ABSTRACT
Rapid economic growth, high birth rates, and even harmful technologies can be tolerated in natural ecosystems having plentiful resources and high assimilative capacities. Howard Odum stated, "Whenever an ecosystem reaches its steady state after periods of succession, the rapid net growth specialists are replaced by a new team of higher diversity, higher quality, longer living, better controlled and stable components. The response of state and federal governments to growing environmental problems has been poorly planned and implemented. Environmentalists are in the roretront or this decentralist, participatory trend, for nowhere else are the global problems more obvious, the need to solve them more compelling, and the tangible benefits of proper management more immediate. Entropy in strictly physical terms is denned as an increased requirement to expend available energy to maintain the health, safety, and welfare of a system. The environmental planning and management involve the control of the inevitable entropic effects of developing socioeconomic systems.
