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Contributions from Modernism, Postmodernism, and Metamodernism to Building a New Earth System Management Paradigm

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David P. Turner / February 9, 2026

Introduction

The defining feature of the Anthropocene Epoch is that humanity – through the activity of mass technology (the technosphere) – has become the equivalent of a geologic force.  The geological history of planet Earth now includes an anthropogenic rupture characterized by a rapidly changing atmosphere and climate, as well as a wave of extinctions among plant and animal species.  The negative impacts of these self-induced global environmental changes on the human enterprise are already being felt, and in coming decades will cause widespread misery and death.

Humanity has begun to coalesce in the face of this threat, and is scaling up programs of mitigation (reduction of greenhouse gas emissions) and adaptation (e.g. sea walls).  The results thus far, however, are rather feeble.  Here, I want to survey three cultural-intellectual responses to western Modernity in hope of finding inspirational ideas on how humanity (“we”) might better address global environmental change issues.

There are certainly many ideas from outside the western cultural perspective that are relevant to this project of building a new model for how humanity interacts with the Earth system.  But in this blog post I will be admittedly western centric for the sake of coherence.

Modernity, and Pushbacks against it from Modernism, Postmodernism, and Metamodernism

Modernity is a historical period in the course of western civilization extending from the 16th Century onward to the present.  It began with the Enlightenment, when religious dogma as a way of knowing was displaced by reason and science.  A core event was the Industrial Revolution, which fostered a proliferation of machines and buildings, along with a global infrastructure for travel and communication.  Capitalism is the operating system of Modernity.  Relentless economic growth is a characteristic feature.  The grand narrative of Modernity is progress – elaborated in the form of improving technology and quality of life.  The many downsides of Modernity include two world wars, rising inequality, and the aforementioned global environmental changes.

Cultural theorists have identified three movements, or constellations of ideas, which have arisen since around 1900 as a critique of Modernity.  The modernism, postmodernism, and metamodernism movements are sequential, but with substantial overlaps.  Modernism flourished from around 1900 to 1960, postmodernism from around 1960 to 2010, and metamodernism from around 2010 to the present.  These movements do not represent political ideologies, rather different ways of thinking.

They have of course inspired vast troves of lectures, articles, books, and videos, within both academia and popular media, but here I want to evoke only a few ideas or themes within each movement that might be extracted as contributions to a new paradigm for the relationship of humanity to the rest of the Earth system.

Modernism

In the early 20th Century, before World War One, countries around the world were exuberantly pursuing what I have called the “buildout of the technosphere”, i.e. the extension and thickening of the network of cities, factories, machines, roads, and support infrastructure that now cloaks the planet.

Great masses of people were drawn into this network as factory workers, construction workers, ship builders, administrators, and the like.  The natural environment was treated as an infinitely malleable background, and environmental quality was largely ignored.

Science advanced rapidly, but served as both a boon (e.g. nitrogen fertilizer) and a bane (e.g. nerve gas) to civilization.  National leaders were feeling so inspired by all the “progress” that they stumbled into the First World War, with all its mindless waste and horror. 

Modernism as a cultural-intellectual movement arose as a critique of this trajectory (i.e. the trajectory of Modernity).  Writers, philosophers, architects, and artists of many types began to question the linearity, regimentation, environmental degradation, and human degradation (including colonialism) that were features of Modernity.

A significant theme that surfaced early on was the idea of nature as a force greater than humanity.  Modernist writers understood nature as something more than just a background to industrial development.  Joesph Conrad, in The Heart of Darkness, saw nature as “an implacable force”, something we degrade but cannot ultimately control.  This idea is relevant to the present because we are now beginning to recognize nature – framed as Gaia (the quasi self-regulating Earth system) – as having agency.  James Lovelock, early Earth system scientist and popularizer of the Gaia narrative, referred to “The Revenge of Gaia” in the title to one of his books.  Humanity must now aspire to cooperate with or manage Gaia.

A second useful theme from modernism is “interiority”.  In contrast to the realist novels of the 19th Century (e.g. George Eliot’s Middlemarch), the novels of early modernism often spend considerable time inside the heads of the protagonists.

