This post explores possible ties
between urbanites on Earth and terraformers in Space along a gradient of
concepts of human-planet intersections.
Summary
Notions like terraforming, planetary
gardening, geoengineering or technosphere trace a suite of concepts about
anthropogenic planetary change. While reductionist perspectives, e.g., ’…get
the physics right then…’ are likely flawed; nevertheless, a planet's
physical and chemical qualities mould its climate, geomorphology, and
hydrology. Human activities on Earth have nowadays altered its climate,
geomorphology, and hydrology, leading to a substantial human-geosphere
intersection at the planetary scale. Studying ‘appropriate behaviors and
practices wherever human activities interact with the Earth system’ (e.g.
geoethics) leads to rationales for reasonable practices at the Human-Earth Nexus.
This essay uses these rationales to argue for commonalities between urban,
geoengineered and terraformed realms.
Introduction
Humans living in Space are featured
in science fiction (e.g., (Robinson
2012)), settlements on the Moon and Mars
are scientifically envisioned (Beech
2021), and terraformed planets were
already thought of about half a century ago (Sagan
1973). Such speculation about space-based anthropogenic
planetary change associates concepts such as geoengineering (Morton
2015), ecomodernism (Asafu-Adjaye
et al. 2015), or planetary gardening (Klosterwill
2021), which, in turn, serve as a bridge
to concepts like technosphere (Szerszynski
2017) or ergosphere (Renn
2020).
"Getting the physics and
chemistry right, then 'the rest' would persist, i.e., biological and (human)
social life" is a well-trodden reductionist perspective. Its simple view is flawed, not only because
of a probable Gaian bottleneck [*] (Chopra
and Lineweaver 2016) in the evolution of rocky
planets. Still, a planet’s physical and
chemical qualities mould its climate, geomorphology and hydrology, i.e., the
diversity of non-living nature. Subsequently, climatic, geomorphological and
hydrological features suitable for biological life make habitable planets (Langmuir
and Broecker 2012) which, biological evolution
permitting, also might persist and support social life (Alahuhta
et al. 2022).
The human prowess to alter Earth's
climate, geomorphology and hydrology at the planetary scale is a central
component of current anthropogenic global change (Rosol
et al. 2017) (Otto
et al. 2020). Nowadays, human work and the material
qualities of Earth are linked at the planetary scale (Grinspoon 2016) (Thomas 2022). The planetary
urban realm is the primary human-geosphere intersection, given its size and
dynamic.
The geoethics approach of enquiring
what are "appropriate behaviours and practices, wherever human
activities interact with the [geomorphological] Earth system" (Di
Capua et al. 2017) [p.5] led to descriptions of the intersections
of human activities and Earth (Bohle
et al. 2019). Applying political philosophies
led to amalgamating them into geo-philosophical rationales of the Human-Earth
Nexus (Bohle
and Marone 2021) (Peppoloni
and Di Capua 2022).
Mutatis mutandis, this essay argues that
the reductionist perspective 'get climate, geomorphology and hydrology right'
provides an analytical perspective to discuss commonalities of urban,
geoengineered, and terraformed realms, including sharing of geo-philosophical rationales
across them.
Subitem: terraforming & geoengineering
The concept of terraforming connotes
adjusting the material qualities of rocky planets (or moons) for possible human
residence. For example, it is envisaged
to alter the features of the atmosphere, e.g. the pressure and temperature at
the planet's surface. Next, more evolved
constituents of the planet’s qualities should adjust, like climate, geomorphology,
or hydrology, and, subsequently, alteration by biological agents is envisaged.
Considering Earth, the notions of geoengineering
(Morton
2015) or planetary gardening (Klosterwill
2021) substitute the notion of terraforming.
Conceptually, these notions superpose, and geoengineering is terraforming
Earth, for example, enhancing carbon-dioxide capture by biological, chemical,
or technical means. Hence, the current
climate engineering discussions, such as solar radiation management to recover
a climate status quo ante, are downscaled variants of more comprehensive
concepts (Möller
2023).
Notwithstanding explicit
geoengineering, the ongoing anthropogenic global change processes of the Great
Acceleration (Steffen
2022) might be viewed as unintentional
geoengineering, and being both precursors of dedicated geoengineering and supplementing
precursors, such as altering terrestrial geomorphology or hydrology, i.e.
landscapes (Meiske 2021).
Subitem: urban realm
Looking for inspiration for ideas of
engineering planet Earth, the human activities to build and operate the urban
realm exhibit the underlying thinking (Herrero-Jáuregui
et al. 2018). For example, taking an elementary view, houses
are built to maintain ambient indoor temperatures in a suitable range. Taking a less elementary view, creating an
urban environment is about niche-building (Fuentes
2017) (Xu
et al. 2020) to accommodate the material
qualities of the local natural environment.
The notion of human niche describes
the protected spaces humans set up for living well, i.e., humans' various
complex-adaptive social-ecological systems on planet Earth (Schoon
and van der Leeuw 2015) (Bohle
and Marone 2019). These systems enable people to
produce commodities, goods, or services. In this context, civil engineering
works (e.g., power plants, waterways, and tunnels) are material interconnections
between human activities and the geosphere and socially enacted activities.
