Kalle Reflects on How the Laws of Nature Underpin the Logic of the Operative System

Takeaway for leaders at all levels everywhere

This Reflection explores how the universal laws of nature, as described by Physics and Chemistry, together with Biology, have shaped our understanding of the world. In particular, it explores how Nature can be understood as a vast quality-generating system, continuously creating and maintaining structure, organization, and value from available resources.

Nature accomplishes this through a remarkably sophisticated information-processing technology. Every oak tree, eagle, coral reef, and human being is an expression of matter organized into higher quality through information. Atoms are positioned with extraordinary precision to create the biodiversity of Nature. The process is astonishingly efficient. Nature stores and processes information at a level estimated to be around 500 million times more efficient than the movement of zeros and ones in our digital memories. In fact, this level of sophistication approaches the point at which physical constants set the limits of what is theoretically possible.

So, the purpose of this Reflection is not to explore the Framework for Strategic Sustainable Development (FSSD) itself, nor how to apply it, but rather to illuminate the deep scientific foundations upon which it was built. Although we brought these elements together into a special area of science, as an essential step in the development of the FSSD, please read this Reflection as a general, free-standing essay. It is rich in innovative ideas and analogies within its own domain, so spend most of your time engaging with the Reflection on its own terms. The underlying physics, chemistry, and biology were indeed necessary for the forty-year development of the FSSD. Today, however, the FSSD is ready for use and can be learned and applied at high levels of expertise without detailed knowledge of the natural sciences outlined here.

Still, there may be value in looking behind the curtain. Understanding these scientific underpinnings can be intellectually stimulating and may deepen both appreciation of and engagement with the “FSSD game.” Not least because it helps us understand the virtually unimaginably high level of sophistication by which the Biosphere works, and thereby gives us greater leverage in our efforts to protect and safeguard it.

The Reflection is relatively long and can be viewed as a mini-course in science. You may read it either to learn something new or to revisit and connect ideas you already know. Even if you have studied Physics, Chemistry and Biology before, you may not have encountered them from the perspective of the biogeochemical cycles that underpin life and evolution on Earth. Perhaps you studied Thermodynamics in the context of heat engines such as the steam engine, but not in the context of the enormous quality-producing heat engine we call planet Earth? At the same time, it may be enlightening to learn how the associated terminology is often misused and being part of misinformation.

The text has been written with numerous explanations, analogies, and examples intended to create those rewarding “aha” moments of understanding.

Why not give it a shot?

More in detail

This Reflection is relatively long and can be viewed as a mini-course in science.

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Contents

An experiment of thought.

Physics: Laws that Govern All Systems

Chemistry, Material Accumulation and Boundary Conditions

Photosynthesis, Stored Energy, and Evolution

Social Sustainability

Nature as Information Technology

Concluding remarks

An experiment of thought: Before we begin exploring these topics, let us start with a thought experiment. It may help you realize that simply by growing up and observing the world around you, you have already learned to apply many of the physical laws we are about to discuss, often without being aware of it.

Imagine a small model of Nature: an aquarium that can sustain itself indefinitely as long as sunlight enters and heat is allowed to leave. Dead plants and animals are broken down and recycled into dispersed nutrients that become food for plants, which in turn become food for animals. New generations continuously emerge. The water remains clear, and the aquarium stays clean and pleasant to look at.

Now imagine placing this aquarium inside a gigantic, perfect thermos. No light can enter. No heat can leave. The aquarium is completely sealed off from its surroundings.

After a few years, you open the thermos.

What do you expect to see?

Fish happily swimming about, perhaps grateful to see the light again?

Or are they dead and on their way to be dissolved?

Is the water still crystal clear or muddy?

How does it smell?

It turns out that most people exposed to this thought experiment expect to see exactly what physics predicts: a foul mess. Without a continuous influx of high-performing energy (sunlight) to drive processes capable of converting waste back into resources (photosynthesis), and the accompanying export of low-performing energy (heat radiation), the aquarium’s model of the biosphere gradually breaks down and disperses into the simpler mixtures of matter from which it ultimately emerged. In effect, the thought experiment allows us to visualize biological evolution running in reverse.

