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VIII. Earth Earns: An Open CoCreative Earthropocene to Astropocene PediaVerseC. Hearthica: Astro Sapiens Achieves a Unified, Peaceful, Gaiable,Worthy, Home Base Rowe, Stan. Earth Alive. Resurgence. March/April, 2003. The superorganic nature of our special planet ought to be the proper matrix of life. This British-based journal and its website has for twenty five years published some of the best practical and poetic essays on a humanely sustainable abide. Awareness of Earth as the giver and maintainer of life, shifting the focus from organisms to the larger system that is their mutual source and support, might in time revivify and re-enchant a world that science for several hundred years has assumed to be dead. Rozzi, Ricardo, et al, eds. Earth Stewardship: Linking Ecology and Ethics. Berlin: Springer, 2015. With several coeditors such as Baird Callicott and Mary Power, the edition cites the imperative need for a “worldwide moral revolution” if we are ever to environmentally sustain and survive. Along with conceptual theory and principles, local inputs such as Japanese indigenous biogeochemistry and Andean llamas are evoked. A real appreciation of such indigenous cultural and planetary aspects, far more vital than bottom lines, might anoint a holy planet instead of holy pollution and war. Ruether, Rosemary Radford, ed. Women Healing Earth. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1997. Papers from Latin American, Asian and African women offer sane, nurturing, integral visions of ecology, community and religion. Ryszkowski, Lech, ed. Landscape Ecology in Agrosystems Management. Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, 2002. A fundamental rethinking of agriculture as based on natural, ecological principles. Sachs, Jeffery. The End of Poverty. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. The tireless advocate of motivating governments and populaces to face and eliminate the abject state of a third of the world’s peoples here provides an excellent and practical survey. Now director of the Earth Institute at Columbia Institute (check website), economist Sachs draws on the successes of Eastern European countries, along with how China and India have prospered, to propose an “enlightened globalization” to address the situation. For example, at very low cost mosquito nets can be supplied to rural Africa so peoples and villages can begin to overcome disease and start on a path to recovery. The accomplishment of such Millennium Development Goals requires the empowerment of women, an end to warlords and corruption, universal primary education, environmental sustenance, a voice for the poor, a redress of priorities for the United States, the IMF World Bank, and so on. But it would seem all the good data and argument is in need of a common vision – just as a person cannot live with festering illness in parts of the body, so organic, super-personal humankind needs to heal, rehabilitate and integrate the destitute poor from Guatemala to Niger to Bangladesh. Sachs, Jeffery, et al. Six Transformations to Achieve the Sustainable Development Goals. Nature Sustainability. 2/9, 2019. Six senior authorities from the USA, Germany, the UK, and Austria, from Columbia University to the Potsdam Institute, including Johan Rockstrom, provide a thorough conceptual and technical study to date. But as I review in April 2022, the world has gone to blazes in an orgy of bombings and summer firestorms. Our pan- demic world is exhausted, ill advised, beset by mad warlords, with little academic natural philosophy. We have long been trying to discern and give our most especial bioworld an epochal relevance to the future and fate of the entire ecosmic genesis so as an incentive. A finding that social protocells as noted in Sustainable Ecovillages are meant to be life’s metabolic stage could provide an actual rationale. And so on. The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the Paris Agreement on Climate Change call for deep transformations in every country that will require cooperative actions by governments, civil society, science and business. Yet stakeholders lack a shared understanding of how the 17 SDGs can be achieved. Following on the World in 2050 work, we introduce six SDG Transformations as modular building-blocks: (1) education, gender and inequality; (2) health, well-being and demography; (3) energy decarbonization and sustainable industry; (4) sustainable food, land, water and oceans; (5) sustainable cities and communities; and (6) digital revolution for sustainable development. We also outline an action agenda for science to provide the knowledge required for designing, implementing and monitoring the SDG Transformations. (Abstract excerpt) Sanderson, Eric, et al. From Bottleneck to Breakthrough: Urbanization and the Future of Biodiversity Conservation. BioScience. Online April, 2018. In a well considered proposal, senior Wildlife Conservation Society, Bronx, NYC ecologists Sanderson, Joseph Walston, and John Robinson focus on three prime aspects for a viable Gaia: the stabilization of human population, the end of economic and environmental poverty, and a shift to creative, sustainable cities. By this view, an old and new, once and future Anthropocene era can be sketched – prior unplanned, unrestrained growth, and this intentional shift to a biospheric and regional symbiosis of our human phase, as it historically moves into equitable urban ecologies. For the first time in the Anthropocene, the global demographic and economic trends that have resulted in unprecedented destruction of the environment are now creating the necessary conditions for a possible renaissance of nature. Drawing reasonable inferences from current patterns, we can predict that 100 years from now, the Earth could be inhabited by between 6 and 8 billion people, with very few remaining in extreme poverty, most living in towns and cities, and nearly all participating in a technologically driven, interconnected market economy. Building on the scholarship of others in demography, economics, sociology, and conservation biology, we articulate a theory of social–environmental change that describes the simultaneous and interacting effects of urban lifestyles on fertility, poverty alleviation, and ideation. (Abstract)
Saravia, Leonardo, et al.
