Abstract
The world’s population is growing constantly and, more importantly, the need for raw materials and food products is growing quickly, as a result of the western development model. The energy-consuming (energivorous) and consumerist nature of this model is being consolidated globally, ignoring both the issue of resource limitations, and the medium-long term environmental consequences (e.g. climate change, water pollution). This development model, in order to maintain its internal integrity and further develop (often at increasing rates of growth), needs to import energy and materials from the external environment and to produce waste and disorder (entropy) in an inexorable slide toward thermodynamic equilibrium. Sustainable development should focus on contrasting these processes as far as possible, and on developing suitable planning praxes. This paper aims to show how to achieve sustainable land-use through local resource evaluation, overturning the “linear” logic of acquisition-consumption-disposal of wastes, in search of circular processes, capable of reducing entropy growth in a social-ecological system. An analysis of the exergetic availabilities of the landscape mosaic demonstrates great potential for exploiting energy supplies from local and renewable sources, thus lessening the system’s overall impact on the global environment.
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Notes
- 1.
Woodlands have been an insurance against famine, providing forage for livestock, but, in extreme cases, forage for humans too.
- 2.
Sadi Carnot was the son of Lazarus Carnot, known as the “Organizer of victory” of the French Revolution and an archetypal modern man: engineer, mathematician, politician and freemason. It can be said that Sadi and Lazarus Carnot personify the Modern Age.
- 3.
Indeed, it seems that this shrinking process is started and even rich northwest young people heredity a minor living level.
- 4.
The Georgescu-Roegen (1971) economic theory has to date scarcely influenced praxis and economic mainstream thinking.
- 5.
Also the environment has a dynamic nature, if on a larger temporal scale, as Darwin demonstrated.
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Leone, A., Gobattoni, F., Pelorosso, R. (2016). Energy Supply, Thermodynamics and Territorial Processes as a New Paradigm of Sustainability in Planning Science and Practice. In: Papa, R., Fistola, R. (eds) Smart Energy in the Smart City. Green Energy and Technology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-31157-9_5
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