“Emergy” means waste, it also means value, and so poses a fundamental question for environmental accounting.
Emergy is Howard Odum’s neologism for embodied energy or energy memory, the total energy used in the production or preparation of a product or process, whether natural or artificial. Put the other way, it accounts for all the energy transformations [...]
It is all about POWER.
One of Howard Odum’s most compelling ideas concerns the cascade of energy (food) that develop in established ecosystems.The diagram by Thomas Abel illustrates the classic example: the large amount of photosynthesizing plants required to support a smaller population of herbivores, who in turn support a smaller population of carnivores, and so [...]
Kiesler’s definition of the term was succinct: ‘the term “correalism” expressed the dynamics of continual interaction between man and his natural and technological environments’ (1939).
In Kiesler’s view, the interaction between tools, needs, and environment was continual and as he repeatedly explained, ‘no tool exists in isolation. Every technological device is coreal: its existence is conditioned [...]