Power Laws and Critical Fragmentation in Global Forests.
Nature Scientific Reports.
8/17766,
2018.
We cite this entry by Argentine and American researchers for its sophisticated quantification (97 references) of how ecosystem dynamics reach tipping points between stable viability or a disorganized, perilous condition. Another implication would be the active presence of an independent mathematical, geometric formative source in effect, which is a crucial realization we have not yet collectively made. The replacement of forest areas with human-dominated landscapes usually leads to fragmentation, altering the structure and function of the forest. Here we studied the dynamics of forest patch sizes at a global level, examining signals of a critical transition from an unfragmented to a fragmented state, using the MODIS vegetation continuous field. We defined wide regions of connected forest across continents and big islands, and combined five criteria, including the distribution of patch sizes and the fluctuations of the largest patch over the last sixteen years, to evaluate the closeness of each region to a fragmentation threshold. Regions with the highest deforestation rates – South America, Southeast Asia, Africa – all met these criteria and may thus be near a critical threshold. (Abstract) Sardar, Ziauddin, ed. Rescuing All Our Futures. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1999. A theme of this website is the need for a global representation of all peoples in a peaceful, sustainable, much kinder abode. Within the palpable dominance of West and North over East and South, which augurs for a more of the same technological, consumptive future, these papers explore non-Western, indigenous, feminine options. Noted contributors include Susantha Goonatilake, Eleonara Masini, Sohail Inayatullah, Ivana Milojevic, Vinay Lal and Ashis Nandy. The traditional vision of the Maori peoples of New Zealand would make a suitable organic vision. For the Maori, writes activist Ramana Williams, the appropriate term is the creation of a whanau. It means a vast universal family that connects the stars and the moon, the earth, and the sky and all life forms that reside therein, the world of animation and inanimation, the worlds of the living and the dead. (56) Scheffer, Marten, et al. A Dynamical Systems View of Psychiatric Disorders and Practical Implications. JAMA Psychiatry. April, 2024. In this dedicated AMA journal, thirteen theorists posted at Wageningen University, University of Amsterdam, University of Melbourne, Virginia Commonwealth University, and Johns Hopkins University describe a beneficial application of the latest complexity science to a wide range of mental maladies. The discussion involves both symptoms and their management course. The endeavor is now possible because a worldwise computational prowess and its daily public discourse has been able to realize a life-like dual reality with a mathematic, informative, programmic source and consequent phenotype phases. A vital aspect of this genotype code-script that its independent, self-familiar, presence is manifestly underlies every such instance. This novel avail is a harbinger of a more effective, natural health care approach, along with ecovillages and all else. Importance: Dynamical systems theory is widely used to explain tipping points, cycles, and chaos in complex systems from the climate to ecosystems. It has been suggested that the same theory might be used to deal with psychiatric disorders, which come and go as symptoms change. Here we review evidence for the practical applicability of this theory in medical psychiatry. Observations: Emerging results suggest that the time series of mood and behavior do use similar generic nonlinear indicators as employed globally to monitor tropical rainforests and weather patterns. Conclusions: These observations evoke follow-up questions on how best to collect dynamic data, infer informative timescales, construct mechanistic models, and can give patients an active role in their lifelong challenges. Schellnhuber, Hans, et al. Earth System Analysis for Sustainability. Environment. 47/8, 2005. A second Copernican Revolution is cited as science becomes a global project to not only collectively study nature but to intentionally quantify and take over the sustainable maintenance of planetary anatomy and physiology. Examples are the Amsterdam Declaration on Global Change and the Earth System Science Partnership. For today, we live in what may appropriately be called the “Anthropocene:” a new geologic epoch in which humankind has emerged as a globally significant (and potentially intelligent) force capable of reshaping the face of the Earth. (12) Schneiderman, Jill, ed. The Earth Around Us. New York: Freeman, 2000. Essays from leading scientists articulate our current environmental dilemma and propose solutions. Its seven sections include: Records of Time and History, Scientific Judgments and Ethical Considerations, Resources Reconfigured, Local Manipulations, Inventive Solutions, Whole Earth Perturbations, and Global Perspectives.
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