The technosphere, our agency, our planet
What can we do, what should we do?
Mapping is a foundational technology in the evolution of the technosphere, linking the expansion of its material infrastructure with economic activities. It is a key theme in postcolonial studies. During the colonial expansion of Western powers, mapping was instrumental in dispossessing Indigenous peoples. This process began with the establishment of sovereignty by colonial powers and …
Continue reading "Mapping as a medium of technosphere growth and nature-based countermapping"
The humanities are in a deep crisis. Worldwide, funding for humanities departments shrinks, and the young generation in many countries, such as in East Asia, loses interest. After all, governments call for strengthening the STEM disciplines, seen as crucial in achieving the nation’s competitive advantage. At the same time, we observe a flurry of humanities …
Continue reading "Why we don’t need posthumanism to get rid of anthropocentrism"
It has been four months since I last posted a blog on this site. Among many other tasks, I was focused on completing my new book "Havings: Steps towards a New Economic Philosophy of Property and Beyond," which will be released soon by Campus Publishers. This book is the culmination of my four years of …
After many years of debates and research, the International Union of Geological Science issued the final verdict: We do not (yet) live in the Anthropocene. This decision, despite its authority, will not quell the widespread usage of the term in non-geological scholarship and public debates. Specialist journals and numerous books are dedicated to exploring the …
In his essential book ‘Indigenous Economics’ Ronald Trosper, himself a member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes of the Flathead Indian Reservation Montana, explains that Indigenous people often try to neutralize their spirituality when representing, advocating, and reinstating their ways of life in the context of mainstream society and politics. For example, when formulating …
Continue reading "Translating Indigenous spirituality into the language of science"
Max Weber famously associated capitalism with rationalization, an ‘iron cage.’ Indeed, we can speak of adapting human thinking, practices, and worldviews to the technosphere as the environment in which most humans today live. This translates into secularism, means-ends instrumentalism, rational technocracy, and many other social forms of Western modernity. In economics, one expression treats the …
Continue reading "Ritual: Demarcating humanity from the technosphere"
Recently, I assumed the new task of editor-in-chief of the journal ‘Cultural Science. A multidisciplinary journal for the study of more-than-human culture’. In the Anthropocene, cultural science pursues the study of culture by liberating culture from anthropocentrism: We can no longer treat culture as a, or even ‘the’ human domain exclusively, both in the sense …
Continue reading "Cultural science: The study of more-than-human culture"
The Earth sciences have suggested the notion of ‘hybrid planet’ Earth. In principle, this idea relates to Lovelock’s notion of Gaia in the sense that thermodynamic disequilibrium is conceived as an indicator of emergent and evolving planetary activity, in the case of Gaia the biosphere. Life transforms solar energy into processes that change the Earth’s …
The German philosopher Tilo Wesche has published a book ‘Rights of Nature’ that submits an inspiring, important and comprehensive argument why ‘nature’ owns property that must be recognized in our legal systems and that would transform our societies to become ecologically sustainable, in an institutional regime of cohabitation between humans and ‘nature’ on the basis …
Continue reading "On Tilo Wesche’s ‘Die Rechte der Natur’ (‘Rights of Nature’)"
Recently I discovered landscape architecture and design as a fertile ground for thinking about the technosphere, especially in the context of the concept of 'landscape urbanism', a movement theorized by Charles Waldheim. This is a fascinating field because different from what most technosphere scholars do, the protagonists in this discipline mostly spend their time with …
Continue reading "The Landscape as mediator between Technosphere and Biosphere"
The technosphere, our agency, our planet 
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