Nowadays, most people live in urban
areas, which form an interconnected network of metropoles, cities or towns
dispersed over the globe. The concept of an urban realm recognises that urban
areas are complex, multi-dimensional systems shaped by various social,
economic, and environmental factors, i.e., complex-adaptive social-ecological
systems. Nevertheless, the concept urban realm also entails the physical
environment, i.e., material externalities of the urban areas such as
geomorphology or transport infrastructures. As the archetype of the human
niche, urban areas encompass the entire engineered environment, including
buildings for housing and work, infrastructures above and below ground, and
managed open spaces.
The urban realm extends beyond the
perimeters of the urban areas into the so-called countryside, e.g., what would
be London or Venice without flood barriers (Witze
2018). More conventional examples include
drinking water supply or wastewater discharge. Civil engineering developments
in urban spaces, such as bridging a river or housing developments in
floodplains, exemplify the ‘how and what’ of building the human niche (at
local, regional or planetary scales). For example, a river basin's
characteristics and operation must match geomorphology, hydrodynamics, safety
rules, and societal needs such as electrical power supply, irrigation, flood
control, and leisure activities. The ‘how and what’ of operating a river basin
involve value-driven choices, which imply opportunities and risks for different
social groups, and often impact distant constituencies. People are building urban areas to shelter
from hazards, to limit dependence on the natural pace of Earth-System dynamics,
and to appropriate and process natural resources.
Urban realms behave well when
changes in the material qualities of the surrounding physical environments
(e.g., weather) are docile. When they
are erratic, e.g., disruptive flooding, heat wave or dust/snowstorm, the living
conditions of people are challenged because the fluxes of energy, matter, and
information are physically perturbated.
Urban realms shape people's
experiential connections with the geosphere. Urbanites' connections with the
geosphere are often limited to events (e.g., storms, flooding, or heat waves)
that disrupt the engineered structures supporting urban lifestyles (Bohle
et al. 2017). Despite such biased individual experiences,
societies’ literacy in geosciences is vital for well-behaving production
systems, sustainable consumption patterns, and convenient everyday life
spanning work and leisure activities. The weather forecast is the primary
example illustrating the importance of geosciences literacy in modern societies.
Weather news became a ‘prime time’
event decades ago, substituting individual experiences. Since the early 1950s,
the regular broadcasting of weather forecasts has become standard (Lynch
2008) (Bauer
et al. 2015). Before broadcasting weather news,
systematic weather observations were practised for centuries, supported by the
development of instruments, communication technologies, and standard
observation protocols and organisations. Weather reports for specialised
professional audiences have been produced manually and published since the
mid-nineteenth century with increasing regularity. Numerical weather
forecasting has become feasible since the early 1950s. From those early days,
it took half a century to build the web of providers of weather products and
their consumers. In a single narrative, the modern media combine the weather
forecast with additional information on meteorological phenomena, climate
change, and news of impacts on economic and social activities. The reliability
and accuracy of these forecasts directly influence people's work and life,
which is dependent upon reliable geoscientific information and professional
practice.
Subitem: anthropogenic global change
De-facto, contemporary societies are experimenting
with anthropogenic global change (Otto
et al. 2020). They also conceived the concepts of geoengineering
and terraforming (Morton
2015) (Dickinson
2021). These two concepts are exalting human agency, which
is experienced as: "[w]ith their rapidly evolving culture, humans have
introduced an "ergosphere" (a sphere of work, as well as of
technological and energetic transformations) as a new global component of the
Earth system,… changing the overall dynamics of the system "(Renn
2018) [p. 7]. Scholars of the history of science have
formulated this alternative description of the Human-Earth Nexus for societies on
an Anthropocene trajectory (Steffen
et al. 2018).
Engineered environments, i.e., the
technosphere (Donges
et al. 2017) and the people living because of it
(United Nations 2014) (Rosol et al. 2017), are the primary
representation of the ergosphere. The ergosphere is built and operated
to favour exercising human agency. It is
centred on the urban realm, consisting of urban dwellings and industrialised
agriculture, extraction industries and waste depositories, partly off-site,
i.e., in the 'wilderness'. The
ecomodernist school of thought has developed such perceptions into a cultural
program of geoengineering and urbanised life (Asafu-Adjaye
et al. 2015). Related, although distinct, the concept of 'half-world'
(Wilson
2016) (Ellis
and Mehrabi 2019), i.e., sharing Earth between humans
(World) and other living beings (Nature), see human societies as primarily urban
and set apart. Planetary gardening (Klosterwill
2021) is a further related concept of
intentionally shaping the planet.
Securing a geographical space of
steady abiotic features might seem appropriate to describe the engineering of
urban and planetary realms. Although steady abiotic features do not make the
essence of urban realms, climate, geomorphology, and hydrology constrain
economic operability and human life. Hence, geoengineering and terraforming
differ by the scale of the related civil engineering endeavours when
considering building and operating the urban realm. A shared category of risks is
that non-steady abiotic/non-living environments preclude well-functioning
economic, social, cultural, and political activities.