Physics: Laws that Govern All Systems

First: Nothing disappears. The two conservation laws. Matter is conserved in all normal reactions, the principle of Matter conservation. And Energy is also conserved, the First law of Thermodynamics. Atoms entering any process leave it again, in the same quantities though often rearranged into different combinations e.g. as molecular and solid waste. Energy likewise is never destroyed, only transformed into different forms.

Second: Everything spreads. According to the Second Law of Thermodynamics all energy transformations irreversibly lead to more and more disperse energy to eventually end up as dispersed heat. Matter also tends to mix and disperse over time. A burning log or a rusting car illustrates both processes: the same atoms and the same energy remain, but in dispersed and mixed forms that are less useful to us.

Third: Quality matters. From the first two relationships follows a crucial insight: it is not the quantity of matter or energy that is consumed in all processes, but their quality. Ordered, concentrated matter and high-quality energy are consumed, degraded and dispersed into mixed, diffuse forms. Always. Just as an inner exercise of thought: You eat food, but no matter is consumed – all the atoms in the food remain after your meal. Where did it go? Or the potential energy of gasoline; where did all the energy go, and where did the molecules go when the tank is empty?

These laws naturally apply also to Earth as a whole. A natural question therefore arises: how could the biosphere—with its growing complexity and order of high-value quality—have evolved at all under such laws?

To explain this, let us unpack the three physical principles above a bit by introducing the corresponding terms within the language of Physics.

Energy, First Law of Thermodynamics, Second Law of Thermodynamics and Entropy

Energy is motion in its broadest physical sense. This includes visible motion—such as winds, sea waves, vehicles—as well as less visible forms like molecular motion, electric currents, and electromagnetic radiation. In all energy transformations, motion is conserved but it is bound to become increasingly dispersed until it ends up as disperse heat distributed over very large numbers of moving particles.

For example, the potential energy stored in fuel may be converted into kinetic energy of a moving car. Throughout the entire journey, the total amount of energy (motion created from the fuel’s potential energy) remains constant, but its form changes continuously. Friction in the engine, turbulence in the air, deformation of tires, and interaction with the asphalt all create heat that disperse more and more from the recruiting of more and more articles into the “bumping”. Whereby temperature drops everywhere from where the heating appeared, since the total motion is conserved amongst more and more particles sharing it.

Energy thus appears in multiple forms: kinetic energy (macroscopic motion), heat and electricity (microscopic motion of particles or charges), and potential energy (stored capacity for motion, such as in fuels, food, or water held at elevation behind a dam). If you want to experience the “bumping” of particles in heat, just think of putting your finger into hot water. So, energy is conserved in all processes. Yet something essential is nonetheless consumed. What is it?

Exergy is the measure of energy’s quality—its capacity to perform useful work. Only use this term when you think or talk about energy, not matter. Unlike energy itself, exergy is consumed in all real processes. Exergy exists only by virtue of contrasts or gradients: differences in height within a gravitational field e.g. in a waterfall, chemical disequilibria such as fuel in the presence of oxygen (gasoline or biomass surrounded by oxygenated air), electrical potential differences between plus and minus poles, or temperature differences between hot and cold.

As these gradients are diminished, exergy may be used for high utility performance in processes, but is still inevitably destroyed. Completely dispersed heat—thermal motion uniformly spread at ambient temperature—contains energy but no exergy, because it lacks any contrast that could be harnessed for work. Electricity, represents energy of very high exergy since it can, in principle, be almost entirely converted into work. Incoming sunlight to Earth is another example of extremely high-exergy energy. When used for work, however, these exergy sources eventually end up as dispersing heat that becomes so diffuse that it has lost all its exergy as the temperature falls to ambient and there are no contrasts left.

The most prominent example of exergy loss in the Earth system is the continuous emission of infrared radiation into outer space. By the time solar energy leaves Earth in this form, it has lost essentially all of its capacity to perform work. Energy remains; exergy does not.

Entropy provides the accounting framework for this quality loss of energy. It is a direct consequence of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, and is therefor also called the Entropy law. Entropy measures the degree to which energy has become dispersed, reflecting the irreversible production of disorder of the motion, that accompanies every process in which exergy is consumed. In thermodynamics, entropy is said to be produced in proportion to the exergy destroyed.

