Can Collapse Be Avoided? Part I: Learning from the Biosphere How to Handle Inequality

Biospheric insights into whether the brutal collapse of societies is the normal human trajectory—or whether more stable forms of civilized existence are possible.

In light of recent dramatic events, a growing number of people conclude that the energy and material capacities of modern civilization are reaching their limits before our eyes, and that some form of collapse may occur relatively soon. These people try to explain what is happening to others who remain of the opinion that things are generally manageable, and that solutions to humanity’s energy problems can still arrive in time, facilitated by human ingenuity and financial incentives.

Besides energy, there is also the problem of the biosphere being destroyed before our eyes — here, too, there is a wide spectrum of opinions even among well meaning people, from things are totally fine and the biosphere is re-greening, to human ingenuity will fix it provided sufficient financial incentive, to stop the destruction and let nature space to breathe.

People arguing for some form of diminishing human activity are naturally the least optimistic, since they are trying to assess the limits that nature has placed on what human ingenuity can realistically achieve. Interestingly, when it comes to the question of “what to do,” increasingly common advice is to “go local”: for example, become a carpenter or learn other practical skills. Two recent interviews in the Great Simplification podcast—with Balázs Matics and Craig Tindale—end with essentially the same advice to listeners. The latest Frankly also concluded that now is the time to put stones in the river (presumably to slow the water). The more optimistic human-ingenuity group, on the other hand, tends to advocate grand and ambitious projects.

Of course, if everything crashes, people with practical skills and strong local connections are likely to endure the crisis relatively better (whatever “better” might mean then). However, focusing strategically on individual and local survival—and letting the larger dynamics (sometimes loosely referred to as “self-organization”) take care of themselves—is precisely what brought us to the current state in the first place.

Instead of giving up too early and alienating ourselves from one another even further as we regain a local focus, I would like to suggest that we still have an opportunity, at least, to discuss what kind of human civilization could remain stable under natural limits, without continually generating existential problems that must then be solved—successfully or not—by ingenuity. From my perspective, it would be a major fiasco simply to start a new cycle of “being local — going global — collapsing” without even having found a theoretical solution for how we might organize our existence in a better and more stable way—if such a solution exists at all.

As an early disclaimer, I myself think that we do need to become more local, in the sense that we should grow more food where we are. (My personal dilemma, which has its global counterpart, is that on our small plot of land a natural forest has been allowed to regrow, so clearing space for vegetables would mean cutting trees, something that I hope is not going to happen while I am alive.)

Helping friends to harvest potatoes (Siberia, the Yenisey river)

What I am arguing against is localization as a global strategy. Besides being intellectually unsatisfactory, it would not work: being well off amid mass starvation is not safe. Now that we are all in one boat, it is in our common interest that nobody be driven to such despair as to destroy the boat for everyone. This requires an increased global coordination and mutual understanding.

My persistent motivation is to share several insights that emerge from the concept of biotic regulation, which, despite its high relevance to today’s problems, remains little known. In today’s post, I will discuss the problem of inequality in a biospheric context.

Energy Consumption and Increasing Size

The cause of the current predicament is often attributed to the genetic hardware that shapes human behavior, in which context the Maximum Power Principle is often invoked.

While there is much discussion in the literature about what this principle could actually mean in a biospheric context (see, e.g., Sciubba 2011 “What did Lotka really say?”), its common interpretation is that a system that utilizes more power tends to prevail over one that utilizes less power, and that natural selection favors the former.

Since larger systems generally utilize more power, there should be a corresponding tendency for larger, internally correlated systems to prevail. The way competitive capacity can increase aggressively with size and correlation was vividly described by the Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky:

One man alone

feels down and out.

One man alone

won’t make weather.

Any old bully

can knock him about -

even weaklings

if two together.

But when

we midgets

in a Party stand -

surrender,

enemy,

fade

out of sight!

A Party’s

a million-fingered hand

clenched

into one fist

of shattering might.

These words were written about a century ago in revolutionary Russia, but in the modern context “Party” can be replaced, for example, by “Corporation” or “Monopoly,” or, if one wants a more positive connotation, by “Trade Union.”

What matters is that this type of spontaneous development, if it were universally supported by natural selection and facing no structural constraints, could lead to a single large internally correlated structure occupying all available space and claiming all energy flows. This seems to have occurred in the case of global human civilization, which now represents a rigidly correlated entity—the Superorganism—with no external rivals left to compete with.

Once previously competing units become tightly interdependent within a single structure, their residual competition becomes pathological, taking on the meaning—and the destructive effect—of an autoimmune disorder.

Detachment from Reality Associated with Size

So, if greater power consumption translates into higher competitive capacity, and larger size translates into greater power consumption, we end up with a small number of large, internally correlated energy consumers.

As an entity grows larger, its surface-to-volume ratio declines, effectively decoupling most of it from the external environment. In a multicellular body, for example, the proportion of cells directly bordering the environment is roughly equal to the ratio of the linear size of a cell to the linear size of the body. Thus, for a mammal with a linear size of 0.5 meter and a cell size of about 50 micrometers, only about one cell in ten thousand is in direct contact with the outside world.

