There are no longer any places left on Earth untouched by humans. In the newly designated ‘human age’, our species’ impact on the oceans, the land and the atmosphere has become an inescapable feature of the Earth. This idea that humanity has forced a geological transition is capturing people’s attention not just because changes in epochs are rare. It is attracting notice because our species is gripped by the idea that we possess planetary powers. The significance of this goes beyond statistics documenting melting glaciers and shrinking species counts. It signals a new geological epoch, The Anthropocene. One of the…
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…