One thing that occupied those minds was maintaining a personal relationship to the natural world.  Characters in D.H. Lawrence novels often espoused that an antidote to the environmental and intellectual squalor of industrialization was an engagement with blood, flesh, and soil.  The Birken character in Women in Love strips off his clothes and writhes around on the ground, communing with a bed of primroses.  A hundred years later, the disconnect from nature induced by Modernity is ever greater.  We need modernism’s reminder to immerse ourselves in nature, to engage with it.  We might thus come to love and nurture it instead of degrading it.  The aggregate effect of many caring individuals could be significant societal change.

A third modernist writer pushback was against the increasingly regimented and mechanical sense of time that is imposed by industrialization.  Virginia Woolf compresses much of Mrs. Dalloway into a single day, and stretches the life of her protagonist in Orlando over multiple generations (even alluding to a change in climate over that period).  Woolf, James Joyce, and others tried to break out of conventional temporal framing.

This concern with compressing and stretching time is relevant to contemporary issues because the advent of the Anthropocene means we must juxtapose historical time with geological time.  Comprehending humanity as a geological force requires that we place the near-time environmental impacts of humanity (e.g. climate change) in the context of environmental changes happening over a geologic time scale.  And we must firmly grasp scenarios for the Earth system extending into the distant future, scenarios that differ greatly depending on current investments in mitigation (e.g. how soon we accomplish a renewable energy revolution to reduce greenhouse gas emissions).  Our capacity to mentally shift temporal perspective needs exercise.

Postmodernism

By the 1960s, the products of Modernity had come to include another World War, the threat of nuclear holocaust, and environmental decline at the global scale.  Artistic and philosophical critique of Modernity proliferated, and the dominant critique began to be packaged as the postmodern movement.

The core orientation of postmodernism is a suspicion about “grand narratives” especially the narrative of continuous progress during the roll-out of western civilization.  Postmodern philosophers maintained that what we call reality is constructed (made-up essentially) by the dominant socio-economic actors in society.  Even the scientific epistemology was questioned to the degree that it claimed to be the only way to establish universal truths.

In literature, postmodern novels like DeLillo’s White Noise and Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow portrayed a world without reliable sources of authority, and immense ambiguity about every aspect of the human condition.

Postmodernism did not have much to say about the environment except perhaps to reject the environmentalist’s totalizing narrative of decline.  However, if there is something worth saving from postmodernism for our purposes here, it would be having the vision and fortitude to question the whole direction that western civilization is headed, i.e. asking if it is really progress to precipitate a 6th Mass Extinction and a cataclysmic change in the global environment.  Too many people today are not asking big questions. 

Postmodernism itself can’t take us much beyond asking questions, but it certainly rattles the foundations of western self-regard.

Metamodernism

By the time of the 9/11 terrorist attack, cultural theorists had grown weary of postmodernism.  Modernity was drifting towards apocalypse, and instead wallowing in a nihilistic labyrinth of deconstruction, perhaps something should be done about it. 

The polycrisis that now besets humanity is clear to see.  It includes environmental degradation at all scales, the emergence of AI as something that may become superior to ourselves in many ways, a rickety economic system based on capitalism that continues to generate vast inequality, and systems of governance at all scales that are disrupted by polarization and are inadequate to the demands of the times.  We also face a metacrisis  – an inner psychological turmoil induced by the pace and complexity of environmental, technical, and societal change.  Our mental capacities seem to be incommensurate with the demands of the times.  No wonder doom scrolling has become a global pastime.

The metamodern movement is a new set of ideas and concepts inspired by the deficits of Modernity and daring to be forward looking.

Meta- here implies oscillation between modernism and postmodernism, but it also allows for emergence above them and beyond them.

Like modernism and postmodernism, the metamodern movement is not fundamentally political, i.e. does not advocate any particular stance on the many political polarities of the day.  Metamodernism is rather a way of thinking that will hopefully birth a new version of humanity, a version able to accomplish the needed “Great Transition” away from the polycrisis.  The meta- move is to take a step back to gain perspective.

I’ll focus on four critical metamodern concepts.  For this blog post, I want to concentrate on the ways these concepts might inform how we think about the environment.

1. History.  Metamodernism recognizes the benefits of Postmodern skepticism about grand narratives.  Nevertheless, it maintains that we can sincerely take a stand on momentous issues like massive anthropogenic environmental change and envision a non-calamitous future.

