RESEARCH AREAS
The six themes
Ecology: Literally "knowledge of the home" from the ancient greek oikos and logos, ecology is the study of the interactions between the Biosphere and its surroundings. Thus ecology lies at the heart of the work of BIOSRI. We focus on two aspects: the forces shaping these interactions and the change in function and structure through time. Fundamentally, all such interactions are shaped by the laws of thermodynamics which govern the function and structure of all things. We have written a number of papers and books relating to this subject. Community succession is central to our understanding of change through time, and we have led the way in producing the first model of entropic change through time, identifying thermodynamics as the driver of change.
Design: Design represents the fundamental way in which humans integrate with and perturb our natural environment. All of the products and processes that we use are designed, and so this field represents the portal for change, either for better or for worse. BIOSRI sets out to emphasise the importance of systems theory to design students and practitioners through courses, advice and fieldwork, emphasising the importance of ecological ethics, embedded design, dynamic design and more fundamentally, emergence, non-linearity, feedback and sub-optimality. We can design ourselves back into the biosphere, be it through artificial intelligence networks, architecture, supply chain connectivity or socio-ecological framing. The importance of recycling at the conceptual stage is emphasised, where we do not approach the afterlife of a product as something that needs to be dealt with, but, rather, something that needs to dominate thinking from the earliest stages. Much of this thinking is set out in our Director's book, Artificial Intelligence and the Environmental Crisis: Can Technology Really Save the World? (Routledge, 2020).
Economics: The leading book in the field, Sustainable Economics: Context, Challenges and Opportunities for the 21st Century Practitioner (co-authored by our director and by the economist, Professor Alan Murray, published by Routledge, 2017). Sets out radical new approaches to sustainable business development. This book is essential reading for the modern business practitioner and legislator, and for anyone who is interested in sustainable economic practice. This ground-breaking text traces the relationship between economics and sustainability, identifying core areas where challenges and opportunities emerge, while opening up important new directions for application, transition and innovation. At BIOSRI we offer businesses consultative engagement, where we can reshape the fundamentals of your organization to enable you to operate in a sustainable way, transforming the processes and functionality, around the principles of the most successful business on the planet, the Biosphere. Central to this approach is systems theory.
Sustainability: BIOSRI focuses on a balanced approach to sustainability, and we are prepared to challenge many of the damaging myths such as:
Anthropology: Tied into our understanding of the Biosphere is our understanding of ourselves. Two books by our director, Escape from Bubbleworld: Seven Curves to Save the Earth (Ard Macha Press) and Artificial Intelligence and the Environmental Crisis (Routledge), are, ultimately, a study of humanity. Culture is emergent from landscape, and thus our relationship with our local environment is an essential starting point for a sustainable society, where we resonate with our environmental context and where the relational self includes our social and environmental contexts, rather than an individualist approach. Ecological empowerment and ecological actualization, rather than individual empowerment and individual actualization, are key concepts for a resilient, functional society, and our latest work explores these themes.
Thermodynamics: Tying together our understanding of the other five frames, the laws of thermodynamics are fundamental to all processes involving energy and matter. Physics forms not only the foundation but the skeleton and network around which all else is fashioned. In order to understand the cosmos, the biosphere and ourselves, we must grasp the central role of the laws that govern energy. It is the flow of energy through the biosphere that shapes the architecture, evolution and function of life. Reduce that flow, as when the dust from a comet colliding with the earth blocked the sunlight from the surface 65 million years ago, and mass extinctions result. Life ultimately is an energy-dissipating process, converting useful energy into less useful energy, a process called entropy production. Greater complexity requires greater entropy production, as order requires the production of disorder elsewhere. Thus life is expected to evolve in such a way as to become more complex at the Biosphere level, up to a point of maximum entropic production, beyond which the system can no longer be sustained. Just as we can only build a tower so tall before it structurally fails, so we can only have a limited maximum amount of entropy production before the chaos in our surroundings prevents further complexity. This concept is known as the Maximum Entropy Production Principle and has been demonstrated in a wide range of fields, from global circulation models to language, from ecological succession to evolution and from DNA coding to economics. While many experts exist around the world working on particular aspects of this, BIOSRI is the only centre operating at a multidisciplinary level.
The six themes
Ecology: Literally "knowledge of the home" from the ancient greek oikos and logos, ecology is the study of the interactions between the Biosphere and its surroundings. Thus ecology lies at the heart of the work of BIOSRI. We focus on two aspects: the forces shaping these interactions and the change in function and structure through time. Fundamentally, all such interactions are shaped by the laws of thermodynamics which govern the function and structure of all things. We have written a number of papers and books relating to this subject. Community succession is central to our understanding of change through time, and we have led the way in producing the first model of entropic change through time, identifying thermodynamics as the driver of change.
