“I don’t have much hope for this century,” Kristine Tompkins of said in a recent interview. She’s the CEO of Patagonia, and was speaking about the rapid unraveling of ecological and social systems. What she said wasn’t new—but the clarity and steadiness of her voice made it land differently. Sometimes it’s not new facts that move us, but a new weight behind them.
She added, “I don’t really think about hope very much.” That stuck with me. Over time, I’ve come to see hope less as a virtue and more as a shield—often a way to hide from fear. Fear of collapse, of not being enough, of powerlessness. Hope becomes a mask when we can’t face those fears directly.
Tompkins chose action. She helped protect over 15 million acres in Chile and Argentina and reintroduce lost species. She encourages people to do what they can: volunteer, connect with nature, offer their skills. It’s meaningful. But it may not be enough.
Most people who seriously engage with the human predicament feel the impulse to act—to fix, to intervene. We’re the only species that tries to repair the world. The rest focus on surviving, reproducing, and making the most of their short lives. What exactly are we trying to fix? Maybe that urge says more about us than about the world itself.
We tend to think we’re the only beings capable of meaning or joy. But nature suggests otherwise. Birds sing each morning—not out of duty, but out of being. Science offers reasons, but those don’t explain the beauty. Humans, meanwhile, wake to the burden of fixing. Our stories are soaked in redemption. Birds sing. Humans strive. There’s a lesson in that.
Alfred Lotka offered another way of seeing. Building on Darwin, he framed evolution as a function of energy. Systems evolve to maximize energy flow, he proposed—laying the foundation for the Maximum Power Principle.
Odum and Pinkerton advanced this idea. It’s not just energy that matters—it’s power: the rate at which energy flows. Too fast and you burn out. Too slow and you fall behind. Charles Hall extended this to Energy Return on Investment (EROI): what matters isn’t how much energy you produce, but how much remains after you subtract the energy it took to extract and deliver it.
Hall summed it up clearly:
“The maximum accumulation of energy allows maximum reproductive output which is, after all, what natural selection is based on.”
This shift in thinking changes everything. Many popular solutions—renewable energy, degrowth—clash with the way natural systems actually operate. Nature selects for power, not restraint.
Energy is potential, an abstraction. We can’t touch it, only measure its effects. It becomes real—useful—only when it flows. That flow is power. And power is what drives everything from machines to ecosystems. (Figure 1).
Figure 1. Energy is an abstraction–Power is real.
Source: Labyrinth Consulting Services, Inc.
Click on the image to enlarge.
That’s why renewable energy isn’t a one-to-one substitute for fossil fuels (Figure 2). Fossil fuels deliver high-density, high-speed power—concentrated solar energy, stored in coal, oil and and natural gas, and released in bursts. This is what built industrial civilization.
Renewables are slower, more diffuse. Matching fossil fuel flow rates requires massive infrastructure and storage—systems that themselves demand energy.
Viewed through the Maximum Power Principle, this is a downgrade. It’s not just changing fuel—it’s stepping down to a system that delivers less usable power. A high-energy civilization can’t run on slower sources without major simplification.
Figure 2. A civilization built on fast, surplus-rich energy flows can’t run on slower, diffuse sources.
Source: Labyrinth Consulting Services, Inc.
Click on the image to enlarge.
It gets worse.
There are two basic ways systems use energy. One is linear—energy comes in, gets used once, and then drifts off as waste heat. Like sunlight warming a rock. Nothing builds, nothing feeds back (Figure 3).
The other way is autocatalytic: some energy gets used to capture even more. An animal burns calories to chase food. A city uses energy to expand the infrastructure that pulls in more resources. Energy drives feedback, and feedback drives growth.
Fossil fuels powered the creation of machines that extracted more fossil fuels. They’re autocatalytic. Renewables are less autocatalytic. They don’t sustain that kind of feedback loop.
Figure 3. It gets worse. Renewable energy is linear. Fossil fuels are autocatalytic.
Source: Labyrinth Consulting Services, Inc.
Click on the image to enlarge.
Yet many assume we can swap fuels and continue as before. That’s reductionist thinking—focusing on parts, not the whole. Civilization is a web of feedback loops. Break the energy flow, and the structure unravels.
The Maximum Power Principle helps explain why. Systems don’t survive by being efficient. They survive by maximizing useful energy flow. Not all energy is equal. Not all fuels can support complex systems.
So yes, renewables have a role. But they require a different kind of civilization—smaller, slower, more local, far less energy-intensive. Fewer people. Simpler lives.
That might not be bad. But most who advocate for renewables haven’t thought through what it really means.
As Daniel Yergin, Peter Orszag, and Atul Arya put it:
“The energy transition is not just about energy; it is about rewiring and reengineering the entire global economy.”
It’s not a substitution. It’s a transformation.
