People’s normative frameworks and practices within the planetary habitat called Earth require understanding the human World and the natural Earth, rooted in a shared epistemological foundation. This essay sketches how.
The Earth supports
a planetary habitat
in which humans
and other living beings
coexist. Planetary-scale anthropogenic change turns this coexistence into a
material and political condition: human practices couple to Earth’s natural
dynamics, so that the habitual partition between ‘nature’ and ‘society’ becomes
analytically misleading and normatively evasive [1] [2] [3].
To foreground this coupling, an epistemological concept is conceived: a
nexus of the human World and the natural Earth as a single, co-constituted
configuration. This nexus is pictured as an amalgam of diverse elements
(materials, organisms, infrastructures, institutions, semiotic resources, cultural universes) whose coherence is
fluid and whose boundaries are adaptable [4]. This concept makes evident that
cultural, social, and ethical practices are not ‘external drivers’ of the
planetary habitat; they are endogenous features that determine how the
planetary habitat is inhabited, modified, and governed.
Within the planetary-habitat framing, several theoretical contributions
are combined: The concept of an Anthroposphere [5], i.e. humans’ planetary
habitat, designates the range of human niches - people, cultures, institutions,
and the built environment - as they reshape and are reshaped by biophysical
processes. The concepts of a Technosphere and an Ergosphere [6] capture the
material-operational substrate of these niches, including infrastructures and
organisational networks that process energy,
matter, and information/entropy at various scales.
Taken together, these concepts help locate material constraints (Technosphere),
civic purposes (Anthroposphere), and people’s leverage points for intervention (Ergosphere). Yet these ‘spheres’ are not neatly nested: the same objects
(for example, a dam, a port, a data centre,
a standard, or a regulatory
agency) appear in multiple configurations. Subsequently, the concept of the
nexus between the human World and the natural Earth invites analysing open
boundaries rather than proposing a closed system.
Traditional Earth and geosciences focus on Earth’s
telluric features, i.e. material attributes, dynamics and processes. As is
often the case in STEM disciplines, social attributes are secondary, and
cultural attributes receive even less
emphasis. However, advances in Earth System Science [7], the debate over the
concept of the Anthropocene, and the expanding corpus of geoethical insights
have jointly rendered the co-constitution of telluric (Earth-related) dynamics
and societal organisation unavoidable. Therefore, the term nexus emphasises the
co-constituting of tellurian dynamics without dissolving material constraints
into discourse or freezing social life into a simplistic model. The notion of a ‘Nexus of human World and natural
Earth’ proposes an epistemic device for disciplined level-switching between planetary
constraints, social organisation, artefactual infrastructures, and conceptual
regimes.
To construct the nexus, insights are assembled from different sources:
Earth System Science (including theories of social-ecological systems and
complex-adaptive dynamics), Bunge’s
materialism and systemism, and
anthropological-philosophical resources. These include interpretations of
Arendt’s ‘human condition’, Kohlberg’s stages of moral development, Jonas’s
ethic of responsibility, and Renn’s account of knowledge-driven ‘sphere of
work’ (Ergosphere1 ). The resulting
construct is systemist in its insistence on materiality, causal powers,
structured explanation and practice-sensitivity.
To render the notion of a nexus operational, an
ideal-typical description is conceived, comprising four realms (of systems or
assemblages). The telluric realm gathers
natural processes and their constraints; the social realm gathers relations of coordination, conflict,
and authority; the conceptual realm
gathers mental/cognitive concepts, semiotic resources or symbolic
universes including knowledge
claims and legitimating narratives; and the artefactual realm gathers
human-made assemblies of material and symbolic structures. The artefactual
realm generalises the concept of an Ergosphere and is pivotal: it is the
privileged means where telluric constraints, social relations, and conceptual
regimes assemble into tellurian features of the Anthroposphere through
infrastructures, standards, devices, routines, and organisational forms. Notably, the artefactual realm
includes intangible structures (norms, practices, protocols, models, and
narratives) alongside tangible ones (machines, buildings, networks).
Because the planetary
habitat is complex-adaptive, the different realms
are co-constitutive rather
than separable: objects and attributes interlace, drift, and re-stabilise.
Earth System Science formalisms describe constraints and tendencies.
Accompanying system notions, the notion of assemblages signals partial
closures, including temporary stabilisations that can be undone and remade through
innovation, crisis, policy,
and cultural reframing. Seen through system
and assemblage lenses, the proposed heuristic is for practical use: it
operationalises reflexive, geoethically informed civic participation in shaping
the future of a cohabited planetary habitat - Earth-aligned civics attentive to
material limits, plural values, and distributed agency.
Founded on the concept of an ‘artefactual realm’,
the notion of ‘tellurian discourses’ is designed to indicate discourses on the emergence of the
1 "[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". [8] [p.7]
- Otto IM, Wiedermann M, Cremades R, et al (2020). Human agency in the Anthropocene. Ecological Economics 167:106463. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2019.106463
- Thomas JA (2022). Altered Earth. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK
- Jansson F (2026). The dynamics of cultural systems. (pre-print, arxiv.org) 1–36
- Spies M, Alff H (2020). Assemblages and complex adaptive systems: A conceptual crossroads for integrative research? Geogr Compass 14:. https://doi.org/10.1111/gec3.12534
- Huggett R (2024). Earth’s spheres: Conceptual and definitional debates. Progress in Physical Geography: Earth and Environment. https://doi.org/10.1177/03091333241275465
- Renn J (2020). The Evolution of Knowledge - Rethinking Science for the Anthropocene. Princeton University Press, Oxford, UK
- Steffen W, Richardson K, Rockström J, et al (2020). The emergence and evolution of Earth System Science. Nat Rev Earth Environ 1:54–63. https://doi.org/10.1038/s43017-019-0005-6
- Renn J (2018). The Evolution of Knowledge - Rethinking Science for the Anthropocene. HoST - Journal of History of Science and Technology 12:561. https://doi.org/10.2478/host-2018-0001