2. Interiority.  Metamodernism takes a step beyond modernism’s call to pay attention to interiority by calling for deliberate personal growth.  We each have the capacity to grow in terms of self-awareness, emotional depth, and intellectual breadth – but doing so requires focus and effort.  Digital Modernity strives to consume our attention, leaving few inner resources available for personal reflection and self-development.  However, personal growth is now entangled with the polycrisis.  Individual decisions about consumption (EV vs. gas guzzler), and about politics, matter.

3. Intimacy.  In late Modernity, a person is essentially a consumer.  Our relationships with each other are largely transactional.  The new ask from metamodernism is that we bind ourselves to the other humans on this planet based on our shared predicament.  We know the causes of rapid climate change and the 6th Extinction, and we share the responsibility to do something about them.

4. Context.  The fragmentation of life in Modernity keeps us juggling many balls simultaneously.  Metamodernism asks us to step back, or forward, or above, each ball.  There is no fixed frame of reference, but always a need for context.  In terms of systems theory, we need to construct hierarchies and holarchies that permit changing the spatial and temporal scale of our perspective.  Metamodernism asks that we never wholly rest in one context.

Two recent novels that qualify as metamodern are Ian McEwan’s Solar and Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry of the Future.  In Solar, McEwan satirizes his main character (Beard, a theoretical physicist) as having good intentions with respect to the environment, but deep human flaws that prevent him from accomplishing much.  Besides examining the interiority of Beard, McEwan uses the novel to educate the reader about the environmental crisis and possible technologies to address it.  That oscillation makes it metamodern.  The oscillation or tension in Ministry is between the exceedingly dire environmental trajectory portrayed for the near-term future vs. a long-term future in which humanity manages to deal with the vested interests that block climate change mitigation.

A New Paradigm

The selection of ideas here from modernism, postmodernism, and metamodernism provides only a glimmer of the constellation of ideas needed to create a new paradigm (technobiosphere symbiosis?) for the relationship of humans to the Earth system. 

However, that glimmer has significant implications.

  1.  Linear time is disintegrating.  Humans will be dealing with past and present actions (e.g. carbon emissions) for centuries to come.  We have to project ourselves into the future and cultivate a sustainable world.  The distant past and the distant future matter.
  2.  Our sense of space is also destabilizing.  The nation has been a spatial reference for Modernity.  Now, we have to think globally.  The biosphere is a thing, the technosphere is a thing.  Earth is our home. 

Relevant ideas for building a new relationship of humanity to the rest of the Earth system will come from many other sources besides the cultural-intellectual movements discussed here, notably from science – especially the young discipline of Earth system science.  Both the Arts and Sciences need more rather than less societal support to continue creation of ideas and experiences that foster inner personal growth and outer global sustainability.

Commentary on “The Letter: Laudato Si Film”, and “Laudato Si” (the encyclical)

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David P. Turner / January 23, 2023

Pope Francis issued an encyclical (Laudato Si) in 2015 about “care for our common home”.  The document discussed a wide range of global environmental change topics, notably climate change and loss of biodiversity.  It aimed to provide a moral rationale for simultaneously addressing the issues of global environmental change and human inequity.  The encyclical runs to nearly 200 pages and is not a light read.  Perhaps to make its message more accessible, the Vatican recently produced and released (October 12, 2022) a related video (The Letter: Laudato Si Film), clocking in at 81 minutes.

The encyclical was released just prior to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change COP21 meeting that was held in Paris.  The product of that meeting was The Paris Agreement, which is widely perceived as a significant step towards mitigating global climate change.  Considering that there are 1.3 billion Catholics who ostensibly consider the pope infallible, the encyclical may well have strengthened global political will to seriously address the climate change issue.

The film is a very different vehicle from the encyclical, leaving behind the encyclical’s more controversial aspects (discussed below) and presenting an engaging narrative about global change with good visuals and music.  The premise of the film is that the Pope invites a set of 5 people from widely different backgrounds to Rome for a “dialogue” about the encyclical.

The five participants included the following.

1.  A poor black man from Senegal who is considering an attempt to migrate to the EU because of the deteriorating environment in his home country.  He represents the billion or so people expected to be displaced by climate change this century.