A related but distinct concept is “Mixing Entropy”, which applies to when also materials are engaged in processes related to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, e.g. fuels. When matter is dispersed—for example, when smoke or ashes are emitted from exhaust pipes or chimneys, or when pollutants spread through air, water, and soil—mixing-entropy increases through the random mixing of substances. While this form of entropy is usually very small in numerical terms compared to thermal entropy, its consequences are often profound or devastating and even more profound to sustainability than the entropy accompanying consumption of exergy. This is partly because mixing entropy explains how valuable resources such as metals, during poor management, may disperse and get lost, partly also because it explains how pollution disperses until we may find all kinds of pollutants foreign to nature in mother’s milk, even amongst Polar bears far away from the sources of pollution.

Closed (insulated) systems inevitably evolve toward thermodynamic equilibrium—a state sometimes referred to as heat death, think of the insulated aquarium example above. Open systems, however, can maintain or even increase internal order if they receive a continuous input of exergy, have some mechanism to apply that exergy to run processes that create material order back from disorder, and export entropy to their surroundings to sustain the contrasts.

The biosphere operates precisely in this way, as well as the open aquarium in the thought-experiment above. High-exergy sunlight drives photosynthesis of plant cells, upon which virtually all biological order depends, while low-exergy infrared radiation carries entropy back into outer space. Civilization, as a subsystem embedded within the biosphere, is subject to the same constraints.

From this perspective, a high-order human society cannot be sustainable if it relies primarily on internal, finite exergy stocks such as fossil fuels or nuclear fuels. These sources draw down gradients that are not renewed within the Earth system. Perpetual motion machines are impossible—not only in theory e.g. in machines, but at every scale.

The Sun–space system, by contrast, functions as an external exergy source that will continue to operate for roughly another two billion years. This raises the central question for sustainability science: what fundamental mechanisms enable the biosphere—and human civilization within it—to convert incoming solar exergy into enduring order?

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Photosynthesis (“building with light”), uses the incoming and high exergy solar beams, to continuously rebuild structure from disperse matter —creating plants from carbon dioxide, water, and other dispersed nutrients—while the resulting waste heat, entropy, leaves the system. Which is thus open to exergy import to reproduce biomass and oxygenated air, as well as entropy export to sustain the contrasts in the Earth’s ecosystem.

Over billions of years, this process has enabled what we call the Cycles of Nature: large, coupled cycles in which plants, animals, and microorganisms together produce and maintain conditions favorable for life. Within a finite amount of matter, biological complexity and value has increased dramatically during evolution, while generated entropy has been continuously exported into outer space. All to sustain the contrasts, or gradients, between the hot incoming sunbeams and the relatively colder environment. This also explains why photovoltaics in relatively cold climates as Sweden work so surprisingly well. Though the warmth in the air, radiated from the heated ground as infrared light, is relatively low compared to countries in the South, the contrast to the hot incoming sunbeams is still very high.

This physical logic is the deep reason why life can exist at all—and why it can persist only if we model and reach futures withing the boundary conditions of sustainability, see below.

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Chemistry and the Logic of Material Accumulation

Chemistry adds the next layer of insight by explaining how different substances behave when they circulate through society and nature. These behaviors are part of biological evolution, but also give rise to predictable sustainability related risks if various practices are modelled and tested by use of the boundary conditions. Nature, or the Biosphere, has evolved to exist within a perfect cyclic balance of resources on the one hand, and waste on the other. Three overriding mechanisms can destroy this fundamental balance, only three, see below. But they create myriad and unmanageable sustainability related impacts if civilization’s design continues to violate the boundary conditions.

Now, based on the above, let us look at the boundary conditions for ecological sustainability, one by one, and explore them through the laws of Nature.

Boundary Condition 1: A design principle by which Substances from the Earth’s Crust are no longer emitted, or leak, into Nature to cause systematically increasing concentrations of disperse waste and waste molecules there.

