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Psychological Aspects of Waking Up to Global Environmental Change

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David P. Turner / July 23, 2026

The waking-up meme is a bit of a trope in the context of global environmental change.  Greta Thunberg believes “the world is waking up” to the climate crisis; attention to the collapse of biodiversity has been cast as “Waking up to Nature”; deforestation should inspire waking up to the environmental costs of overconsumption.  Despite this overexposure (and ambiguous use of the “woke” meme in culture wars about race and social justice), the waking-up metaphor might still do some work for us in trying to understand what it takes to foster global sustainability.

Here, I examine one route to personal waking up in relation to global environmental change (GEC), and consider how the associated psychological processes, or realizations, might help induce societal-scale change.

With respect to GEC, humanity (“we”) are undeniably in a crisis that needs waking up to at the personal and societal scale.  Essentially, many of the global environmental quality indices (planetary boundaries) are getting worse, yet there is limited public urgency about making the fundamental changes needed to address them.  The psychological and social sciences can contribute significantly to understanding how these needed changes can occur.

Waking Up at the Scale of an Individual

There are many kinds of waking up (notably spiritual awakening), but for the purposes of this essay, individual waking up to GEC has two aspects: 1) realization that the way you think and feel about the environment is highly dependent on your genetic and cultural programming, and may represent a limited worldview, and, 2) coming to understand the evolutionary context that produced and shaped you, which could inform a needed redesign of your personal value system.

Genetic and Cultural Programming

Genetic programming refers to results from the field of evolutionary psychology that suggest some of our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are strongly shaped by biological evolution (natural selection).  Both benevolent tendencies (e.g. altruism, love for babies) and not so benevolent tendencies (e.g. fear of strangers) are probably rooted in genes.  Perhaps most relevant to GEC is biologist E.O. Wilson’s claim that we are naturally imbued with some problematic tendencies (e.g. acquisitiveness), but also with biophilia (love of biological life).

Cultural programming refers to aspects of our thoughts, feelings and behaviors that we learn from our parents, teachers, peers, and informational environment.  It matters for our relationship with GEC because our models and teachers may be ignorant or biased about GEC.  If our education lacked much concern for global scale entities and processes, we are unlikely to take an interest in, and help to mitigate, GEC issues.

Waking up is recognizing that personality development and acculturation tend to lock us into highly constructed, and possibly self-harming, belief systems.  With that realization, the individual becomes alive to the possibilities for self-directed personal change and growth, or even some kind of organic psychological transformation.  AI may turn out to be an incredible aid to self-education because individuals can readily enter into dialogue with, and learn from,  AI chatbots that are vastly well informed and endlessly patient (with, of course, caveats about bias, misinformation, and overdependence).

For personal waking up to truly take hold (i.e. change one’s self-identity), new behaviors must be manifested.  Regarding GEC, those behaviors might look like reducing consumption of fossil fuels (e.g. buying an EV rather than a gas guzzler), investigating supply chains for products you consume, becoming politically active, or contributing to environmental NGOs.

Awareness of Cosmic Evolution and its Implications

Once a person wakes up to having been programmed, they may need a framework for creating a revised self, notably with regard to values.  In the Enlightenment era, when forward thinkers rejected Christian dogma as a source of truth, they began to wonder what then is the basis for morality (when God is dead, where does morality come from?).

Scientists have pulled together a coherent picture of the history of the known universe (i.e. Big History or Cosmic Evolution).  A key feature in that scientific narrative is a pattern of increasing complexity, generated by pervasive evolution in many forms (physical, biological, and cultural).  We owe our existence on this extraordinary planet to these creative forces.

When that cosmic perspective comes into view, a possible alignment of the self with the cosmic process presents itself.  Rather than a lifestyle of blithely contributing to degradation of the biosphere – as we are doing with the 6th Extinction and by mowing down the remaining rain forests – we might aspire to conservation and enhancement of the environment.  Aldo Leopold’s “land ethic” points the way towards a new (non-dualistic) GEC values paradigm.

The current Earth system – with its interacting lithosphere, atmosphere, hydrosphere, biosphere, and technosphere – is one of the most complex entities in the universe.  It deserves our respect and care.  And, with sympathetic attention, it could well evolve into something more sustainable than its current state (albeit with greater technosphere energy flow).

What Waking Up Means at the Societal Level

A society begins to wake up when a critical mass of citizens starts to question social norms, e.g. the counter-culture movement in the 1960s questioned societal norms regarding civil rights, the Vietnam War, and environmental quality.  Social awakening leads to public discourse, with the effect that the current status or trajectory is viewed as a product of obsolete thinking or sentiments, and should be changed.  Organized public movements advocating for change follow, and lastly actual changes are built into laws, policies, and norms.

