The ecological era we find ourselves in — whether we like it or not, and whether we recognize it or not — makes it necessary to rethink and revaluate our relationship with nature and technology. The world has entered a new era of rapid and major change. Significant shifts are occurring in global economic power, technology, urban growth and through Earth System changes that pose existential threats to humanity, and our relationship with nature on which human life depends. Given current trajectories, transformation of human societies in some form is inevitable. It is, however, not clear whether global transformations can…
The more we destabilize the processes and systems that maintain the stability and resilience of our planet, the more our civilization is at risk. For millions of years temperatures on Earth have changed, significantly, there have been extinction events, but the planet it still here. During those millions of years, it’s our civilization that wasn’t there. Our world as we know it, including all of its history, goes back only about 12000 years. And this period has been characterized by a miraculously stable climate, that has allowed for the development of the agriculture, cities, economies and human societies that we…
ENTANGLED HABITATION, COHABITATION IN THE MORE-THAN-HUMAN CITY Landing in the Anthropocene, where our actions are leaving traces on the very rooted fabric of the planet, we are called to the challenge of moving towards a postanthropocentric paradigm. The anthropocentrism that our species has imposed on all others has unbalanced our position within nature, founded on what we often see as an evolutionary success: intrinsically human-centered, acting and developing as a continuous transformation of matter into products and processes, in a steady flow of supply and exploitation and extermination of animals and plants. But the effects of this imbalance are becoming…
When The Limits to Growth was first published in 1972, most economists, along with many industrialists, politicians, and Third World advocates raised their voices in outrage at the suggestion that population growth and material consumption need to be reduced by deliberate means. Over the years, Limits was attacked by many who didn’t understand or misrepresented its assertions, dismissing it as Malthusian hyperbole. But nothing that has happened in the last 50 years has invalidated the book’s warnings. We are experiencing the symptoms of a world in overshoot, where we are drawing on the world’s resources faster than they can be restored, and we…
