Nesting Anthropocene Rupture Within the Process of Noosphere Formation

Discussion

Boris Shoshitaishvili:

"Of the limited scholarly efforts at bringing the two concepts closer together (de Jong, 2019; Lemmens, 2018; Nordblad, 2014), one of the most important early attempts appeared briefly in a 2005 paper co-authored by Paul Crutzen, the atmospheric chemist who first coined the term Anthropocene 20 years ago: Will the Anthropocene simply turn out to be a very short era in which humanity blindly careens forward, continuing to transform the Earth until the planet loses its capacity to support us? Or might humanity rises to the challenge posed by Vernadsky, becoming the reflective, thinking, and proactive agent that transforms the biosphere into a noösphere, and consciously striving to shape a niche for ourselves in a sustainable Anthropocene? (Clark et al., 2005).

Clark, Crutzen, and Schellnhuber present the Anthropocene as historically pivotal: it will either be “a very short era” leading to disaster, or it will be an intense time of challenge in which humanity successfully becomes the “reflective, thinking, and proactive agent that transforms the biosphere into a noosphere.” Therefore, the Anthropocene may indeed be a world-historical crisis, a monumental rupture as its etymology suggests, but through it humankind may pass into a Noosphere.

This perspective reinterprets the Anthropocene's critical and material bent as the part of the story in which humanity first confronts (in appropriate collective dismay) the Earth system destabilization that has attended our Great Acceleration. However, this reinterpretation also lends greater significance to the Great Acceleration than the dire realization of the Anthropocene on its own. Through the Great Acceleration and the Anthropocene, the Noosphere, carrying the promise and meaning of global interconnection, has sped up its formation.

In other words, the two paradigms can be reframed as nested features of the Great Acceleration. The Anthropocene captures the entanglement of human-caused global changes in their suddenness, disturbance, and scale, while the Noosphere gives name, significance, and orientation to the overall transformation. The one concept balances the associations of the other: The Anthropocene prevents the Noosphere from being heedless and utopian, while the Noosphere prevents the Anthropocene from becoming meaningless and dispiriting.

* Combining the Global Protagonists of the Anthropocene and the Noosphere

In addition to reconciling rupture and formation, the implied protagonist of the Anthropocene, humankind personified as anthropos, can be reconciled with the global protagonist that appears in some of the earliest theories of the Noosphere. These theories interpret the formation of the cosmic sphere in organic terms as being tantamount to the development of a global superorganism.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the Noosphere's key early theorist alongside Vernadsky, imagined it to be not only a cosmic zone of human thought developing from and transforming the biosphere, but a living superorganism, a new organic unity in evolutionary history emerging from human beings' cultural and technological interconnection. Teilhard went so far as to analogize specific organ systems taking shape in this global human superorganism, including a supernervous system (global interactions via communication technologies), a superinheritance system (intergenerational transmission of accumulating cultural archives), a supercirculatory system (the global economy's movement of goods and capital), and a supermusculoskeletal system (mechanical and automated industry) (Miller, 1978; Teilhard de Chardin, 2004). In this particular Noospheric tradition, the Great Acceleration quite literally represents the physical growth, or more accurately, growth spurt of the global superorganism.

The Noosphere as global superorganism could potentially give an evolutionary and life history to the Anthropocene's more abstract figure of anthropos. Moreover, the Teilhardian concept advances the conviction that the human superorganism/anthropos must develop new levels of mind and mindfulness (noos). At the same time, the Anthropocene's focus on the alarming activity of its anthropos protagonist complements this Noospheric vision by emphasizing how disruptive and dangerous to the Earth system and biosphere the early formation of a conjectural human superorganism can be/has been. No less than the Noosphere would enhance the Anthropocene, this reverse complementarity is crucial, since the monumental fact of Earth system disruption and climate change was hardly foreseen by the early Noosphere thinkers, who wrote before the environmental consequences of globalizing humanity became widely recognized.

A seed of such reconciliation through combination of the two global protagonists can be glimpsed in the astrobiologist David Grinspoon's (2016) book Earth in Human Hands, in which he proposes a new criterion for the beginning of the Anthropocene: Self-conscious global change is a completely new phenomenon. It puts us humans into a category all our own and is, I believe, the best criterion for the real start of the era. The Anthropocene begins when we start to realize that it has begun. This definition also provides a new angle on the long-vexing question of what differentiates our species from other life. Perhaps more than anything else, it is self-aware world-changing that marks us as something new on the planet. What are we? We are the species that can change the world and come to see what we're doing.

By this alternative criterion, the true Anthropocene—what we might call the “mature Anthropocene”—is just getting started (Grinspoon, 2016).

Grinspoon's vision of a “mature Anthropocene,” which he later explains should follow our species's “technological adolescence,” brings the abstract disruptive anthropos of the Anthropocene closer to the Noosphere's developing superorganism. Humankind, in Grinspoon's framework, is growing and maturing like an organism (or superorganism), and the process of maturation is correlated with growing consciousness and awareness, the dimension privileged in Noosphere discourse. Furthermore, the presentation of the Great Acceleration as humanity's collective adolescence allows Grinspoon to underscore the simultaneous precariousness and promise of the moment, to balance the Anthropocene's warning and the Noosphere's hope without letting either slip from view. Formulations such as Grinspoon's “mature Anthropocene” are possible beginnings for more systematic reconciliation of these two global protagonists."

(https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2020EF001917)