In his insightful book "Gaïa: Terre Vivante," Sébastien Detreuil highlights on page 412 that Paul Crutzen introduced the concept of the Anthropocene precisely when he rejected the idea of Gaia as a framework for addressing the challenges of climate change within Earth System sciences (though this is a coincidence, and not expressed explicitly). There are …
Mapping as a medium of technosphere growth and nature-based countermapping
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 …
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Why we don’t need posthumanism to get rid of anthropocentrism
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 …
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Beyond property: The theory of havings
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 …
Beyond Anthropocene?
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 …
Translating Indigenous spirituality into the language of science
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 …
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Ritual: Demarcating humanity from the technosphere
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 …
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Cultural science: The study of more-than-human culture
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 …
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Hybrid Planet Earth: More-than-human infrastructural landscaping in the Anthropocene
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 …
On Tilo Wesche’s ‘Die Rechte der Natur’ (‘Rights of Nature’)
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 …
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The technosphere, our agency, our planet 
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