Societies around the world are indeed now waking up to: 1) the fact that we are living in the Anthropocene (human impacts on the Earth system are at the geologic scale), and 2) the recognition that humanity has a responsibility not to extinguish itself or degrade the biosphere.  These are societal identity issues. 

Concurrent Individual and Societal Waking Up

Optimally, individual waking up and societal waking up re-enforce each other.  Individuals, who wake up and change their own ideas and behaviors, self-organize to alert others to new possibilities for themselves and for their society. 

To complete an effective societal wake-up, the ideals emerging from individual waking-up experiences must inspire more organized, movement-type activities that ramify into structural changes in society.  Some movements (e.g. Occupy Wall Street in 2011) were effective in raising issues and popularizing particular viewpoints, but not successful in generating structural change.  In contrast, the 20th Century civil rights movement in America led to specific legislation, e.g. the Civil Rights Act, because activists engaged with the political process.

There is always a danger that individual psychological change can be hijacked, e.g. by corporate or commercial interests, hence blunting pressure to change at the societal scale.   The proliferation of roadside litter in the 1950s – caused in part by corporate introduction of single-use disposable containers – induced individual awakening about the issue, and roused public sentiment to do something about it.  However, corporate interests introduced a very successful advertising campaign that put the responsibility on the litterer (rather than on the importance of mandating recyclable containers).

In driving societal change, it helps to have prestige bias (we tend to believe people who are famous, e.g. Robert Redford on the environment), and conformity bias (we tend to believe in something the majority believes) come into play.

It also helps to have economic conditions in society that support new enlightened views.  The Boomers were able to build an effective counterculture movement in the 1960s partly because of the prosperity of the post WWII decades.  Young people were able to support themselves and be activists.  Renewable energy is now growing by leaps and bounds, perhaps more so because the economy favors renewables than because renewable energy is an effective strategy to mitigate climate change.  Economists debate the design of an economy that is not destructively consumptive but retains the vitality to power through a sustainability revolution.

Conclusion

Addressing GEC will require significant changes in individual and social psychology.  Fortunately, individuals and societies have malleable identities.  At the individual level, waking up to limitations imposed by biological and cultural programming, and to the cosmic origins of order, can inspire new identities as planetary citizens.  At the societal scale, civil society and educational institutions can spread awareness and motivate structural change.  Economists must design an economy that can invest in an eco-friendly infrastructure.  Leaders and politicians must make it all happen.

Taming the Technosphere in an Age of AI Ascendency and Information Plenitude

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David P. Turner / May 23, 2025

AI-infused technosphere

Stylized image of Earth and its AI-infused technosphere.  Image Credit: MS CoPilot.

Introduction

The technosphere is increasingly impacting core features of the Earth system, notably the climate and the biosphere.

Accordingly, there is wide recognition that we humans (with the usual caveats about the meaning of “we” here) need to rein in (tame) the technosphere.

However, this project does not amount to just putting constraints on existing technology; new technologies designed to harvest, synthesize, and act on vast arrays of digital data are also needed.

The idea of managing the technosphere, or indeed the Earth system, has an obvious air of hubris.  But the technosphere is unquestionably having global scale deleterious impacts on the Earth system, and the human responsibility to do something about it is clear.

Notable recent changes in the technosphere that will help with global management include the arrival of well-functioning Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools like large language models (LLMs) and neural network-based machine learning algorithms.  Along with the information plenitude referred to in my title  ̶   a product of the recent trend to digitize all information, be it in the form of text, images, audio, or video  ̶  some hope of grasping global scale dynamics is emerging.

AI provides a fundamentally new way of thinking – beyond historical faith-based and reason-based approaches.  The human thinking apparatus – our brain  – simply does not have the capacity to assimilate and synthesize information at the scale with which it is being produced.  Fortunately, AI algorithms in combination with massive computing power and vast observational data sets can often do the job.  One great strength is that they can search the solution space of a problem more thoroughly than the unassisted human mind.

AI might also be considered analogous to a new source of energy.  Just as fossil fuels freed up our bodies to do more interesting and less labor-intensive activities, AI is freeing up our minds to do more fulfilling and less routine activities, including attending to sustainability at local to global scales.

The Role of AI in Earth System Management

Managing a socio-ecological system (such as the Earth system) requires monitoring the system, developing a model to assimilate observations of the system and help with understanding and planning, and organizing a deliberative body to make decisions.

The relevant global scale monitoring data includes observations of the metabolism and growth of the technosphere and the biosphere, along with tracking of the real time behavior of other parts of the Earth system, e.g. AI machine learning has proved useful in satellite-based monitoring of deforestation.

The relevant models could be 1) process-based Earth system simulation models, e.g. that include a representation of the global climate as well as social subsystems, 2) mechanism-free data driven models based on AI-assisted pattern analysis, or 3) combinations of these two approaches.

