The Anthropocene Biosphere

Humans are transforming Earth in absolutely unprecedented ways.

A study shows how homo sapiens has radically changed their natural home, planet Earth and has "caused shifts in world ecosystems unprecedented in the last 500 million years." (source)

• Similar to the Great Oxygenation Events 2.3 billion years ago, human impact has produced a new kind of biosphere.
• Intervention in the diversity of life has been the greatest for the past half billion years.
• Our only home, planet Earth is entering a new kind of planetary state

Some of the key changes are:

•         "The homogenisation of species around the world through mass, human-instigated species invasions – nothing on this global scale has happened before

•         One species, Homo sapiens, is now in effect the top predator on land and in the sea, and has commandeered for its use over a quarter of global biological productivity.  There has never been a single species of such reach and power previously

There is growing direction of evolution of other species by Homo sapiens

•         There is growing interaction of the biosphere with the ‘technosphere’ – a concept pioneered by one of the team members, Professor Peter Haff of Duke University - the sum total of all human-made manufactured machines and objects, and the systems that control them" (source)

 M. Williams, J. Zalasiewicz, P. Haff, C. Schwagerl, A. D. Barnosky, E. C. Ellis. The Anthropocene biosphere. The Anthropocene Review, 2015; DOI: 10.1177/2053019615591020

Afterthoughts:
The global homogenisation of flora and fauna is obvious. People support a world full of poodles and horticultural weeds. They do not appreciate the endemic biodiversity of the place they dwell in. The eradication of bio-diversity is replaced with a monoculture.

Only one species (Homo sapiens) grabs 40% of net primary production

Burning fossil fuels and biomass seems an unstoppable addictive behaviour. We would rather burn to death, than modify our way of life.

Humans dictate the evolution of all other species, also having a go at their own imperfections.

We are constructing a gestell/ artifact that "could persist over geological timescales, an interaction of the biosphere with the technosphere (the global emergent system that includes humans, technological artefacts, and associated social and technological networks)." (source)

This noosphere (mind sphere) or a distributed agency seeks to expand the domination of space as well as planet Earth.

Spaceship Earth is fully in the hands and the code of the human helmsman. While vandalising the cradle of humanity and depriving the rest of life of a habitable planet, man steers for the goal of more and more.

Images:
The face of man, graffiti EU


Update:
Clive Hamilton, The Banality of Ethics in the Anthropocene, Part 1, Part 2, 

The Armed Man - Thoughts on War

The Concert:
Karl Jenkins: The Armed Man (‘Mass for Peace’) The anti-war piece was performed by the North Coast Performing Arts Orchestra and Choir for the UN International Day of Peace. The event took place in the Bellingen Soldiers' Memorial hall.

Thoughts on War:
Intense warfare is the evolutionary driver of large complex populations. Primate and ant societies pursue war to defend their turf or invade others for resources. Settler culture and rapid reproduction leads to an overflow of the 'petri dish'. The early enthusiasm for endless growth and expansion brought about a way of life of  'Go forth, multiply, fill the Earth, subdue and vandalise the Garden'. The logic of expansionism led man to the "The brutal destruction of 'creation'." H. Blumenberg

The uncanny hubris
of 'creation's crowning glory' promising to achieve paradise on Earth now might have as an outcome the creation of hell on a once habitable planet. (Anthropocene, CO2)

'The pride of creation' usurped the place of the many Earth gods, which they later rationalised into monotheism before upstaging 'the only one'. Heads of hierarchical societies grounded their existence with recourse to God - the sovereign's ownership of the land.

Techné
Controlled fire use by early humans and tool manufacturing enabled a civilisation of ever-refined means of destruction. Warfare conducted throughout human history has refined the means of killing and formed society.
The perpetual peace of “citizens of the Earth” (Erdbürger) had no chance against the perpetual war of defending the home soil from the other, or the land grab 'over there'. The state of war of all against all' in a 'free market' and the invisible fist of the market place became the new state of nature.

Sovereignty declares a 'state of exception' (G.Agamben) with a tendency to generalize of the exceptional state. This is a powerful strategy for legalised lawlessness,  suspension of the juridical order. Undeclared wars rage and no one can any longer say "we didn't know".

Framing of War
War is "framed" in the media so as to prevent us from recognising the people who are to be killed as living fully "grievable" lives, like ours. "Collateral damage" is not part of the war game.

Spectacles of Blood
"Roman gladiatorial shows were not put on for the purposes of indulging violence, bloodlust and cruelty, even if they may seem that way today. Instead, they were put on for several important purposes including social control and education". Today's media frames the robot wars 'over there'. Decisions are outsourced to machines. The masses consume the spectacle at a safe distance on screens. The spectacle, a social relation between people that is mediated by images is a self-fulfilling control mechanism for society.
 
A society modelled on war.
The 'war model' of the modern city and of human catastrophic society is elaborated in Virilio's  'dromology'.  "The expansive project of modernity has reached its limit in the light speed colonization of terrestrial time and space by technology and media"

A permanent war economy merged with Disaster Capitalism (Naomi Klein) further accelerates and exacerbates the catastrophic nature of modernity. Disasters (economic, political, military or natural) are good for profits - they reboot the system.  "Creative destruction, interventions and economic reconstruction mobilise resources for some. Margins are the largest outside the system of civil society. All is frontier with the loot going to the 'highest bidder'. There is no longer a safe place - anywhere!

Discipline techniques
Disciplinary or managerial techniques are initiated and developed into a technology for the control of individuals. (Michel Foucault) "'Discipline' may be identified neither with an institution nor with an apparatus; it is a type of power, a modality for its exercise, comprising a whole set of instruments, techniques, procedures, levels of application, targets; it is a 'physics' or an 'anatomy' of power, a technology." Psycho-orthopedics and pharmaceuticals also aid in the pathology of normality.

Ordinary people engage in "the banality of evil." (Hannah Arendt). Genocides continue and we are running amok causing "the earth’s sixth mass extinction event, through such anthropogenic impacts as habitat loss and modification, the spread of invasive species and climate change" Is omnicide the goal? Modernity as a system of efficiency, beyond ethics, mobilises all in the war against nature.

The driverless and shipwrecked ship of fools cruises (kyvernó̱:  steers, navigates) into the anthropocene, with no goal other than cruising the ocean of 'business as usual': more growth on an infinite planet, holding tight to the rudder of pathological denial. 

Armed man is a tautology inhabiting the machinery of war.


Texts:
Agamben, Giorgio,  State of Exception. Translated by Kevin Attell. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005, excerpt, Video, European Graduate School. 2003, starts at 2.29 min.
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus:, 1980/ Nomadology: The War Machine (New York: Semiotext(e), 19
Subtopia, A field guide to military urbanism
Aeschylus, The Persians 

Images:
1.  Blake, William Blake, The Ghost of a Flea, 1819–1820  
2.  Arcimboldo, Giuseppe, Fire 1566
3.  Goya, Francisco, The Disasters of War  (Désastres de la Guerra), 1815–1820
4.  Bosch, Hieronymus, detail of Haywain Triptych, 1516