Civics, Geoethics and Planetary Habitat - A Systemist's Framework

How can the relationship between humanity and Earth be adequately described today? This question has become more urgent because human action now shapes the dynamics of the planet to an extent that can no longer be understood as a mere “external influence” on a separate nature. Anyone who wants to understand the present must therefore do more than place nature and society next to one another. It is necessary to grasp how deeply both are intertwined.

This is where the line of thought should begin. Its starting point is simple, yet far-reaching: human beings and other living beings live together in one single planetary habitat. This habitat is not only an external environment. It is the condition of their existence. Under present conditions of planetary change co-shaped by human beings, this shared existence becomes visible in material, political, technical, and cultural relations. Human practices do not merely intervene in natural processes; they are already interwoven with them.

For this reason, the classical opposition between “nature” and “society” is no longer analytically sufficient. It does not capture how closely human action, technical infrastructures, institutional orders, and Earth-system dynamics are connected. More than that, it makes it easier to set normative questions aside. If nature and society appear as separate domains, responsibility can easily be shifted elsewhere. One field is then seen as the matter of the natural sciences, the other as the concern of politics or culture. What disappears from view are the actual relations through which both are connected.

What is needed instead is an integrated description. At its centre stands the idea of a nexus between the human world and the natural Earth. This nexus is not a thing, nor is it a new ontological object. It is a tool of understanding: a concept that helps describe how the planetary habitat is inhabited, shaped, and regulated. Its advantage is that it does not presuppose rigid, closed systems. It works with open boundaries, changing configurations, and elements that may appear at the same time in different contexts.

This matters because many formative objects of our time cannot be assigned unambiguously to a single domain. A freshwater reservoir, for example, is at once a material structure, a technical infrastructure, an instrument of political steering, an object of legal regulation, an expression of societal aims, and an intervention into hydrological processes. Similar considerations apply to harbours, data centres, standards, or regulatory authorities. Such formations show the limits of models that divide the world into neatly nested spheres. The idea of the nexus therefore begins with the relations themselves.

In this view, the concept of the Anthroposphere gains particular weight. What is meant is that part of the planetary habitat in which human life is organised through niches composed of people, cultures, institutions, and the built environment. These niches alter biophysical processes, just as they are themselves altered by them. Cultural, social, and ethical practices therefore no longer appear as additional external factors. Rather, they belong to the internal properties of the humanly inhabited planetary condition.

Alongside this stand the concepts of the Technosphere and the Ergosphere. They make visible the material and operational foundations on which human forms of life depend: infrastructures, networks, devices, routines, and organisational arrangements through which the distribution of energy, matter, and entropy changes. Taken together, these concepts help distinguish material limits and possibilities, societal purposes, and points of human intervention, without artificially separating them from one another.

For the Earth and geosciences, this view has far-reaching consequences. With the development of Earth System Science, the debate on the Anthropocene, and the formulation of geoethical questions, it has become clear that telluric Earth dynamics and societal organisation can no longer be thought apart. Scientifically, it is no longer tenable to treat Earth only as a physical-chemical system and to regard human society merely as an external disturbance.

To sharpen this insight, the book proposes an ideal-typical analytical tool. It distinguishes four realms. First, a telluric realm, which comprises natural processes as well as the possibilities and limits inherent in them. Second, a social realm, which describes relations such as coordination, conflict, authority, and power. Third, an artefactual realm, which comprises the material and symbolic configurations produced by human beings, including codified knowledge and symbolic resources. Fourth, a conceptual realm, which includes mental concepts: ideas, worldviews, dreams, and imaginations.

For the overall approach, the artefactual and social realms are especially central. Very often, the approach proceeds through the thing-like features of the artefactual. This realm marks the transition between the telluric, meaning the features of planet Earth, and the tellurian, meaning dwelling and acting on Earth. In the artefactual realm, infrastructures, standards, devices, routines, protocols, models, and narratives condense. Here, material conditions, social relations, and conceptual orders meet in practice. Human-made artefacts, in this sense, are not only things. They also include standardised procedures, established practices, and culturally effective modes of interpretation.

With this move, the description of human life on Earth also changes. The planetary habitat no longer appears as a static container, but as a complex, adaptive configuration in which the four realms co-produce one another. They can be analytically distinguished, but they are not really separated from each other. Objects and properties connect, move apart for a time, stabilise again, and are reshaped through innovation, crisis, politics, and cultural reinterpretation. Here, the concept of assemblage complements the concept of system: it points to partial and provisional closures that are neither fixed nor complete.

From this theoretical perspective, a practical horizon also emerges: geo-civicness. What is meant is a way of thinking that captures human co-dwelling on Earth more adequately than debates that still ask how the social acts upon nature, or vice versa. Geo-civicness asks how human beings are embedded in telluric, technical, institutional, and symbolic arrangements that themselves help bring forth the planetary habitat.

This becomes visible in examples such as the Columbian Exchange, the worldwide construction of large dams, the Montreal Protocol for the protection of the ozone layer, deep-sea mining, sea-level rise, or the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation. Such examples show that geoscientific insights and socio-cultural orders do not stand side by side in separation. Together, they generate frameworks of interpretation and forms of action.

At this point, the geoethical significance of the approach becomes clear. Geoethics does not appear here as a moral commentary subsequently added to scientific knowledge. It becomes a language through which geo-societal responsibility can be expressed under conditions of uncertainty. Once the planetary habitat is understood as a shared, materially bounded, and politically contested condition of dwelling, questions of responsibility, participation, and collective shaping can no longer be avoided.

What stands at the end, therefore, is not a closed worldview, but a heuristic: a conceptual tool for an Earth-oriented geo-civic practice. It helps us move between planetary conditions, social orders, artefactual infrastructures, and symbolic regimes without losing sight of their interweaving. Perhaps this is its greatest strength: not that it simplifies a complex world, but that it develops a language better able to do justice to that complexity.

p.s. 'Simple language' summary of book I am drafting; questions and comments are welcomed.