Proceedings of the IS4CE2020 Conference of the International Society for the Circular Economy 6 – 7 July 2020, University of Exeter, Exeter https://www.is4ce.org Turning Throw-away People into Fuel for Socio-economic Vitality *S. J. Goerner1 1Planetary Health Lab, University of Edinburgh, 320 Bridge St., Hillsborough, NC, 27278, USA *sgoerner@mindspring.com

Abstract A number of disciplines, including sustainability, resilience and the Circular Economy (CE), are based on the science of energy flow networks. Yet, though flow principles apply directly to human systems, most CE research focuses on improving human-environment relationships, not on rectifying the human-human dynamics that undergird socioeconomic sustainability itself. The result is an uphill battle against the main premises of oligarchic capitalism, from excessive extraction to a callous disregard for human and environmental well-being. In contrast, the full story of flow joins the technical aspects of flow, i.e. regenerative circulation and resilient structure, and the key human factors, i.e. collaborative learning and common-cause culture, into an integrated science of systemic health capable of restoring both civilization and the environment. In this view, collective learning is pivotal because humanity is a collaboratively learning species that thrives by pooling information, forging ever-better hypotheses, and then changing our behaviour by changing our beliefs. Common-cause values, such as justice and honesty, are crucial because they provide the grease that smooths our interactions and the glue that holds us together. Regenerative circulation, i.e. investing in people and socioeconomic infrastructure, is important because human networks form the engine behind all work and learning. Resilience is critical because losing too many links in the chain makes the engine fall apart. The change of vision that results is both logical and profound. Instead of promoting constant consumption, a solution-seeking society consciously strives to enhance the well-being of all people and the planet as a whole. Instead of focusing on financial wealth, it seeks to build the world we all want to inhabit, one with social, economic and environmental well-being rising in tandem. In this world, purpose, meaning, belonging, commitment, contribution, caring and integrity are more important than money. Furthermore, unmet human needs and underutilized human capital are dangerous because they generate explosive pressures, which build over time. Consequently, the surest path to environmental health and economic vitality is to meet human needs by turning oligarchic capitalism’s “throwaway people” (Cahn, 2004) – including workers, women, blacks, the poor, elderly and handicapped (to name a few) – into empowered, energizing fuel for societal learning and doing. Keywords: collapse; regenerative economics; resilience; collaborative learning; Energy Systems Science How do you create economies that make civilization thrive? Neoliberal (i.e., trickle-down) economics is hard on both people and planet. For 50 years, the sustainability movement has fought a determined battle for environmental health against trickle-down’s take-make-waste practices. It is now time to apply the same techniques to restoring systemic health to civilization itself. Kate Raworth (2017) identifies the goal: “Instead of economies that need to grow, whether or not they make us thrive, we need economies that make us thrive, whether or not they grow.” How does one create a civilization that makes us thrive? None of trickle-down’s answers seem to work as advertised. Maximizing profit for owners has created an oligarchic form of capitalism bent on extracting as much as possible from people and planet, with little regard to harm done. Instead of investing in productive capacity, tax-cuts for the wealthy serve to concentrate wealth evermore massively in the hands of a few. Outsourcing jobs keeps prices down, but it makes us dependent upon distant supply chains, and drives up debt because limited pay only extends so far. What else could there be? It turns out that the same Energy System Science (ESS) that explains systemic health in biology and ecology can be used to explain systemic health in human systems too. In this view, systemic societal health rests on four pillars: societal learning, common-cause culture, regenerative circulation and resilient structure. This combination connects human factors and technical solutions into a logical, practical whole. Its account of humanity as a collaborative-learning species explains why we can build a better world. Its laws of growth and development show us how to do so, and its predictive principles and precise measures provide practical markers to guide our steps. The ideas I present here are not new. ESS simply helps connect findings from across disciplines into a unified picture. Building unity starts with language. Here, for example, I use the term “Energy System Science” as an umbrella term for the diverse disciplines that use energy dynamics and the study of flownetworks to understand the laws of systemic health and development in living, non-living and supra-living systems such as economies and ecosystems. ESS disciplines include: Resilience, Self-Organization Theory, Panarchy, Keynesian economics and Circular Economics to name a few. As its name implies, ESS is a way of studying systems, i.e. profoundly interconnected wholes that are built of- and into other such wholes. Internally, for example, you are built of cells organized into muscle, circulatory and nervous systems. Externally you are built into various larger human organizations such as family and country, as well as the biosphere at large. The same nesting holds for every system imaginable from atoms in molecules to civilization in the biosphere. ESS is distinct because, where many researchers rely on