Research Area

Emergy Accounting

I am a bit of an ‘emergy complainer’. First, the work is hard, assembling all that data, and if you are an anthropologist without as much ‘quantitative’ background, it is a bit unnatural. But second, I am not completely satisfied with my appreciation of it. I am currently working on it, conducting some of my deep dive reading of Odum’s writings into the origin of emergy. My most recent papers down below are quite valuable, I think, so things are coming along. I’ll be updating this note in the future.

Papers

  • 2000 Ecosystems, Sociocultural Systems, and Ecological Economics for Understanding Development: The Case of Ecotourism on the Island of Bonaire, Netherlands Antilles. Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Florida. [online] URL: http://etd.fcla.edu/etd/uf/2000/ane0595/Abel.pdf.

    • I wrote a long description of this research on the Ecotourism page. Here’s one sentence that is important here: “In total, I produced 85 systems diagrams and 22 linked emergy analysis spreadsheets, probably the most thorough emergy research of any single location in the world.” I was just learning emergy at the time, and there are surely mistakes. It was a big effort in my fieldwork, to collect all that data and assemble it. You can see in the next paper that I was still trying to figure out the implications.

  • 2003 “Understanding Complex Human Ecosystems: The Case of Ecotourism on Bonaire.” Conservation Ecology 7(3):10. [online] URL: http://www.consecol.org/vol7/iss3/art10.

    • Emergy analyses were used in a novel way to compare ‘scales’ of production processes. The result was that Bonaire had reached a new stable state after 45 years, in which all three scales were now again processing similar amounts of emergy.

  • 2007 “Emergy, Sociocultural Hierarchy, and Cultural Evolution” Proceedings from the 4th Biennial Emergy Research Conference, January 12-21, 2006, Center for Environmental Policy, Gainesville, FL, Chapter 28.

  • 2009 “Testing Principles of Spatial Hierarchy: What Households Research Has to Say” Paper presented at the 5th Biennial emergy Research Conference, January, 2008.

    • From a survey of 20 households in a small coastal village on the East Coast, interviewed by my research assistant Ke-wei, I assembled an emergy hierarchy of households. From that small piece, I produced a Hualien county diagram of households. Finally, from that, I produced a Taiwan households systems diagram, located within a world-system. I like that diagram a lot and use it to represent spatially located towns and cities, human hierarchies. I refer to the diagram in my 2025 paper. Somewhere around this time however I came to realize that I misunderstood something important about emergy analyses. Energy transformation processes produce products. I had been conceiving of households as objects of emergy storage. But for household emergy analyses, those products should be people. That’s what households are for, raising and supporting people. I believe that I refused to submit this paper to the proceedings, I did not want to create confusion. In the 2010 paper (next), I focused my emergy analysis on people.

  • 2010 “Human Transformities in a Global Hierarchy: Emergy and Scale in the Production of People and Culture.” Ecological Modelling 221:2112-2117, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolmodel.2010.05.014

    • More than any of my papers, I receive notifications that people have downloaded this paper. Probably emergy researchers looking for some guidance for dealing with human information. They should read the papers down below instead.

  • 2011 “The 'Locations' of People and Households within the Culture-Nature Hierarchy of Hualien County, Taiwan.” In Proceedings of the 6th Biennial Emergy Research Conference, Pp. 461-482, Gainesville, FL, 2011

    • There are two good outcomes to this paper, both based on emergy analyses. The first is the production of my global culture-nature hierarchy from my database of many types of emergy analyses. They included (C) Crops, (N) Natural, Environmental, (M) Materials, Chemicals, (F) Fuels, (E) Electricity, (G) Global, (S) Ecosystems, (P) Plants, (A) Animals, (T) Trees, (H) Humans, (I) Information, (U) Urban, (L) Landform, (R) Rock, (W) Waste Treatment, (X) Atmosphere and Temperature. I use these improved diagrams in many papers. Second is my emergy research focused on Hualien households from which I produced the ‘scale’ of households and people at the center of the global hierarchy diagram. I evaluated many typical inputs to households and many atypical inputs like inputs from banks, communication, government, ritual, stock markets, and others.

  • 2011 “Culture in Information Cycles: An Emergy Evaluation of Conversation.” In Proceedings of the 6th Biennial Emergy Research Conference, Chapter 2, Gainesville, FL, 2010.

    • I presented two papers at this conference. Very ambitious! This was my first work on Dr. Odum’s ‘information cycle’ model. I had forgotten that I attempted an ‘emergy’ analysis of this subject that I am now pursuing vigorously (see Culture in Cycles), though without emergy for the most part. I don’t think much of these early information emergy evaluations.

  • 2013 “Emergy evaluation of DNA and culture in ‘information cycles’.” Ecological Modelling 251 (2013) 85–98. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolmodel.2012.11.027

    • This is my second most downloaded emergy paper. I trace a detailed emergy analysis conducted by Odum for the emergy of rainforest trees. I then produce an emergy analysis of conversation utilizing the same format. I do a better job exploring Odum’s information emergy in my 2023 paper below.

  • 2016 “Pools of Money: ‘Information Cycles’ for the Production and Maintenance of Financial Information”. In Proceedings of the 9th Biennial Emergy Research Conference, Chapter 34, Gainesville, FL, 2016

    • The focus is the production of ‘storages’ of money. In systems language, that is what the financial industry produces. Concentrations of money that can move in countercurrent to energy.

  • 2023 “Evaluating Information with Emergy: How Did Howard T. Odum Incorporate Human Information into Emergy Accounting?” Discover Environment 1,9. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44274-023-00007-z

    • This paper and the next were originally intended to be one paper. This paper is the ‘literature review’ in a sense, and the next paper is the ‘case study’. I describe this integrated version of the paper in one of my long webinar videos. Work on this paper was very educational for me. It forced me to look at every information emergy analysis that was produced by Odum. I discovered the main themes of his thinking, and I chose the approach that is the best, in my view. I used that approach in the second paper, below.

  • 2024 “An Emergy Analysis of Cultural Information: Tackling the Most Difficult Problem in Ecological Economics” Journal of Environmental Accounting and Management, 12(2): 169-184. https://doi.org/10.5890/JEAM.2024.06.005

    • This paper uses an emergy ‘areal analysis’ and one that focuses on the ‘recipient’ of information. While cultural information today has many ‘intermediate’ carriers with high data throughput, i.e., fiber optics, electromagnetic waves and storage, TV broadcasts, etc., and of course sound and sight, the flow of information always requires a final ‘recipient’, a person that can only receive information on human time scales. That makes emergy analyses of cultural information in any form easier and comparable, which should be very valuable for emergy researchers who choose to follow this work. That being said, this paper was still a bit of hard labor that I might not have finished without the help of my grad assistant, Christine. The paper is also explored in the long emergy webinar video.