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comments and criticism of the proposed ELT, because it is important that we discuss ecological theory much more widely than it has been the case up to now. I assert that we have an ecosystem theory, when we put together the contributions from several system ecologists (included the contributions from late professor Ilya Prigogine and Ramon Margalef). The theory may not be complete and will most probably be improved significantly during the coming decades, but it is in my opinion sufficiently complete to be applied to explain ecological observations and in environmental management discussions. By application of the theory it becomes more obvious where it has short-comings. It is therefore crucial to discuss such an important hypothesis as ELT and propose improvements in the formulation and interpretation. So, let me try to answer the criticism and that may hopefully together with Rutger de Wit’s comments contribute to an even better formulation and interpretation of ELT. I have used exergy to express the working capacity content of ecosystems. Exergy is, as correctly indicated by Rutger de Wit, the energy that can do work relatively to the environment. What is the environment of an ecosystem? Of course other ecosystems; but if we would use adjacent ecosystems as reference state, we would just get the difference in exergy between two ecosystems and it would not be interesting. So, I used the same ecosystem at the same temperature and pressure but at thermodynamic equilibrium as reference state to get an expression for the distance from thermodynamic equilibrium, because that would be a good measure of the development of an ecosystem. I have lately applied the term eco-exergy to emphasize that it is not the technological exergy that uses the environment as reference state. We can calculate the eco-exergy of an ecosystem compared with the same system at the same temperature and pressure but in form of an inorganic soup without any life, biological structure, information or organic molecules as follows:

Answer to Rutger de Wit's comments to the proposed tentative “Ecological Law of Thermodynamics” (ELT)