Entropies and the Anthropocene crisis

International audienceThe Anthropocene crisis is frequently described as the rarefaction of resources or resourcesper capita. However, both energy and minerals correspond to fundamentally conservedquantities from the perspective of physics. A specific concept is required to understandthe rarefaction of available resources. This concept, entropy, pertains to energy and matterconfigurations and not just to their sheer amount.However, the physics concept of entropy is insufficient to understand biological andsocial organizations. Biological phenomena display both historicity and systemic properties.A biological organization, the ability of a specific living being to last over time, resultsfrom history, expresses itself by systemic properties, and may require generating noveltiesThe concept of anti-entropy stems from the combination of these features. We proposethat Anthropocene changes disrupt biological organizations by randomizing them, that is,decreasing anti-entropy. Moreover, second-order disruptions correspond to the decline ofthe ability to produce functional novelties, that is, to produce anti-entrop