Rethinking Incomplete Metaphors for the Earth System
Reading Time: 6minutes
The concept of the Anthropocene has penetrated public discourse in contemporary environmental humanities and social sciences.[1] Rather unsurprisingly, the Anthropocene is not the only lens for examining the relationship between human societies and the Earth system. These other lenses are sparsely referenced across literature, ideas untold. Among them, two took hold of my curiosity: the noosphere and technosphere. Lurking in the shadow of environmental discourse, as halting climate and ecological breakdowns calls for inward reflection, could these ideas reveal nuances unnoticed until now?[2] More importantly, could learning about them prompt a poignant rethinking of our relationship with the environment?
This essay intends to take readers by the hand and walk together through the insights I gathered while reading about the noosphere and the technosphere. Considering how these ideas have been applied over time, I conclude by encouraging readers to distinguish between metaphorical lenses and scientific theories to study the environment. This matters even more given the rise in pseudoscience and conspiracy theories, as well as the institutional attacks against science from populist, undemocratic, and far-right governments.
Noosphere: A Utopian Idea?
To the best of my knowledge, the idea of the noosphere has two ”founders”: Vladimir Vernadsky, a scientist born in the then-Soviet Union with Ukrainian roots, and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a French Jesuit priest and philosopher of biology. Historians conclude that the two mutually influenced each other and had common acquaintances, rendering difficult the claim that only one of them is the “original” founder.[3] Beyond investigating who proposed the noosphere, the what offered by this idea captivates me. Vernadsky and de Chardin each took a different approach.
Looking at its etymology, the word noosphere derives from Greek: νόος, nous, meaning “mind” or “reason” and σφαῖρα, meaning “sphere.” In other words, the noosphere is the “sphere of [human] mind.”[4] As Shoshitaishvili remarks, the noosphere takes a spatial view of human reasoning and its role in the Earth system, envisioning cognition as a constitutive element of the planet.[5]
In the nineteenth century, scientists became riveted by theorizing on the interconnectedness of Earth, from her interior (geosphere) to her surface, where life dwells (biosphere). This is when the idea of the noosphere emerged.
In his work, Vernadsky, a biogeochemist, suggests the presence of a third phase in the evolution of the Earth where a “thinking sphere” materialized. The noosphere contains the “integrated humanity achieving planetary significance in globally interconnected culture, technology, and awareness.”[6] Through such interconnections based on human minds and human consciousness, the Earth evolves further, where humans reach full rationality. By adhering to science and rational thinking, he argues, the Earth will take a sustainable shape because of “humankind’s ability to ‘manage’ the planet.”[7] This is why environmental historians contend that Vernadsky has a utopian vision at heart—however, he died before taking his thoughts on the noosphere further.[8]
In contrast to Vernadsky’s theorization of the noosphere, de Chardin takes a religious turn. He presented the noosphere to explain how humanity will reach a final point of unification. Unification through minds will develop a novel level of consciousness, he argues. De Chardin’s writing pushes a theological account on the evolution of the Earth, stating that the noosphere is related to a global human superorganism.[9] Infused with mysticism, de Chardin questionably places humans at the center not only of the Earth system, but also of the universe.
As of late, there has been an increasing politicization of the noosphere idea with a nationalist-civilizational spin. Since the early 2000s, Russian nationalists and the fossil fuel company Gazprom have been using the noosphere to benefit their political agenda, calling for a reflection on the use and political promotion of non-scientific concepts. As Myznikova writes, the noosphere has been mobilized to advance policy about information monitoring in Russia, while Russian companies have praised Vernadsky as a ”pioneer,” particularly since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, altogether clashing with the initial aim of Vernadsky’s research on the Earth system.[10]
Technosphere: A Dystopian Idea?
