Great Acceleration
Description
Boris Shoshitaishvili:
"The complex set of human-driven global, social, technological, and environmental changes intensifying dramatically since 1950 has been identified as the “Great Acceleration.” This period of time represents a radical shift in our collective relationship to each other as well as to the Earth system as a whole."
(https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2020EF001917)
Contextual Quote
"The Anthropocene paradigm interprets the Great Acceleration as a world-historical shift in which humanity becomes a technologically empowered and primarily material planetary force, signaling the start of a new geological epoch. Anthropocene accounts are often cautionary and sometimes predict catastrophe for humanity and the living world. They are centrally concerned with the human impact on the Earth system and its physical subsystems such as global climate.
The Noosphere paradigm also treats the current period as a world-historical transformation but places less emphasis on the process's materiality and environmental disruption. Noosphere accounts present the Great Acceleration as a stage toward an integrated humanity achieving planetary significance in globally interconnected culture, technology, and awareness. In contrast to the Anthropocene, the Noosphere paradigm’s mood is primarily hopeful and occasionally becomes utopian.
In addition to divergences in content and mood, the two paradigms are geographically divergent: the Anthropocene serves as a key concept for understanding anthropogenic global change among scholars and thinkers in Western Europe and the Americas (Hudson, 2014); meanwhile, the Noosphere is central to Eastern European scholars and scientists working on comparable topics (Bernstein, 2019; Ronfeldt & Arquilla, 2020)."
- Boris Shoshitaishvili [1]
More information
* Article: From Anthropocene to Noosphere: The Great Acceleration. Boris Shoshitaishvili. Earth's Future, Volume 9, Issue 2, February 2021
URL = https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2020EF001917
" In this article I consider two major paradigms now taking shape to offer different perspectives on the Great Acceleration: The Anthropocene and the Noosphere. I explore the scientific-intellectual traditions from which each paradigm derives and contrast their nearly opposite normative evaluations of global transformation. The Anthropocene has emerged as the paradigm of rupture, materiality, and warning; the Noosphere as the paradigm of development, mind/culture, and hope."