Reflection V

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 ...

Criminology: Some lines of flight

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.

Arqueologia do Digital

Sob o viés arqueológico denominado archaeogaming (Reinhard, 2018), este artigo tem por objetivo central colaborar com a metodologia de análise de jogos eletrônicos em ambientes digitais a partir do produto Detroit: Become Human, lançado em 2018 pela desenvolvedora francesa Quantic Dream. Serão objetos de análise as paisagens arqueológicas extra e intra-jogo, buscando os tecnofósseis que corroboram a inserção do jogo, enquanto mídia física, no debate sobre o Antropoceno; e, enquanto mídia digital, na recente hipótese de datação geológica, elencada pelo químico e ambientalista James Lovelock denominada Novaceno (Novacene). Pretende-se, assim, apresentar não uma Arqueologia Digital, mas, sim, uma Arqueologia do Digital, escavando e trazendo à luz vestígios que permitam, ao mesmo tempo, o entendimento do uso humano de máquinas cibernéticas, bem como a representação dessas máquinas a partir de códigos de programação intra-jogo escritos por humanos.

Gaia Theory: Between Autopoiesis and Sympoiesis

The article discusses the development of the Gaia Hypothesis as it was defined by James Lovelock in the 1970s and later elaborated in his collaboration with biologist Lynn Margulis. Margulis’s research in symbiogenesis and her interest in Maturana and Varela’s theory of autopoiesis helped to reshape the Gaia theory from a first-order systems theory to second-order systems theory. In contrast to the first-order systems theory, which is concerned with the processes of homeostasis, second-order systems incorporate emergence, complexity and contingency. In this respect Latour’s and Stengers’s takes on Gaia, even defining it as an “outlaw” or an anti-system, can be interpreted as specific kind of systems thinking. The article also discusses Haraway’s interpretation of Gaia in terms of sympoiesis and argues that it presents a major reconceptualization of systems theory.

José Lutzenberger e a divulgação da Teoria de Gaia no plano internacional (década de 1980)

José Lutzenberger protagonizou, ao longo de 31 anos (1971-2002), uma forte atuação ambientalista no Brasil e em âmbito internacional, divulgando a ética do convívio ecossustentável. Um dos conceitos que alicerçaram seu pensamento foi “Gaia”, a partir da formulação teórica de James Lovelock. Neste trabalho, analisamos como se deu a participação de Lutzenberger na constituição de fundações que tinham como conceito-base a teoria de Gaia: a Gaia Foundation e a Foundation For Gaia, na Europa, na década de 1980. A análise está embasada nas fontes do Acervo Privado de José Lutzenberger (APJL): correspondências, folhetos, transcrições de palestras e textos do personagem.

Ancient natural philosophy: A resource for environmental education

Studying humankind’s relationship to the earth involves broad and deep questions for students as today’s educators explore changing teaching methods. This article highlights benefits of a multidisciplinary approach to environmental education, drawing upon ancient natural philosophy as a coherent conceptual resource. The Greek philosopher Plotinus is introduced to show the application of ancient natural philosophy across all fields and on all levels of knowledge under a common banner. The significance of ancient natural philosophy is its conception of overall unity. This is the key. Unity is implicit in interrelationships between parts to whole on all levels of existence. From such a perspective, all life forms and other entities in the natural world can be understood as interrelated — just as James Lovelock demonstrated in describing the homeostatic state of natural processes on earth. On a similar reasoning, the diversity in people, societies and places can be appreciated physically and sociologically as belonging to one world. Several studies are cited to explore this overlap between ancient natural philosophy and honouring the connection and dependence of humanity on the fragility of the earth’s ecosystem.