DYNAMIC CHANGE We are confronted with changing, increasing globalization and the importance of innovation and new technologies. Innovations and technologies that will have consequences for us in areas such as cities and the built environment. And thus for our structure and culture. The anticipated global population of more than 9.7 billion by 2050 poses daunting challenges from providing sufficient energy, food, and water, as well as health care more accurately and at lower cost, to trespassing biogeophysical boundaries. These challenges are enormous in scale and complexity, and we will need to take equally enormous leaps in our imagination to meet…
THE FUNDAMENTALLY AMBIGUOUS NATURE OF TECHNOLOGY Technology and/or Nature: Denatured/Renatured/Engineered ... In our high-tech world, do we live at the end of nature? Is the technosphere replacing the biosphere? Can humans control their genetically inherited Pleistocene appetites in an Anthropocene Epoch? Living on an engineered planet? Would this fulfill human destiny or display human arrogance, failing to embrace our home planet in care and wonder? The future holds advancing technologies to create unimaginable futures, but do not want to live a de-natured life, on a de-natured planet. We are powerfully reshaping human existence: the degradation, if not destruction, of large…
The Anthropocene Transition is a cultural term that encompasses the ways in which changes in the planet's bio-geo-chemical dynamics, triggered by the human-technology complex, interact with that complex. It spans the geo-political, economic, social, and even the personal. Look around. The symptoms are already everywhere apparent. The list of traumas that haunt our present and near future are clear: economic stagnation, zero-hour and ‘bullshit’ jobs, the rise of the robots and the end of employment, mental ill-health, sexual violence, consumption addiction, resurgent extremism, climate collapse, population displacement, virulent pandemics, and a political system that, subordinate to the short-termism of the…
We may perceive global warming, biodiversity loss, tropical deforestation, spreading marine dead zones, chronic air/water pollution, land/soil degradation, plummeting sperm counts, etc., as separate problems, but it is more realistic and potentially more productive to recognize that all are symptoms of a singular phenomenon, gross human ecological dysfunction. This is a genuine global meta-problem; it is potentially fatal to civilization and, paradoxically, entirely self-induced. Several of the most important causal mechanism have come together to produce a global economic system whose conceptual framing, operating assumptions and de facto practices are pathologically incompatible with the very ecosystems that sustain it. In…