computer simulations to understand complex systems, it uses the ancient observation that all systems are flow-networks, i.e., organizations whose existence arises from and depends on circulating energy, resources, or information throughout the entirety of their being (Figure 1). Your body, for example, is an integrated network of cells kept healthy by the circulation of water, nutrients and products. Ecosystems are networks of plants and animals connected by flows of oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, etc. Societies are interlinked networks of people, businesses, communities and governments that depend on the circulation of money, information, resources, products etc. The movement of energy and matter even shows up in the Milky Way’s swirl. While most people associate the term “energy” with various forms of fuel (e.g., oil or solar), here it refers to any kind of flow that is critical to the system under study. Ecologists study the flow of carbon and oxygen in the biosphere. Transportation planners study the flow of traffic in cities; and economists study the flow of money, resources, products, etc. Seeing the universal nature of flow help connect diverse findings by highlighting the common principles, such as circulation, which connect them. Figure 1: Some common flow-networks. ESS works on profoundly different systems because energy is universal: it applies equally to living, nonliving, and supra-living systems such as ecosystems and economies. Ecologists use flow-network models to understand water, carbon, and oxygen cycles in the biosphere. Biologists use them to understand the Krebs cycle and other metabolic processes in living organisms. John Maynard Keynes and Karl Marx used the circular flow of money, goods, and services to understand economic instability, and today’s Institutional economists use it to explain the need for economic equity, cross-scale circulation, and financial reform. Biologists and economists are equally likely to use energy laws of health and development because energy provides the fuel for motion, the pressure that drives development, and the nourishment that keeps systems going, regardless of whether that system is a living organism, the biosphere or an economy. Energy systems, however, create a very different picture of how the universe works. Instead of a cosmos of randomly colliding particles and economies built of self-serving rational agents, ESS creates: 1) a metabolic view of economic functioning that explains the need for resilience and regenerative circulation; and 2) a self-organizing view of growth, development and evolution that incorporates intelligence and explains the need for common-cause values such as justice, as well as processes such as communication. Economic Metabolism: Why we need regenerative circulation and resilient structure From a flow-network perspective, the cosmos is built of interconnected systems whose existence depends on constant circulation. Economists observing this fact realized it meant economies serve the same function in a society as a metabolic system does in a living organism (Fischer-Kowalski & Hüttler, 1998). Like a metabolic system, economies are networks of specialists whose interlocking efforts turn energy, information and resources into all the products, services, information and fuel a society needs to thrive. Here, people, businesses, communities, value-chains, governments and even the biosphere are like cells and organs in your body: they all play diverse roles in production, distribution, and learning. All social, economic, political and environmental systems are connected, and the entire system is – or should be – designed to be regenerative, i.e. self-feeding and self-renewing. Money is like blood: it is a vehicle for circulating the information, products and resources that nourish economic muscle and brain. Nourishing all levels and sectors of the economy is important because elements at every level plays a distinct role in a highly interdependent whole. The pivotal roles circulation and structure play in economic metabolism leads to several obvious laws of systemic health: Cross-scale circulation is essential because vitality depends on the care and feeding of the entire network from individuals and cities to value-chains and governments. Conversely, poor economic circulation produces economic necrosis, i.e., the dying off of large swaths of economic tissues with accompanying damage to the health of the whole. Regenerative investment, i.e. funding the human, social, economic and environmental systems that keep an economy functioning, is fundamental. Human capital it is particularly important because socioeconomic health depends on the intelligence and energy of people at all levels who do all the work! Reliable inputs are essential because, in flow-networks, running out of a critical resource is a death sentence. Plants need water; businesses need money; and societies need reliable circulation of money, information, goods, and resources from food and water to energy and electricity. Healthy outputs are important because the concept of “poisoning one’s own nest” applies as much to civilizations as to animals. Fractal structures – A network’s structure, i.e., the arrangement by which its elements connect, is important because it impacts circulation. Fractal structure, i.e. balanced, resilient ones that maintain a particular ratio of small, medium, and large elements – are essential because they promote cross-scale circulation. A wide variety of systems – from lungs and river deltas to ecosystems and circulatory systems exhibit a hierarchical branching structure that maintains a particular ratio of small, medium, and large elements. Your circulatory, for example, has a few large, highly-efficient conduits branching into successively smaller, more numerous, less efficient conduits below. Ecosystems have a few