The technosphere, our agency, our planet
What can we do, what should we do?
Recently I have been engaging in a collaboration with scholars in the field of geoethics and ocean sciences. We discuss the question whether and how the ocean can become an inspiration for developing entirely new ways of thinking about the future design of human societies and economies in the Anthropocene. One of them, Martin Bohle, …
Continue reading "Who can stop the ‘blue acceleration’? The utopia of ‘ocean commons’"
This post was first published on the blog of the SFB Cooperative Research Center 'Structural Change of Property'. In responding to the challenge of climate change, the political focus is on decarbonizing the economy. This is certainly a priority, however it overlooks the issue that the catastrophic decline of biodiversity in recent decades was not …
My colleague Christian Hederer and I are currently preparing our new book ‘A New Principles of Economics. The Science of Markets’ for production with Routledge. The book establishes economics ‘from scratch’, though relying on the accumulated research of economics in the past centuries. One fundamental difference to established approaches is starting out from Earth system …
Continue reading "Overcoming the Anthropocentric Epistemics of Economics"
James Bridle’s new book ‘Ways of Being. Beyond Human Intelligence’ bristles with inspiration for thinking about the technosphere, although he does not tie up with the Earth system sciences and economics in detail. His key concern is how we can approach both the living world and technology in similar frameworks of understanding more-than-human intelligence. This …
Recently, I have been digging deeper in the issue of property and ecology. As follow-up to my recent posts on Earth ownership and customary law, I received further inspiration from Karen Bradshaw’s book on 'Wildlife as Property Owners'. She argues that wildlife should be granted full property rights on their habitat. This is a complex …
The IEA recently published a roadmap how to reduce oil consumption to an extent such that Russian oil would not be needed anymore. This roadmap is highly suggestive for the thesis that I presented in my previous post on Ukraine: The measures for reducing dependence on Russian oil are just the same as those ones …
Continue reading "Saving oil, saving Ukraine: Slow down the technosphere!"
For a German, Putin’s attack of the Ukraine and the atrocities committed against its people, which aim at annihilating its statehood, evokes bitter memories of 1939. Putin’s strategy of escalation will ultimately force the free world to stop him, unless brave Russians could topple him from power. Yet, this will take time. Understandably, NATO cannot …
Hegel famously called institutions the ‚second nature’. Indeed, in modern societies, our relationship with the ‘first nature’ is deeply shaped by institutions that govern our interactions. In fact, what is ‘nature’ is not given, but is an institutional construct itself. Therefore, if we want to heal our broken relationship with the biosphere, we must change …
Continue reading "Lessons of Customary Law for a Geocentric Legal Transformation"
In the literature on global justice, we find the position that the Earth is commonly owned by humankind (advocated by Matthias Risse, for example). Although this smacks of biblical hegemony of ‘man’ over the rest of the biosphere, the protagonists claim that this can be reconciled with eco-centric views, although there are limitations: Human basic …
The history of economic thought is written in a deeply Western-centric view. I recently consulted a volume of contributions to monetary theory before Adam Smith that only included European authors. But the first exposition of a theory of money and prices can be found in the Chinese text ‘Guanzi’ which combines different sources across five …
Continue reading "The Moral Economy of Growth and Markets: Chinese Narratives over two Millenia"
The technosphere, our agency, our planet 
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