In a recent paper, Inigo Wilkins and Bogdan Dragos develop the theory of money as a ‘machine’, building on earlier ideas of Mirowski and Cartelier. This theory perfectly dovetails with the arguments presented on money and the technosphere in this blog and in my related writings on the technosphere. If economists discuss technology, they rarely …
Who can stop the ‘blue acceleration’? The utopia of ‘ocean commons’
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’"
Ecology and More-than-human Property
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 …
Overcoming the Anthropocentric Epistemics of Economics
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"
‘Ways of Being’ in the Technosphere
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 …
The Universal Commons
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 …
Saving oil, saving Ukraine: Slow down the technosphere!
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!"
The Great Trouble
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 …
Lessons of Customary Law for a Geocentric Legal Transformation
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"
Who owns the Earth?
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 technosphere, our agency, our planet 
You must be logged in to post a comment.