GeoCivics for a Planetary Habitat

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).  

Observations and experiences, for example, the Columbian Exchange, global reservoir construction, the Montreal Protocol, deep-sea mining, mean sea-level rise, the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, and observations from the geoscience-society interface, complement the theoretical grounding of the concept of a nexus between human World and natural Earth. 

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 artefactual. This confluence mediates how humans cohabit Earth rather than discourses about ‘the social’ interventions into ‘the telluric’ or vice versa. Concepts and observations show how geoscientific insights and socio-cultural attributes co-produce frame and action, and how geoethics provides a vocabulary for civic responsibility under uncertainty.

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]

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