Self-sufficiency

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Self-sufficiency (also called self-containment) is the state of not requiring any aid, support, or interaction for survival; it is a type of personal or collective autonomy. [1] On a national scale, a totally self-sufficient economy that does not trade with the outside world is called an autarky.

In development or moral, political, and bioethical philosophy, autonomy is the capacity to make an informed, un-coerced decision. Autonomous organizations or institutions are independent or self-governing. Autonomy can also be defined from human resource perspective and it means a level of discretion granted to an employee in his or her work. In such cases, autonomy is known to bring some sense of job satisfaction among the employees. Autonomy is a term that is also widely used in the field of medicine. As a matter of fact, personal autonomy is greatly recognized and valued in health care.

An economy is an area of the production, distribution, or trade, and consumption of goods and services by different agents. Understood in its broadest sense, 'The economy is defined as a social domain that emphasize the practices, discourses, and material expressions associated with the production, use, and management of resources'. Economic agents can be individuals, businesses, organizations, or governments. Economic transactions occur when two parties agree to the value or price of the transacted good or service, commonly expressed in a certain currency. However, monetary transactions only account for a small part of the economic domain.

Autarky is the quality of being self-sufficient; the term is usually applied to political states or their economic systems. Autarky exists whenever an entity can survive or continue its activities without external assistance or international trade. If a self-sufficient economy also refuses all trade with the outside world then it is called a closed economy. The term "closed economy" is also used technically as an abstraction to allow consideration of a single economy without taking foreign trade into account – i.e. as the antonym of open economy. Autarky in the political sense is not necessarily an economic phenomenon; for example, a military autarky would be a state that could defend itself without help from another country, or could manufacture all of its weapons without any imports from the outside world.

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Self-sufficiency is a type of sustainable living in which nothing is consumed other than what is produced by the self-sufficient individuals. Examples of attempts at self-sufficiency in North America include simple living, homesteading, off-the-grid, survivalism, DIY ethic and the back-to-the-land movement.

Sustainable living describes a lifestyle that attempts to reduce an individual's or society's use of the Earth's natural resources, and one's personal resources. Its practitioners often attempt to reduce their carbon footprint by altering their methods of transportation, energy consumption, and/or diet. Its proponents aim to conduct their lives in ways that are consistent with sustainability, naturally balanced, and respectful of humanity's symbiotic relationship with the Earth's natural ecology. The practice and general philosophy of ecological living closely follows the overall principles of sustainable development.

North America Continent entirely within the Northern Hemisphere and almost all within the Western Hemisphere

North America is a continent entirely within the Northern Hemisphere and almost all within the Western Hemisphere; it is also considered by some to be a northern subcontinent of the Americas. It is bordered to the north by the Arctic Ocean, to the east by the Atlantic Ocean, to the west and south by the Pacific Ocean, and to the southeast by South America and the Caribbean Sea.

Simple living lifestyle

Simple living encompasses a number of different voluntary practices to simplify one's lifestyle. These may include, for example, reducing one's possessions, generally referred to as minimalism, or increasing self-sufficiency. Simple living may be characterized by individuals being satisfied with what they have rather than want. Although asceticism generally promotes living simply and refraining from luxury and indulgence, not all proponents of simple living are ascetics. Simple living is distinct from those living in forced poverty, as it is a voluntary lifestyle choice.

Practices that enable or aid self-sufficiency include autonomous building, permaculture, sustainable agriculture, and renewable energy. The term is also applied to limited forms of self-sufficiency, for example growing one's own food or becoming economically independent of state subsidies. The self-sufficiency of an electrical installation measures its degree of grid independence and is defined as the ratio between the amount of locally produced energy that is locally consumed, either directly or after storage, and the total consumption. [2]

An autonomous building is a building designed to be operated independently from infrastructural support services such as the electric power grid, gas grid, municipal water systems, sewage treatment systems, storm drains, communication services, and in some cases, public roads.

Permaculture agriculture practices using few energy resources and human intervention

Permaculture is a set of design principles centered around whole systems thinking simulating or directly utilizing the patterns and resilient features observed in natural ecosystems. It uses these principles in a growing number of fields from regenerative agriculture, rewilding, community, and organizational design and development.

Sustainable agriculture farming relying on ecosystem services for maintenance

Sustainable agriculture is farming in sustainable ways based on an understanding of ecosystem services, the study of relationships between organisms and their environment.

See also

Amish group of traditionalist Christian church fellowships

The Amish are a group of traditionalist Christian church fellowships with Swiss German Anabaptist origins. They are closely related to, but distinct from, Mennonite churches. The Amish are known for simple living, plain dress, and reluctance to adopt many conveniences of modern technology.

Anarchism is an anti-authoritarian political philosophy that advocates self-governed societies based on voluntary, cooperative institutions and the rejection of hierarchies those societies view as unjust. These institutions are often described as stateless societies, although several authors have defined them more specifically as distinct institutions based on non-hierarchical or free associations. Anarchism holds capitalism, the state, and representative democracy to be undesirable, unnecessary, and harmful.

