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Ecologies of the Anthropocene: Global upscaling of social-ecological infrastructures

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The Anthropocene is commonly portrayed as a recent crisis brought on by the overwhelming demands of industrial societies on Earth’s “life support systems.” And contemporary rates and scales of industrial environmental change are certainly unprecedented. Left unchecked, these might derail all prospects for a desirable future, especially climate change caused by fossil fuel combustion. Yet the single greatest global change wrought by humanity to date is likely the transformation of the terrestrial biosphere by human use of land. While far slower than industrial changes, the evidence from archeology, paleoecology, and environmental history demonstrate clearly that human societies have been reshaping the terrestrial biosphere, and perhaps even global climate, for millennia. What are the prospects for humanity and ecology on a planet ever-more rapidly and completely reshaped by human societies? The challenges are unprecedented and there is no going back. Remarkably, the continued global upscaling of the social-ecological infrastructures that sustain humanity might still offer the greatest planetary opportunities—the global social-ecological design spaces—in which the future prospects for both humanity and nonhuman nature might be dramatically improved.
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021
Jason W. Moore
GROUNDING METABOLISM
edited by DANIEL IBAÑEZ & NIKOS KATSIKIS
New Geographies 06
Grounding Metabolism
Editors
Daniel Ibañez & Nikos Katsikis
Editorial Board
Daniel Daou
Ali Fard
Taraneh Meshkani
Pablo Pérez Ramos
Founding Editors
Gareth Doherty
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El Hadi Jazairy
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Stephen Ramos
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Advisory Board
Eve Blau
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Hashim Sarkis
Charles Waldheim
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Graphic Design
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Distributed by Harvard University Press
ISBN 978-1-934510-37-7
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New Geographies is the journal of Design, Agency,
Territory founded, edited, and produced by doctoral
candidates in the New Geographies Lab at the
Harvard University Graduate School of Design. New
Geographies presents the geographic as a design
paradigm that links physical, representational,
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New Geographies 06—Grounding Metabolism
has been made possible by grants from the
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002 Daniel Ibañez & Nikos Katsikis
Editorial
010 Jason W. Moore
Toward a Singular Metabolism:
Epistemic Rifts and Environment-
Making in the Capitalist World-Ecology
020 Erle C. Ellis
Ecologies of the Anthropocene:
Global Upscaling of Social-
Ecological Infrastructures
028 Peter Baccini
Understanding and Designing the
Metabolism of Urban Systems
038 Timothy W. Luke
Urbanism as Cyborganicity: Tracking
the Materialities of the Anthropocene
052 Roi Salgueiro Barrio, Aanya
Chugh & Maynard León
Petried Metabolism as Urban Artifact:
Tells and Articial Topographies
in the Khabur Basin, Syria
062 Sabine Barles
Urban Metabolism: Persistent
Questions and Current Developments
070 Matthew Gandy in Conversation with
Daniel Ibañez & Nikos Katsikis
On Circulations and Metabolisms:
Challenges and Prospects
078 Volker M. Welter
The Valley Region—From Figure of
Thought to Figure on the Ground
088 Hadas A. Steiner
After Habitat, Environment
098 Ken Tadashi Oshima in Conversation
with Daniel Ibañez & Nikos Katsikis
On Metabolism and the Metabolists
108 Douglas Spencer
Nature Is the Dummy:
Circulations of the Metabolic
114 Felipe Correa & Tomás Folch
Resource Extraction Urbanism and
the Post-Oil Landscape of Venezuela
122 Rahul Mehrotra & Felipe Vera
Ephemeral Urbanism: Learning
from Pop-up Cities
132 Paola Viganò
Territorialism I
140 Rania Ghosn & El Hadi Jazairy
Hassi Messaoud Oil Urbanism
150 Reinier de Graaf / OMA
Moscow after Moscow
160 Vicente Guallart
Barcelona 5.0: The Self-Sufcient City
166 Philippe Rahm
Toward a Thermodynamic Urban Design
174 Kiel Moe
The Nonmodern Struggle
for Maximum Entropy
184 Pierre Bélanger
Ecology 5.0
188 Daniel Daou & Pablo Pérez Ramos
Projective Views on Urban
Metabolism”: Conference Postscript
Erle Ellis is Associate Professor of Geography and
Environmental Systems and Director of the Laboratory
for Anthropogenic Landscape Ecology at the University
of Maryland, Baltimore County, and Visiting Associate
Professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.