large predators atop a pyramid of successively smaller and more numerous prey animals. This balance of sizes is common because it helps nourish activity at every level by optimizing circulation across scales. Big, efficient elements (arteries or multinational banks) provide the speed and volume needed for rapid cross-level circulation, while the many small elements (capillaries or local banks) reach every nook and cranny. Nowadays, we call these structures “fractals” and use power-law mathematics to determine the optimal balance of sizes needed to maintain health. (Figure 2) Figure 2: Healthy hierarchies maintain a fractal balance of small, medium and large elements The importance of balance puts “resilience” in a new light. Resilience – i.e. the ability to spring back from crises – is enhanced by the number and diversity of fallback options. Most reformers rightly focus on rebuilding small-scale resilience destroyed by oligarchic extraction, but fractals prove that there is more to the story. Vitality actually requires a balance and integration of sizes, which means small-scale resilience is only half of the story. Here, for instance, the economies of scale big firms bring not only make them more profitable and able to hire more people, they also make them the only suitable choice for large-scale projects. Yet, balance also explains why too much or too little of any size creates problems. For instance, towns and economies dominated by a few large companies are brittle; if a mainstay company collapses, they have no other industries to fall back on. A bevy of small businesses offers more diversity and redundancy which increases resilience, but economies built solely of small firms tend to be stagnant because small firms lack the economic power to build surplus. This leaves overstretched staffs with little money for specialization, expansion, or quality improvements. How the laws of growth explain collaborative learning and common-cause values The metabolic lens makes the need for regenerative investment and robust circulation easy to see, but it doesn’t explain humanity’s most important characteristic: collaborative learning. How did we become a collaboratively learning species that thrives by developing better ways? Where Darwinians see intelligence as an accidental outcome of genetic mutation, ESS sees both genes and intelligence as natural results of energy laws of growth and development. While researchers have studied energy’s role in organizational emergence and development since the early 1900s, Nobel Laureate Ilya Prigogine made it mainstream in the 1970s by showing how an energy process he called self-organization drives the emergence of new organizations, and the ongoing, cyclical development of existing ones. Self-organization’s basic rules are: pressure drives, diversity catalyses, and energy fuels. For example, in boiling water, turning up the heat creates pressure that pushes molecules to move faster. When molecules can go no faster via random collisions, small impurities provide seed crystals for little bubbles that begin moving up the side of the pot. Some eventually reach the top, lose their heat, and sink back down, triggering a large circular flow. If the heat continues, the pattern will repeat. The circular flow will go faster and faster until it reaches the limits of that pattern. Some small impurity will trigger the system to reorganize into figure-8 pattern. In this way, a series of more intricate patterns of organization emerge, each circulating energy faster than the one before. On the other hand, if all impurities are removed, bubbles don’t self-organize; instead pressure builds until the system explodes. Like all energy processes, self-organization is universal. Recurrent rounds of pressure, innovation and limits has produced on-going cycles of development and a stairstep succession of increasing power, intelligence and organizational intricacy from the origins of atoms and life to the latest cycles of civilization (Figure 3). The study of Big History details its incredible results (Christian, 2019). In each round, pressure drives, diversity catalyses, and energy fuels. The first atoms were forged in the intense pressure of the Big Bang. The first forms of life emerged from the fiery furnace of early Earth’s primordial chemical soup. The first hierarchical civilizations emerged in constrained areas of fertile land, such as the Tigris and Indus river-valleys, where population pressures created intense conflicts over land, giving rise to territorial wars and eventually a warrior administrative-class. Figure 3: Self-organization creates a stair-step of increasing complexity & intelligence Some breakthroughs lead to radically new types of organizations. For example, the organization we call life emerged when some non-living chemical organizations began responding to information about where to find a new energy supply (food). Information began as fine-grained energy trails – a few photons of light or the chemical trail we call smell – that moved the system in some way. Intelligence, i.e., responding functionally to informative nudges, probably began when some bump accidentally propelled a cell toward fuel for continued activity. ‘Responding functionally’ evolved rapidly after that because each advance in intelligence allowed the organization to survive (i.e., continue) longer than those that didn’t respond so. Another law of growth explains why “collaboration” is also key. Why are all living and human systems built of smaller entities linked in common-cause? Besides the benefits of collaboratively-linked specialists, the deeper reason for this pattern lies in a rule of growth called the Surface-Volume law. It notes that all organizations are held together by bonds, and the bigger an organization gets, the more those bonds get stretched, until they literally reach a breaking point. At this