Ecomodernism

Ecomodernism is an environmental philosophy which argues that humans can protect nature by using technology to "decouple" anthropogenic impacts from the natural world. Ecomodernism is a school of thought from many environmental and design scholars, critics, philosophers, and activists. Ecology-based Modernism is the most direct way to define this movement. It embraces the most successful aspects of the Outlaw Designers from the 1960s and 70s with the reform-based hopeful pragmatism of the Modernists. It demands a more detailed understanding of the discipline's history and encourages designed objects and systems created with the logical inspiration of nature's cycle built in to its goals. The resulting material and immaterial creations hope to better unite technology, humanity and nature. Eco-Modernism urges designers to unplug from their world of pixels and reconnect with the nuances of our natural environment so as a collective we can better understand the materials we use, processes we employ and appreciate the importance of our natural resources. Instead of a linear approach to a design process, based on Fordism and Taylorism, Eco-Modernism embraces nature's model of "waste equals food" and cradle-to-cradle coined by Walter R. Stahel in the 1970s where design and manufacturing aim to "close the loop". To achieve this component of the movement designers must minimize their environmental footprint by utilizing local and renewable resources for all of our future endeavors. In their 2015 manifesto, 18 self-professed ecomodernists—including scholars from the Breakthrough Institute, Harvard University, Jadavpur University, and the Long Now Foundation—enlarged the scope of Eric Benson's and Peter Fine's 2010 original definition as such: "we affirm one long-standing environmental ideal, that humanity must shrink its impacts on the environment to make more room for nature, while we reject another, that human societies must harmonize with nature to avoid economic and ecological collapse."

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In physics, power is the rate of doing work or transferring heat, the amount of energy transferred or converted per unit time. Having no direction, it is a scalar quantity. In the International System of Units, the unit of power is the joule per second (J/s), known as the watt in honour of James Watt, the eighteenth-century developer of the condenser steam engine. Another common and traditional measure is horsepower. Being the rate of work, the equation for power can be written:

In statistics, a statistic is sufficient with respect to a statistical model and its associated unknown parameter if "no other statistic that can be calculated from the same sample provides any additional information as to the value of the parameter". In particular, a statistic is sufficient for a family of probability distributions if the sample from which it is calculated gives no additional information than does the statistic, as to which of those probability distributions is that of the population from which the sample was taken.

In logic, necessity and sufficiency are terms used to describe a conditional or implicational relationship between statements. For example, in the conditional statement "If P then Q", we say that "Q is necessary for P" because P cannot be true unless Q is true. Similarly, we say that "P is sufficient for Q" because P being true always implies that Q is true, but P not being true does not always imply that Q is not true.

Heat capacity intensive physical property

Heat capacity or thermal capacity is a measurable physical quantity equal to the ratio of the heat added to an object to the resulting temperature change. The unit of heat capacity is joule per kelvin , or kilogram metre squared per kelvin second squared in the International System of Units (SI). The dimensional form is L2MT−2Θ−1. Specific heat is the amount of heat needed to raise the temperature of one kilogram of mass by 1 kelvin.

Homesteading

Homesteading is a lifestyle of self-sufficiency. It is characterized by subsistence agriculture, home preservation of food, and may also involve the small scale production of textiles, clothing, and craftwork for household use or sale. Pursued in different ways around the world—and in different historical eras—homesteading is generally differentiated from rural village or commune living by isolation of the homestead. Use of the term in the United States dates back to the Homestead Act (1862) and before. In sub-Saharan Africa, particularly in nations formerly controlled by the British Empire, a homestead is the household compound for a single extended family. In the UK, the term 'smallholder' or 'crofts' is the rough equivalent of 'homesteader'.

Thermodynamic potential scalar physical quantities representing system states

A thermodynamic potential is a scalar quantity used to represent the thermodynamic state of a system. The concept of thermodynamic potentials was introduced by Pierre Duhem in 1886. Josiah Willard Gibbs in his papers used the term fundamental functions. One main thermodynamic potential that has a physical interpretation is the internal energy U. It is the energy of configuration of a given system of conservative forces and only has meaning with respect to a defined set of references. Expressions for all other thermodynamic energy potentials are derivable via Legendre transforms from an expression for U. In thermodynamics, external forces, such as gravity, are typically disregarded when formulating expressions for potentials. For example, while all the working fluid in a steam engine may have higher energy due to gravity while sitting on top of Mount Everest than it would at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, the gravitational potential energy term in the formula for the internal energy would usually be ignored because changes in gravitational potential within the engine during operation would be negligible. In a large system under even homogeneous external force, like the earth atmosphere under gravity, the intensive parameters should be studied locally having even in equilibrium different values in different places far from each other (see thermodynamic models of troposphere].

Ergodic theory is a branch of mathematics that studies dynamical systems with an invariant measure and related problems. Its initial development was motivated by problems of statistical physics.

Internal energy energy contained in a system, excluding energy due to its position as a body in external force fields or its overall motion

In thermodynamics, the internal energy of a system is the total energy contained within the system. It is the energy necessary to create or prepare the system in any given state, but does not include the kinetic energy of motion of the system as a whole, nor the potential energy of the system as a whole due to external force fields which includes the energy of displacement of the system's surroundings. It keeps account of the gains and losses of energy of the system that are due to changes in its internal state.

