Eric,

One point John misses, is the cumulative leaves, bark, aborted and broken branches a tree puts out over the course of its life is probably many times the final dead weight of the tree.

If you really want people to understand the importance of energy, you need to consider the issue of time.

We are mobile organisms, so this sequence of perceptions by which we interface with our environment is a logical consequence of navigating it. So our concept of time is as the point of the present, moving past to future. From narrative based culture, to physics codifying it as measures of duration.

The reality is that change turns future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns. Duration is the present, as the events rise and fall.

There is no dimension of time, because the past is consumed by the present, to inform and drive it. Causality and conservation of energy. Cause becomes effect.

Energy is "conserved," because it manifests the present, creating time, as well as temperature, pressure, color and sound. Time is frequency, events are amplitude.

So the energy, as present, goes past to future, while the patterns generated go future to past. Energy drives the wave, while the fluctuations rise and fall. No tiny strings necessary.

Consciousness also goes past to future, while the perceptions, emotions and thoughts giving it form and structure go future to past. Though it's the digestive, respiratory and circulatory systems processing the energy, feeding the flame, while the central nervous system sorts the information, signals from the noise.

So while our thought process is constantly caught up in the reductive search for order in the chaos, it has proven a somewhat fruitless search, because the patterns being generated really are just shadows on the wall. Products of the light.

Processes create patterns, not the other way around.

The real dichotomy is between energy and form. Even galaxies are energy radiating out, as structure coalesces in. One centrifugal, the other centripetal.

Synchronization of waves, path of least resistance, is centripetal. While the energy radiating out, distributing the constituent energy out across the universe, is harmonizing it. Both entropic.

Nodes and networks, organisms and ecosystems, particles and fields.

For example, there is no Dark Matter, because gravity, this centripetal effect, culminating in everything collapsing into the vortex in the middle and shot out the poles as quasars, is what creates this intermediate stage of mass, not the other way around, of gravity as a property of mass. The bending of the light isn't an effect of gravity, it is gravity.

Yet the feedback loop of academia has everyone searching for the ultimate order in the chaos, whether macrocosmic, microcosmic, or abstraction. Whether math, or money. Reductionism.

It's like boiling a body down to its most stable structure and assuming it's the egg, not the skeleton.

The answer isn't in more complexity, but that simplicity is even more sublime. We can better identify with the chicken, than the egg.