His research investigates the ecology of human
landscapes at local to global scales with the aim of
informing sustainable stewardship of the biosphere in
the Anthropocene. Recent projects include the global
mapping of human ecology and its changes over the
long-term (anthromes), online tools for global synthesis
of local knowledge (GLOBE), and inexpensive user-
deployed tools for mapping landscapes in 3D (Ecosynth).
Erle C. Ellis
Global Upscaling of
Social-Ecological
Infrastructures
Ecologies
of the
Anthropocene
An attempt at a systematic
classification of the hybrid
socio-ecological fabric
associated with the long
and continuous human
use of the earth’s surface.
021
Human populations quadrupled over the
past century and will likely reach 10 billion before
leveling off midcentury. Per capita rates of food,
energy, and other resource consumption have
grown even faster than population, accelerating
already massive human demands for resources. 01
These dramatic trends have led some to forecast
imminent environmental and societal collapse as
human demands transgress Earth’s natural limits. 02
Yet global and regional indicators show human well-
being increasing steadily over the same period. 03
To understand the extraordinary long-term growth
and development of human societies is to recognize
the adaptive processes of social-ecological upscaling
that have enabled a single species to reshape an
entire planet. It is not by using up and destroying
environments that human societies have been
able to grow and develop over the long-term but
rather, by ever-greater scales of social and material
exchange and ever-more intensive alteration of
ecosystems to better support human populations—
often to the detriment of other species and by
exploiting non-renewable energy and material
resources.
04 Nevertheless, as will become clear,
the upscaling of human societies from bands of
hunter-gathers to farming communities to global
urban industrial networks has made the Earth more
capable of sustaining human populations, not less.
Yet what are the prospects for humanity and ecology
on a planet ever-more rapidly and completely
reshaped by human societies? The challenges are
unprecedented and there is no going back. Remarkably,
the continued global upscaling of the social-ecological
infrastructures that sustain humanity might still
offer the greatest planetary opportunities—the
global social-ecological design spaces—in which the
future prospects for both humanity and nonhuman
nature might be dramatically improved. 05
Emergence of the Anthropocene
Human use of land for agriculture and settle-
ments—the key social-ecological infrastructures that
sustain humanity—has already transformed more than
three-quarters of the terrestrial biosphere into anthro-
pogenic biomes, or anthromes, yielding a host of novel
ecologies characterized by their sustained direct inter-
actions with human populations and infrastructures in
the forms of crops, pastures, built structures, and other
used lands [Figure 01]. 06 This profound and perma-
nent transformation of Earth’s ecology together with
anthropogenic global changes in climate, hydrology,
element cycling, biodiversity, and other environmental
processes has recently led scientists to recognize
the emergence of human systems as a global force
transforming the Earth system and the beginning of
a new epoch of geologic time, the Anthropocene. 07
The Anthropocene is commonly portrayed as a recent
crisis brought on by the overwhelming demands of
industrial societies on Earth’s “life support systems. 08
And contemporary rates and scales of industrial envi-
ronmental change are certainly unprecedented. 09 Left
unchecked, these might derail all prospects for a desir-
able future, especially climate change caused by fossil
fuel combustion. Yet the single greatest global change
wrought by humanity to date is likely the transforma-
tion of the terrestrial biosphere by human use of land
[Figure 02]. 10 While far slower than industrial changes,
the evidence from archeology, paleoecology, and
environmental history demonstrate clearly that human
societies have been reshaping the terrestrial biosphere,
and perhaps even global climate, for millennia. 11
Long before the rise of industry, even before the rise of
agriculture, human societies began transforming ecosys-
tems to support their populations and sustained these
processes for thousands of years in some regions. 12 Even
our predecessors in the genus Homo, now extinct, used