Subitem: geo-philosophical thinking
Less radical cultural visions than
ecomodernism acknowledge, for example, a defiant (Hamilton
2017), human (Lewis
and Maslin 2018), or altered (Thomas
2022) planet Earth. These appraisals of
the contemporary Human-Earth Nexus combine geoscience knowledge and
philosophical insights at a high level of abstraction. When downscaling the
levels of abstraction, ambition, or association in the quest for
geo-philosophical insights, schools of thought in responsible geosciences are
found. They propose various concepts
named, for example, geo-logic (Frodeman
2014), geo-ethics (Di
Capua et al. 2021) or geo-societal sense-making (Bohle
and Marone 2021).
The current enquiries into responsible
geosciences, which use geoscience knowledge and philosophical insights as
inputs, are about the functioning of abiotic environments and human activities'
epistemic, moral, social, or political aspects. The outcome of these enquiries are geo-philosophical
appraisals, which describe human practices as part of the Earth System. Common to these schools of thought is
focussing on the abiotic features of planet Earth and human interactions with
them.
Although these schools of thought recognise
the role of biological processes in geochemical cycles, they do not consider
planet Earth to be regulated by living beings, i.e., applying a Gaian
hypothesis (Lovelock
J. 1979) (Lenton
and van Oijen 2002). Hence, these schools of thought take as a primary
stance a reductionist approach (getting 'right' the physical / material /
abiotic / non-living qualities) to the well-functioning planet Earth (Bohle
et al. 2020). This apparent limitation can be
patched by applying the theory of complex-adaptive social-ecological systems,
which ties the physical / material / abiotic / non-living subsystem into a
comprehensive mesh of non-separable entities (Preiser
et al. 2018) (Biggs
et al. 2021).
Subitem: Complementing
current geo-philosophical concepts & applications
The bulk of contemporary
geo-philosophical thinking, whether driven philosophically or by responsible
geoscience, is not informed by theoretical descriptions of human practices'
socioeconomic and political constraints. Instead, these constraints are treated
case-by-case, reflecting professional experiences (Abrunhosa
et al. 2021) without using a conceptual
(philosophical) framework to describe them.
A popular variant of
geo-philosophical thinking, the geoethical approach, can be summarised (Bohle
2020) in five tenets (agency, virtue,
responsibility, knowledge base, inclusivity, and universal human rights). As observed (Bohle
and Marone 2022), this “approach seems incomplete
because it is not informed by socioeconomic constraints, which, for example,
limit the freedom of human agents. A
remedy can be found in interpreting Hannah Arendt's political philosophy of the
“Human Condition” (Arendt
1958) for times of anthropogenic global
change. Her notions of labour (for
subsistence), work (of agents of technological change), and act (political
agency)” allow
addressing matters such as social stratification or differential power.
Hannah Arendt’s general description of
human agency distinguishes three categories: labour, work, and civic
activities. She discusses them for
European/Western history emphasising their varying mutual relations. The application to a planet under
anthropogenic change does not alter the categories (i.e., the agent) but modifies
the object of human agency: (i) category labour, or ‘laboran’ struggling for
biological and social reproduction/subsistence as well in local as globalisation
contexts; (ii) category work, or ‘homo-faber’ operating a primarily planetary
ergosphere; (iii) category civic activities, or ‘zoo-politikon’ attempting Earth
system governance in multicultural interaction;
Subsequently, depending on the human
agency category, the application of the tenets of geoethics is modulated. Although the essence of the five geoethical tenets
is kept, a ‘zoo-politikon’ or ‘homo faber’ would probably exercise them more
effortlessly than a ‘laboran’. This
shift is simple but realistic and assigns individual responsibility (Bohle
2021) as the geoethics approach intends (Di
Capua et al. 2017).
Shared application of the adjusted
geo-philosophical concepts in the urban realm (and subsequently in
geoengineering and terraforming) is founded on the fact that all these
environments are complex-adaptive socio-ecological systems, therefore having
similar system dynamics (Bohle
2020): the emergence of new properties;
non-separable subsystems; path-dependent, non-reversible, and non-linear
development with no final solution; failing of engineering like
command-and-control management. Consequently, generic policy choices apply in
various circumstances, although they may guide diverse practices (Bohle
and Marone 2022).
Conclusion
The focus on a stable abiotic
environment is the feature that indicates terraforming is for urbanites, as
studies of SF literature have already revealed (Heise
2016).
The ideas expressed by the notions 'experiencing
anthropogenic global change', 'experimenting with global change', 'ecomodernism'/'geoengineering',
and 'terraforming' describe a suite of concepts about engineering at a
planetary scale, which finds its essential root in ‘building and operating
urban realms’. Hence, terraforming is a variant of geoengineering Anthropocene(s),
and the urban realm is its central feature. Therefore, geo-philosophical (e.g., geoethical)
descriptions of contemporary societies/humans interacting with planet Earth
also apply to humans in terraformed realms.
[*] “the maintenance of planetary habitability is a property
more associated with an unusually rapid evolution of biological regulation of
surface volatiles than with the luminosity and distance to the host star”.
[p.8]
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