2.  An indigenous man from Brazil whose forest homeland in the Amazon Basin is under siege.  He represents forest dwellers throughout the tropical zone who are losing their homes to rampant deforestation.

3.  A young woman from India.  She represents the voice of a younger generation who will be forced to deal with the massive environmental change problems caused by their elders (intergenerational inequity).

4.  A man and a woman from the U.S. who are scientists working on monitoring and understanding coral reef decline.  They represent the community of research scientists trying to understand climate change impacts and what to do about them.

Each participant is shown in their home environment receiving a letter of invitation from the Pope.  The film then documents their experiences in Rome, including discussions amongst themselves and with the pope.

The film was engaging and had a positive message about the need for solidarity across all humanity in the face of threats from climate change and loss of biodiversity.

However, I did have some concerns.

First was that the film seemed to be more about the victims of global environmental change (both human and nonhuman) than about the solutions.  The participants were certainly sincere, and helped put a human face on the challenges ahead; but little was said about the personal changes and the political realities involved in transitioning to global sustainability.

Second was the emphasis on climate change as the sole driving force in the current surge of migration.  Climate change is indeed driving international migration but a host of other factors are of equal or greater importance, including civil war, overuse of local natural resources, and gross defects in local governance.  If indeed a billion people will potentially be displaced by climate change in this century, they can’t all migrate.  Alternatives to migration include foreign aid for adaptation, and aid to improve local educational opportunities that would help train citizens for local economic activity and help limit population growth (the fertility rate in Senegal is 4.3 births per woman).

Third was that the film may point viewers towards reading the actual encyclical, which has inspired much more commentary  ̶  both positive and negative  ̶  than the film.

The proclamations of the pope usually do not draw much attention from the scientific community, but in the case of the Laudato Si encyclical, the science of global environmental change is front and center.

As I started reading the encyclical, I was surprised because the tone sounded as if it were written by an environmental science policy analyst rather than a religious leader (apparently there was a ghost writer).  The scientific causes of climate change and biodiversity loss were reasonably explained, and it was refreshing to see the “dominion” over the Earth given to humanity by God presented more in terms of responsibility to conserve environmental quality than as a license to exploit limitless natural resources.  The intrinsic value of all species, independent of their utility to humans, was recognized.  When the text veered into explaining the Christian belief system (e.g. the Holy Trinity), it lost cogency from an Earth system science perspective.

The encyclical was well received by scientific authorities in some cases, perhaps because the Pope broadened the usual rationales for caring about climate change and biodiversity loss to include the moral dimension.  Wealth-based inequity (relatively wealthy people have caused most of the greenhouse gas emissions but it is relatively poor people who will suffer the greatest impacts) and intergenerational inequity (recent generations have caused most of the greenhouse gas emissions but future generations will suffer the greatest impacts of climate change) are  clearly moral issues.

Critiques of the encyclical have referred to its limited regard for the full suite of dimensions (technical, political, and economic) needed to address global environmental change.  The encyclical comes across as hostile to the “technocratic paradigm”, suggesting some technofixes will induce more problems than they solve.  There is much emphasis on reducing excess consumption.  Realistically though, there must be a revolutionary change in technology towards renewable energy and complete product recycling.  Likewise, beyond calling for a stronger climate change treaty (as the Pope did), we must have stronger institutions of global environmental governance, and new economic policies that prioritize sustainability.

The section of the encyclical about population control was especially provocative.  The pope took issue with calls for limiting population growth for the sake of the environment, a position  consistent with formal Catholic doctrine against contraception.  This view rings false, however, because of the contradiction between saying that Earth’s natural resources are limited (as stated several times in the encyclical) and that all humans deserve a decent quality of life (which inevitably consumes natural resources), while at the same time maintaining that high rates of population growth in developing countries are not an issue.  In contrast, the recent World Scientists’ Warning of a Climate Emergency 2022  called for “stabilizing and gradually reducing the human population by providing education and rights for girls and women”.  Ehrlich and Harte also point out that unchecked population pressure on food supply and natural resources pushes development into ever more vulnerable ecosystems, and fosters ever more inegalitarian forms of government.