In a large internally correlated system, most resources are spent on maintaining internal stability rather than on interacting with the environment. These maintenance costs are often cited as one reason why very large systems become inefficient. But what may matter even more is that, once the system’s decision-making core becomes decoupled from the environment and enclosed in the comfort provided by internal homeostasis, it can generate decisions that have no environmental validity and drive the system as a whole toward degradation.

The human brain provides an example. It consumes a disproportionately large share of total body power and can be biochemically induced to generate feelings of satisfaction and passivity even under life-threatening external conditions.

The greater the energy imbalance between the decision-making core and the peripheral parts that interact with the environment, the greater the potential for dangerous distortions. Therefore, as the system grows larger, the reliability of information gathered about the natural environment acquires primary importance.

Changing the software?

One of the most interesting suggestions I have come across recently is that our current predicament might have been avoided had our information gathering been governed by different principles. This idea complements the proposition that human self-awareness of the predicament could itself become a central part of the solution—what Nate Hagens refers to as the “fifth law of thermodynamics”.

In “The Path to the Singularity: An Ideological History”, Steven J. Newbury (2026) describes three approaches to information gathering. Two, in his view, led to miserable outcomes, while the third was never historically pursued.

• The “Strong” (Mechanistic/Reductionist) Enlightenment — the mechanistic idea of nature as a clockwork that can be decomposed to elementary parts and, as a clock, practically lacks dissipation. The author believes that this neglect of entropy (dissipation) is what has driven our species to the current state of overshoot. Champions: Bacon, Descartes.

• The “Romantic” (Counter-Enlightenment): a reaction against the “soulless” Strong Enlightenment. Champions: Rousseau, Herder.

  It rejected the ”clockwork” and instead championed emotion, intuition, and the ”organic” or ”spiritual” essence of a people (the Volk). While it correctly identified the soulless, alienating nature of the reductionist worldview, its ”solution” was equally dangerous. By replacing universal reason with essentialist, ”natural” hierarchies based on ”blood and soil,” this tradition provided the ideological seedbed for the ethno-nationalism and Fascism that would emerge later. It was another form of reductionism, just biological and spiritual instead of mathematical. (S.J. Newbury)

• The Sceptical (Empirical/Emergent) Enlightenment:

  This tradition (David Hume, Adam Smith) represented a profoundly different path. It was not based on a priori rationalist design but on a posteriori empirical observation and scepticism. This was the true scientific method—a critical, observational, and materialist worldview. It saw systems (like economies or societies) as emergent, complex, and historically contingent—the very antithesis of reductionism. (S.J. Newbury)

I would mention two things in passing. First, I agree that the path, in which information is gathered and shared predominantly through emotions rather than intellectual assessment, is dangerous precisely because emotions are subjective and therefore divisive rather than unifying. As I noted in a previous post with regard to Rob Lewis’s essay “The Mystery at the Heart of Things. Are Facts Enough?”, the same emotional appeals can provoke drastically different responses in people with different backgrounds.

Second, I think that the main difference between the destructive and the constructive routes lies not only in mechanistic versus systems thinking, but also in the way scientific problems are posed. The dominant route of our information gathering has been governed by the question “What can be done?”—to facilitate growth and increase competitive capacity. A constructive route could instead focus on asking “What should not be done?”—so as not to undermine long-term persistence. This is what the concept of biotic regulation is about.

At present, for example, biological science focuses mainly on evolution—that is, on how genetic information changes—whereas in the second route it would focus on stasis, that is, on why genetic information does not degrade in the first place.

My main point, however, is that the probability that adequate information gathering will be spontaneously chosen by decision-makers cut off from environmental stimuli must be low—much like the probability that a color-blind person, presented with many pills, will spontaneously choose the one of the right color.

The overall implication of these considerations is that large size and large power consumption tend inevitably to produce detachment from reality and thus threaten persistence. Therefore, since life has persisted, these tendencies must be strictly limited in natural ecosystems. Let us take a look at how this is achieved.

Inequality in Nature and Human Society

Modern life comes in all sizes, from bacteria to whales. Different size means different per capita energy consumption, because per unit mass energy consumption is broadly size-independent (see “The Small and the Big: Life’s Fundamental Energetic Dichotomy” for graphs and sources).

Judged on a per capita basis, the inequality of energy consumption across life is astounding. At opposite ends of the spectrum, a whale with a body mass of 100 tons and a bacterium with a cell mass of one picogram (10^-12 g) have rates of energy consumption that differ by a factor 10²⁰ (a hundred-billion-billion-fold difference).

By comparison, income differences in global human society are far more compressed. The poorest people on Earth live on a few dollars per day; their annual income is only about a million times lower than that of the richest billionaires.

However, when we look at the global picture, things change in a radical way.

In global human society, the poorest 50% of individuals receive less than 10% of global income, while the richest 10% receive more than 50%.