As far as deliberative bodies, the world is dangerously short of global governance infrastructure.  United Nations sponsored efforts such as the Paris Climate Accords are only a shadow of what is needed.  AI may be helpful in generating and summarizing relevant data, though of course the bigger challenge is with human capacity and willingness to change.  Ultimately, superintelligent AI might have features that make it better at devising optimal choices about global governance than (mere) humans could come up with.

Use Cases That Already Effectively Combine AI with Massive Data Sets

1) AI management of regional electricity grids.  Management of regional electricity grids has become much more complicated as they transition from traditional base-load power plants to supply by renewable sources.  The intermittency of wind and solar, as well as variation in the scale of the inputs (roof-top to utility-scale operations in the case of solar energy), are particularly challenging.  Smart grids must be capable of sending and receiving power from a multitude of individual customers, and maintaining dynamic pricing to balance power consumption during periods of high and low demand.

Fortunately, machine learning is effective at assimilating a blizzard of power system data, and in making automated decisions that link energy supply and demand.

2.  Use of meteorological observations, climate models, and AI to develop early warning systems for extreme weather events.  The incidence of extreme weather events (EWEs) such as floods, droughts, and fire is increasing because of anthropogenically-driven climate change.  Associated human fatalities, and damage to technosphere infrastructure, are correspondingly rising.

Weather forecasting tools like regional weather models have significant limitations with respect to forecasting EWEs.  These models are regularly updated by observations, and they project conditions into the near future based on simulating physical processes such as wind, precipitation, and heat transfer.  The model limitations show up in terms of the kinds of information they can assimilate, and in representing physical processes at the proper spatial and temporal scale.

An alternative weather forecasting approach uses AI (machine learning) to assimilate a much broader array of observations.  This approach largely leaves physical mechanisms behind and is said to be “data driven”, i.e. based on statistical relationships between historical observations of the causes and effects of weather change.  The forecast of an extreme weather event from this approach can be promptly fed to appropriate emergency response organizations that act to make relevant preparations and increase local resilience.

Beyond weather forecasting,  the machine learning approach is beginning to be used in applications based on Earth system digital twins.  A digital twin can be used to simulate alternative scenarios and may have embedded one or more process-based simulation models.  As model complexity increases, e.g. by adding models of social subsystems, a machine learning-based model may prove to be more effective.

A critical point here is that mass observations of weather and ground data are needed to train and drive an AI-based model.  In that regard, the recent focus on shrinking federal agencies like NOAA, NASA, and EPA, which make critical environmental observations, is particularly counterproductive.

3)  Use of Large Language Models (LLMs) in Earth System Science education and advocacy.

The technosphere is creating vast amounts of textual, graphical, and video information specifically about global environmental change, including peer-reviewed journal articles, books, periodicals, blogs, and NGO reports.  The more that people use this information to understand what is happening in the Earth system, and what could be done about it, the better chance we have of making needed changes in the technosphere (e.g. reducing greenhouse gas emissions). 

Domain-specific LLMs (e.g. Earth Copilot) have an important role to play in this aspiration because they can, with infinite patience, communicate a synthesis of the scientific consensus on a given topic at an appropriate level of learning ability (i.e. level of education). 

Certainly, an LLM can produce wrong answers at times.  The output of an LLM depends on the data used in its training, the manner in which it is fine-tuned, and new web-based information that it employs in response to a specific prompt.  Errors or lies in the training data may thus leak into the outputs.  Already, researchers have found policy relevant differences among the most used AI-chatbots, and bad actors are creating web sites with false information purely for the consumption of AI web crawlers that scrape the web seeking new information.

Despite the resistance of LLM creators to having their training data censored, more care is needed.  It is also important to continually expand, by way of further research, the range of concepts and ideas used in training data. 

Conclusion

AI gives us the ability to access, synthesize, and manage the contemporary plenitude of digital information.  Early successful applications of AI include management of regional electric grids, forecasting of Extreme Weather Events, and facilitating learning about Earth System Science.  Given that human progress in managing the technosphere is incommensurate with the damage the technosphere is doing to the Earth system, the range of potential applications is immense.  “We” must continue to develop them.

Credits

The lead image was created by collaboration with MS CoPilot, and some of the links were inspired by Perplexity.AI.  The text, with all its human flaws, is of my own hand. Taming the Technosphere blog posts are apparently used by the web scrappers that collect training data for AI LLMs, and are used (sometimes with attribution) for query-related responses by AI-assisted chatbots.

Differentiating the Concepts of Biosphere, Technosphere, and Technobiosphere

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David P. Turner / February 20, 2025

Figure 1. A stylized rendering of the integration of biosphere and technosphere. Image credit: Original Graphic.

