Abstract
Enrique Leff is a philosopher and environmentalist from Mexico who focuses his work on fields of epistemology, the political ecology, and environmental education. His work has inspired many and he has continued to educate the public in Mexico as well as internationally through his involvement with the United Nations Environment Program.
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Beyond its meaning in information theory and a measure of order, I derive the concept of negentropy from the thermodynamic meaning assigned by Erwin Schrödinger (1944) to the principle of life as the energy captured from the sun and transformed through the photosynthetic process in biochemical energy. Negentropy is not intended to negate the ineluctable entropic process throughout all the trophic chain and metabolic processes – including the industrial metabolism of natural resources and energy losses in throughput – but to state the fact that sustainability of biodiversity, human life and production, implies the preservation and enhancement of negentropy as source of life and life support systems. I extend the concept in a heuristic sense to ecological, cultural and social organization that enhances this principle in the social modes of appropriation of nature, thus guiding and inducing the construction of sustainability counter to the prevailing entropic modes of production and cultural organization that view development as social evolution through complexifying structures that maximize the use and transformation of energy, the fundamental cause of the environmental crisis.
References
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Georgescu-Roegen, Nicholas (1971) The Entropy Law and the Economic Process, Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
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Schrödinger, Erwin (1944) What is Life, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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Maintains that sustainability must be a condition for an alternative social rationality
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Leff, E. Forging an Environmental Rationality for a Sustainable Future. Development 54, 174–176 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1057/dev.2011.23
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/dev.2011.23