Since its inception in the 1960s, the idea of a technosphere is regularly infused with dystopian visions about the relationship between humans and modern technologies on Earth, which some refer to as a “Frankensteinian relation.”[11] The technosphere describes the total system of human-made technologies interacting with the Earth system. Taking this definition, one of the first to write about the technosphere is Wil Lepkowski, technology writer from the U.S. In the early 1960s, he tells readers that “modern man has become a goalless, lonely prisoner of his technosphere.”[12] Therein, Lepkowski refers to the technosphere as the assemblage of human construction, bringing into conversation larger concerns about modern technologies. The 1960s witnessed remarkable technological developments, particularly towards technological automation and space exploration, which were scary to some. By leveraging the elasticity of how societies perceive technologies, Lepkowski’s writings take this observation and morally charge the idea of a technosphere. As an example, he argues that the technosphere is a parasite for the biosphere and the ecosphere.[13]
In more recent times, mentions of the technosphere started to recirculate with the establishment of the Anthropocene for the current geological epoch. While the Anthropocene considers technologies as a creation of human societies, the discourse around the technosphere increasingly focuses on the agency of humans in the context of technology. This is where the Anthropocene and the technosphere fundamentally clash. A key moment to highlight this clash is 2014, when Peter K. Haff, a U.S.-based geologist, argued that humans cannot be agents at the times of large-scale technologies, including those to mitigate the climate and ecological crises. Moreover, he contends that humans “may have been the originators of technological systems, but [now] are no longer their controlling factor.”[14] In an almost Frankensteinian fashion, as put by Otter, Haff contends that large-scale technologies are taking control over human actions at a massive scale and in an autonomous way.[15] It is not surprising that the technosphere is embraced by collapsitarian conspiracy theorist Dmitri Orlov, who sees the technosphere as a fully autonomous and malicious entity.[16]
While all these appear to be extreme accounts of the widespread reach of technologies, science and technology studies scholars offer more nuanced lenses for academic and rigorous use of the idea of the technosphere.[17] They urge to imbue the emerging conceptualization of technosphere with critical social dimensions of how technologies come to be and their deep political history. Otter tells us to “socialize the technosphere” to “explore how technologies, at all scales, differentially shape social experience.”[18] In this way, the technosphere is not only understood as a material entity, but also as a “milieu and medium of human power relations.”[19] This suggests that the technosphere could expand the study of the relationship between humans and the Earth system to include technologies as another active party. Yet, it remains unclear how to navigate the polarized ideological space of the technosphere, with conspiracy theorists on the one hand and questionable billionaire tech-bros linked to far-right politics on the other.
Takeaways and standing up for science
Reading these ideas, I could not help but be deliberate and critical. As conspiracy theories and pseudoscience movements are becoming louder and more powerful, I questioned whether these ideas could be interpolated in such fringe discourses. The answer? Absolutely. From parapsychology and mystical propositions about “energetic psychic fields” based on the noosphere, to conspiracy theories on how global elites control our minds through the technosphere, I was confronted with how non-empirically tested theories, which could nevertheless be seen as metaphors for the interconnectedness of the Earth system, can be weapons to science. This appears to be the case for those metaphors and ideas that remain incomplete, such as the noosphere and the technosphere, which can be interpolated in anti-science movements.[20] In this context, reading about these ideas invokes the importance of reflecting on how historical and non-scientific concepts can be applied, and how they relate to science and current politics.
Now, more than ever, we ought to reject and fight against conspiracy theories and pseudoscience. This includes distinguishing what could be an incomplete and poetic metaphor seeing human reasoning or technologies as a layer of the Earth system, and what science tells us about the role of societal and technological transformations in addressing climate and ecological breakdowns.
[1] Liana Chua and Hannah Fair, “Anthropocene,” in The Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology, ed. Felix Stein (facsimile of the first edition in The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Anthropology, 2019; 2023).
[Cover Image Description: Diagrams of Earth systems by Ptolemy, Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, and Descartes; diagrams of solar and lunar eclipses; and 12 illustrations of planets with descriptive texts.]
Edited by Nina Foster; reviewed by Lívia Regina Batista-Pritchard.