Pope Francis deserves credit for bringing attention to the moral questions raised by anthropogenically-driven global environmental change.  Our contemporary materialistic and instrumental value system has proven to be unsustainable and should indeed be influenced by values based on respect for the natural environment, as well as values derived from human solidarity.  The Laudato Si encyclical and film (along with associated praise and critique) are contributing in a positive way to the ongoing process of cultural evolution, which has now begun to operate at the global scale.

Environmental Reglobalization

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David P. Turner / April 24, 2022

Globalization refers to the increasing interconnectedness of individuals and social groups everywhere on the planet, and to the increasing inability of any particular social group to isolate itself from outside influences.  The process has geopolitical, economic, cultural, and environmental dimensions. 

In this post, I am particularly interested in how globalization, and its follow-on stages of deglobalization, and reglobalization, impact the global environment (Figure 1).

three stages of globalization
Figure 1.  Three sequential phases of globalization.  Neoliberal globalization from around 1980 to 2008 was based on maximizing profits by way of free trade within a global capitalistic system.  More recently, nationalistic deglobalization is characterized by a reassertion of national borders and reduction in flows of trade goods, financial capital, and immigrants.  Environmental reglobalization is a potential way forward in which the necessity to collectively address global environmental change issues provides a basis for global solidarity.  Image Credits: Neoliberal Globalization, Nationalistic Deglobalization, Environmental Reglobalization, Composite (D. Turner).

Despite globalization’s significant detrimental impacts on the global environment – notably a large stimulus to growth in the global Gross Domestic Product and associated greenhouse gas emissions – it has also had significant beneficial effects on the global environment, e.g. progressive environmental standards have been widely promulgated, and a global environmental governance infrastructure has begun to function.

However, globalization is currently in retreat, and any possible environmental benefits from it are in jeopardy.  Causes of the current wave of deglobalization include: 1) the economic suffering imposed on workers in the most developed countries by globalization of the labor market (which has inspired efforts to reduce imports of manufactured goods), 2) the psychological shock of juxtaposing very different cultures (e.g. secular vs. religious) made possible by modern transportation and communication technology (hence leading to revivals of xenophobic fundamentalism), and 3) the political benefits to autocratic leaders from rousing nationalist fervor (hence leading to outbreaks of war, as in Ukraine).

The rise of nationalism and deglobalization is associated with a retreat from global environmental change issues, e.g. the withdrawal of the U.S. from the Paris Climate Agreement by the Trump administration in 2017, and the anti-environmental policies of the Bolsonaro administration in Brazil.  That kind of nationalism shirks responsibility for planetary scale problems and in practice is a false nationalism.  It ultimately endangers all nations on Earth as the global biophysical environment deteriorates and ecosystem services to humans are lost.

Reformed globalization (reglobalization) is a new concept that could help overcome the dangers of deglobalization.  Reglobalization would include stronger national and international efforts to reduce economic inequality and to extend the benefits of globalization more uniformly.  It would mean a wide recognition that we live on a crowded planet, which must be managed collectively to insure continued delivery of nature’s services.  Indeed, global environmental change issues could be the major driver towards an era of greater global unity.

With respect to the environment, reglobalization would include stepped-up green-tech transfer to developing countries for mitigation of climate change, stronger institutions of global environmental governance, and a revived commitment by individuals, institutions, and nations to global sustainability.

Environmental reglobalization will likely not have the prodigious force of the neoliberal globalization wave that began in the 1980s.  Rather, it must be cultivated based on wide public awareness, active civil society organizations, and wise political leadership.

Capitalism and the Global Environment

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David P. Turner / January 15, 2021

Humanity is beset by global scale problems, notably climate change, pandemics, and geopolitical struggles.

Clearly, global scale solutions and – broadly stated – more global solidarity are needed.

The most obvious factor currently binding together nearly all humans and nations on the planet is the global economy.  That economy is rooted in capitalism, albeit in various forms (e.g., free market capitalism, crony capitalism, state capitalism, and monopoly capitalism).  Thus, capitalism is a logical place to look for both the source of our global scale problems and perhaps even, in its reform, solutions to those same problems.

