The Ecologists

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The Ecologists

• Material Circulation, Energy Hierarchy, and
  Building Construction

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What is Ecology?

• Ecology is the study of populations, communities,
  and ecosystems

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Energy Hierarchy

• A hierarchy is a pattern of organization in which
  many units at one level converge to fewer units
  at the next
• ex. Tree example Many leaves and small roots
  send organic substances and material to branches,
  the branches send products to the tree trunk

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Emergy

• Emergy (spelled with an m) evaluates all the
  work previously done to make a product or service
• Emergy is a measure of energy used in the past
  that is different from a measure of energy now

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Empower

• Empower is the rate of emergy flow
• Empower is measured in the units emjoules per
  time

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Transformity

• Transformity is defined as the emergy of one kind
  of available energy required directly and
  indirectly to make one joule of energy of another
  type
• The ratio of emergy to available energy

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Laws of Thermodynamics

• 1. Energy is conserved
• 2. Energy concentrations are spontaneously
  dispersed
• 3. The complexity of heat is zero (-273
  degrees C) when molecular motions cease

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Laws of Thermodynamics (cont....)

• 4. The maximum empower principle (Lotka,
  1922a,b)
• 5. The universal energy hierarchy- all energy
  transformations form a series marked by
  transformity (Odum 1996a,2001)
• 6. Materials are coupled to the energy
  transformation hierarchy and circulate toward
  centers of hierarchical concentration,
  recycling to dispersed background concentration

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Materials and Energy Hierarchy

• Material cycles
• Material budgets

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Material Valuation

• Emdollar
• Value of materials concentration

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Emdollar

• Relates emergy to economic values
• Monetary equivalent of emergy is the emdollar
  (the equivalent dollars of buying power)

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Calculation of the Emdollar

• Total emergy used divided by gross domestic
  product
• ex. In 1997, US average emergy to money ratio is
  1.1 trillion emjoules/dollar
• To express emergy values of materials in
  emdollars, divide it by the emergy/money ratio

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Kinds of Materials and Emergy Mass

• Mass emergy indicates the energy role of
  materials
• The more abundant the material is in the
  geobiosphere, the higher the concentration of the
  materials in the levels of the energy hierarchy

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Value of Material Concentration

• Higher concentration of materials, the more
  energy it contains
• Emdollar values are higher than market values
  because they include the services of both Nature
  and Humans

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Metabolism

• Metabolism is the processing of materials and
  energy
• Metabolism is represented quantitatively by
  either the rate of energy processing or material
  processing

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Material Circulation and the Hierarchical Units

• The Process
• Construction
• Depreciation
• Replacing parts and whole
• Material dispersal from use of the structure
• Destruction and recycle

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Construction (Production)

• Production is the incorporation of materials into
  a new product with help of an energy source

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Depreciation

• Spontaneous loss of structure
• Depreciation releases materials that were
  previously bound into the structure

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Replacing Parts and Wholes

• When structures depreciate, parts become
  non-functional and need to be replaced
• Maintenance is replacing parts of something
  larger to keep it operating

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Material Dispersal from Use

• Waste materials that are returned back to nature
  in their original concentration
• Roots of a big tree gathers nutrients from a
  large area and brings nutrients to the rest of
  the tree-gt when the leaves fall and decompose
  these nutrients are dispersed back to the ground
  over a broad area

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Destruction and Recycle

• Use of a destruction process that uses energy and
  work from larger scales to disperse the structure
  while utilizing some stored energy

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Self-Organization

• Self-organization is the spontaneous emergence of
  new structures and new forms of behavior in open
  systems far from equilibrium, characterized by
  internal feedback loops and described
  mathematically by nonlinear equations

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Self-Organization(cont...)

• A self-organizing system does not just import
  order from its environment, but takes in
  energy-rich matter, integrates it into its own
  structure, and thereby increases its internal
  order

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Ecological Engineering

• Ecological engineering fits human civilization
  into the environment so that they reinforce each
  other
• This has resulted in the new field of industrial
  ecology (construction ecology)

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Maximum Empower Principle

• The maximum empower principle is a unifying
  concept that explains why there are material
  cycles, autocatalytic feedback, successional
  stages, spatial concentrations in centers, and
  pulsing over time
• Designs prevail that maximize power
• This principle is a refinement of Lotkas
  proposed 4th Law of Thermodynamics- The maximum
  power principle

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Spatial Concentration

• As the materials are part of the production and
  transformation process, they are also converged
  and concentrated into centers
• This happens at each stage of energy hierarchy

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Autocatalytic Feedback
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Pulsing

• A destructive force which disrupts the
  environment and allows for renewal
• Large scale example
• earthquakes
• volcanic actions
• catastrophic storms
• disease epidemics
• economic storms
• Small Scale example
• Rainforests hit by hurricanes- rapidly regrowth
  of foliage

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Succession

• The building of structures and replacing them in
  cycles is called stages
• The sequence of staging is called succession

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Upscale Overview

• Understanding and management of any process
  requires overview at the next largest scale
• The overview needs to take into account the
  longer time scale of the life cycle of
  construction and reconstruction
• Connie Grenz of Collin Pine Company of Portland
  Oregon explained how the provision was made for
  longer sustained productivity rather than
  short-term exploitation profit.

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Characteristic for Zones

• Evaluating energy mass identifies zones
• These help indicate the design properties needed
  for the system to be sustainable, such as the
  territory of support and replacement time
  conversely the territory and replacement times
  determine the emergy per mass of materials that
  are appropriate

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Returning Waste to the Environment

• Waste materials that are too dilute to be reused
  or reprocessed economically require public
  management
• It is beneficial to reprocess a material if the
  emergy/mass ratio is high

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Global Materials and Construction

• Human uses start when materials are mined and
  processed into stocks available to the building
  industries
• During construction the materials are
  incorporated into buildings and are eventually
  released to the global cycle at the end of the
  buildings life-cycle
• Human services are involved only on the right
  side of the global hierarchy

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The End of a Materials Cycle

• When old structures are taken out of use their
  place on the emergy hierarchy helps determine
  whether to reuse, recycle or reprocess

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Future in Construction Ecology

• In the future, when reserves (energy and
  materials) are less, self-organization will be
  required to adapt buildings and material
  processing
• Buildings will become more permanent and diverse

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Summary

• In spite of, and because of, human creativity and
  purpose, civilization and ecosystems build
  structure and recycle according to the principles
  of the energy hierarchy