Geo-societal Agency and Narratives: Framing the Human Condition

Humans craft insights through "social processes pertaining to the production, preservation, accumulation, circulation, and appropriation of knowledge" (¹ p.429). Insights and related practices shape the socio-ecological niche humans live in. Partaking makes social processes (practices) effective. Promoting geoethics for inspiring politics is founded upon the following:

Earth: Contemporary societies connect Earth into a single complex-adaptive social-ecological system² through global supply chains, an all-embracing division of labour, a planetary technosphere, and a worldwide knowledge system³. Cycles of matter, energy, and information tie socio-economic systems and the planet's physical and biological systems. The hegemonic contemporary culture tackles Nature as a cheap, nearly unlimited resource, nourishing the primary narrative of planetary-scale anthropogenic change.

World: The human condition, agency and practices encompass reproduction, work, and governance, regardless of the role a specific individual, collective, or institution human agent has at a given time and place. Using Hannah Arendt's analysis of the human condition⁴, laborans tell of the struggle for biological and social reproduction (at subsistence or affluence levels). Homo-fabers' story is about building and operating the technosphere. Zoo politikons embody civism, a citizen's political and cultural virtues and sentiments.

Rupture: Over the past few centuries, homo-faber has built a planetary technosphere conceived by zoon-politikons of primarily European origin^5,6. The onset of disruptive planetary-scale anthropogenic change⁷, i.e. the Anthropocene, terminates peoples' unintentional impact on Earth. Instead⁸, it challenges the zoon-politikons and homo-fabers to secure lasting reproduction for all.

Practice: Geo-societal narratives acknowledge inequality, i.e. people (human agents) acting as laborans, homo-fabers or zoon-politikons, and power relations, i.e. zoon-politikon's political and cultural perspectives guide homo faber's engineering of the technosphere, which determines laborans' experience of Earth System dynamics. Comparative justice requires partaking in crafting narratives.

The Earth scientists' conventional narratives encompass socio-economic development (e.g. production of goods, living conditions), individual well-being and cultural values, e.g. favouring the sustainable functioning of the telluric Earth System, and cultural or metaphysical perspectives like the evolution of life-bearing planets. However, informing the handling of disruptive planetary-scale anthropogenic change, i.e. going political, Earth scientists' narratives are about the geo-societal, i.e. they must recognize people's labour to reproduce biologically and socially, people's work to build and run the technosphere, and people's acts as citizens.

• 1) Renn, J. The Evolution of Knowledge - Rethinking Science for the Anthropocene. (Princeton University Press, 2020).
• 2) Otto, I. M. et al. Human agency in the Anthropocene. Ecol. Econ. 167, 106463 (2020).
• 3) Rosol, C., Nelson, S. & Renn, J. Introduction: In the machine room of the Anthropocene. Anthr. Rev. 4, 2–8 (2017).
• 4) Arendt, H. The Human Condition. (The University of Chicago Press, 1958).
• 5) Mokyr, J. A Culture of Growth. (Princeton University Press, 2016). doi:10.1515/9781400882915
• 6) Reinhard, W. Die Unterwerfung der Welt - Globalgeschichte der Europäischen Expansion 1415-2015. (Verlag C.H. Beck oHG, 2016).
• 7) Summerhayes, C. P. et al. The future extent of the Anthropocene epoch: A synthesis. Glob. Planet. Change 242, 104568 (2024).
• 8) Hamilton, C. Defiant Earth - The Fate of Humans in the Anthropocene. (Wiley, Polity Press, 2017).