The managers has adopted the concept of attempting to gain space-heating/cooling energy self-sufficiency and achieving high levels of cost-effective energy conservation.

Alternatives means for doing this are being attempted and others and under study. The sources include wood, water, wind, solar, geothermal, biogas, and others. The area has the potential to provide for some of these energy sources, most conspicuously solar and biomass (wood, etc.).

The managers of the area seeks to achieve capabilities for operation with minimum fossil fuel inputs so as to minimize any future disruption in achieving and the maintaining the desired high-quality condition. Fossil energy shortages can endanger entire projects on the area. These in any way related to endangered species can be very serious and life-threatening for species.

The management has a general willingness to work with people seeking special use permits for areas to produce alternative energy. As always, compatibility with a stable or increasing R will be a major criterion. Costs will typically be borne by the applicant for a "special use" permit.

The key energy concepts fundamental to operation and activities of the environment of the area are:

• Energy may be transformed from one form into another but it is neither created nor destroyed. You cannot do more work than the energy you have that is available for such work.
• All transformation processes are entropic, that is they change in energy from a non-random to a random form. Waste of energy is inevitable. Entropy is the tendency of all systems toward randomness or maximum dispersion. Entropy is an increase in the inability to do work.
• Systems that can tap the most energy sources and that can maximize the flow of energy to do the most useful work will survive and expand over or outcompete other systems.
• Developed systems have an inherent tendency to grow beyond optimum size and at the expense of natural systems.

  Other related concepts are:

• Any system that does less than possible is likely to lose in competition.
• Effective systems maximize energy returns on energy investments over the short run, diversify energy returns over the long run.
• Successful systems store energy, but at some cost.
• Some energy must be spent on new alternatives for the system so that it can evolve as the context changes.
• Concentrated energy (e.g., gasoline) has a greater capacity to do work than dilute energy (e.g., sunlight). Green plants concentrate energy.
• Information is energy. Ideas are a highly concentrated form of energy.
• In managerial energetics, the emphasis must be on net, not gross energy.
• Maximum energetic efficiency in nature is not usually desirable as the living environment for people. The mature climax ecological system (e.g., the old-growth forest) is a system most closely approaching this concept.

Energy is so readily lost. There is ample evidence within biology that if life forms are to persist, they develop diverse strategies for energy capture and storage. Perhaps this is the most important message for people available from a study of biology. Therefore it may be useful to consider alternative forms of energy captive/storage and loss-reduction strategies:

1. Coal reserves (crushed and re-store in mine pits)
2. Oil-gas storage tanks
3. Hydrogen in storage tanks
4. Solar collectors
5. Housing (stratified central-well solar storage)
6. Preservatives for wood or metal
7. Fiberglass or glass for windows
8. Catalysts that improve energy use efficiency
9. *Superconductive induction-convertor units for pulsed power loads
10. *Five-megajoul homopolar motor-generator
11. *One-megajoule homopolar motor-generator
12. *One-megajoul fast condenser bank
13. *Reliable, low-cost, energy-storage capacitor for laser pumping
14. *Very high voltage capacitor of flow inductance applications
15. *Inductive energy storage with short-circuit generators
16. *High-magnetic field cryogenic coil for the Frascati tokamak transformer
17. Magnetic field storage system
18. Wind power collector system
19. Pumps for storage reservoirs
20. Water wheel and turbine
21. Flywheels
22. Batteries
23. Methane processor
24. Recreational sculpture
25. Phonograph records
26. Books¹
27. Materials storage areas (as playgrounds)
28. Ball bearings
29. Sludge compressor
30. Land in an optimal climate
31. Forest (or land in local climax status)
32. An orchard
33. Hand tools
34. Needles
35. Surgical and medical tools
36. Farming tools
37. Animal-drawn equipment
38. Re-usable fasteners
39. Non-breakable dishes and utensils
40. Steel pipes
41. Boilers
42. Wine and large storage bottles
43. Concrete manufacturing materials and equipment
44. Great mass in high elevations (rocks-gravitation)

Literature Cited

*Bostick, W. H. (Eds.). 1976. Energy storage, compression, and switching. Plenum Press, N.Y.