VIII. Earth Earns: An Open CoCreative Earthropocene to Astropocene PediaVerse

A. The Old World: Its Archaic, Polar, War Torn, Rapacious Critical Life Support Condition

Bancroft Hunt, Norman. Historical Atlas of Ancient Mesopotamia. New York: Checkmark Books, 2004. An illustrated story of the appearance of human settlements in this legendary cradle of civilization, a era from 3,000 BC to 500 AD marred by constant tribal and regional warfare. The book is noted because some 5,000 years later the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers which is now modern Iraq remains beset by warfare and carnage, today with a global occasion. An obsessive militarism prepares to drop the “mother of all bombs” on this cradle, with nuclear munitions in the works. World civilizations appear not a whit wiser, even worse for we should know better. Has nothing been learned in five millennia, is a common, salutary knowledge yet possible at this late hour?

Bostrom, Nicik. The Vulnerable World Hypothesis. Global Policy. 10/4, 2019. The Oxford University, Future of Humanity Institute scholar continues to astutely identify, as if we needed more worries, further high tech ways that bad guys can us destroy at will.

Scientific and technological progress might change people's capabilities or incentives in ways that would destabilize civilization. For example, advances in DIY biohacking might make it easy for anybody with basic training in biology to kill millions; novel military technologies could trigger arms races in which whoever strikes first has a decisive advantage; and so on. This paper introduces the concept of a vulnerable world: roughly, one in which there is some stage at which civilization gets devastated by default. A general ability to stabilize a vulnerable world would require amplified capacities for preventive policing and global governance, but offer a perspective from which to evaluate the risk‐benefit balance of ubiquitous surveillance or a unipolar world order. (Abstract)

Bostrom, Nick and Milan Cirkovic, eds. Global Catastrophic Risks. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Some 25 get-it-done guys address the plethora of dangers that loom from rogue nanotech and future warlords to visiting asteroids and a hostile, degenerate cosmos. Cirkovic’s chapter on Observation Selection Effects is as usual incisive, but the effort labors in an alien universe where our valiant intelligences remain of no account.

Boutwell, Jeffery and Michael Klare. A Scourge of Small Arms. Scientific American. June, 2000. An introductary article to a special issue on the worldwide proliferation of weapons such as assualt rifles and rocket launchers. These allow any male troop or gang for whatever reason, often territorial such as Liberia or the Philippines, under some religious banner, to wreak havoc and destabilize regions, countries and subcontinents.

Brauch, Hans Gunter, et al. Globalization and Environmental Challenges. Berlin: Springer, 2011. Volume 3 in the Hexagon Series on Human and Environmental Security and Peace. With a European emphasis, whose populace seems able to admit and address a rapidly changing climate and earth ecology, its thousand plus pages are filled by authoritative essays covering every scientific and practical aspect.

Globalization and Environmental Challenges pose new security dangers and concerns. In this reference book on global security thinking, 92 authors from five continents and many disciplines, from science and practice, assess the global reconceptualization of security triggered by the end of the Cold War, globalization and manifold impacts of global environmental change in the early 21st century. In 10 parts, 75 chapters address the theoretical, philosophical, ethical and religious and spatial context of security; discuss the relationship between security, peace, development and environment; review the reconceptualization of security in philosophy, international law, economics and political science and for the political, military, economic, social and environmental security dimension and the adaptation of the institutional security concepts of the UN, EU and NATO; analyze the reconceptualization of regional security and alternative security futures and draw conclusions for future research and action. (Publisher)

Brooks, Rosa. How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016. The author is a Senior Fellow (Mellow) at the New America Foundation, a Georgetown University law professor, former Counselor to the Under Secretary of Defense, and consultant to Human Rights Watch, among other credits. This knowledgeable, way overdue, well researched volume makes a strong case that national, and global society has descended into a terminal state of perpetual ultra-violent, hyper-weaponry conflict. Any sense of a reason why is overwhelmed by internecine slaughter as an end in itself. A closing chapter is War Everywhere, Law Nowhere. And as terminator machines from pocket nuclear warheads to barrel bombs take over governments, academia, religions, market places, peoples seem powerless to grasp, oppose or mollify. For an example, in June a TV News Hour segment showed a children’s classroom in Aleppo, Syria trying to maintain some normalcy, while outside the door men could be seen blazing away with huge guns. One explanation might be masculine lunacy (Yangland) with women so subjugated, debased, eliminated that an ignorant male ISIS replaces this ancient feminine goddess of wisdom.