The ubiquity of capitalism is not in doubt.  Its characteristic feature is a market that allows for competitive exchange of goods and services.  Legal support for accumulation of capital and its investment in profit making enterprises is foundational.  In recent decades, capitalism has taken on a global character, featuring globalization of the labor market and capital flows.

The upsides of national level and globalized capitalism include efficiency in the distribution of goods and services, economic growth to support rising standards of living, and the availability of capital for investment in productive enterprises.

Important downsides include growing inequality of wealth and income, both within and between nations, growing instability of the global financial system, and growing environmental degradation at all scales.

This blog post is primarily concerned with the relationship of capitalism to the global environment.

The impact of capitalism on the global environment traces back to its fundamentals.  A capitalist organizes labor to manipulate natural resources and create products, which can then be sold in a competitive market.  Income from product sales pays for the costs of production, for personal or corporate profit, and possibly for expansion of production.

Key problems with respect to the environment lie in the propensity for expansion and the pressure to minimize costs.

Because of the competitive nature of capitalism, producers are compelled to expand.  More profits mean more capital to invest in beating competitors.  Expansion tends to allow economies of scale that help minimize costs, hence increase competitiveness.  However, production cannot expand indefinitely on a finite planet.  Graphic examples include unsustainable use of ground water for irrigated agriculture, and unchecked conversion of rain forests to soybean fields. 

Minimizing costs often means externalizing environmental costs.  Greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide are freely emitted as a byproduct of the fossil fuel combustion that powers much of the modern economy.  The emitter does not pay the cost of climate change impacts.  Economic globalization makes the externalization of environmental costs easier by shifting production to countries with relatively weak regulation of pollution.

It is time for a global scale reckoning of capitalism, in all its forms, with the fact that nearly eight billion people and a biosphere need to co-exist on what has become a crowded, rapidly warming, planet.  Capitalism clearly causes environmental problems that it cannot solve.

Despite the fact that global climate change “changes everything”, capitalism is not going to go away.  A primary mechanism by which to modify capitalism is policy changes at the level of the nation-state.  Historically, the relationship of western capitalism to the state has undergone several major transformations – and the time is now for the next reset.

A very brief history of that relationship runs as follows.

The Capitalist State arose in the 19th century in association with the Industrial Revolution.  This type of state strongly supported rapid expansion of capitalist enterprises but displayed limited concern for workers or the environment.

Reaction to inequality in wealth and overexploitation of workers led eventually to the Welfare State in which government expanded and supported provision of decent wages, health care, and old age income (e.g., the New Deal in the U.S.).  By the 1960s, the issue of environmental quality also began to be considered a governmental responsibility.

By around 1980, the Neoliberal State (think Reaganomics) began to replace the welfare state.  Here the size of government shrank, i.e., lower taxes and less regulation.  Capitalists were again given free rein to maximize profits. 

Forty years later we find ourselves with vast inequality in the distribution of wealth and income, in America approaching levels in the early 20th century, and an alarmingly deteriorating global environment.

The appropriate transformation at this point is from the Neoliberal State to the Green State.  Governmental concern for the environment must rise to the level of its concern for economic, security, and social welfare issues.  The economic system is then seen as embedded in a society and constrained by the local and planetary ecology.  If the goal is a sustainable Earth system, governments will have to increasingly intervene in the economic system to moderate capitalism’s worst excesses.

The transformation to Green States will require well educated citizens who share environmental friendly values, reformed corporate governance, and leaders who employ government to protect rather than exploit common pool resources (e.g. a carbon tax).    

Note that economic inequality and environmental quality are linked by the notion that people who are not materially secure are not in a position to support potentially costly policies that improve environmental quality.  Consequently, redistribution of income and wealth to improve material security are critically important – not only for the sake of social justice but also for the sake of the environment.  More ominously, highly skewed distributions of wealth are historically associated with violent conflict, which often has adverse environmental consequences.

Moderating the impacts of capitalism on the global environment will require innovations in Earth system governance that parallel the transformations at the nation-state scale.  The institutions of global geopolitical governance, economic governance, and environmental governance must be redesigned and empowered to protect the global environment.  Thus, we might speak of fostering a green planet (or Green Marble as I have termed it).  The vision of a Global Green New Deal from the United Nations outlines some steps that will move us in that direction.