Earth System Science studies the Earth system in terms of the whole, its parts, and the associated dynamics.  The biosphere and the technosphere are well-recognized functional parts of the current Earth system, but while the biosphere helps maintain the global biogeochemical cycles and climate, the technosphere is disrupting them.  The technobiosphere concept represents a potential fusion of these two parts into a matter-, energy-, and information-processing entity that advances planetary evolution.

Biosphere

In the early 20th Century, Russian geochemist Vladimir Vernadsky identified the biosphere as the sum of living organisms on the surface of Earth.  He emphasized how the biosphere absorbs solar energy and uses the energy to construct and maintain order in the form of biomass.  Earth system scientists have subsequently discovered that over geologic time, the biosphere has undergone major changes in the kinds of organisms it contains and in the way it contributes to maintaining the global biogeochemical cycles and global climate.

Technosphere

In a more recent conceptual advance, geologist Peter Haff identified the technosphere as the sum of all human-built technological artifacts on the surface of Earth, along with the human beings and institutions that manage those artifacts.  Like the biosphere, the technosphere uses energy (mostly in the form of fossil fuels) to construct and maintain order.  In this case, the order is in the form of machines and structures of various sorts networked together to support advanced technological civilization.  The technosphere is expanding rapidly, and indeed we have entered the Anthropocene era in which technosphere metabolism has begun to act as a geological force. 

The biosphere and technosphere concepts are helpful in thinking about Earth as a system, and how it changes over time.  One notable observation is that the technosphere is now growing at an exponential pace and its growth is coming in part at the expense of the biosphere – specifically a loss of biodiversity and ecosystem diversity. 

The technosphere – unlike the biosphere – largely does not recycle its wastes, e.g. vast amounts of plastic end up in landfills, and CO2 is freely dumped into the atmosphere from the combustion of fossil fuels.  The current trajectory of technosphere impacts on Earth’s climate and biosphere is leading to an instability in the Earth system that will challenge humanity’s ability to adapt.

Technobiosphere

For the long-term welfare of humanity, the next step in planetary evolution may well be a fusion of the biosphere and technosphere.  This new entity – the technobiosphere – deserves a label because, although it will retain a well-functioning biosphere and technosphere, much of its self-regulation will depend on human consciousness and, perhaps eventually, Artificial Intelligence (AI).

What that fusion will mean in practice is that the technobiosphere is run on renewable energy, largely recycles its waste materials, and does not grow at an exponential rate.  It would have the capacity to monitor itself, maintain itself, and alter its impacts on the global biogeochemical cycles.  New stabilizing negative feedback loops would link components of the technosphere, biosphere, atmosphere, hydrosphere, and geosphere.

The global carbon cycle in particular is amenable to technobiosphere regulation by means of controlling energy-based emissions of carbon dioxide and methane, reducing carbon emissions from deforestation, and increasing biologically-based carbon sinks by tree planting and protection of undisturbed ecosystems.

Integration

Clearly the limited contemporary integration of biosphere and technosphere is insufficient to call the combination a technobiosphere.

As to what will drive an enfolding of the technosphere back into the biosphere, I am afraid it is on us. Most importantly, a functional infrastructure for global environmental governance has to be developed to coordinate the global community.  Key principles on which to base that governance include sustainability and habitability.

Sustainability refers to a relationship between the technobiosphere and the rest of the Earth system such that the global environment is stable enough to support successive generations of humans.  If the global climate is warming by 3oC per 100 years because of carbon-based energy generation, the relationship is not sustainable.

Habitability refers to a planetary environment that supports all life forms.  If the growth of techno-artifacts is causing a 50% loss in biodiversity per 100 years, the habitability of the Earth is in decline.  In contrast, habitability could increase if continued urbanization, and an eventual decline in the human population from the global demographic transition, allowed for more of the land and the ocean to be dedicated to conservation purposes. 

The development of AI represents both threats and opportunities in relation to technobiosphere evolution. 

A key threat lies in how AI will speed up the technosphere (hence making greater demands on natural resources) and make the technosphere more autonomous.  Super-intelligent AI bots and agents may eventually care more about their own survival than the survival of the biosphere. 

AI-based opportunities lie in spurring scientific advances that reduce human impacts on the Earth system, and in helping educate natural resource managers and planetary citizens.  AI-based inquiry (with large language models) is a new form of perception  ̶  an intelligence capable of surveying information at the planetary scale and delivering a synthesis accessible to our individual minds.  

Conclusion

The way language works, the existence and meaning of specific words is socially constructed (by way of cultural evolution).  The biosphere concept allows us to see a planetary scale, energy-harvesting, and order-producing entity that helps regulate the global biogeochemical cycles and climate.

The technosphere concept allows us to see a new human-constructed, planetary scale, control force now altering Earth’s biosphere, biogeochemistry, and climate in a destabilizing manner. 

We need to start imagining an integrated technobiosphere  ̶  a part of the Earth system able to monitor and regulate itself so as to survive and thrive at a geologic time scale.