scholarly journals Wie nachhaltig ist die Gaia-Theorie nach James Lovelock? Eine philosophische Betrachtung

2021 ◽  
pp. 387-398
Author(s):  
Madeleine Hugai
Keyword(s):  
2021 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-33
Author(s):  
Julie Berg ◽  
Clifford Shearing

The 40th Anniversary Edition of Taylor, Walton and Young’s New Criminology, published in 2013, opened with these words: ‘The New Criminology was written at a particular time and place, it was a product of 1968 and its aftermath; a world turned upside down’. We are at a similar moment today. Several developments have been, and are turning, our 21st century world upside down. Among the most profound has been the emergence of a new earth, that the ‘Anthropocene’ references, and ‘cyberspace’, a term first used in the 1960s, which James Lovelock has recently termed a ‘Novacene’, a world that includes both human and artificial intelligences. We live today on an earth that is proving to be very different to the Holocene earth, our home for the past 12,000 years. To appreciate the Novacene one need only think of our ‘smart’ phones. This world constitutes a novel domain of existence that Castells has conceived of as a terrain of ‘material arrangements that allow for simultaneity of social practices without territorial contiguity’ – a world of sprawling material infrastructures, that has enabled a ‘space of flows’, through which massive amounts of information travel. Like the Anthropocene, the Novacene has brought with it novel ‘harmscapes’, for example, attacks on energy systems. In this paper, we consider how criminology has responded to these harmscapes brought on by these new worlds. We identify ‘lines of flight’ that are emerging, as these challenges are being met by criminological thinkers who are developing the conceptual trajectories that are shaping 21st century criminologies.


2020 ◽  
pp. 255-263
Author(s):  
Magnus Ramage ◽  
Karen Shipp
Keyword(s):  

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Gribbin ◽  
Mary Gribbin
Keyword(s):  

Author(s):  
Frédéric Neyrat

In chapter 13 Neyrat summarizes a variety of conceptions of of the Earth conceived from various actors, from the early founding thinkers of the environmental and ecology movements in the United States such as Aldo Lepold and John Muir to more recent scientific conceptions of the Earth as a cybernetic living organism proposed by the celebrated scientist James Lovelock and his Gaia theory or Carolyn Merchant’s conception that each part of the ecosystem contributes to the health of the entire ecosystem as a whole. Neyrat goes on to show that what he terms minoritarian discourses refuse to consider the Earth as something that is mechanical in any way and that it is a living organism in its own right. These minoritarian discourses are in complete contrast to the variety of geo-constructivist discourses that today see the Earth as something technologically manageable.


2021 ◽  
pp. 314-319
Author(s):  
J. Baird Callicott

The year was 1979. Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth, a book by James Lovelock (1919–), was published to much fanfare.1 To much less, “Some Fundamentals of Conservation in the Southwest,” an essay by Aldo Leopold (1887–1948), was also published2—posthumously, exactly three decades after Leopold’s celebrated environmental classic ...


Author(s):  
Thomas N. Sherratt ◽  
David M. Wilkinson

As we wrote the first draft of this chapter (during early summer 2007), the potential dangers of ‘global warming’ had moved up the news agenda to a point where most major politicians were starting to take the problem seriously. Our opening quotation comes from a book published in early 2006, which seemed to coincide with the growth of this wider concern with global warming. Lovelock was not alone in trying to raise awareness of the problem; around the same time another book on climate change by the zoologist and palaeontologist Tim Flannery also attracted global attention to this issue, as did the lecture tours (and Oscar-winning film) of Al Gore—the former US presidential candidate and campaigner on the dangers of climate change. Indeed, in his role as a climate campaigner Gore won a share in the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. It is possible that future historians will see the period 2005–2007 as the start of a crucial wider engagement with these problems. Things may not be as bad as James Lovelock suggests—in his book he deliberately emphasized the most worrying scenarios coming from computer models, and other evidence, in an attempt to draw attention to the critical nature of the problem. However, all these worst case scenarios were drawn from within the range of results that most climate scientists believed could plausibly happen—not extreme cases with little current evidence to support them. That one of the major environmental scientists of the second half of the twentieth century could write such prose as science—rather than science fiction—is clearly a case for concern about future climate change. It also raises another important question, relating to the history of human influence on our planet: when in our history did we start to have major environmental impacts on Earth as a whole? This is clearly an important issue from a historical perspective, but the answers may also have implications for some of our attempts to rectify the damage. Our discussion of this question comes with various caveats. Many of the arguments we consider in this chapter are still the subject of academic disagreement.


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