Emergy as a Tool for an Integrated Knowledge

Starting with Environment Power and Society in 1971, to the Prosperous Way Down proposal thirty years later, most of Howard T. Odum’s fundamental titles address explicitly the potential of emergy as a general epistemological tool. But despite the growing number of studies and scholars who use emergy-based analyses, this philosophical potential remains somewhat underestimated and underexplored, however confined within the “emergy community”. As a matter of fact, Emergy talks us about deep aspects of the reality as a whole. Concepts like energy quality, donor-side view, as well as principles like the maximum (em)power, open a window to a variety of different disciplines and fields, in the holistic framework of an integrated and “universal” culture. Several emergy scholars have been aware of this need and have worked to export emergetic concepts outside the realm of science. But now the factual inability of decision-makers to take on local and global concerns is urgently demanding for further efforts by the scientific community, aimed at providing tools that are analytically reliable and at the same time able to frame the problems within a systemic, holistic awareness, of which emergy is likely to represent one of the most profound ideas. In this contribution, we first provide a short overview of the epistemological aspects of emergy analysis concepts. Then, we discuss about the potential of emergy as an effective bridge to reconcile different “cultures” within the same integrated picture. Epistemology, Language, Axiomatics are -besides Emergy- some of the virtual keywords of this contribution.