tools of stone and re to extract more sustenance from
landscapes than would ever be possible without these
Urban Dense
settlements
Dense Settlements Villages
Rice Irrigated Rainfed Pastoral
Croplands
Residental
Irrigated Populated RemoteRainfed
Rangelands
Residental RemotePopulated
Seminatural
Woodlands
Residental Remote Treeless
& Barren
Populated
Wildlands
Woodlands Treeless
& Barren
Used Semi-Natural Wild
Urban Dense
settlements
Dense Settlements Villages
Rice Irrigated Rainfed Pastoral
Croplands
Irrigated Populated RemoteRainfed
Rangelands
Residental RemotePopulated
Seminatural
Residental Remote Treeless
& Barren
Populated
Wildlands
Woodlands Treeless
& Barren
Used Semi-Natural Wild
Residental Woodlands
AD 2000
Dense Settlements
<100 100-250 250-500 500-
1000
1000-
2000
5000-
8000
2000-
3000
>8000 1-5% 10-20% 20-50%5-10% <50%
Period of First Signicant Use Recovery (% from rst peak use)
3000-
5000
NG06—Grounding Metabolism
technologies. 13 Rather than simply adapting to environ-
ments as they are, our species, like some others, alters
environments to sustain its populations, a process known
to ecologists and archeologists as niche construction. 14
Social Construction of the Human Niche
Niche construction confers powerful evolutionary
advantages because the social-ecological infrastructures
developed by ancestors, such as cleared woodlands
or tools for exploiting diverse species, are inherited
by their progeny, enhancing the adaptive capacity of
future generations. More powerful still is the unrivaled
ability of our species to transmit strategic knowledge
for producing these infrastructures across societies in
generational time, enabling this social-ecological capital
to accumulate over generations across the world. 15
As a result, the human niche has been expanded far
beyond anything that unaltered nature could provide
by processes of cultural evolution far more rapid than
biological evolution. These unprecedented capabilities
for social-ecological upscaling are what have enabled
a single species to transform an entire planet.
Tens of thousands of years ago, hunter-gatherer soci-
eties had already spread across the Earth and depended
on sophisticated social-ecological strategies to sustain
growing populations in landscapes transformed by their
ancestors. 16 Over thousands of generations, these soci-
eties accumulated advanced technologies enabling more
sustenance to be squeezed out of ecosystems, including
the ability to utilize a broad spectrum of species once
preferred megafauna such as the wooly mammoth
became rare or extinct, to extract more nutrients from
them by cooking and grinding, to burn woodlands to
enhance hunting and foraging success, and to propagate
and later to domesticate the most useful species. 17 Hunter-
gatherers transformed their environments and depended
on the social-ecological legacies of their ancestors to
sustain themselves. Ecosystems began changing across
the Earth, setting the stage for even greater rates of
social-ecological change driven by the rise of agriculture.
Land-Use Intensification and
Social-Ecological Upscaling
Populations sustained by agriculture grew more
rapidly than those of hunter-gatherers, ultimately
replacing them across Earth’s most productive lands.
These larger and more demanding populations were
driven to adopt more intensive and productive land-use
systems to gain their sustenance from the same
land using technological innovations such as tillage,
irrigation, and manuring, typically adopting them only
when existing technologies could no longer produce
enough—usually long after technologies rst became
available—but ultimately yielding long-term increases
in land productivity and the social-ecological upscaling
of human societies. 18 Long fallow shifting cultivation
gave way to shortened fallows, the plow, continuous
cropping, irrigation, manuring, and other increasingly
productive land-use technologies. Still, relationships
between a given population and its land system
productivity remained dynamic and complex, driven not
only by populations but also by social and economic
processes regulating resource demand, land availability
AD 2000
Dense Settlements
<100 100-250 250-500 500-
1000
1000-
2000
5000-
8000
2000-
3000
>8000 1-5% 10-20% 20-50%5-10% <50%
Period of First Significant Use Recovery (% from first peak use)
3000-
5000
Figure 01. Human ecologies of the Anthropocene: a global
map of anthromes in year 2000.
