A decade ago, the German economist Carl Christian von Weizsäcker mused that the phenomenon of declining opportunities for profitable investments that is behind the trend towards declining interest rates might reflect the Second Law of thermodynamics, in the sense that the more capital we accumulate, the more we must struggle to keep it in order, …
The Evolutionary Epistemology of the Technosphere
Technology and science are deeply interwoven. Often, this is interpreted in terms of scientific progress driving the emergence of new technologies. But historians of science have always emphasized the fact that science is also enabled by technology that is generated outside the epistemic venture of science. For example, artisanal advances in watchmaking contributed to the …
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Is Anthropocentrism Good Science? Why Sir Partha Got It Wrong
In these days, the ‘Dasgupta Review' receives much attention in policy circles and news reports. The Review pursues the laudable goal to include environmental concerns into economics and to show economic strategies for putting biodiversity at the centre of our efforts to cope with the challenge of climate change. The Review submits many important suggestions, …
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Nature-based Solutions: ‘Naturally’ Growing the Technosphere
In recent initiatives of coping with the challenge of climate change and designing sustainable economies and societies, ‘nature-based solutions’ NBS have become a buzzword. Broadly speaking, this term refers to all sorts of alternatives to techno-engineering (‘grey’) measures directed at adapting and mitigating the impact of climate change which intentionally activate and strengthen ecosystems or …
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Weighing the future more than the present: Paying a negative natural rate of interest to the biosphere
The interest rate is a crucial, if not the pivotal parameter in modelling challenges and strategies facing climate change. It reflects our stances towards the future. There are two basic, though conflicting principles how to determine it, as reflected in the seminal debate triggered by the Stern report in 2007, which opposed William Nordhaus’s position. …
The messiness of human life: the ultimate limit of technosphere expansion
Recently, the term ‘technosphere’ is increasingly used in a slightly different sense than in the Earth system context (see the new issue of ‘The Economist’ and the briefing that inspired and informed this post). The technosphere would be the world of the internet, roughly defined. This refers to the global and comprehensive connectivity and the …
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The Earth: A community of advantage
This post is the follow-up to the previous in presenting core ideas in my recent book chapter draft contributed to the volume edited by Martin Bohle “Geo-societal narratives - contextualising geosciences” (Palgrave). I present a solution to the dilemma in political epistemology that I pinpointed, namely that economists often argue that the market is beyond …
What is the purpose of the economy? The case for a geocentric turn in economics
Recently I have been working on a chapter contribution to a volume on geoethics edited by Martin Bohle “Geo-societal narratives – contextualising geosciences” (Palgrave). Dealing with literature that I was largely unfamiliar with helped me a lot to focus my thinking about ideas that I have been working on for years. This has been condensed …
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The modern corporation: centre of power in the technosphere
There is a black hole in climate research, ecological economics and Earth system models: The corporation. Of course, corporations are recognized as actors, but what happens inside the corporation is normally not included in the macro-scale perspective that most Earth sciences research in the broadest sense adopts. Even when critics claim that the ‘anthropocene’ should …
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The technosphere as a computer: What are the thermodynamic implications?
In modern economics, information is arguably the core notion. Indeed, many economists would agree that the market is a giant distributed computer that processes information about scarcities of resources and generates prices that guide the actions of economic agents accordingly. However, economists rarely consider the physical side of information, although in practice that matters much, …
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The technosphere, our agency, our planet 
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