Chemical elements differ greatly in their natural abundance within the biosphere. Light metals such as aluminum or titanium are already abundant in natural systems, and natural fluxes from weathering and volcanic activity far exceed those caused by mining. Consequently, moderate leakages from society do not significantly alter their background concentrations. (Though we must still strive for close-loop recycling of valuable light metals, see the social boundary condition 7 e.g. in previous reflections)

In contrast, many heavy metals—such as copper, zinc, cadmium, or lead—are normally scarce in natural ecosystems. When societal emissions and leakages of waste of metals and other minerals exceed natural background levels, concentrations in nature inevitably increase to levels that must not be exceeded for survival of Nature. Because elements do not degrade, such accumulation is irreversible without deliberate recovery and recycling, and governance models to ensure this.

A well known industrial example illustrates this logic. By comparing natural flows from volcanos and eruption, and the natural base line levels in natural systems, with the corresponding values from human extraction, Electrolux identified long term risks associated with certain metals such as Copper. So they shifted product design toward naturally more abundant alternatives such as Aluminum, thereby reducing future sustainability risks through informed material choice. They earned billions by being ahead of the game.

It is VERY important to understand that this boundary condition does not state that mining of, for instance Copper, would be bad. Only that the more scarce an element is in Nature, that we mine for, the more rigorously we must justify the mining so that it is not there to cover for losses but only to build up a valuable resource in Society. Furthermore, we must make sure that we develop business models also to comply with the 7:th boundary condition (i.e. close-loop recycling for impartiality reasons between generations).

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Boundary Condition 2: A design principle by which Substances Produced by Society do not leak into Nature to cause systematically increasing concentrations of such waste either.

The second boundary condition concerns compounds created and emitted through societal activity. It is not only about “synthetic” chemicals since naturally occurring substances may also build up in concentrations, e.g. Nitrogen oxides from cow-urine polluting waters around a farm, or from incinerated biofuels.

Some other molecules, even very toxic ones such as acetone, degrade rapidly into smaller harmless waste-molecules that are re-captured by Natural cycles into new resources. Others are both persistent and foreign to biological systems. An understanding of an extreme risk that calls for very different strategies for gradual re-design of operations, even if are not yet aware of their safe thresholds or what will happen when those are trespassed.

Or in other words, Persistent compounds Foreign to Nature, with natural “zero”-baselines such as CFCs (Freons), PFAS (anti-flammables), PCB (plastic materials mainly used in electric components) pose particularly high systemic risks. Already at very low leakages into Nature, their stability allows concentrations in Nature to build up over time, leading to un-foreseen ecological and health effects far away from the leakages or emissions, such as ozone depletion, endocrine disruption or cancer. We must switch from “removing” such compounds only after damage has occurred, to re-designing them out of the system before this happens. The Nobel prize winner Sherwood Rowland, who explored the chemistry by which Freon’s degrade the Ozon layer, was one of the signatories of a document stating that it is mandatory to apply the FSSDs Operative system to manage all chemicals sustainably. Continuing to run after reality and correcting flaws of design only when ecotoxic thresholds are exceeded and validated, amongst hundreds of thousands of chemicals, will not work.

There are, in this sense, no inherently sustainable or un-sustainable materials—only societal and organizational patterns of use and management that are either. Like with scarce metals, we can for instance imagine a persistent molecule, foreign to nature, that can uniquely cure a certain cancer. This calls for rigorous management routines, i.e. collecting the medicine in urine, after administration to patients, and destroying it e.g. by incineration. Addressing such management patterns is precisely the role of the Operative System.

Boundary condition 3; A design Principle by which the Civilization no longer destroys Nature by Physical means.

It is very area-consuming for Nature to make use of the incoming sunlight to create quality of matter, the “order” sufficient for the Civilization-Nature system. So, nature’s ecosystems can be systematically destroyed not only by the two different design-flaws behind systematically increasing pollution, but also by systematically increasing destruction by Physical mechanisms. For instance, encroaching on fertile land through expanding urban sprawl, overharvesting, overfishing, desertification by failing to recycle nutrients back to soil or through un-sustainable water-manipulation that drains groundwater tables.

So, the unsustainable destruction of the same civilization-nature system occurs by three different design flaws and this problem can only be solved by redesign, modelling possible desirable futures within the three boundary conditions, and then stepwise move gradually with improved financial outcomes in this direction.