Figure 02. A global history of land use as a force transforming
the terrestrial biosphere.
Urban Dense
settlements
Dense Settlements Villages
Rice Irrigated Rainfed Pastoral
Croplands
Irrigated Populated RemoteRainfed
Rangelands
Residental RemotePopulated
Seminatural
Residental Remote Treeless
& Barren
Populated
Wildlands
Woodlands Treeless
& Barren
Used Semi-Natural Wild
Residental Woodlands
AD 2000
Dense Settlements
<100 100-250 250-500 500-
1000
1000-
2000
5000-
8000
2000-
3000
>8000 1-5% 10-20% 20-50%5-10% <50%
Period of First Signicant Use Recovery (% from rst peak use)
3000-
5000
Erle C. Ellis
and suitability, barriers to technology adoption and
availability, and the potential for intensive use of land
to degrade its productivity over time. As a result, a
general trend toward increasing social-ecological
upscaling of land productivity has been generated not
by a smooth and continuous process but through a
complex succession of land-use system regime shifts,
some of them regressive, subjecting populations to
both surplus production and productivity crises. 19
Social-ecological upscaling accelerated with the
emergence of urban and industrial societies. 20
Increasingly productive agricultural systems produced
greater potential for extractable surpluses, supporting
growth in nonagricultural populations and ultimately the
rst cities. 21 The growing demands of urban populations
have been supported by ever-larger scales of farming
operations and commercial networks, ultimately leading
to widespread adoption of high-yielding industrial
“green revolution” land-use systems by the 1950s
and continuing today, sustained by fossil energy and
other industrial inputs. These industrial technologies,
especially mechanization, have increasingly decoupled
human labor from productivity growth in agriculture,
driving a growing proportion of humanity into urban
areas while focusing agricultural production in regions
most favorable to large-scale agriculture. Continued
increases in land system productivity have also
largely compensated for the increasing demands
of growing human populations and progressively
richer diets. 22 As a result, lands less suitable for large-
scale agriculture are being abandoned in regions
where governance supports this, leading to “forest
transitions” as woodlands recover, as in the eastern
United States, parts of Europe, and even China. 23
Anthropocene Ecologies,
Anthropogenic Landscapes
Recovering temperate woodlands are just one legacy
of global social-ecological upscaling. The ecologies of
the Anthropocene are rich and diverse, shaped by the
varied agricultural and urban infrastructures that sustain
humanity and dispersed widely across the anthromes
that extend over most of Earth’s ice-free land [Figures 01,
03]. 24 Most important, anthromes are mosaic landscapes
composed both of lands used directly for agriculture
and settlements and the ecosystems left embedded
within them as remnant, recovering, and less directly
used novel ecosystems.
25 Less than one-quarter of
Earth’s ice-free land remains as wildlands, and mostly
in remote areas too cold or too dry to attract humans.
The novel ecosystems embedded within anthromes
now cover a substantially greater extent than that
of wildlands (greater than 35 percent of Earth’s ice-
free land), and are dispersed across the biosphere in
some of its most productive and diverse regions. 26
The global signicance of novel ecosystems is helping
to drive a wholesale rethinking of ecological science and
conservation, though this is not without controversy. 27
population density
builtup
ornamental
rainfed crops
pasture
trees
herbaceous
bare
land use
land cover
dense settlements villages croplands rangelands seminatural wildlands
forestry
irrigated
+
+
+
+
carbon emissions
+
+
+
reactive nitrogen
+
+
+
carbon emissions
+
+
reactive nitrogen
+
+
carbon emissions
+
reactive nitrogen
+
carbon emissions
-
reactive nitrogen
+
carbon emissions
-
-
reactive nitrogen
+
carbon emissions
-
reactive nitrogen
0
carbon emissions
+
+
+
+
reactive nitrogen
024
925 km
25.3
19.2
15.6
6.5
6.5%
15.6%
32.1% 19.2%
25.3%
Croplands
Rangelands
Seminatural
Wildlands
Villages 1.2% Dense Settlements
population density
builtup
ornamental
rainfed crops
pasture
trees
herbaceous
bare
land use
land cover
dense settlements villages croplands rangelands seminatural wildlands
forestry
irrigated
+
+
+
+
carbon emissions
+
+
+
reactive nitrogen
+
+
+
carbon emissions
+
+
reactive nitrogen
+
+
carbon emissions
+
reactive nitrogen
+
carbon emissions
-
reactive nitrogen
+
carbon emissions
-
-
reactive nitrogen
+
carbon emissions
-
reactive nitrogen
0
carbon emissions
+
+
+
+
reactive nitrogen
Erle C. Ellis
025
Figure 03b. Global extent of anthromes.Figure 03a. A guide to anthropogenic biomes of the world:
integrating human systems into ecology.
