potentials, and their expression depends on the context, on the relationship, on living processes, on complexity. As the scientist and author Giulia Enders writes in Gut,
The important thing is not to reduce the human body to a two-dimensional, cause-and-effect machine. The brain, the rest of the body, bacteria and the elements in our food all interact with each other in four dimensions. Striving to understand all these axes is surely the best way to improve our knowledge.3
Linear causality, on the one hand, disconnects climate, agriculture, food and health; on the other hand, it allows claims to be made linking specific tools to complex, multicausal phenomena. It shifts our gaze from complex systems to tools and technology without assessing how the tools impact the system. In the Green Revolution narrative, Norman Borlaug’s ‘miracle’ dwarf wheat varieties, bred for chemicals, were supposed to have increased food production in India. But, as Navdanya’s subsequent studies have shown, food is more than wheat and rice.4 We need vegetables, pulses, oilseeds and millets for a balanced diet. An increase in rice and wheat monocultures displaced India’s rich biodiversity and led to a decline in the production of diverse foods. Acreage given over to rice and wheat monocultures made for greatly increased irrigation. Land and water contributed to a far higher production of rice and wheat, falsely associated with new seeds and chemicals, and then falsely extrapolated to increased food, when, in fact, there was a marked decrease in the diversity of foods produced and consumed. Navdanya’s conservation of biodiversity and research on nutrition5 also shows that calling industrial varieties ‘high yielding’ is inaccurate, because in terms of nutrition, they are low yielding compared to indigenous varieties. Linear causality applied to complex systems allows corporations producing harmful chemicals and GMOs to falsely claim increased yields when there is actually a ‘failure to yield’, and to simultaneously deny the harmful impact of their products.
The impact of bad agricultural practices on destabilising the climate and creating disease, and the impact of biodiverse agriculture on contributing to regenerating the earth and our health, cannot be gauged from a mechanistic, reductionist perspective based on only one element—carbon—linked to destabilising earth systems and climate systems, and on one part of our diet, linked to one disease. Complex system interactions call for systems causality and contextual causality, not mechanical causality. In mechanical causality, one element, one particle, one gene, one molecule, one ingredient can cause one specific impact. In systems causality and contextual causality, a system as a whole leads to potentials and tendencies for multiple changes in another complex system.
When we grow food in accordance with ecological laws, we regenerate the earth, her soil and biodiversity, her climate system. When we produce and distribute food on the basis of fossil fuels and fossil chemicals, we destroy the complex, interconnected systems of soil, water, biodiversity and climate. When we eat food grown with care, in alignment with nature’s laws, free of chemicals and ultra-processing, that food, a complex system, interacts with six trillion cells in our body, another complex system.
The climate crisis is a result of reducing the planet to a machine run by fossil fuels, and our lives and food systems run by fossil chemicals, petrochemicals and fossil fertilisers. It is a result of blindness to the self-organised nature of living systems, including the earth as a living organism. The mechanistic industrial paradigm does not have the epistemic or intellectual and scientific potential to understand the roots of the climate havoc or the disease epidemic it has created, nor does it offer lasting solutions to either.
A mechanical perspective reduces the earth to a single substance—carbon. Climate systems, which are complex, are also being reduced to one element—dead carbon. Living carbon, which is the basis of life and is ecologically and ontologically very different from fossil carbon, is being falsely equated with, and reduced to, dead carbon. Nitrous oxide from synthetic fertilisers, three hundred times more climate-damaging than CO2, does not enter the discussion. Water is left out, even though most climate disasters and deaths are related to extreme water events—floods and drought. The ontology of the earth is reduced to carbon; dead fossil carbon, which brings death and destruction, is falsely equated with living carbon, which is life. Similarly, the complexity and multi-dimensionality of climate systems and processes are being reduced to only one parameter: rising temperatures and the warming of the earth—global warming.
The two basic cycles of life are the nutrient cycle and the water cycle, and both are central to the food system and to the earth’s metabolism. The nutrient cycle, in turn, is the food cycle; food and climate are deeply connected through plants and photosynthesis. The ecological crisis is a consequence of the disruption of these cycles.