A Positive Narrative for the Anthropocene

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David P. Turner / July 16, 2020

Humans are story-telling animals.  Our brains are wired to assimilate information in terms of temporal sequences of significant events.  We are likewise cultural animals.  Within a society, we share images, words, rituals, and stories.  Indigenous societies often have myths about their origin and history.  Religious mythologies remain prevalent in contemporary societies.

The discipline of Earth System Science has revealed the necessity for a global society that can address emerging planetary scale environmental change issues – notably climate change.  A shared narrative about the relationship of humanity to the biosphere, and more broadly to the Earth system, is highly desirable in that context. 

The most prevalent narrative about humanity’s relationship to the Earth system emphasizes the growing magnitude of our deleterious impacts on the global environment (think ozone hole, climate change, biodiversity loss).  The future of humanity is then portrayed as more of the same, unless radical changes are made in fossil fuel emissions and natural resource management.

In the process of writing a book for use in Global Environmental Change courses, I developed an elaborated narrative for humanity − still based on an Earth system science perspective but somewhat more upbeat.  I used the designation Anthropocene Narrative to describe it because Earth system scientists have begun to broadly adopt the term Anthropocene to evoke humanity’s collective impact on the environment. 

There are of course many possible narratives evoked by the Anthropocene concept (e.g. the historical role of capitalism in degrading the environment), all worthy of study.  But for the purposes of integrating the wide range of material covered in global environmental change classes, I identified a six stage sequence in the relationship of humanity to the rest of the Earth system that serves to link geologic history with human history, and with a speculative vision of humanity’s future (Figure 1).  The stages are essentially chapters in the story of humanity’s origin, current challenges, and future.  The tone is more hopeful than dystopian because our emerging global society needs a positive model of the future.  

Figure 1.  An Earth system science inspired Anthropocene narrative with six stages.  Image credits below.

The chapters in this Anthropocene narrative are as follows.

Chapter 1.  The Pre-human Biosphere

The biosphere (i.e. the sum of all living organisms) self-organized relatively quickly after the coalescence of Earth as a planet.  It is fueled mostly by solar energy.  The biosphere drives the global biogeochemical cycles of carbon, nitrogen, and other elements essential to life, and plays a significant role in regulating Earth’s climate, as well as the chemistry of the atmosphere and oceans. The biosphere augments a key geochemical feedback in the Earth system (the rock weathering thermostat) that has helped keep the planet’s climate in the habitable range for 4 billion years.  By way of collisions with comets or asteroids, or because of its own internal dynamics, the Earth system occasionally reverts to conditions that are harsh for many life forms (i.e. mass extinction events).  Nevertheless, the biosphere has always recovered − by way of biological evolution − and a mammalian primate species recently evolved that is qualitatively different from any previous species. 

Figure 2.  The pre-human biosphere was a precondition for the biological evolution of humans.  Image Credit: NASA image by Robert Simmon and Reto Stöckli.

Chapter 2.  The Primal Separation

Nervous systems in animals have obvious adaptive significance in term of sensing the environment and coordinating behavior.  The brain of a human being appears to be a rather hypertrophied organ of the nervous system that has evolved in support of a capacity for language and self-awareness.  These capabilities are quite distinctive among animal species, and they set the stage for human conquest of the planet.  The most recent ice age receded about 12,000 year ago and a favorable Holocene climate supported the discovery and expansion of agriculture.  With agriculture, and gradual elaboration of toolmaking, humanity ceased waiting for Nature to provide it sustenance.  Rather, Nature became an object to be managed.  This change is captured in the Christian myth of Adam and Eve’s expulsion from the Garden of Eden (Figure 3).  They lived like all other animals in the biosphere until they became self-aware and began to consciously organize their environment.

Figure 3.  The story of Adam and Eve symbolizes the separation of early humans from the background natural world.  Image Credit: Adam and Eve expelled from Eden by an angel with a flaming sword. Line engraving by R. Sadeler after M. de Vos, 1583. Wellcome Trust.