Social-ecological patterning of anthrome landscapes.
Anthromes are mosaics of used and novel
ecosystems shaped by human populations and their
use of land, which in turn shape biodiversity and
ecosystem function.
5 km
Urban / Dense built environments
with very high populations
Pastoral Villages / Villages
dominated by rangeland
Rainfed Villages / Villages
dominated by rainfed agriculture
Remote Croplands / Croplands without
significant populations
Populated Rainfed Croplands / Croplands
with significant human populations, a
mix of irrigated and rainfed crops
Remote Rangelands / Rangelands
without significant human populations
Populated Rangelands / Rangelands with
significant human populations
Inhabited Treeless and Barren Lands / Regions
without natural tree cover having only minor
land use and a range of populations
Populated Woodlands / Forest
regions with minor land use and
significant populations
Wild Treeless and Barren Lands / Regions
without natural tree cover (grasslands,
shrublands, tundra, desert and barren lands)
Wildlands Seminatual Used Anthromes
Dense Settlements
Villages
Mixed Settlements / Suburbs, towns and rural
settlements with high but fragmented populations
Rice Villages / Villages
dominated by paddy rice
Irrigated Villages / Villages
dominated by irrigated crops
Residential Irrigated Croplands /
Irrigated cropland with
substantial human populations
Residential Rainfed Croplands /
Rainfed croplands with
substantial human populations
Residential Rangelands / Rangelands
with substantial human populations
Residential Woodlands / Forest
regions with minor land use and
substantial populations
Remote Woodlands / Forest regions with
minor land use without
significant populations
Wild Woodlands / Forests and savanna
026
NG06—Grounding Metabolism
Figure 03c. A Guide to anthropogenic biomes of the world:
integrating human systems into ecology.
While the most densely settled and intensively used
anthromes tend to be the most altered, even the least
intensively used rangelands and seminatural lands tend
toward biotic communities and ecosystem processes
transformed by exotic species invasions, altered re
regimes, nutrient pollution, extinctions, hunting, fuel-
gathering, and other pervasive human inuences. 28
Yet even the most transformed novel ecosystems
embedded within the most intensively used and
densely populated anthromes can retain essential
habitats for most native plant species and other taxa
and can maintain ecological functions and services
at levels similar to those of native ecosystems. 29
Can these novel human ecologies be engaged to shape
a better Anthropocene for both humanity and nonhuman
nature? There should be little doubt that human societies
will continue to depend on the global upscaling of social-
ecological systems to survive and to thrive. It would be
no more possible to sustain 7 billion people by a return
to traditional organic farming than to sustain them by
hunting and gathering. The human niche has expanded
across the planet over millennia of technological inno-
vation, social learning, and ecosystem transformation
toward the industrial technologies, urban settlements,
and global networks of exchange that now sustain
most of humanity. Yet the continued global upscaling
Erle C. Ellis
027
of social-ecological infrastructures may still offer the
greatest planetary opportunity of the Anthropocene—a
design space for guiding social-ecological transforma-
tion of the biosphere toward more desirable outcomes.
As migration to cities depopulates rural landscapes
and agriculture continues to scale up, new spaces are
opening up for ecosystems to recover or be conserved
as social-ecological heritage. As the geosocial powers
of cities grow, so have demands for more desirable
environments and ecologies, both urban and elsewhere.
