Page 210 - Berkshire Encyclopedia Of World History Vol I - Abraham to Coal

anthroposphere 95

“It’s a question of discipline,” the little prince told me later on.
“When you’ve finished washing and dressing each morning, you must
tend your planet.” • Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1900–1944)

problem of how far and how deeply the impact of human anthroposphere and other central concepts used in this
activity has penetrated into the biosphere. By reminding entry such as agrarianization and industrialization, the
us that human societies are embedded in ecosystems, the concepts of intensive and extensive growth are intended
concept helps to bridge the gap between the natural sci- not to express any value judgments.)
ences and the social sciences and humanities. Moreover,
it can be used to formulate and elucidate the simple but Key Role of Collective and
far-reaching proposition that many trends and events in Intergenerational Learning
human history, from its earliest beginnings to the present Human life, like all life, consists of specific combinations
day, can be seen as functions or manifestations of the of matter and energy structured and directed by infor-
expanding anthroposphere. mation. Two particular features distinguish human life
from other forms of life and hence are important in
Extensive and understanding the anthroposphere. First, humans rely
Intensive Growth much more strongly on learned information than any
The anthroposphere emerged with the evolutionary tran- other species. Second, most of the information that
sition from hominids to humans. Initially, expansion human individuals learn comes from other individuals: It
must have been very slow and replete with regressions. In is information that has been pooled, shared, transmitted
the long run, however, the human population grew in —it is, in a word, culture.
numbers from modest beginnings to today’s 6 billion, The most important vehicle for human communica-
and it spread from its origins in northeastern Africa over tion is language, composed of symbols. Symbols there-
increasingly more territory, until it was a significant pres- fore constitute a vital dimension of the anthroposphere.
ence on every continent except Antarctica. These two Information conveyed in symbols can be handed down
forms of expansion together represent extensive growth. from generation to generation and used to aggregate and
Extensive growth can be defined as sheer extension of organize matter and energy in the service of human
biomass, physically and geographically. It is a matter of groups, thus strengthening the position of those groups
proliferation: more of the same, reaching farther and in the biosphere. The development of language made it
farther—like rabbits in Australia or cancer cells in a possible for humans to adopt new forms of behavior that
human body. made them increasingly different from other animals. A
In the expanding anthroposphere, extensive growth strong reason for maintaining the new forms of behavior
has always been accompanied, and in all likelihood even must have been that they gave humans the advantage of
driven, by intensive growth. If extensive growth can be greater power over those other animals.
defined in terms of more and more, intensive growth This seems to be one of the clues for understanding the
refers to the emergence of something new. In the case of course of the long-term development of the anthropo-
the anthroposphere, it arises from the human capacity to sphere.Again and again, innovations occurred, like muta-
find new ways of exploiting energy and matter by collect- tions in biological evolution, and again and again, of
ing and processing new information. If the key word for those innovations, those tended to be retained that
extensive growth is proliferation, the key word for inten- helped increase the power of the groups that maintained
sive growth is differentiation—its primary effect always them. As humans increased their power through such
being to add new and different items to an existing stock innovations as language and the mastery of fire, other
or repertoire. Once an innovation has been accepted, it animals inevitably declined in power. Some became
may then be copied in multiple forms and grow exten- extinct, while all surviving species had to adjust their
sively.Thus intensive growth and extensive growth inter- ways of life to the newly gained superiority of human
mingle. (It should be noted that, like the concept of groups. At later stages, similar shifts in power relations