point, the only way the organization can grow bigger is to divide into two smaller organizations that reconnect using some form of connective tissue. Easily seen in a developing embryo, this law of growth says getting bigger requires keeping small groups linked in an ever-growing meshwork of connective tissue (Figure 4). Transportation systems, food systems, value chains, and media systems all serve as connective tissue for people in societies. In living and human systems, this process leads to “collaboration,” i.e., networks of interconnected individuals and smaller groups playing specialist roles that benefit each other and the whole. Genetic research, for instance, shows that the main way living organisms becomes more complex is by previously- independent organisms joining together and taking on specialist roles (Margulis, 1998). The nucleus, mitochondria and flagella of eukaryotic cells, for instance, were once independent prokaryotic cells, which now serve as organelles of a more sophisticated cellular system. Land plants similarly reflect an immortal marriage between photosynthetic algae and non-photosynthetic lichens; algae’s ability to create fuel from sunlight, and the lichens’ ability to withstand harsh environments allowed the combo to conquer land. People, of course, also depend on collaborating specialists to support all aspects of daily life – from water and food to information and energy. An embryo starts as a single cell which grows, and then divides into two cells that couple back together. The process repeats, producing 4, 8, 16 cells, etc. Found in living, non-living, and supra-organizations, this pattern is called the Surface-Volume law because breakpoints occur when the cell reaches a 2/3rd power ratio of its surface area to its volume (size). Figure 4: A developing embryo shows the Surface-Volume law of development. In turn, the need to stay collaboratively connected also explains the need to communicate in order to stay in sync. When multicellular organisms first arose, staying in sync was easy because specialist cells were in constant contact (literally). Passing resources or signalling an event was a simple matter of releasing a small chemical or electrical discharge. Unfortunately, direct contact only works for organizations below a certain size because signals dissipate with distance. So, the bigger multi-cellular organisms became, the harder it was to stay in sync. The emergence of the first nerve cell solved the coordination problem by circulating information across larger spans. Nerves, for instance, allow your legs and lungs to communicate about activity (like running) and special needs (like more oxygen) even though they are located in different parts of the body. Increased communication and collaboration also increased collective intelligence, i.e., the ability of groups of individuals to respond in organized, functional ways to information. Nervous system and brains: the larger groups grew, the more communication and coordination technologies emerged to support the growing complexity. Groups of multicellular animals also increased coordination and collective intelligence by communicating, i.e. circulating information among themselves. Deer flash their tails to signal danger, and bees dance to show location of honey. Words circulate information in incredibly sophisticated ways, and the symbol-system we call money connects by allowing people who don’t know each other to transact with trust. In biological and human organizations, hierarchical arrangements also serve as a form of connective tissue that helps large organizations stay in sync. While local connectivity works well in small groups, eventually organizations become so large that horizontal connections are not enough to maintain coherence. At this point, growth pressures drive the development of hierarchical structures. In human systems, this means highly efficient, vertical structures that improve coordination, communication and decision-making across large numbers and long distances, while also helping to concentrate wealth for public purpose. (Figure 5). Human beings took communication, collaboration and intelligent response to a new level by organizing their communities around collaborative learning and conscious reinvention. Conscious collective learning – i.e. the ability to knowingly change a group’s response in light of new findings or changing conditions – turns basic intelligence into the ongoing pursuit of improving the group’s ability to live long and prosper. It is why we say humanity is a collaborative learning species whose strategy is to adapt rapidly by learning collectively. Humanity is the cutting-edge of increasing intelligence and collaboration on earth. We are a consciouslylearning species that thrives by forging ever-better hypotheses about how the world works. We coordinate collective behaviour by circulating information. We preserve life lessons in cultural norms, written laws, and scientific theories. We are not swift of feet nor sharp of tooth, but we are very good at finding patterns and using them to change our beliefs, our behaviour and our world. Figure 5: The need to stay in sync drove the evolution of new forms of connective tissue. Understanding the origins of our learning nature also clarifies several rules of health. It explains, for instance: 1) why accurate information and honest powerbrokers are more important than our modern culture leads us to believe; and 2) why we need open, fair, accurate and inclusive information-processing in economics and politics as well as science. It also means we need real democracy, honest media and empowering education. Similarly, collaboration’s importance to survival and prosperity explains why common-cause values and norms are essential. Why Oligarchies Always Collapse Humanity’s ability to learn consciously, and coordinate collectively has allowed