Can denser human settlements become increasingly
attractive to human populations and ever more desir-
able to live in? Can our used lands and infrastructures
be made more productive while at the same time more
permeable to ows of water and wildlife and less con-
ductive of disease, pollutants, and exotic species? Can
we restrain the forces of engineering and domestication
enough to allow evolutionary freedom in the species
we choose to live with? To join with these opportunities
is to empower a post-natural view of the human role in
shaping nature and to become part of a more desirable
future for both nature and humanity in the Anthropocene.
Notes
01. Marina Fischer-Kowalski, Fridolin Krausmann, and Irene
Pallua, “A Sociometabolic Reading of the Anthropocene:
Modes of Subsistence, Population Size and Human Impact
on Earth,” Anthropocene Review 1 (2014): 8-33.
02. Donella H. Meadows et al., The Limits to Growth: A Report for
the Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind
(New York: Potomac Associates, 1972); Paul R. Ehrlich and Anne
H. Ehrlich, “Can a Collapse of Global Civilization Be Avoided?”
Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences (9 Jan.
2013): 280; Paul R. Ehrlich, The Population Bomb (New York:
Ballantine Books, New York, 1968); Rockström et al., “A Safe
Operating Space for Humanity,Nature 461 (2009): 472–475.
03. Ciara Raudsepp-Hearne et al., “Untangling the
Environmentalist’s Paradox: Why is Human Well-Being
Increasing as Ecosystem Services Degrade?” BioScience 60,
no. 8 (2010): 576–589.
04. Fischer-Kowalski, Krausmann, and Pallua, “A Sociometabolic
Reading”; Ellis et al., “Used Planet: A Global History,
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 110
(2013): 7978–7985; Vaclav Smil, “Harvesting the Biosphere,
Population and Development Review 37 (Dec 2011): 613–636.
05. Ruth DeFries et al., “Planetary Opportunities: A Social
Contract for Global Change Science to Contribute to a
Sustainable Future,” BioScience 62 (2012): 603–606.
06. Erle C. Ellis and Navin Ramankutty, “Putting People in the
Map: Anthropogenic Biomes of the World,” Frontiers in
Ecology and the Environment 6 (2008): 439–447; Erle C. Ellis
et al., “Anthropogenic Transformation of the Biomes, 1700 to
2000,” Global Ecol Biogeogr 19 (Sept 2010): 589–606.
07. Will Steffen et al., “The Anthropocene: Conceptual and Historical
Perspectives,Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society
A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences 369 (Jan
2011): 842–867; Erle C. Ellis, “Anthropogenic Transformation of
the Terrestrial Biospehere,Proceedings of the Royal Society
A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Science 369 (Jan
2011): 1010–1035; Will Steffen, Paul J. Crutzen and John R.
McNeill, “The Anthropocene: Are Humans Now Overwhelming
the Great Forces of Nature?” AMBIO: A Journal of the Human
Environment 36 (Dec. 2007): 614–621; Erle C. Ellis and Peter
K. Haff, “Earth Science in the Anthropocene: New Epoch, New
Paradigm, New Responsibilities,EOS Transactions 90 (Dec
2009): 473.
08. Rockström et al., “A Safe Operating Space for Humanity”;
Steffen et al., “The Anthropocene.
09. J.R. McNeill, Something New Under the Sun: An
Environmental History of the Twentieth-century World (New
York: W.W. Norton, 2001).
10. Ellis et al., “Used Planet”; Ellis, “Anthropogenic
Transformation of the Terrestrial Biospehere”; Bruce D. Smith
and Melinda A. Zeder, “The Onset of the Anthropocene,
Anthropocene (June 2013): 2213–3054; William F. Ruddiman,
“The Anthropocene,Annual Review of Earth and Planetary
Sciences 41 (2013): 45–68.
11. Ellis et al., “Used Planet”; Ellis, “Anthropogenic Transformation of
the Terrestrial Biospehere”; Smith and Zeder, “The Onset of the
Anthropocene”; Ruddiman, “The Anthropocene”; Patrick V. Kirch,
Archaeology and Global Change: The Holocene Record,Annual
Review of Environment and Resources 30 (2005): 409–440.