Charles Eisenstein, who writes on environmentalism, economics and philosophy, says,
Earth is best understood as a living being with a complex physiology, whose health depends on the health of her constituent organs. Her organs are the forests, the wetlands, the grasslands, the estuaries, the reefs, the apex predators, the keystone species, the soil, the insects, and indeed every intact ecosystem and every species on earth. If we continue to degrade them, drain them, cut them, poison them, pave them, and kill them, earth will die a death of a million cuts. She will die of organ failure—regardless of the levels of greenhouse gases.… The core of the crisis is not warming, it is ecocide—the killing of ecosystems, the killing of life.6
It is when we see the earth as a living system that we begin to see climate change as a metabolic disorder of the earth, as a symptom of our dysfunctional relationship with her. This is what Amitav Ghosh has called ‘The Great Derangement’: ‘Who can forget those moments when something that seems inanimate turns out to be vitally, even dangerously alive?’7
R. Buckminster Fuller, visionary architect, has said, ‘Universe is nothing but incredible technology.’ The ‘intellectual integrity of an eternally regenerative universe’ is how he has described its complexity. He insisted that the key principle was to recognise nature as technology:
In its complexities of design integrity, the Universe is technology. The technology evolved by man is thus far amateurish compared to the elegance of nonhumanly contrived regeneration. Man does not spontaneously recognize technology other than his own, so he speaks of the rest as something he ignorantly calls Nature. The Natural is the real Technological.8
Photons absorbed from the sun’s energy by green plants split water molecules and reduce carbon dioxide, resulting in the formation of carbohydrates and oxygen. This is the foundational ecological cycle that sustains life on earth. It supports many secondary and tertiary cycles and epicycles. This complex coupling constitutes the metabolism of living systems. The geneticist Mae-Wan Ho elaborates,
Metabolism refers to the totality of chemical reactions that make and break molecules, whereby the manifold energy transformations of living systems are accomplished. The secret of living metabolism—which has as yet no equal in the best physicochemical systems that scientists can now design—is that the energy-yielding reactions are always coupled to energy requiring reactions. The coupling can be so perfect that the efficiency of energy transfer is close to 100%.…
Coupled cycles are the ultimate wisdom of nature. They go on at all levels, from the ecological down to the molecular through a wide range of characteristic timescales from millennia to split seconds. Thus, the transformation of light energy into chemical energy by green plants yields food for other organisms whose growth and subsequent decay provide nutrients in the soil on which green plants depend. The energy in foodstuffs is transformed into the mechanical, osmotic, electrical and biosynthetic work both within plants themselves and in other organisms in all the trophic levels dependent on green plants. Each kind of energy transformation in organisms is carried out by its own particular troupe of busy molecular machines working in ceaseless cycles. And upon all of these turn the innumerable life cycles of multitudinous species that make up the geological cycles of the earth.9
The same processes that cooled the planet and allowed life to emerge in its diversity are the processes that sustain, maintain and regenerate life. Conserving and regenerating the earth’s biodiversity is the most significant climate action and health action that we can undertake.
Over four billion years, the earth evolved microbes and plants which, through the process of photosynthesis, cooled the earth by capturing the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere with the help of sunlight and energy from the sun. This is nature’s sophisticated ‘carbon capture’ technology which allowed carbon recycling, transforming CO2 to O2. Oxygen accumulated in the atmosphere and the earth was transformed from the original heat-trapping, CO2-rich atmosphere to the reduced CO2 atmosphere through the oxidising process of plants and living organisms. This allowed temperatures to be regulated at levels that support human and other biological life on earth.
Four billion years ago, the earth was a hot, lifeless planet. Through evolution, the earth and her biodiversity reduced the carbon rich atmosphere of the planet from 4,000 ppm to 250 ppm; and her temperature from 290°C, without life, to 13°C, with biodiversity. Terra madre created the conditions for the evolution of life’s diversity; 200,000 years ago, she created the conditions for our species to evolve. We are among the youngest siblings in the earth family. In an age of collapse, climate catastrophes and extinction, we need to turn to the earth and to our evolutionary elders—plants—to learn, once again, how to live sustainably on earth and sow the seeds of hope, the seeds of the future.
