Excerpts from Introduction to Third Phase Transition: Solving The Anthropocene Crisis
On the third metabolic phase
“By the third phase transition, Anthropy as the human-earth system, will follow civilisation.”
“A zonal segregation of the planet will be needed, for transcending into global sustainability. It could only be achieved by entire humanity self-organising in association, around its reintegration as advanced circular metabolism within the earth system. This prospect is based in the uneven outcome of 200,000 years of socio-natural co-evolution, proceeding through two metabolic phases.”
“Zonally separating remaining or restorable wildlife of the Evoluzone, as well as biodiversity in existing and restorable cultural landscapes of the Holozone, becomes dependent on constitutionally establishing the natural rights of these two evolutionary zones, in relation to cities and their sprawl of infrastructure.”
“It would signify transformation of urban centra, from destructive forces in exploiting Planet Earth into an Anthropozone primarily reproducing its own autonomous conditions. In binding and unbreakable contracts and balances, it would treat the output from conservationist rural agri- and horticulture, sustainable fossil extraction, as well as exclusivities from wildlife, as the supplementary luxury of natural gifts, in return for urban surplus labour contributing to equitable social services, to technology transfer, and to ecological monitoring, research, and restoration, in the two zones of natural rights. Migration and touring between the zones should be free, within the framework that equitable resource balances permit. Only by such natural historic segregation of earth system’s circular metabolism in three zones, can humanity sustainably reintegrate within nature and within itself.”
“Then, what happens to the human fire regimes? On the one hand, remnants of the carbon-based human fire regimes should be turned into ecosystem services, like controlled fires, optimising the resilience of the Evoluzone and the Holozone, or production of biochar, for combined carbon sink and soil improvement, et cetera. On the other hand, the human fire regime of energy production should be decarbonised. By converting to producing, storing, and burning non-polluting fuel – hydrogen – it would contribute as one of various balance and backup methods for irregularities in flowing energy sources.”
“Disciplining global information technology to preservation of the evolutionary result in Planet Earth’s life system in general, and to the generalised association of humanity as its independent variable in particular, can be the only meaningful definition of contemporary human intelligence. It would express the anthropic principle as collective intelligence in the earth system.”
“If the anthropic principle is the organising principle of our time, expressing the right of association at its present level, then globally majoritarian social mutiny is a concrete principle. Self-organised transparency as well. In the constructive extension, development of socio-natural co-working forces becomes a concrete principle. Such flow organisation gets concrete, through globally decentralised auto-coordination by a virtual, de-propriated (non-property), de-verted (non-transactive), and de-sovereigned (non-state) ‘humus’ currency. Such a non-fungible currency becomes the concrete principle of equitable and sustainable human cooperation.”
Go back to quotes