Various types of stability may be discussed for the solutions of differential equations or difference equations describing dynamical systems. The most important type is that concerning the stability of solutions near to a point of equilibrium. This may be discussed by the theory of Lyapunov. In simple terms, if the solutions that start out near an equilibrium point stay near forever, then is Lyapunov stable. More strongly, if is Lyapunov stable and all solutions that start out near converge to , then is asymptotically stable. The notion of exponential stability guarantees a minimal rate of decay, i.e., an estimate of how quickly the solutions converge. The idea of Lyapunov stability can be extended to infinite-dimensional manifolds, where it is known as structural stability, which concerns the behavior of different but "nearby" solutions to differential equations. Input-to-state stability (ISS) applies Lyapunov notions to systems with inputs.

In quantum physics, a bound state is a special quantum state of a particle subject to a potential such that the particle has a tendency to remain localised in one or more regions of space. The potential may be external or it may be the result of the presence of another particle; in the latter case, one can equivalently define a bound state as a state representing two or more particles whose interaction energy exceeds the total energy of each separate particle. One consequence is that, given a potential vanishing at infinity, negative-energy states must be bound. In general, the energy spectrum of the set of bound states is discrete, unlike free particles, which have a continuous spectrum.

An adaptive system is a set of interacting or interdependent entities, real or abstract, forming an integrated whole that together are able to respond to environmental changes or changes in the interacting parts, in a way analogous to either continuous physiological homeostasis or evolutionary adaptation in biology. Feedback loops represent a key feature of adaptive systems, such as ecosystems and individual organisms; or in the human world, communities, organizations, and families.

The Green–Kubo relations give the exact mathematical expression for transport coefficients in terms of integrals of time correlation functions:

Degenerate energy levels energy level of a quantum system that corresponds to two or more different measurable states


In quantum mechanics, an energy level is degenerate if it corresponds to two or more different measurable states of a quantum system. Conversely, two or more different states of a quantum mechanical system are said to be degenerate if they give the same value of energy upon measurement. The number of different states corresponding to a particular energy level is known as the degree of degeneracy of the level. It is represented mathematically by the Hamiltonian for the system having more than one linearly independent eigenstate with the same energy eigenvalue. In classical mechanics, this can be understood in terms of different possible trajectories corresponding to the same energy.

Fundamental thermodynamic relation

In thermodynamics, the fundamental thermodynamic relation is generally expressed as a microscopic change in internal energy in terms of microscopic changes in entropy, and volume for a closed system in thermal equilibrium in the following way.

In physics and engineering, the time constant, usually denoted by the Greek letter τ (tau), is the parameter characterizing the response to a step input of a first-order, linear time-invariant (LTI) system. The time constant is the main characteristic unit of a first-order LTI system.

In mathematics, a packing in a hypergraph is a partition of the set of the hypergraph's edges into a number of disjoint subsets such that no pair of edges in each subset share any vertex. There are two famous algorithms to achieve asymptotically optimal packing in k-uniform hypergraphs. One of them is a random greedy algorithm which was proposed by Joel Spencer. He used a branching process to formally prove the optimal achievable bound under some side conditions. The other algorithm is called the Rödl nibble and was proposed by Vojtěch Rödl et al. They showed that the achievable packing by the Rödl nibble is in some sense close to that of the random greedy algorithm.

The purpose of energy-autarkic habitats is to be independent of 3rd parties concerning energy consumption for living. This may be based and resource-efficiency respective material, living space and energy.

The free energy principle tries to explain how (biological) systems maintain their order by restricting themselves to a limited number of states. It says that biological systems minimise a free energy functional of their internal states, which entail beliefs about hidden states in their environment. The implicit minimisation of variational free energy is formally related to variational Bayesian methods and was originally introduced by Karl Friston as an explanation for embodied perception in neuroscience, where it is also known as active inference.

The eigenstate thermalization hypothesis is a set of ideas which purports to explain when and why an isolated quantum mechanical system can be accurately described using equilibrium statistical mechanics. In particular, it is devoted to understanding how systems which are initially prepared in far-from-equilibrium states can evolve in time to a state which appears to be in thermal equilibrium. The phrase "eigenstate thermalization" was first coined by Mark Srednicki in 1994, after similar ideas had been introduced by Josh Deutsch in 1991. The principal philosophy underlying the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis is that instead of explaining the ergodicity of a thermodynamic system through the mechanism of dynamical chaos, as is done in classical mechanics, one should instead examine the properties of matrix elements of observable quantities in individual energy eigenstates of the system.

References

  1. ↑ Maurice Grenville Kains (1973). Five acres and independence. ISBN   0-486-20974-1.
  2. ↑ Guilherme de Oliveira e Silva; Patrick Hendrick (September 15, 2016). "Lead-acid batteries coupled with photovoltaics for increased electricity self-sufficiency in households". Applied Energy. 178: 856. doi:10.1016/j.apenergy.2016.06.003 . Retrieved July 20, 2016.
  3. ↑ Decoupling from nature
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