For centuries, economics has conceived of itself as an autonomous science. An abstract mechanics governed by prices, markets, interest rates, production and exchange. In this vision inherited from the Enlightenment and the industrial revolution, nature was merely a backdrop: a vast reservoir of resources destined to fuel human growth indefinitely.
But a fundamental flaw runs through this entire intellectual edifice.
Modern economics has forgotten physics.
For before being monetary, financial or accounting, all human activity is first a material and energetic process governed by the laws of thermodynamics. Producing, transporting, transforming, consuming, digitizing, building or extracting always involves an irreversible degradation of matter and energy.
The contemporary ecological crisis can therefore no longer be reduced to a simple problem of pollution or poor market regulation. It reveals something far deeper: a contradiction between the current organization of our industrial civilization and the physical limits of the living world.
In other words, the ecological crisis is also a thermodynamic crisis.
I. The Great Economic Illusion
Mainstream economics has historically rested on a mechanical representation of the world. Classical models often describe the economy as a circular system in which production and consumption balance out in a near-perfect loop. In this abstract representation, resources seem substitutable, technology appears capable of solving any scarcity, and growth could theoretically continue indefinitely.
But this vision collides head-on with the second law of thermodynamics: the entropy principle.
This law states that with every energy transformation, a portion of energy becomes irretrievably unavailable for useful work. Total energy is conserved, but its quality progressively degrades. A lump of coal can power a machine, but once burned, its energy is dispersed as heat and gas. It can no longer be reconcentrated without cost.
The economic process is therefore not a perfect circle.
It is a combustion.
Every act of production transforms organized, concentrated and useful resources into dispersed matter, dissipated heat and waste. Modern economic growth thus rests on a continuous acceleration of this irreversible transformation.
II. Georgescu-Roegen: The Arrow of Time Enters Economics
It was the Romanian economist and mathematician Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen who articulated this critique most radically. In his major work The Entropy Law and the Economic Process, he demonstrates that economics cannot be separated from the physical laws that govern the universe. According to him, the economic process fundamentally consists of transforming low-entropy resources — concentrated ores, oil, fertile soils, biodiversity — into high-entropy waste: pollution, dissipated heat, molecular dispersion and ecological destruction.
This transformation is irreversible.
Capital does not create matter. Finance does not create energy. Technology does not eliminate thermodynamic constraints; it often merely displaces or accelerates dissipation flows.
Georgescu-Roegen then attacks one of the central dogmas of modern economics: the belief in infinite substitutability. For neoclassical economics, any resource that becomes scarce can be replaced through innovation and technological progress. But this idea overlooks an elementary reality: machines, infrastructures and technologies themselves require matter and energy to be built, maintained and powered.
As Georgescu-Roegen implicitly summarized: you cannot replace ingredients with the cook.
Capital is complementary to nature, not substitutable for it.
III. Modern Economics Accelerates the World's Entropy
As industrial societies grow more complex, they require ever more gigantic flows of energy and matter. Contemporary major cities have become colossal dissipative structures, dependent on vast networks of extraction, transport, logistics and digital infrastructure.
Industrial agriculture, globalized supply chains, data centers, permanent transportation and the digital economy together form a system based on continuous acceleration of flows.
Yet this acceleration carries an immense thermodynamic cost.
The faster a civilization grows, the more complex it becomes and the greater its material throughput, the more it mechanically increases its entropy production. Modern growth therefore does not only produce wealth; it simultaneously produces disorder, dissipation and instability.
The ecological question no longer concerns only CO₂ emissions or resource scarcity. It concerns a civilization's very capacity to maintain over time the conditions for the reproduction of life.
IV. The Paradox of the Living
This is where a fundamental insight from physicist Erwin Schrödinger comes in. In his lectures published as What Is Life?, he poses a vertiginous question: how does life manage to maintain its order in a universe that naturally tends toward disorder?