Chapter 3.  The Build-out of the Technosphere

The next phase in this narrative is characterized by the gradual evolution and spread of technology.  An important driving force was likely cultural group selection, especially with respect to weapons technology and hierarchical social structure.  The ascent of the scientific worldview and the global establishment of the market system were key features.  Human population rose to the range of billions, and the technosphere began to cloak Earth (Figure 4).  The Industrial Revolution vastly increased the rate of energy flow and materials cycling by the human enterprise.  Telecommunications and transportation infrastructures expanded, and humanity began to get a sense of itself as a global entity.  Evidence that humans could locally overexploit natural resources (e.g. the runs of anadromous salmon in the Pacific Northwest U.S.) began to accumulate.

Figure 4.  The Earth at night based on satellite imagery displays the global distribution of technology dependent humans.  Image Credit: NASA/GSFC/Visualization Analysis Laboratory.

Chapter 4.  The Great Acceleration

Between World War II and the present, the global population grew from 2.5 billion to 7.8 billion people.  Scientific advances in the medical field reduced human mortality rates and technical advances in agriculture, forestry, and fish harvesting largely kept pace with the growing need for food and fiber.  The extent and density of the technosphere increased rapidly.  At the same time, we began to see evidence of technosphere impacts on the environment at the global scale – notably changes in atmospheric chemistry (Figure 5) and losses in global biodiversity.

Figure 5.  The impacts of the global human enterprise on various indicators of Earth system function take on an exponential trajectory after World War II.  Image Credit: Adapted from Steffen et al. 2015.

Chapter 5.  The Great Transition

This phase is just beginning.  Its dominant signal will be the bending of the exponentially rising curves for the Earth system and socio-economic indicators that define the Great Acceleration (Figure 5 above).  Global population will peak and decline, along with the atmospheric CO2 concentration.  Surviving the aftermath of the Great Acceleration with be challenging, but the Great Transition is envisioned to occur within the framework of a high technology infrastructure (Figure 6) and a healthy global economy.  To successfully accomplish this multigenerational task, humanity must begin to function as a global scale collective, capable of self-regulating.  Neither hyper-individualism nor populist tribal truth will get us there.  It will take psychologically mature global citizens, visionary political leaders, and new institutions for global governance.

Figure 6.  A critical feature of the Great Transition will be a renewable energy revolution.  Image Credit: Grunden Wind Farm

Chapter 6.  Equilibration

Human-induced global environmental change will continue for the foreseeable future.  The assumption for an Equilibration phase is that humanity will gain sufficient understanding of the Earth system – including the climate subsystem and the global biogeochemical cycles – and develop sufficiently advanced technology to begin using the technosphere and managing the biosphere to purposefully shape the biophysical environment from the scale of ecosystems and landscapes (Figure 7) to the scale of the entire planet.  Humanity is a part of the Earth system, meaning it must gain sufficient understanding of the social sciences to produce successive generations of global citizens who value environmental quality and will cooperate to manage and maintain it.  The challenges to education will be profound.

Figure 7.  An idealized landscape in which the biosphere and technosphere are sustainably integrated.  Image Credit: Paul Cézanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire, 1882–1885, Metropolitan Museum of Art.

As noted, this Anthropocene Narrative is largely from the perspective of Earth system science.  In the interests of coherence, humanity is viewed in aggregate form.  Humanities scholars reasonably argue that in the interests of understanding climate justice, “humanity” must be disaggregated (e.g. by geographic region or socioeconomic class).  This perspective helps highlight the disproportionate responsibility of the developed world for driving up concentrations of the greenhouse gases.  The aggregated and disaggregated perspectives on humanity are complementary; both are needed to understand and address global environmental change issues.

The Anthropocene Narrative developed here is broadly consistent with scientific observations and theories, which gives it a chance for wide acceptance.  The forward-looking part is admittedly aspirational; other more dire pathways are possible if not probable.  However, this narrative provides a solid rationale for building a global community of all human beings.  We are all faced with the challenge of living together on a crowded and rapidly changing planet.  The unambiguous arrival of global pandemics and climate change serve as compelling reminders of that fact.  A narrative of hope helps frame the process of waking up to the perils and possibilities of our times.

Recommended Video:  Welcome to the Anthropocene (~ 3 minutes)

This blog post was featured as a guest blog at the web site for The Millennium Alliance for Humanity and the Biosphere (MAHB).

https://mahb.stanford.edu/blog/a-positive-narrative-for-the-anthropocene/