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Photosynthesis, Stored Energy, and Evolution

It follows from the above section of Physics, that Photosynthesis converts solar energy into chemical potential, stored in biomass and accompanied by the release of oxygen as “waste” being put into the air during the process. Animals make use of this stored exergy by eating and breathing. Their cells metabolize the potential chemical energy in food, breathe in Oxygen that Photosynthesis has put in the atmosphere, exhale CO2 and water vapor back into the air, whereafter the cycle can be repeated indefinitely. For as long as the Sun provides the right temperature for this i.e. for another around 2 billion years.

So, in physical terms, the biosphere functions like a vast, self regenerating “quality machine”. Hot solar radiation surrounded by a cooler environment creates gradients and these gradients have driven evolution from the earliest photosynthesizing organisms to today’s rich diversity of life.

Over many billions of years, increasing biological order emerged. Remarkably, most animal diversification occurred within the last half billion years, enabled by the mobility and complex internal regulation of first amoebas and later more advanced animals . Human civilization, based on agriculture and specialization of labor, occupies only a tiny fraction of this timeline – it began with agriculture only 10.000 years ago.

Today, however, societal processes are violating the boundary conditions by design, increasingly reversing the evolutionary trend by converting concentrated resources into dispersed waste faster than natural systems can restore order. Understanding this trajectory clarifies why deliberate redesign is not optional but essential. If you want to read more about Evolution in particular, taking into account also Physical evolution before the Biological, I recommend the article “from Big Bang to Sustainable Societies”, co-authored with professor of theoretical physics Karl-Erik Eriksson https://fssd.global/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/From-Big-Bang-to-Sustainable-Societies-Eriksson_and_Robert_1991.pdf. Evolution brings us to the need also for social sustainability amongst humans.

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Boundary Conditions 4-8, operationally defining Social sustainability.

Humans have developed civilization, and it is civilization currently destroying it. Unfortunately, humans are destroying the scientific basis for ecological sustainability as well as the social. This is at a time when we would need social sustainability more than ever for re-design of also of our ecological relationships. This aspect can obviously not be understood by the above basic laws of Nature. So it goes beyond this Reflection and I recommend to go to the Reflection that specifically addresses social sustainability, and how this can be explored by 5 boundary conditions designed for robust guidance of Social (re)design.

Nature as an Information Technology

One of the most striking features of biological systems is their extraordinary efficiency in processing information. Life achieves immense functionality with minimal exergy consumption.

To get a sense of this, consider information transfer in different processes. An old type electric typewriter consumes roughly one joule of exergy per bit of information, the exergy amount needed to write for instance “A” on a piece of paper. Traditional television systems improved that efficiency by orders of magnitude. Modern computer memory is roughly a trillion times more efficient than a typewriter.

Yet biological information processing—encoded in DNA and executed through cellular machinery to produce life—is hundreds of millions of times more efficient even than modern digital memory. Using DNA coded instructions, atoms are arranged into oak trees, microscopic algae, birds, and human beings, all integrated into self maintaining ecological cycles.

This efficiency is not incidental. Organisms must process enormous amounts of information every second to stay alive, repair damage, and function coherently within ecosystems. IT- inefficiency at the levels tolerated by technical systems would make life physically impossible.

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Concluding remarks

The implications of a deeper World’s view built on science are profound. There is likely no theoretical upper limit to how much society can mimic Nature’s IT performance to save resources per utility value, all through more sophisticated social and ecological design. It’s about innovative ways of design that replaces brute force material and energy throughput with intelligent information flows for improved quality of life everywhere.

At its deepest level, quality of life is shaped and experienced by information: how we interpret experiences, products, environments, and social relations. By redesigning technical and social systems within the inescapable boundary conditions set by nature, it becomes possible to reduce material and energy use dramatically while simultaneously increasing human well being from the start. We seek more successful forerunners to make it in time.

The Operative System offers leaders a scientifically grounded framework for doing exactly this. It fosters innovation, scalability, and prosperity, while maintaining respect for the biosphere as the foundational system upon which all human activity depends.

Understanding the laws of nature at this level also sharpens one final and essential capability: caution. We would never pour liquids into our computers, even “harmless” ones like coffee. Yet we routinely expose the biosphere—an immensely more sophisticated information system—to substances and flows in concentrations and/or types it has never encountered and cannot manage.

Recognizing this mismatch between technological power and ecological understanding is the first step toward mature stewardship of our home in the universe.