THE BIOSPHERIC EMERGENCY, ANTHROPOCENE SYNDROME Gone is the relative stability and predictability of the past 12,000 years as the established patterns and regularity of Holocene phenology begin to fall into chaos. While some cosmic constants remain such as the cycles of day and night, the moon’s influence on the tides, the date of the solstices and the length of time the Earth takes to go around the sun, many other patterns and rhythms of Earth phenology are undergoing major change. Culturally, the Anthropocene is generally recognized to be an era in which human activity has grossly disturbed the natural environment. …
I have always been led by a desire to understand life; I went from ecosystems to biophysics to quantum physics and on my way life slipped through my fingers. What’s the point? If the universe is just machinery, a set of differential equations acting on initial conditions, and we are but blips of complexity in an uncaring universe, temporarily self-aware conglomerates of particles that will soon be washed away by entropy increase, then why spend time figuring out just exactly how insignificant our existence is? What’s the meaning of life if there’s no purpose to it? We all have to…
Humanity is making tremendous progress. It is the best time ever to be alive. Why does no one know it? Cities are a dense network of interconnected systems of increasing complexity, all of which use feedback information to exist in dynamic equilibrium. A new era of innovation for our urban future. A moment of recognition/realization The city as the general form of human settlement, as the ecological niche of our species, belongs to the world of antifragility. The city as a system has proven through history to be capable to adapt, self-organize, improve and take advantage of the unpredictable, in…
The Earth formed 4.5 billion years ago with the Sun and rest of the solar system. Life is known to have appeared a billion years later, though that may be a conservative appraisal. No matter the exact date of life’s formation, very soon after its appearance, co-evolution began in which life and the Earth began changing together. The biosphere, which is the sum-total of living organisms, began exerting strong feedback forces on the other geospheres of air (atmosphere), water (hydrosphere), ice (cryosphere), and land (lithosphere). Together, the bio and geospheres formed a coupled Earth system that has evolved as a…