According to thermodynamics, any isolated system evolves toward dissipation and equilibrium. Yet living organisms seem to do exactly the opposite. They maintain their structure, repair themselves, reproduce and store information.
To explain this phenomenon, Schrödinger introduces the concept of negentropy.
Life survives by importing order from its environment and exporting its disorder outward. Life does not violate the laws of physics; it creates local, temporary organization by dissipating energy.
This idea profoundly changes how we think about economics. If living systems depend on the maintenance of organized structures, then an economy that continuously destroys ecosystems, soils, cultures, knowledge and social balances becomes fundamentally anti-life.
V. From the Anthropocene to the Entropocene
Philosopher Bernard Stiegler extended this reflection by arguing that our era could be described not only as an Anthropocene, but as a genuine "Entropocene."
For entropy does not only affect the climate or natural resources. It also affects cultures, knowledge, human relationships and even attention.
Digital capitalism also produces a form of dissipation. Algorithmic standardization, permanent attention capture and cognitive automation progressively tend to destroy psychic singularities and capacities for collective reflection.
From this perspective, entropy becomes simultaneously ecological, social, cultural and cognitive. A civilization can die not only from material exhaustion, but also from symbolic disintegration.
VI. The Decoupling Myth
One of the great contemporary narratives claims that we could "green" growth through technological innovation. But this idea also runs up against physical limits.
Every so-called green technology requires metals, infrastructure, networks, mining extraction and complex industrial systems. Even recycling has strict thermodynamic limits.
Recycling always requires energy, transportation, chemical processes and itself produces new dissipations. Perfect recycling would require infinite energy; it is therefore physically impossible.
This does not mean recycling is useless. It simply means that the perfect circular economy does not exist.
Every industrial civilization necessarily rests on irreversible consumption of low entropy.
VII. The Real Economic Question: Producing Negentropy
If material growth accelerates the world's dissipation, then the fundamental question becomes: what does an economy truly compatible with life look like?
Perhaps we must stop measuring wealth solely through GDP, production volumes or financial flows. A genuinely sustainable economy should be judged by its capacity to maintain over time the conditions of stability for life.
Soil quality, infrastructure resilience, energy robustness, knowledge transmission, social cohesion, and a territory's capacity to absorb shocks become forms of wealth far more fundamental than abstract financial accumulation.
True prosperity may no longer reside in the permanent acceleration of flows, but in the capacity to preserve the organized structures upon which our collective survival depends.
This implies a radical transformation of our economic and monetary systems. For money is not neutral. It directs investments, behaviors and productive structures. A monetary system based exclusively on expansion, debt and financial return mechanically tends to favor the most dissipative activities.
This is precisely the observation at the origin of the NEMO IMS system (NEgentropic MOney International Monetary System), explored in L'Économie de l'Équilibre: anchoring money creation not in debt, but in the regeneration of living systems — making negentropy the measure of value.
VIII. Between Extractive and Regenerative Civilization
The 21st century now pits two civilizational logics against each other.
On one side, an extractive economy based on permanent acceleration of flows, hyperconsumption, financialization and exhaustion of natural stocks. This logic progressively transforms the planet into a giant dissipative system, where ecological, social and psychic structures become ever more fragile.
On the other, a regenerative logic that would seek less to maximize flows than to preserve structures capable of enduring. Robustness would take precedence over speed, resilience over extreme optimization, ecosystem care over immediate extraction.
The goal would no longer be to indefinitely accelerate the circulation of matter and energy, but to maintain the conditions allowing life to continue producing organization.
The true historical stakes may therefore no longer be simply ecological. They are thermodynamic.
A civilization that destroys more organization than it regenerates will inevitably consume the very conditions of its own existence.
The central question of the 21st century is therefore no longer simply:
How do we produce more?
But rather:
How do we maintain the order of life in a universe tending toward dissipation?
Between the Entropocene and the Neganthropocene, humanity will have to choose.
Jean-Christophe Duval