us to adapt more rapidly and innovate more powerfully than any other species on earth. It is directly responsible for the marvels we have today. Yet, human learning is never done because every civilization eventually reaches limits that force it to choose: cling to old ways and decline, or innovate and transform. We appear to be facing this choice today. This brings us to a curious question: if humanity is so good at learning, why do we seem to be so stuck in dysfunctional ways today? The main answer is that we no longer live in a free-enterprise democracy, but a capitalist oligarchy – or as Aristotle put it, “[a] government by the rich for their own advantage.” Oligarchies are inherently unstable because they violate the laws of systemic health. Instead of commoncause culture, they put elite self-interest above the good of everyone and everything else. Instead of regenerative investment, they extract so much wealth that they create widespread economic necrosis. Instead of learning rapidly and wisely, they cling to old ways of privilege, dominance and extraction until the society collapses around them. Why would a social species like humanity build its civilizations around injustice, inequity and extreme extraction? Elite-serving hierarchies emerged some 5000 years along with conquest-states, particularly in the Middle East. In early human groups, leadership was a fiduciary responsibility to help guide the group toward well-being; it was not an opportunity to exploit other members of the tribe. Early agrarian villages, for example, were run by governing councils usually consisting of elders from different clans. Conqueststates changed all of this. Hierarchy became a vehicle for elite power, accumulation, subjugation and exploitation. “Leadership” or rather “rank” specifically gave high-ranking individuals the Divine Right to exploit others. Today’s oligarchic capitalism is a variation on this theme. How do we get out of oligarchy? People in every society have been asking this question for centuries. Their efforts have produced a slow, painful, cyclical movement toward curbing oligarchic license and increasing human rights, democratic empowerment, and elite accountability. ESS’ laws of systemic health provide a new foundation for this ongoing effort by explaining why oligarchies always end up destroying their home society. Obsession with elite interests, causes oligarchies to stifle solutions, rationalize elite privilege, and ignore harm done to the society as a whole. Unrelenting extraction destroys people and planet, and creates concentrations that allow elites to rig the system to their own advantage. Here, allowing businesses to become too big and elites to become too powerful has the same effect on societies as having too many predators has on an ecosystem: violating the law of fractal balance ends up destroying systemic balance, circulation and health. While these points have been made many times before, energy laws make the problem predictable, while nature’s universal patterns provide measurable targets for long-term health. Trump’s Oligarchic Approach to Pandemic vs a Regenerative Learning Society What makes societies thrive whether or not the economy grows? ESS teaches us to value collaborative learning, common-cause culture, regenerative circulation, and balanced structures. Its deeper message is that systemic vitality depends heavily on developing critically-thinking citizens linked in common-cause community. Here, human factors come first for obvious reasons. Energized intelligence makes us innovative and adaptive; common-cause values make us strong; and diversity and distributed empowerment make us resilient. Here, building belonging, commitment, contribution, caring and integrity are central to creating a vibrant human-networks aimed at building a better world for us all. ESS also says oligarchy fails because it runs counter to all of these laws. The Trump administration’s handling of the coronavirus shows the problem. Instead of intelligent learning and wise, rapid response, the Trump administration ignores medical scientists and puts relatives and sycophants in charge of addressing the pandemic. Instead of circulating money to the grassroots workers who need it the most, Trump’s bailout went first to the Wall Street bankers and large corporations who donate the most, but need it the least. Instead of resilience, decades of curtailed funding have eviscerated many of the institutions meant to address this problem, including the Center for Disease Control (CDC) and the National Institute of Health (NIH). Instead of common cause culture, Trump puts elite wealth first, and human health last. Not only did he bail out big business ahead of small business, but instead of using the Defence Production Act to require manufacturers to make more ventilators, Trump used it to force meatpackers to go back to infected factories to keep meat production up. What then shall we do? Repair, remake, redesign, and rethink – the best way to create a sustainable civilization is to apply similar techniques to cities, societies, economies and all the “throwaway people” that now fill our world. References Cahn, Edgar. 2004. No more throwaway people: The coproduction imperative. Washington DC: Essential Books. Christian, David. 2019. Origin story: A Big History of everything. New York: Little, Brown Spark. Fischer-Kowalski, M., W. Hüttler. 1998. Society's metabolism: The intellectual history of material flow analysis, Part I: 1860-1970. Journal of Industrial Ecology, 2(1), 61-78. Fischer-Kowalski, M., W. Hüttler. 1998. Society's metabolism: The intellectual history of material flow analysis, Part II: 1970-1998. Journal of Industrial Ecology, 2(1), 107 – 137. Margulis, Lynn. 1998. Symbiotic planet: A new look at evolution. New York: Basic Books. Raworth, Kate. 2017. 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