Last time I went to Greenham Common in 1987 it was to follow a cruise missile convoy as part of a protest. I couldn't believe I was stood beside decaying missile silos. The second photograph is taken in the middle of the runway looking at where planes used to land. Nature has reclaimed the land and it is now a nature reserve. But has the entropy increased? You'd think so because entropy is a measure of disorder. The more disordered a space is, the higher the entropy. So you'd say that a tarmac runway and mown fields would be more ordered and thus have a lower entropy than the heathland that is re-growing. But the gorse bushes themselves are highly ordered organisms. And it is well on the way towards a climax community woodland, so a biologist might argue that it is headed towards something more ordered. In the end, the total entropy in the Universe must increase even if the local entropy decreases. They say that this is what gives us the Arrow of Time.