Design: Design represents the fundamental way in which humans integrate with and perturb our natural environment. All of the products and processes that we use are designed, and so this field represents the portal for change, either for better or for worse. BIOSRI sets out to emphasise the importance of systems theory to design students and practitioners through courses, advice and fieldwork, emphasising the importance of ecological ethics, embedded design, dynamic design and more fundamentally, emergence, non-linearity, feedback and sub-optimality. We can design ourselves back into the biosphere, be it through artificial intelligence networks, architecture, supply chain connectivity or socio-ecological framing. The importance of recycling at the conceptual stage is emphasised, where we do not approach the afterlife of a product as something that needs to be dealt with, but, rather, something that needs to dominate thinking from the earliest stages. Much of this thinking is set out in our Director's book, Artificial Intelligence and the Environmental Crisis: Can Technology Really Save the World? (Routledge, 2020).
Economics: The leading book in the field, Sustainable Economics: Context, Challenges and Opportunities for the 21st Century Practitioner (co-authored by our director and by the economist, Professor Alan Murray, published by Routledge, 2017). Sets out radical new approaches to sustainable business development. This book is essential reading for the modern business practitioner and legislator, and for anyone who is interested in sustainable economic practice. This ground-breaking text traces the relationship between economics and sustainability, identifying core areas where challenges and opportunities emerge, while opening up important new directions for application, transition and innovation. At BIOSRI we offer businesses consultative engagement, where we can reshape the fundamentals of your organization to enable you to operate in a sustainable way, transforming the processes and functionality, around the principles of the most successful business on the planet, the Biosphere. Central to this approach is systems theory.
Sustainability: BIOSRI focuses on a balanced approach to sustainability, and we are prepared to challenge many of the damaging myths such as:
- carbon is the biggest problem facing us (It is not). The excessive flow of energy through the Biosphere, crippling concentrations of key nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus and the destruction of ecological interactions are the three modern horsemen of our apocalypse;
- conservation will save the planet (it will not). Planting trees in a field doesn't create a forest, but creates a field with trees in it, whose soil is not a forest soil. Re-introducing beavers without their predators will created an ecological disaster, not restore the garden of Eden). True sustainability lies in restoring the creative capacity of nature, to heal and re-organize itself;
- biomimicry is the way ahead (its not). Bio-participation is the way ahead. Step out of the theatre and into the real world, where we reacquaint ourselves with the house rules of living within a system, not apart from it, particularly given that our future relies on the functioning of that system.
- thinking that the planet is a closed system and that a circular economy is possible (It is not). Nature relies upon vast amounts of energy from the sun flowing through our planet every day, wasting much of it.
- green energy is environmentally and socially sustainable (this is often not the case). The shadow of the jolly green giant creates chaos across the world, from oil palms in Borneo to rare earth metal mining, essential for wind farms, in China. Increased lithium extraction threatens the health and well-being of indigenous people in Chile and Bolivia. A true ecological accounting must be made.
Anthropology: Tied into our understanding of the Biosphere is our understanding of ourselves. Two books by our director, Escape from Bubbleworld: Seven Curves to Save the Earth (Ard Macha Press) and Artificial Intelligence and the Environmental Crisis (Routledge), are, ultimately, a study of humanity. Culture is emergent from landscape, and thus our relationship with our local environment is an essential starting point for a sustainable society, where we resonate with our environmental context and where the relational self includes our social and environmental contexts, rather than an individualist approach. Ecological empowerment and ecological actualization, rather than individual empowerment and individual actualization, are key concepts for a resilient, functional society, and our latest work explores these themes.
Thermodynamics: Tying together our understanding of the other five frames, the laws of thermodynamics are fundamental to all processes involving energy and matter. Physics forms not only the foundation but the skeleton and network around which all else is fashioned. In order to understand the cosmos, the biosphere and ourselves, we must grasp the central role of the laws that govern energy. It is the flow of energy through the biosphere that shapes the architecture, evolution and function of life. Reduce that flow, as when the dust from a comet colliding with the earth blocked the sunlight from the surface 65 million years ago, and mass extinctions result. Life ultimately is an energy-dissipating process, converting useful energy into less useful energy, a process called entropy production. Greater complexity requires greater entropy production, as order requires the production of disorder elsewhere. Thus life is expected to evolve in such a way as to become more complex at the Biosphere level, up to a point of maximum entropic production, beyond which the system can no longer be sustained. Just as we can only build a tower so tall before it structurally fails, so we can only have a limited maximum amount of entropy production before the chaos in our surroundings prevents further complexity. This concept is known as the Maximum Entropy Production Principle and has been demonstrated in a wide range of fields, from global circulation models to language, from ecological succession to evolution and from DNA coding to economics. While many experts exist around the world working on particular aspects of this, BIOSRI is the only centre operating at a multidisciplinary level.