Slijepc̆ević reminds us that we have only been around for 0.01 percent of the time. For 99.9 percent of the time, the planet has evolved without us. To learn how to deal with climate change, we need to attend to the earth and her biodiversity, which have created the conditions for our species to evolve, sustain ourselves and provide for the basic needs of food, clothing and shelter in partnership with the biosphere and other species. We are inter-beings. We are made of microbes. We are made of the plants that give us food.
Food and energy are the currencies of life, and all three begin with the green leaf of the plant. Sir Albert Howard writes in An Agricultural Testament,
The energy for the machinery of growth is derived from the sun; the chlorophyll in the green leaf is the mechanism by which this energy is intercepted; the plant is thereby enabled to manufacture food—to synthesize carbohydrates and proteins from the water and other substances taken up by the roots and the carbon dioxide of the atmosphere. The efficiency of the green leaf is therefore of supreme importance; on it depends the food supply of this planet, our well-being, and our activities. There is no alternative source of nutriment. Without sunlight and the green leaf our industries, our trade, and our possessions would soon be useless.10
The seed, with the blessing of the sun, grows into plants that become the green mantle of the earth, returning part of the plants to the soil as organic matter to create living soil. The very processes that regulate the climate also provide us with food. Climate and food are interconnected, because ecologically, all life is plant-based. Yet, we have been blind to the creative and regulatory processes in plants.
Regeneration begins with the consciousness that we are part of one interconnected entity, the earth, rich in biodiversity. Sickness lies in broken processes and relationships, while the potential for health lies in diverse relationships which create, maintain and regenerate health. Mae-Wan Ho reminds us that,
Life uses the highest grade of energy and organises it. It does not ‘heat up’ the body of the organism. Living systems can do this by their meticulous space-time organisation, in which energy is stored in a range of time-scales and spatial extents.
Unlike mechanical energy that runs mechanical systems, the living energy of living systems is based on negative entropy. In What is Life?, Schrödinger observes,
It is by avoiding the rapid decay into the inert state of ‘equilibrium’ that an organism appears so enigmatic. What an organism feeds on is negative entropy.… Or, to put it less paradoxically, the essential thing in metabolism is that the organism succeeds in freeing itself from all the entropy it cannot help producing while alive.11
Living systems increase the organisation of life through negative entropy. Mechanical, industrial systems increase entropy, or disorder. Entropy indicates the waste and pollution created by mechanical systems. Construed in terms of order, the entropy principle tells us that the natural development of any total system is towards states of greater disorder.
According to the Hungarian biochemist and Nobel laureate Albert Szent-Györgyi de Nagyrápolt,
It is common knowledge that the ultimate source of all our energy and negative entropy is the radiation of the sun. When a photon interacts with a material particle on our globe it lifts one electron from an electron pair to a higher level. This excited state as a rule has but a short lifetime and the electron drops back within 10-7 to 10-8 seconds [less than 100 millionth of a second] to the ground state, giving off its excess energy in one way or another. Life has learned to catch the electron in the excited state, uncouple it from its partner and let it drop back to the ground state through its biological machinery utilising its excess energy for life processes.12
Mae-Wan Ho clarifies,
The biosphere … does not make its living by absorbing heat from the environment. No organism can live like a heat engine.… Instead, life depends on catching an excited electron quite precisely—by means of specific light absorbing pigments—and then tapping off its energy as it falls back towards the ground state. Life uses the highest grade of energy, the packet or quantum size of which is sufficient to cause specific motion of electrons in the outer orbitals of molecules. It is on account of this that living systems can populate their high energy levels without heating up the body excessively, and hence contribute to what Schrödinger intuitively identifies as ‘negative entropy’. But what enables living systems to do so? It is none other than their meticulous space-time organisation in which energy is stored.… Energy flow organises the system, which in turn organises the energy flow.13
