The technosphere, our agency, our planet

These days are replete of ominous climate symbolism. The UN organizes a climate summit, Greta gives a speech, last Friday in Germany hundreds of thousands of people took part in the Fridays for Future movement, with some companies and trade unions even joining, and the weekly ‘The Economist’ published a full ‘climate issue’. Is this …

Continue reading "Revolution impossible? Us against Us"

I fully agree that at the current stage, we may suffer from partial blindness to the limits and constraints of our agency in technosphere evolution. However, at the same time I believe that in improving our scientific understanding of these, we can regain our human agency and find an escape route, as James hopes for. …

Continue reading "Why we can regain agency and how – a riposte to James Dyke"

The following is a repost of an article originally published in The Conversation and The Idependent. The coffee tasted bad. Acrid and with a sweet, sickly smell. The sort of coffee that results from overfilling the filter machine and then leaving the brew to stew on the hot plate for several hours. The sort of …

Continue reading "We’ve created a civilisation hell bent on destroying itself"

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 …

Continue reading "Marxism and the Technosphere"

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 …

Continue reading "In a Climate-neutral Solar Economy, Would the Technosphere Outcompete the Biosphere? A Provocation."

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?"