The sum of the biosphere and the technosphere is a constant.
The biosphere is the totality of living creatures, both plants and animals, and the space that they occupy: soil, air and water. The technosphere is the part of the environment that is made or modified by just one species: homo sapiens.
Expansion of the technosphere is always accompanied by a corresponding contraction of the biosphere. Conversely, expansion of the biosphere is only achieved by means of a corresponding contraction of the technosphere.
Industrial civilization is an ecological ponzi scheme: it steals from tomorrow's biosphere to pay for today's technosphere.
The contraction of the biosphere has greatly accelerated since the start of the industrial revolution. Industrial civilization uses all of nature as a resource to expand the technosphere, but in the biosphere it has benefited humans and their domesticated animals almost exclusively.
At the end of the last ice age, humans represented about 0.1% of the world's mammal biomass. Today, humans and their domesticated animals represent about 96% of the world's mammal biomass. This change, from 0.1% to 96%, is a measure of the conquest of the biosphere by the technosphere. The biosphere continues to contract at an ever-faster pace: the world has lost half its wildlife in the last 40 years.
Many of the victories of the technosphere over the biosphere are easy to identify: deforestation, desertification, climate change, monocultural agriculture, lifeless oceans, and the proliferation of waste - industrial, chemical and nuclear - all belong in this category.
Victories of the biosphere over the technosphere, on the other hand, are harder to identify: they depend on rust and entropy, which work slowly. Often, these are Pyrrhic victories, won by accident: for example, in the exclusion zone surrounding the failed Chernobyl nuclear reactor.
The ideology supporting the expansion of the technosphere, and therefore also the contraction of the biosphere, can properly be labelled 'technoprogressive'. Conversely, the ideology supporting the expansion of the biosphere, and therefore also the contraction of the technosphere, can properly be labelled 'bioconservative'.
The contradiction between the technosphere and the biosphere determines the relationship between them; that is, technoprogressivism and bioconservativism stand in dialectical opposition to eachother. Note that this use of 'technoprogressive' and 'bioconservative' replaces, and greatly broadens, earlier definitions of these terms. Earlier definitions failed to recognise the dialectical nature of the relationship.
The struggle between technoprogressivism and bioconservatism is the defining ideological conflict of the 21st century.
This struggle cuts across existing ideological and political divisions. "Left vs right", or "socialism vs capitalism", is an obsolete narrative: the problem with the technosphere, which exploded at the dawn of the industrial era, is neither the control nor the ownership of industrial production. The problem with the technosphere is the defining character of the industrial mode of production itself, which is its destructive power over the biosphere.
"Nationalism vs globalism" is another obsolete narrative. Economic globalization separates producers in poor countries from consumers in rich countries. The problem with the industrial mode of production is not the location in which it is found: the problem is that it exists at all.
The asymmetry of this struggle is plain to see. The technosphere has corporations and neoliberal governments on its side. In the 21st century, the survival of the neoliberal project - characterized by privatization, deregulation, globalization, free trade, austerity, and reductions in government spending - depends on the extension of technoprogressive control. However, the extension of technoprogressive control (also called “technocratic control”) requires the reversal of hard-won democratic gains: it is fundamentally anti-democratic. This can be most easily be seen by comparing the technologies that could be developed to the technologies that actually are developed: the latter invariably serve the interests of a corporate oligarchy.
Real democracy requires autonomy, self-sufficiency and economic freedom, which can only be found outside the technosphere. Technoprogressivism depends on the technosphere: it is therefore incompatible with real democracy.
Marx wrote that …
the philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.
That is a technoprogressive view, and therefore a fundamentally anti-democratic one. The biosphere does not need to be changed; it needs only to be understood.
A Bioconservative Manifesto
Thank you for this.