The technosphere, our agency, our planet
What can we do, what should we do?
Most observers of the current climate crisis argue that we need fundamental changes of our lifestyles and economic policies. There is less emphasis on whether and how we must change the fundamental institutional structures of our economic systems. But when thinking about agency in the technosphere, institutions are central. If the technosphere follows its partly …
Continue reading "How to restore human agency in the technosphere"
Vaclav Smil is one of the world’s leading thinkers on energy, society and nature. He has just published a volume on growth across many scales and domains (“Growth: From Microorganisms to Megacities”). As always, he presents an amazing richness of facts, often extremely enlightening. For example, he definitively shows that all thinking about ‘decoupling’ or …
Continue reading "Vaclav Smil on Growth: Seeing the Trees, but not the Forest"
In recent debates about reforming capitalism, we observe a problematic tension between the social and the ecological. There are growing concerns about the social consequences of capitalism, which eerily remind me of Karl Polanyi’s political analysis of the ‘Great Transformation’: These social conundrums are increasingly driving the rise of populism worldwide. Many commentators explain them …
Continue reading "Global urbanization: The dangerous delusion of economics"
Fifteen years ago, the late and renowned Swiss economist Hans Christoph Binswanger published a book that deeply influenced my own work in economics: The Growth Spiral: Money, Energy, and Imagination in the Dynamics of the Market Process In a nutshell, he argued that the monetary economy is inherently expansive, and that this drives the relentless …
These days are replete of ominous climate symbolism. The UN organizes a climate summit, Greta gives a speech, last Friday in Germany hundreds of thousands of people took part in the Fridays for Future movement, with some companies and trade unions even joining, and the weekly ‘The Economist’ published a full ‘climate issue’. Is this …
I fully agree that at the current stage, we may suffer from partial blindness to the limits and constraints of our agency in technosphere evolution. However, at the same time I believe that in improving our scientific understanding of these, we can regain our human agency and find an escape route, as James hopes for. …
Continue reading "Why we can regain agency and how – a riposte to James Dyke"
Two weeks ago, I attended the meeting of the European Society for Ecological Economics at Turku, Finland. The core topic of the conference was ‘co-creation’. Many people attending had no clear idea what that means, including myself. However, as I had been invited as a keynote speaker, in the recent months I invested some intellectual …
Continue reading "Co-creation and agency in the Earth system"
The problem of agency in the technosphere has much in common with Marx’s treatment of agency in capitalism. In capitalism agency is endogenous to the system: Capitalists are not the bad guys who expropriate workers with sinister intentions, but the forces of ‘capital’ subject them to this type of behavioural governance. The system drives their …
In his recent post, Axel Kleidon offered a grand view on the thermodynamics of the Earth system that includes the human domain. His fundamental point is that the human economy follows the same systemic dynamics as the Earth system, i.e. Lotka’s Maximum Power principle. That means, it manifests an inherent physical trend towards maximizing energy …
In current debates about the technosphere, human agency is often taken as a given: Humans are conceived as creators of the technosphere. Anthropocentrism seems also implicit in the term ‘anthropocene’, as many critics point out. One reason for this human-centred approach is that the evolutionary framework for analysing the technosphere is not well developed. Some …
Continue reading "A Unified Evolutionary Approach to the Biosphere and the Technosphere?"
