History of Ecological Sciences, Part 63: Biosphere Ecology
https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/bes2.1568

TUHO: In ecological economics, human economy is not a closed loop—it is a transitory assemblage of matter and energy; a metabolic flux, an unstable moment of larger geophysical and biochemical drama.[8] This metabolic perspective is championed also by early founders of ecological economics, especially Nicolas Georgescu-Roegen. His account suggests that economy is an evolving apparatus functioning as a thermodynamic differential—it sucks low entropy and spits out high entropy, while ideally keeping its internal entropy on a stable level, much like organisms do.[9] What is crucial here is the overall “carrying capacity”[10] of the environment that hosts the economic assemblage—if the assemblage produces too much high entropy, it undermines environmental conditions allowing for future existence of this very assemblage. Here, the figure of the limit gets reinscribed in its dynamic version. If we are to follow this metabolic metaphor further, we might even say that just as organisms, economic assemblages obey what Sanford Kwinter—while discussing Jakob von Uëxkull’s idea of Umwelt—labelled as principle of immanentism, which states that “the distinction between organism and environment, inside and out, is but one of degree: a greater or lesser compression or dilation of information”.[11]

A nejaky uvody do ekologicke ekonomike

The Development of Environmental Thinking in Economics
https://www.jstor.org/stable/30302282

The early history of modern ecological economics
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0921800904002058

A neco k diverzite

Measuring commonness and rarity is pivotal to ecology and conservation. Zeta diversity, the average number of species shared by multiple sets of assemblages, and Dark diversity, the number of species that could occur in an assemblage but are missing, have been recently proposed to capture two aspects of the commonness-rarity spectrum. Despite a shared focus on commonness and rarity, thus far, Zeta and Dark diversities have been assessed separately. Here, we review these two frameworks and suggest their integration into a unified paradigm of the “rarity facets of biodiversity.” This can be achieved by partitioning Alpha and Beta diversities into five components (the Zeta, Eta, Theta, Iota, and Kappa rarity facets) defined based on the commonness and rarity of species. Each facet is assessed in traditional and multiassemblage fashions to bridge conceptual differences between Dark diversity and Zeta diversity. We discuss applications of the rarity facets including comparing the taxonomic, functional, and phylogenetic diversity of rare and common species, or measuring species' prevalence in different facets as a metric of species rarity. The rarity facets integrate two emergent paradigms in biodiversity science to better understand the ecology of commonness and rarity, an important endeavor in a time of widespread changes in biodiversity across the Earth.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ece3.8096

Jeste k metabolicke perspektive

ŠUM
http://sumrevija.si/en/lukas-likavcan-autonomy-and-necessity-sum12/

Why is Science Important?. Yesterday, I had a Q&A session with… | by Avi Loeb | Dec, 2022 | Medium
https://avi-loeb.medium.com/why-is-science-important-416fc081a8ed

The challenges of adapting to new environments in space would be vast, far greater than the challenge of leaving the jungles of Africa to inhabit tech-rich cities — which our predecessors accomplished in the span of the last hundred thousand years. Survival of the fittest in interstellar space requires the tools of advanced science and technology.

For long-term survival, we must figure out how to repair and augment the human body so that our future astronauts will have a lifetime of millions of years in interstellar space. This would lead to an exponential growth in the population of interstellar spacecraft. The doubling time could be as short as 100,000 years, the travel time of our existing chemical rockets to the habitable planets around the nearest star to the Sun, Proxima Centauri. Over merely 5 million years, the lifespan of the human species so far, interstellar astronauts could go through 40 doublings. Starting with a single craft might yield 2 to the power of 40 spacecraft in 5 million years. This amounts to a trillion spacecraft which could target all the habitable planets in the Milky Way galaxy.

Sharing our scientific knowledge with all intelligent beings in interstellar space could be a natural extension of our international scientific endeavor on Earth. Expanding the scientific program from international to interstellar also offers a grander benefit from reciprocity. One of our destinations might include a civilization which made scientific discoveries that exceed our knowledge. In that case, we could learn from them.

Here’s hoping that the friction that interstellar explorers will encounter with nay-sayers or bureaucrats who want them to focus all resources on their home planet, might be overcome by the fruits of interstellar wisdom. Ad Astra!

Unprecedented UAP Legislation
https://www.christophermellon.net/post/unprecedented-uap-legislation

Unbeknownst to most Americans, President Biden just signed into law far-reaching legislation that could soon confirm the existence of an alien presence on earth. The relevant provisions, incorporated into legislation needed to provide funding for the Department of Defense (DoD) and the Intelligence Community (IC), enjoys strong bipartisan support in both the House and Senate. This is arguably the biggest story mainstream news organizations have ever failed to cover.

Defining floors and ceilings: the contribution of human needs theory
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15487733.2020.1814033

This article argues that a theory of human needs is essential to buttress and give content to the concept of consumption corridors. In particular it enables us to, first, define a safe, just, and sustainable space for humanity, and second, to decompose and recompose consumption based on a distinction between necessities and luxuries. After an introduction, the article is divided into four parts. The first compares different concepts of human needs and concentrates on universalizable need theories. The second presents a method for agreeing on contextual need satisfiers, and the third discusses current research identifying the floors of poverty and necessities. A fourth section then sets out how sustainable needs can underpin the upper bound of the corridor and how this ceiling might be measured in income and consumption terms. However, >strong>once we move from a national to a global perspective a profound dilemma is encountered as rich country corridors diverge from a global consumption corridor