Systems ecology and environmentalism: Getting the science right. Part II: The Janus Enigma Hypothesis

Abstract Aspects of ecology-based environmentalism may run counter to how nature works; it is important to get the science right. The Janus Enigma Hypothesis is formulated as a flow–storage network approach to holistic ecological understanding. It proceeds from primary energy–matter consumption toward maximization of throughflow. When transferred material is energy, the goal function is maximum power (energy flow). The Janus Hypothesis has the following line of development: 1. The 2nd Law of Thermodynamics requires that the environments of aggrading (anti-entropic) processes become themselves degraded. To restrict such degradation is to limit life's processes. 2. A maximum power conjecture holds that aggrading systems self-organize to maximize power generating work. Maximal resource use, work production, and environmental degradation necessarily follow. This applies also to material flow in generalized energy–matter (throughflow) processing. 3. In maximizing power (throughflow), biota perform work to maximize their fitness (Type I, biological), but at the expense of degraded environments. Zero-sumness of conservative, consumptive transfers produces a proximate life–environment relationship that is win–lose. 4. But covert mechanisms also operate such that maximizing throughflow also maximizes a system-wide, nonzero-sum, network property— dominant indirect effects . 5. These maximize another property of network organization, network synergism . This transforms proximate, tangible, zero-sum, agonistic, (+, −) transactions into ultimate, intangible, nonzero-sum, mainly positive (+, +) and synergistic relations . The proximate transactions lead by network processes to ultimate nonzero-sum benefits > costs, which is network synergism. 6. By the indirect line from maximum power (throughflow) to network synergism, biotic work maximizes both biological and ecological fitness (Type II), and the life–environment relationship becomes win–win. This cannot be seen from pure empiricism because it plays out diffusely as limit processes in networks that are virtual. Three lines of evidence are presented in support of the Janus Hypothesis: (1) “Building a biosphere” by progressively adding nodes and links in simple compartment models shows throughflow and network synergism to be positively correlated. (2) Decomposing the utility measure of network synergism in these models into its constituents shows them to be largely made up of throughflows; maximum network synergism likely follows from the maximization of throughflow. (3) Comparing total system throughflow with network synergism in 31 food webs described for Ukrainian pasturelands shows the two measures to be positively correlated in this large empirical database. The Janus Hypothesis has a built-in paradox. Because the positive benefits derived from the nonzero-sum maximum throughflow → network synergism → Fitness-II line exceed the negative costs generated by the zero-sum maximum throughflow → Fitness-I line, applied programs designed to reduce environmental degradation will reduce not only Fitness-I, but also Fitness-II by foregoing the implicit benefits of network synergism that inherently exceed the explicit costs of maximizing throughflow. This is the Janus Enigma. It means that well-meaning but misguided environmental programs may actually, in fact must, induce a lose–lose relationship between life and environment. If the Janus Hypothesis proves scientifically valid, environmentalism must resolve and manage the apparent conflict, and ecology as its parent science must expand its dimensions and become a complex systems science competent in understanding and methodology to meet the challenges of complex, intractable, non-obvious holism in nature's living networks.