12. Kirch, “Archaeology and Global Change.
13. Kim Sterelny, “From Hominins to Humans: How Sapiens
Became Behaviourally Modern,Philosophical Transactions
of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 366 (Mar 2011):
809–822.
14. McNeill, Something New Under the Sun.
15. Sterelny, “From Hominins to Humans.
16. Ibid.
17. Kirch, “Archaeology and Global Change.
18. Ellis et al., “Used Planet”; Ester Boserup, The Conditions
of Agricultural Growth: The Economics of Agrarian Change
under Population Pressure (London: Allen & Unwin,1965).
19. Ellis et al., “Used Planet.
20. Ibid.
21. Luc-Normand Tellier, Urban World History: An Economic and
Geographical Perspective (Québec: Presses de l’Université
du Québec, 2009).
22. Ellis et al., “Used Planet.
23. Patrick Meyfroidt and Eric F. Lambin, “Global Forest
Transition: Prospects for an End to Deforestation,” Annual
Review of Environment and Resources 36 (2011), 343–371.
24. Ellis and Ramankutty, “Putting People in the Map”; Ellis et al.,
Anthropogenic Transformation of the Biomes.
25. Ibid.
26. Ellis et al., “Anthropogenic Transformation of the Biomes.
27. Richard J. Hobbs, Eric S. Higgs, and Carol Hall, eds., Novel
Ecosystems: Intervening in the New Ecological World Order
(Oxford: Wiley, 2013).
28. Ellis, “Anthropogenic Transformation of the Terrestrial
Biospehere”; Hobbs, Higgs, and Hall, Novel Ecosystems.
29. Hobbs, Higgs, and Hall, Novel Ecosystems; Ellis, “Sustaining
Biodiversity and People.
Image Credits
All images courtesy of the author.
Figure 03: drawn by Noam Dvir.
... Similar attitudes are adopted by environmental scientists advocating for a non-catastrophic ecological perspective on the ongoing disruptions of the geosphere. They rely on the neo-positivistic confidence in the incremental scientific knowledge and technological know-how available to humankind to govern ecologic changes (Ellis, 2014). Such perspectives have proven functional to pseudoecologist movements in the disciplines of spatial design such as Landscape Urbanism. ...
... While spiraling through the expansion of habitat destruction and intensification of production, the unlimited-growth model has been unloading its burden of refuse onto the geosphere. Natural biomes have been replaced by new entities defined by some anthromes (Ellis, 2014), to boldly mark the new hybrid metabolism of natural and artificial components instated by humankind. Others, in a more subtle perspective, have referred to these entities as socio-ecological systems (Winkler et al., 2018) to emphasize their relational essence, interlinking natural ecologies and socio-economic systems through multiple levels of tangible and intangible variables. ...
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... Every spatial arrangement is the product of structural information [12,[64][65][66]. Information has been considered as a basic property of the universe like energy and matter. ...
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Moving horizon was born as a doctoral investigation that moves across research and design dimension. It explores the relationship between landscape design and soil transformation, focusing on the mutual effects and potential disciplinary developments aiming at structurally linking the two fields. Soil is one of the most complex biomaterials on Earth in continuous exchange with the terrestrial systems. The starting assumption is that the soil is a condition of inherent shifting in landscape evolution both in physical and semantic relationship. The value of soil as an element of planning and design lies in handling live and dynamic physical matter. From being ‘background’ for the built environment, the soil transformations become the ‘foreground’ both in landscape design praxis and in theoretical implications, by embedding the soil as a ‘palimpsest’ in reading and writing the landscape. The framework produced by this assessment has been condensed in ten propositions, collected in form of a landscape manifesto. A first application of moving horizon approach has been developed and tested in the Ravenna Climate Change Adaptation Plan (Italy), by identifying a planning procedure capable of integrating territorial adaptation measures to climate change through an approach based on understanding and transforming the soil as a fundamental material of this process.
... 207-210, 218) [26]. Surviving fragments are so directly or indirectly impacted that the notion of 'biome' can now be considered only theoretical, replaced in practice by that of 'anthrome', the product of human activities on an ecosystem [27,28]. ...
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