Ecological systems of food production and consumption are autopoietic, based on endosomatic energy or energy generated by the living system. Economic systems based on ecological production and on basic needs aim at low entropy. Economic systems based on industrial production and on maximising profits are high entropy systems. The irreversible flow of energy and matter, which is implied by an entropic transformation, led the Romanian American mathematician and economist Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen to assert that ‘entropy is the sole temporal law in physics’.14 In his book The Entropy Law and the Economic Process, he writes,
It is natural that the appearance of pollution should have taken by surprise an economic science which has delighted in playing around with all kinds of mechanistic models. Curiously, even after the event economics gives no signs of acknowledging the role of natural resources in the economic process. Economists still do not seem to realize that, since the product of the economic process is waste, waste is an inevitable result of that process and ceteris paribus increases in greater proportion than the intensity of economic activity.15
Mae-Wan Ho points out that
A living system differs from a conventional thermodynamic machine. A living system is a much more complex and dynamic organisation that somehow empowers it to metabolise, grow, differentiate, and maintain its individuality and vibrant wholeness, something no physical system can yet do.16
Thermodynamics has its origin in describing the transformation of heat energy into mechanical work. Concepts of thermodynamics are a result of the fossil fuel industrial age, when attempts were being made to determine how much mechanical work can be made available from steam engines fuelled by coal. Fossil fuel addiction has created a way of thinking that I call ‘fossilised’. It is a monoculture of the mind, blind to biodiversity and its regenerative potential. It has created a fossil fuel-dependent industrial mode of production for meeting our daily needs. We eat oil. We drink oil. We breathe oil. The fossil age has created government policies and economic policies which privilege oil and oil-based systems and punish soil and soil-based local economies. The last two centuries of dependence on fossil fuels have created multiple distortions in our view of our production and consumption systems, our ideas of efficiency and productivity, our bias towards technological progress and of the way we produce and distribute our food. We use more resources to produce the goods we consume, and we call this being more ‘productive’. We create more waste and more externalities that the earth and others have to bear, and we call this being more ‘efficient’. We degrade the planet, push species to extinction, make the planet unliveable because of climate chaos, and call this ‘progress’.
1 Evelyn Fox Keller, Reflections on Gender and Science (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985).
2 Gyorgy Scrinis, Nutritionism: The Science and Politics of Dietary Advice (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013).
3 Giulia Enders, Gut: The Inside Story of Our Body’s Most Underrated Organ (London: Scribe Publications, 2015), 178.
4 Vandana Shiva, Agroecology and Regenerative Agriculture: Sustainable Solutions for Hunger, Poverty, and Climate Change (Santa Fe: Synergetic Press, 2022); Vandana Shiva with Vaibhav Singh, Health per Acre: Organic Solutions to Hunger and Malnutrition (New Delhi: Navdanya/Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology, 2011).
5 Vandana Shiva with Vaibhav Singh, Health per Acre.
6 Charles Eisenstein, ‘How the Environmental Movement Can Find Its Way Again’, March 26, 2023, https://
7 Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2016).
8 ‘R. Buckminster Fuller: The Science of Design’, Weird Tales Designs, June 23, 2023, https://
9 Mae-Wan Ho, The Rainbow and the Worm: The Physics of Organisms, 3rd ed. (Singapore: World Scientific Publishing Co., 2008), 54–55, https://
10 Sir Albert Howard, An Agricultural Testament (Oxford University Press, 1921), 23.
11 Erwin Schrödinger, What is Life? With “Mind and Matter” and “Autobiographical Sketches” (Cambridge University Press, 1992).
12 Albert Szent-Györgyi, in W.D. McElroy and B. Glass, eds., Symposium on Light and Life (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1961), quoted in Mae-Wan Ho, op. cit., 57.
13 Mae-Wan Ho, op. cit., 70.
14 Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, The Entropy Law and the Economic Process, 1st ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971, 141.
15 Georgescu-Roegen, The Entropy Law, 19.
16 Mae-Wan Ho, op. cit.