Meanwhile, in stable natural ecosystems such as forests, the smallest organisms, though consuming the least per capita, can claim more than 90% of total ecosystem productivity. By contrast, the “energy multibillionaires” — the largest animals — despite their vastly greater per capita energy consumption, are allowed to consume no more than about 1% of total ecosystem productivity. In other words, they are exceptionally intense energy consumers, but nature keeps their numbers exceptionally low.

Distribution of energy consumption versus heterotroph body size in stable natural ecosystems (solid contour) and in current human society (excluding deforestation; dashed contour).

While everyone understands what an income-inequality diagram shows, I would like to provide some context for how the above distribution, showing the energetic dominance of the smallest consumers, is derived.

Walking in the forest, we notice that most of what the forest generates in energetic terms is leaf biomass. Every autumn we can see how many leaves are dropped from the trees to form a carpet on the ground. Evergreen trees such as spruces, for example, maintain such a carpet beneath them permanently. This carpet, however, does not accumulate from year to year in a mature forest: it disappears. Its disappearance is a sign that it is being decomposed by the invisible smallest heterotrophs—bacteria and fungi. So, as a first approximation, one can estimate the large consumption of these smallest actors from the seasonal disappearance of fallen leaves.

Spruce needles on spring snow

The simplest task is to calculate the energy consumption of the largest animals, mostly vertebrates. Their individual energy-consumption rates have been measured in laboratories for hundreds of species and predictably depend on body mass. Thus, by calculating their population densities—which is easier for large animals, since they are readily seen—and multiplying by per capita consumption, then relating the result to the primary productivity of the supporting ecosystem, we obtain their share. An example of how this is done for the boreal forest ecosystem can be found in this work.

We then need to estimate the contribution of the intermediate-sized animals, the invertebrates. This, too, can be done from their population densities. Sometimes researchers simply brush everything off a tree and then calculate the amount of living material associated with each tree. That their share is smaller than that of bacteria and fungi is clear from the fact that only a smaller proportion of leaves is normally eaten by insects. On the other hand, energy consumption by invertebrates turns out to be greater than that of the largest animals, because the total biomass of the former is larger.

The Small Effective Size of Trees

So far we have discussed energy consumers—the heterotrophs. It may seem that the energy producers, trees, are very large, and yet they claim about one half of the gross organic matter they synthesize for their own metabolic needs. The other half—the so-called net primary productivity—is consumed by the heterotrophs, as discussed above.

In reality, however, the effective energetic size of trees is very small. Green leaves have energy-consumption rates that are, per unit living mass or volume, comparable to those of animals.

Green leaves globally contain only about 15 gigatons of carbon in biomass.

Meanwhile, the woody parts of trees, which make up most of their visible biomass (several hundred gigatons of carbon globally), are largely metabolically inactive, apart from the thin cambium layer. They do not consume energy, but serve structural purposes. That is why trees can remain alive even when their trunks are severely damaged, like the willow below.

It still has green leaves and branches, but its stem is almost entirely gone. Yet what remains is strong enough to keep the tree standing.

Furthermore, unlike the tightly correlated bodies of animals, leaves on a tree are only loosely correlated with one another, mainly through their common stem, and can function with a high degree of independence.

Outlook

We therefore conclude that both the production and the consumption of energy in natural ecosystems such as forests are carried out largely by small, approximately independent actors: green leaves and unicellular heterotrophs.

Such an organization of energy production and consumption, in which numerous small actors dominate, ensures an efficient transfer of environmental information to living organisms, allowing them to respond effectively to environmental perturbations and keep the optimal environment stable.

Organisms whose decision-making is insulated from the external environment by a large buffer—the multicellular body—play a smaller role in ecosystem-level decision-making, that is, in directing the flow of ecosystem energy and regulating environmental conditions.

This stands in contrast to the way energy flows are organized in modern human society, where larger actors dominate.

If higher energy consumption leads to (temporarily) greater competitive capacity, then increased system size will tend to be favored, since it is associated with higher energy consumption. But increased size simultaneously causes decoupling from the external environment through a diminishing surface-to-volume ratio. This degrades strategic decision-making.

From this perspective, a spontaneous increase in size and energy consumption—even when it appears to be accompanied by greater specialization and complexity of internal parts—can be understood not as a gain in orderliness, but as a common route of decay of a formerly persistent population of smaller objects. That is why human society has anti-monopoly laws.

In life, local decision-making by numerous independent actors results in global environmental homeostasis, because all these actors base their functioning on meaningful genetic programs that have been tested for environmental validity over millions and billions of years. In contrast, in modern human society our governing cultural programs are still confused and unstable. If we were simply to begin acting locally without regard for one another, we would accelerate rather than prevent chaos, and in unpredictable ways. Therefore, our species requires a certain overarching communication, as well as the development of local strategies that would be globally non-disruptive.

Once environmental conditions change, a moment may arise when a constructive strategy aimed at persistence suddenly becomes competitive. By that time, a global network of local actors ready to implement such strategies should already be in place. Until then, I believe we need to support one another and foster mutual understanding and respect as broadly as possible across cultural landscapes.

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