ETHICS IN SCIENCE AND ENVIRONMENTAL POLITICS (ESEP) - NEW ARTICLE ALERT

Allen, John
Ethnospherics
Origins of human cultures, their subjugation by the technosphere, the beginning of an ethnosphere, and steps needed to complete the ethnosphere.

ESEP 2003:7-24

Full text available free of charge at: http://www.esep.de/articles/esep/2003/E29.pdf

ABSTRACT: With the invention of cultures human populations escaped dependence on a single ecosystem. Human cultures today have become an ecological and geological force equal in scale to the five previous kingdoms of life. Cultural structural forms arise from the recurrent fulfillment of economic and reproductive needs. Gaps not closed by the economic institutions in this fulfillment are universally handled by three metaphysical institutions: (1) magic to instill confidence, (2) science to provide explanations, and (3) mysticism to deal with disasters. Linking institutions, such as arts, authority, and techne, connected people with these master institutions. The interplay of these three levels led to the evolution of the "Ten Thousand Cultures". About six millennia ago the linking institution of techne invented the megamachine (the armed state) and a mode of economic expansion by conquest, ideology, and trade control. By 1900 the technosphere and its pampered offspring War had devastated whole biomes and their cultures, When the Berlin Wall fell the technosphere unleashed ever more chaotic and unsustainable expansionism. However, a rising ethnosphere now self-organizes the remaining battered cultures. A union of specific cultural roots with universally accessible scientific spin-offs from techne, such as biospherics and geospherics, give their cultures the means to re-organize locally and communicate biospherically. The ethnosphere needs to create a cybersphere that gives immediate feedback on new impacts from the technosphere. A noosphere can then emerge in which intelligence will end the war on the biosphere and allow cultures to flourish once again, this time armed with hard-earned wisdom and biospheric understanding.

Full text available free of charge at: http://www.esep.de/articles/esep/2003/E29.pdf