Biosphere

Our galaxy, the Milky Way, holds 100 to 400 billion stars. One of those stars, our sun, has eight planets orbiting it. One of those, planet Earth, has a biosphere, a complex web of life, at its surface. The thickness of this layer is about twenty kilometres (twelve miles). This layer, our biosphere, is the only place where we know life exists. We humans emerged and evolved within the biosphere. Our economies, societies, and cultures are part of it. It is our home. The complex adaptive interplay between living organisms, the climate, and broader Earth system processes has evolved into a resilient biosphere. The biosphere has existed for about 3.5 billion years. Modern humans (Homo sapiens) have effectively been around in the biosphere for some 250 000 years.

Volodymyr Vernadsky (1863-1945)

The concept of the biosphere was initially proposed in the early twentieth century by the Russian mineralogist and biogeologist Vladimir Vernadsky. He propounded the idea that it was not just the mass of living things on Earth, but the combination of that mass with the air, water and soil that sustain organic life, and that the Sun’s energy largely powers it. More than the sum of its parts, the biosphere interlinks and overlaps with other spheres of the Earth, (atmosphere, hydrosphere, geosphere, cryosphere) while having its own dynamics and emergent properties. Vernadsky’s concept of the Earth illuminates the difference between an inanimate, mineralogical view of Earth’s history, and an endlessly dynamic picture of Earth as the domain and product of life. According to Vernadsky, the Biosphere is not only “the face of the Earth”, but is the global dynamic system transforming our planet since the beginning of biogeological time.

The biosphere contains life-supporting ecosystems supplying essential ecosystem services that underpin human well being and socioeconomic development. For example, the biosphere strongly influences the chemical and physical compositions of the atmosphere, and biodiversity contributes through its influence in generating and maintaining soils, controlling pests, pollinating food crops, and participating in biogeochemical cycles. (see ecology)

Because of the political barriers of the postwar “iron curtain”, even James Lovelock remained unaware of Vernadsky’s work as he developed his theory. (see Gaia)

In 1926, Vernadsky acknowledged the increasing impact of mankind: “The direction in which the processes of evolution must proceed, namely towards increasing consciousness and thought, and forms having greater and greater influence on their surroundings.” Teilhard de Chardin and Vernadsky used the term ‘noösphere’ — the‘world of thought’ — to mark the growing role of human brain-power in shaping its own future and environment.

Cities in the Anthropocene

‘it is important to realise that the truth of the Anthropocene is less about
what humanity is doing, than the traces that humanity will leave behind’ (Bronislaw Szerszynski)

Humans are now primarily an urban species, with about 55% of the population living in urban areas. By mid-century, about 7 out of 10 people are expected to live in cities and towns. In terms of urban land area, this is equivalent to building a city the size of New York City every 8 days. Cities account for about 70% of CO2 emissions from final energy use and the highest emitting 100 urban areas for 18% of the global carbon footprint. The accelerated growth of cities is perhaps now the most characteristic geo-physical feature of the so-called Anthropocene-in-the-making. Although it is the infrastructure of cities, including its road and electricity networks that are the most visible expression of human influence and inhabitation on the Earth from space, the most visible constructions on land may nevertheless be the most transient when subject to forces of erosion Like a giant footprint or burrow preserved in the rock record the massive trace fossils of cities will probably be made up of the subways, sewers, conduits and infrastructures presently below ground. (see technofossils) As sociologist Bronislaw Szerszynski sums it up: ‘it is important to realise that the truth of the Anthropocene is less about what humanity is doing, than the traces that humanity will leave behind’

In Provisional Cities, Renata Tysczcuk “touches on what it means to dwell within an unfolding disaster of human making, a world without stability — and yet continue to attempt the fiction of a settled life.” (p.8)

Philippe Petit 1974

The type of rock that makes up Manhattan Island is more intrinsic to its existence than anything else. Without Manhattan’s stable bedrock, the looming skyscrapers that are often conceived of as an integral part of its identity would not be supported enough to exist. Knowing that Philippe Petit walked between the towers and survived, but that the towers subsequently collapsed adds poignancy to this image. Perhaps it illustrates Tysczuk’s argument about provisional cities and the “shaking of being:” How should humans act when they have so little stability on offer?

In Provisional Cities, Tysczcuk calls the Anthropocene a period of greater unsettlement than our species has ever known. “This unsettlement refers not only to the fracturing and displacement of human lives, but also to the disjunctures and shifts of a dynamic Earth.” (p.223) “Urban poverty”, she goes on to explain, “magnifies geological, technological, and climatic hazards — these are disasters waiting to happen”

Makeshift Cities in the Desert

”In the Middle East, we were building camps: storage facilities for people. But the refugees were building a city. These are the cities of tomorrow. The average stay today in a camp is 17 years. That’s a generation. Let’s look at these places as cities.” Killian Kleinschmidt, UNHCR. (quoted in Tyszschuk, p.239)

Zaatari Camp Jordan

above: The subversion of Zaatari camp's plan through daily urban practices initiated by refugees

“Strategies of resistance, cooperation, adaptation, and resourcefulness may prove to be especially important in a fragile and fraught world of both diminished human agency and more-than-human agency gone awry.” Recent convulsions of earthquakes, tsunamis, flooding, wildfires, drought, and conflict across the world have demonstrated the convergence of two different earthly mobilities: people moving across the Earth’s surface through economic and forced migrations, and the shifting ground beneath our feet. (Nigel Clark)

ruin

"In the ruin history has physically merged into the setting. And in this guise history does not assume the form the process of an eternal life so much as that of irresistable decay. Allegory thereby declares itself to be beyond beauty. Allegories are, in the realm of thoughts, what ruins are in the realm of things. " (Walter Benjamin, Origins, pp 178-9)

Komar - Melamid, Scenes from the Future: The Guggenheim Museum, 1974.

