It's Easy Being Green: The Elegance of Nature
On Mondays, Michael explores the world of environmentalism and its intersection with queer culture in the column It’s Easy Being Green, despite what Kermit says.
A Fibonacci spiral, which illustrates the golden ratio and can be found throughout natural patterns.
Last week, I discussed how I believe that the meaning of live is to make order out of chaos, and how modern, “civilized” humans are quite possibly the only species that creates more disorder than order, in effect living out of sync with the purpose of our very existence.
While I might have butchered a simple law of physics in the process, I think my logic held up well enough to continue on along that vein. So, where are we? If the meaning of life is to create order out of disorder, what does that have to do with environmentalism? How exactly to people create “order” in the universe? What differentiates “order” from “disorder” anyway? Let’s explore this a bit.
I’ll bet that everyone reading this knows what pi is. Just to rehash, pi is the ratio of the circumference of a circle to it’s diameter. It works for every perfect circle, no matter the size. Pi is an irrational number, meaning that it has an infinite number of digits after the decimal point, and those digits have no pattern to them. This is pretty cool, and has inspired a lot of questioning about higher meanings of the universe.
While I find pi interesting, what I find more interesting is another irrational number that is also the ratio of things found in our world. It’s called phi (confusingly similar to pi) or “the golden ratio”, and unlike pi its derivation isn’t quite so simple. According to Wikipedia, 
Two quantities are in the golden ratio if the ratio between the sum of those quantities and the larger one is the same as the ratio between the larger one and the smaller.
That’s a lot of jibberish, I know, but the thing is that this ratio shows up EVERYWHERE in nature: in sea shells, sunflowers, the human body. It’s even in our DNA. The golden ratio explains a certain type of order that permeates life, and is found rarely elsewhere. Well, except for mathematics, art and architecture and music, all of which are the result of human brains trying to make order of and enjoy the natural world. A quote cited in the Wikipedia entry on the golden ratio from 1854 goes so far as to state:
[The Golden Ratio is a universal law] in which is contained the ground-principle of all formative striving for beauty and completeness in the realms of both nature and art, and which permeates, as a paramount spiritual ideal, all structures, forms and proportions, whether cosmic or individual, organic or inorganic, acoustic or optical; which finds its fullest realization, however, in the human form. [cite]
The Fibonacci spiral in a nautilus shell.
This is what I talk about when I refer to order. We humans so often go through our lives without any awareness of the bigger picture: that there is an elegance to all nature, and we are a part of that nature and should be contributing to that elegance in everything that we do.Instead, we tend to focus on our individual needs, perpetuating an unsustainable way of life that does not contribute to such order. We take what we need from nature and discard the rest, leaving so many formerly elegant structures and beings to collapse into chaos, digging ourselves into an ever deeper hole of disarray that no amount of modern “self actualization” can free us from.
Imagine any or all other life forms. They go through their lives finding that they get all of their needs met directly from nature. And the waste that they create goes back into nature, providing nutrients to other lifeforms, adding to even more order.
Think for a second about everything you touch over the course of an average day. Where did it come from? What are its component parts, and where did they originate? Where will these objects go when you’re done with them? Will they go back to their origin or assist other lifeforms in creating even more order? Or do they sit in a messy heap of garbage in some waste transfer station awaiting their final destinations in a landfill miles from where they are now?
Being truly green is a lot more than cutting down on driving and bringing your own bags to the grocery store. It can, it must, permeate every aspect of one’s life. True, it’s can be challenging to live in a truly green manner, but this is primarily because we have few resources that encourage and support green living. Luckily, these resources are becoming more and more readily available. And I’ll continue to explore how it can truly be easy to be green in this space every Monday. Stay tuned.
(I never said it was simple… Statistical thermodynamics was one of the hardest classes I’ve had. I think your argument stands up just as well (/better) appealing to the classical notions of “order” and “disorder” ;)
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