The Brockovich Report

Life is all about cycles. Open up any student biology book and it will show you animal life cycles, cell cycles, water cycles, ecosystem cycles and the like. It is all a balance between producers and consumers, and how energy flows through an ecosystem.

If you look at the big picture of our ecosystem, plants get their energy from the sun; herbivores get their energy from plants; carnivores get their energy from herbivores; and omnivores get their energy from plants and herbivores. It's pretty efficient. Most energy is recycled within our ecosystem, but there is some loss, mostly heat or kinetic. This in spite of that law in physics. The "law of conservation of energy" that states that the quantity of energy in a system is constant.

It seems that our scientists should be able to use that law, somehow, to help us find energy sources as all of this energy is constantly transitioning form one form to another to another to another.

We just have to find that balance, you know the one implied in that Disney Lion King song--Circle of Life. Not that the Circle of Life song goes into physics; but it promises "we find our place/ On the path unwinding/ In the Circle/ The Circle of Life."

For us, nature is the ultimate environmental continuum in our circle of life, one that is not overly destructive--especially as we human beings are conscious of our participation in the dynamics of life-cycles.

We just have to find our place in it.