Nate Hagens takes it further. He links the Maximum Power Principle to the whole human predicament: we get daily reminders the global economy isn’t working—rising inequality, debt dependence, political instability, ecological decay. To avoid confronting biophysical limits, we’re using finance to extract what we can’t afford, and consume what we shouldn’t.
Civilization, he writes, functions like a superorganism—a global web of humans, machines, institutions, and systems acting as one. It’s not conscious, but it behaves as if it is.
It’s blind, hungry, and in charge. It follows energy and momentum, not foresight. Still, he believes individuals and small groups can respond—prepare, adapt, soften the landing.
Tompkins echoes this. The causes of climate chaos are clear, she says. But the will to act is missing. Voluntary efforts won’t cut it. Real change needs hard limits—enforced accountability.
She sees the need to leave fossil fuels behind. But if the Maximum Power Principle holds, that shift likely means collapse. Climate chaos won’t come alone. It’ll bring social breakdown too, as energy systems fail and the structures built on them fall apart.
The one solution many believed in no longer holds. So what now?
There are deeper implications here. Most people feel something is off. They blame leadership, policy, politics. Some see the crisis as economic. Others see it as environmental. Many feel helpless—and have stopped trying.
But beneath all of this is determinism. The system’s momentum, its energy patterns, the feedback loops—it all suggests we’re being carried, not steering.
And yet, those who see the crisis still tend to blame society. Nearly every report begins with “despite decades of warnings…” as if we could’ve prevented this.
But the path we took wasn’t just ignorance or error. It was the logic of nature itself. Life expands by maximizing power. From bacteria to cities, systems grow by capturing more energy. Evolution doesn’t optimize for good. It optimizes for throughput.
As Hagens says, energy is the currency of life. I’d add: population is the currency of evolution. Agriculture didn’t make us healthier—but it fed more people. Civilization runs on fossil fuels and credit—not because they’re ideal, but because they scale.
The Agricultural Revolution wasn’t a mistake. It was a shift. A moment when we began serving a system larger than ourselves. Today, that system is the superorganism.
Until we see this not as moral failure but as systemic outcome, we’ll keep missing the point.
In that light, collapse isn’t failure. It’s part of the cycle. Systems overshoot. Some burn out. Others adapt. Evolution doesn’t care if the game ends. It just plays it. Calls for foresight and sustainability don’t speak in evolutionary terms. They speak in human values. Ethics. Longing.
Nature is not only balance. It’s also extinction, overshoot, and churn. That’s the tension. We celebrate nature’s laws, then ask to override them. It’s like praising the lion and then scolding it for killing the gazelle.
Nature doesn’t do oughts. It just is.
The drive to fix may not be about changing outcomes. It may be how we cope. A way to stay human. Even in collapse, we reach for meaning.
But psychology holds little ground in modern life. The World Health Organization says over a billion people live with anxiety or depression. Only 15 percent seek help. We once had myth, ritual, and community. Now we have reason. But logic doesn’t hold grief. It doesn’t heal.
Modern thinking is reductionist. It wants parts, solutions, action. Introspection slows things down.
That’s not a flaw. It may serve the superorganism better. Reflection interrupts growth. A species tending its soul is less useful to a system bent on expansion. And so, quietly, we let that part of ourselves go.
Still, we don’t know what’s coming. Tompkins believes in Black Swans—tipping points we can’t predict. “Am I pessimistic about this century? Yeah. But we don’t know how it will turn out.”
Lotka and Odum used thermodynamics to understand life. Their insights were transformative. But even they had limits. Quantum theory has no explanation for matter, life, or consciousness—yet these are the ground of experience.
Einstein once said: “Whether you can see something or not depends on the theory you use.”
Above the Temple of Apollo at Delphi were the words: “Know thyself.” Maybe that was the oracle’s way of saying: you already know—you just can’t see it.
The metacrisis isn’t just ecological or political. It’s psychological. It’s spiritual. A rupture in how we relate to reality, nature, and each other.
Healing won’t come from solutions. It begins with honesty. With facing what we’ve denied.
Real change asks for presence. Not perfection. It asks us to sit in the dark until our eyes adjust.
To face the metacrisis, we must realign with reality. Accept our full humanity—our destructiveness, our beauty. Embrace humility. Reconnect with life.
This path isn’t for everyone. It demands transformation. And it starts with those ready to see–mostly young minds who are not just smart, but awake. Those who care can guide them—not to escape, but to engage. To think differently. To recover meaning. To remember wonder.
What we call determinism isn’t the only way of seeing. There are others. Analysis without presence is hollow. Science isn’t just a method. It’s a way of being in the world.
As Iain McGilchrist wrote:
“Little though we are, we don’t know how big that is.”
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Art Berman is Director of Labyrinth Consulting Services, Sugar Land, Texas, and a world-renowned energy consultant with expertise based on over 40 years of experience working as a petroleum geologist. Visit his website, Shattering Energy Myths: One Fact at a Time, and learn more about Art here.
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