What can we do, what should we do?
Two weeks ago, I attended the meeting of the European Society for Ecological Economics at Turku, Finland. The core topic of the conference was ‘co-creation’. Many people attending had no clear idea what that means, including myself. However, as I had been invited as a keynote speaker, in the recent months I invested some intellectual …
Continue reading "Co-creation and agency in the Earth system"
The problem of agency in the technosphere has much in common with Marx’s treatment of agency in capitalism. In capitalism agency is endogenous to the system: Capitalists are not the bad guys who expropriate workers with sinister intentions, but the forces of ‘capital’ subject them to this type of behavioural governance. The system drives their …
In his recent post, Axel Kleidon offered a grand view on the thermodynamics of the Earth system that includes the human domain. His fundamental point is that the human economy follows the same systemic dynamics as the Earth system, i.e. Lotka’s Maximum Power principle. That means, it manifests an inherent physical trend towards maximizing energy …
John Maynard-Smith and Eörs Szathmáry (Maynard Smith and Szathmáry 1995; Szathmáry and Maynard Smith 1995) famously argued that evolution has undergone highly significant ‘major transitions’ in the very units of evolution and the mechanisms by which evolution proceeds. Incorporating the technosphere fully within their schema of ‘major transitions’ would involve expanding the definition of the …
Continue reading "The technosphere as a ‘major transition’?"
What does it mean to be an agent in the ‘critical zone’, the near-surface environment of the Earth where most living things reside and have evolved? This is a complex, dense, folded world, a commons where the powers of each entity – abiotic, living or technological – are dependent on those around it. The character …
Continue reading "Agere and gerere – on ‘action’ in the critical zone"
In current debates about the technosphere, human agency is often taken as a given: Humans are conceived as creators of the technosphere. Anthropocentrism seems also implicit in the term ‘anthropocene’, as many critics point out. One reason for this human-centred approach is that the evolutionary framework for analysing the technosphere is not well developed. Some …
Continue reading "A Unified Evolutionary Approach to the Biosphere and the Technosphere?"
Figure: The human imprint on Earth can easily be seen at night. Is this imprint simply a manifestation of thermodynamics? Image source: NASA/NOAA. I really like to think that I am free to decide on what I like, want and what I do, manifestations of what one commonly refers to as free will. Or one …
In Andrew Jarvis’ previous post I read that on the one hand we might just observe evolutions that are “most likely”, and on the other hand that the economy is a “low-probability” structure. How can a low-probability structure be most likely? This apparent contradiction applies for all living systems. The Maximum Entropy approach to evolution …
Continue reading "Solving the Puzzle of Emergent Order: The Case for Maximum Entropy Thinking"
Just because humans form part of this thing we generally call the 'economy', and may at times appear free to choose how to spend what income it affords them, we mustn't simply assume they sit in the driving seat. Economies are complex objects, and the defining feature of complex things is that the whole is …
For some scholars, the technosphere should be approached as a physical phenomenon in the first place. For example, geologists would measure it in terms of artefacts that accumulate in layers of sediments, such as plastics, or Earth system scientists would approach it as the artefacts that make up the infrastructure of human societies, buildings, roads, …
Continue reading "The Challenge: Agency in the Technosphere"
The technosphere, our agency, our planet 
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