Proleptic views of “future ruins viewed through an intact present" have a history that extends at least as far back as Neo-Classicism, Piranesi, and the painter Hubert Robert, whose two contrasting views of the future of the Louvre illustrated both his hopes and his fears for the future. The latter possibility can be seen in his Vue imaginaire de la Grande Galerie du Louvre (1796), showing the museum in ruins, while the former is illustrated in his Projet pour la Disposition de la Grande Galerie, of the same year, showing the former palace transformed into a national museum. Joseph Gandy would make similar opposing views of the Bank of England, one pristine and the other in ruins.

Hubert Robert, Vue imaginaire de la Grande Galerie du Louvre (1796).

“Nature is no longer the backdrop to human creation; our human world has become the backdrop for things of nature. The natural world will survive humankind. Whether it will re-create the means of life necessary to our species, or to beings resembling our species, is not within our ken. .. The environmental catastrophe we think of as the ruin of nature is in fact the ruin of human nature, the end of our sustainable life on earth.” (Susan Stewart, The Ruins Lesson p.270)

In the ruins of collapsed civilizations, surviving parts tend to be simple and inert, like the scattered stone blocks that once cooperated to define a building or monument. in the ruins of collapsed, the more complex, dynamic parts of the civilization – buildings, institutions and cities –often cannot maintain their existence if the larger system they helped define ceases to exist. (Haff)

Extinction

There have been five major extinction events, each one leading to a profound loss in biodiversity in earth’s history, and there is general consensus that we are in the midst of a sixth. Some of the previous ones took place in the late Ordovician period, some 450 million years ago, when living things were mainly confined to the water. The most devastating event took place at the end of the Permian period, some 250 million years ago. It came perilously close to emptying the earth of life altogether. The most recent — and famous — mass extinction came at the close of the Cretaceous period, 66 million years ago, and wiped out the the non-avian and marine dinosaurs. (see Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction).

The possibility, in fact the inevitability of human extinction informs speculation about the future of humanity in the Anthropocene. Humans seem to be actively reducing their chances for survival as a species. Will their technoscience produce descendants in the form of machines? Will they modify their gene pool sufficiently to thrive in the conditions of a new world?

governance

Big guys: Justice Alito and Chief Justice Roberts at the Supreme Court

Governance is the exercise of authority -- the decisions, regulations, and enforcement that determine how we will act and who will benefit. Governance refers to a condition in which those governed are embroiled in the apparatus that exercises political control to an extent that they are not outside it, but the means through which it is exercised.

Democratic governance implies the participation of those who are governed in the decision-making process -- either directly, through representatives, or both.

Big gal: Ursula von der Leyen, President of EC

According to public choice theory, public decisions are particularly likely to be bad when concentrated and well-organized groups with stable, substantial, and well-identified interests face off against diffuse groups with high information costs whose interests, while enormous in the aggregate, are individually small.

In Democracy's Discontent, Michael Sandel traces the changes in the American democratic ideals from a republican political theory of self-governance that emphasized the formation of civic virtue and the common good, to a procedural republic, designed to guarantee toleration, fair procedures, and respect for individual rights, without taking any particular position on the good.

Republican theory, in its various forms from Aristotle to Jefferson and up to the beginnings of the free labor movement, sought to further the public good through the cultivation of virtue its citizens and to actively define the good life of political association in relation to their moral character. In this conception, freedom, or liberty, depends on shared participation in self-government, and it requires moral bonds between citizens and the community.

Modern liberal theory, on the other hand, holds that government should be neutral on the question of the good life. It defines freedom as an individual's right to unfettered choice without prejudice to the choices of others. It is more concerned with right and equal justice than with the good. According to Sandel, both conceptions have been part of American political philosophy from the outset, but the latter forms have come to define the contemporary American state, its laws and their interpretation, and its political economy of growth and distributive justice rather than citizenship. Political economy engages the foundations of economic life: what kind of wealth an economy produces, how it distributes that wealth, what kind of freedom and equality it promotes, and what provision it makes for the future.

According to Sandel's account, the triumph of the voluntarist concept of freedom coincided, paradoxically, with a growing sense of disempowerment, resulting from the fact that the liberal self-image of the freely choosing, independent self is sharply at odds with the actual organization of modern social and economic life (p.202). This sense of disempowerment results as well from the corresponding decline of the republican civic tradition, which cultivated solidarity and civic engagement.

In Down to the Wire, David Orr links the cynicism and apathy symptomatic of the decline in public confidence in political institutions as encouraging malfeasance in high places. If the legal system had already been reshaped to the advantage of men of commerce and industry by the middle of the nineteenth century -- at the expense of farmers, workers, consumers, and other less powerful groups within society -- in the postwar period of the twentieth century, "government became increasingly shrouded in secrecy and organized to accelerate the exploitation of natural resources, subsidize corporations, treat the symptoms of environmental problems without touching their root causes, alleviate some aspects of poverty without solving deeper problems, and protect the interests of the wealthy." (p. 15) Echoing Sheldon Wolin's descriptions in Democracy Incorporated, of the "inverted totalitarianism" that marked "the political coming of age of corporate power and the political demobilization of the citizenry," Orr claims that "We have had neither an open and honest political system that effectively encouraged public participation in major decisions nor one particularly distinguished by its competence -- partly the fault of self-fulfilling prophecies from those who said they wanted to get government off our backs." (ibid) In a call to "repair and enhance the capacity of government to do what only government can do," Orr reminds us that "Markets seldom act for the enduring public good; governments can and must."

Wendy Brown documents the rise of Antidemocratic politics in the west in her book, In the Ruins of Neoliberalism.