Brown, Lester. Plan B 2.0: Rescuing a Planet Under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble. New York: Norton, 2006. An authoritative, wide ranging and realistically practical update by the environmentalist founder of the Worldwatch and Earth Policy Institutes. As China now rapidly industrializes new impacts need be factored in with regard the integral biosphere.

Brown, Lester. Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization. New York: Norton, 2008. The latest clarion manifesto from the Earth Policy Institute, of which former U. S. Secretary of Agriculture Brown is founder and director. Because of its planetary breath, factual depth, and range of practical solutions, if one such document could be a guide for informed action it would be the document. It is becoming increasingly clear, via a critical shift in public attention, spurred by a plethora of climate and resource disruptions of record proportions, just look out the window George W., that nothing less than an historic corrective in human life style will suffice. A voracious first-world consumption, taken for granted, fed by impoverished third-world masses lately engulfed in food riots, cannot go on. But it will require an epic metanoia, a change of awakened mind, which soaring fuel prices are starting to impel, for people to move on from unsustainable McMansions to viable ecovillage communities. A good first step would be to buy his book. Aware of its importance the entire text is available on the EPI website: http://www.earthpolicy.org/Books/PB3/index.htm

Brown, Paul. Global Warning: The Last Chance for Change. Pleasantville, NY: Reader’s Digest, 2007. A well-illustrated book that is not the usual popular gloss but relies on much travel and research to chronicle the urgent worsening of megacities, poverty, melting ice caps, loss of shellfish habitats, voodoo economics, and many other realities. A benign ‘Pleasantville’ is on the way out unless a suitably informed public is aroused to sensible lifestyle adjustment, like now.

Caesar,, Levke, et al. Planetary Health Check Report 2024. (Google Keywords). Germany: Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, 2024. This is a premier multi-author, wide-ranging review and preview of the worsening critical condition of the whole Earth Humanity bio/eco/noosphere (Google keywords to access) See also A just world on a safe planet: Earth Commission report on boundaries, translations, and transformations. by Joyeeta Gupta, et al in Lancet Planetary Health (September 11, 2024).

This inaugural annual report represents a crucial step in monitoring and safeguarding Earth's stability, resilience, and life-support functions — what we refer to as "Planetary Health". Our new international science partnership called Planetary Boundaries Science (PBScience), will work on advancing the Planetary Boundaries (PBs) framework by integrating new data and methods along with clear communication. The PBs team analyses monitors nine main processes known to be most involved. The 2024 Planetary Health Check report reveals that six of them have breached safe levels.

PB Processes Climate Change, Change in Biosphere Integrity, Land System Change, Freshwater Change, Modification of Biogeochemical Flows, Ocean Acidification, Increase in Atmospheric Aerosol Loading, Stratospheric Ozone Depletion and Introduction of Novel Entities

Caldeira, Ken. We Live in a Human World. www.earthsky.org/humanworld/interviews. An environmentalist at the Carneige Institute Department of Global Ecology speaks in this radio series on the realities of the human impact on the earth and vital remedies. This project, accessible at the above website, is devoted to this imperative.

Humanity is at a crossroads. Either we can learn to develop and grow economically and culturally while reducing our environmental footprint (which will require new technologies and approaches to generation and consumption of both energy and consumer products), or we can face a future with a planet in decay. A human world could be a world with peace, justice, and democracy, wherein people can pursue their aspirations in ways that are consistent with the long-term health of the environment. Or a human world could be an ugly, polluted, and impoverished place characterized by injustice and wars over resources. The choice is ours, and the failure to make a choice is equivalent to making the wrong choice.

Caldicott, Helen, ed. Sleepwalking to Armageddon: The Threat of Nuclear Annihilation. New York: New Press, 2017. The Australian physician and lifetime global activist against an excessive, terminal obsession with nuclear weapons gathers latest views such as Global Catastrophic Risk by Seth Baum, Nuclear Weapons and Artificial Intelligence by Max Tegmark, National Politics versus National Security by Noam Chomsky, and What Would Happen If an 800-Kiloton Warhead Detonated above Midtown Manhattan? by Steven Starr, Lynn, Eden, and Ted Postol. A persistent theme is why are we talking about this at all, since it is so patently absurd. See also a concurrent volume The Doomsday Machine by Daniel Ellsberg (Bloomsbury, 2017).

The world’s leading spokesperson for the antinuclear movement, Helen Caldicott is the co-founder of Physicians for Social Responsibility, a nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize, and the 2003 winner of the Lannan Prize for Cultural Freedom. She is the author of The New Nuclear Danger, Nuclear Power Is Not the Answer, and Loving This Planet. She divides her time between Australia and the United States.

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