Planet Earth: Scientific Proposals to Solve Urgent Issues 3031532074, 9783031532078

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Avelino Núñez-Delgado   Editor

Planet Earth: Scientific Proposals to Solve Urgent Issues

Planet Earth: Scientific Proposals to Solve Urgent Issues

Avelino Núñez-Delgado Editor

Planet Earth: Scientific Proposals to Solve Urgent Issues

Editor Avelino Núñez-Delgado Department of Soil Science and Agricultural Chemistry Engineering Polytechnic School University of Santiago de Compostela Lugo, Spain

ISBN 978-3-031-53207-8 ISBN 978-3-031-53208-5 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-53208-5 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

Preface

When the scientific editor conceived and proposed the book to Springer Nature, the intention was to finally include chapters elaborated by top researchers working on different fields, from “experimental” to “social sciences and humanities”. At that time, the aim was to explore some of the main issues affecting our planet, as well as to propose solutions for specific aspects in relation to climate change, air, water, and soil pollution, problems related to demography, access to food, water, etc. Now, with the book completed, we can confirm that it counts with the participation of authors that have huge experience, which have provided high-quality chapters dealing with both broad and specific issues of main relevance. At the time of starting the book, as well as now, inspiring and motivating readers to promote sustainability, biodiversity, and survival in the whole Earth were and are key objectives. As the final shape was reached, we think that the interested audience could be not just scientists working in any of the fields covered, but also students and any member of the society worried about the crucial problems treated in this work. We really believe that we have achieved the first objective, namely that those asking for views from top scientists

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analyzing these issues and proposing possible solutions could find here an interesting and detailed reading Fig. 1.

Fig. 1 Forest in Galicia (NW Spain). Forest and soils where trees grow are key for helping to solve many of the current environmental issues affecting the Earth

Lugo, Spain

Dr. Avelino Núñez-Delgado The Scientific Editor of the Book [email protected]

Contents

Survival on Earth: An Introductory Chapter for the Book . . . . . . . . . . . . . Avelino Núñez-Delgado

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Pandemics: The Challenge of the Twenty-First Century . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Jordi Serra-Cobo and Roger Frutos

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The Living-Planet Imperatives: Mandatory Interrogation and Redesigning of Development Universally: An Argument from Environmental Realism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Giridhari Lal Pandit New Technological Directions for a Sustainable Development and Sustainability . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Mario Coccia Reversing Ruins: Artistic Interventions for Recovering from Disaster Capitalism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Federico López-Silvestre, Sandra Alvaro, and Guillermo Rodríguez Alonso

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Nanomaterials in Biomedical Applications: Specific Case of the Transport and Controlled Release of Ciprofloxacin . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125 Guillermo Mangas García, Ventura Castillo Ramos, Cinthia Berenice García-Reyes, Ricardo Navarrete Casas, Manuel Sánchez Polo, and María Victoria López Ramón Maximizing Phosphorus Recovery from Waste Streams Through Incineration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141 Ario Fahimi, Bruno Valerio Valentim, and Elza Bontempi

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Agricultural Biomass/Waste-Derived Adsorbents for the Abatement of Dye Pollutants in (Waste)Water . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 161 Panagiotis Haskis, Ioannis Ioannidis, Paraskevi Mpeza, Georgios Giannopoulos, Pantelis Barouchas, Rangabhashiyam Selvasembian, Ioannis Pashalidis, and Ioannis Anastopoulos Technical and Socio-cultural Implications of the Municipal Solid Wastes Production and Disposal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 185 Eugenio Zito, Marco Race, and Antonio Panico Diversity of Microbes Inside Plants and Their Reaction to Biotic and Abiotic Stress . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 207 Pooja Sharma, Ambreen Bano, and Surendra Pratap Singh Current Data on Environmental Problems Due to Ionophore Antibiotics Used as Anticoccidial Drugs in Animal Production, and Proposal of New Research to Control Pollution by Means of Bio-Adsorbents and Nanotechnology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 241 Ainoa Míguez-González, Raquel Cela-Dablanca, Ana Barreiro, Ventura Castillo-Ramos, Manuel Sánchez-Polo, María Victoria López-Ramón, María J. Fernández-Sanjurjo, Esperanza Álvarez-Rodríguez, and Avelino Núñez-Delgado The Impact of Food Overproduction on Soil: Perspectives and Future Trends . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 263 Florentios Economou, Iliana Papamichael, Teresa Rodríguez-Espinosa, Irene Voukkali, Ana Pérez-Gimeno, Antonis A. Zorpas, and Jose Navarro-Pedreño Acidic Soils . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 293 Muhammad Shaaban Impact of Fruit and Vegetable Wastes on the Environment and Possible Management Strategies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 307 Tanveer Ali Sial, Inayatullah Rajpar, Muhammad Numan Khan, Amjad Ali, Muhammad Shan, Ambrin Baby Rajput, and Pir Ahmed Naqi Shah Scientific Collaboration to Generate Solutions for Urgent Issues Affecting the Earth: A Conclusion for the Book . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 331 Avelino Núñez-Delgado

About the Editor

Avelino Núñez-Delgado, Ph.D. born in O Barco de Valdeorras (Ourense province, Galicia, Spain). He obtained Ph.D. at the Department of Soil Science and Agricultural Chemistry, USC, in 1993. He was Postdoc Researcher in France (University of Montpellier) and Spain (USC), between 1993 and 1996; Professor at the Department of Soil Science and Agricultural Chemistry, Engineering Polytechnic School, Campus Lugo, University of Santiago de Compostela (USC), Spain, since 1996; he has nine patents and earned several research awards. He has published more than 400 publications at the date (December 2023), with around 200 in D1 and Q1 JCR journals. He was Principal Investigator and/or collaborates with more than 40 research projects. He was listed among the 2% of the top world researchers by the Stanford ranking and among world top researchers by Researchgate, Expertscape, Web of Sciences, Scopus, and other world research classifications. Currently, he is collaborating with a variety of research teams from various countries around the world. He is Book Editor for Springer Nature, Elsevier, and other top scientific publishers. He is Book Series Editor for Springer Nature, Editor for various top research journals (with roles of Chief Editor, Associate Editor, Special Issues Editor, Managing Guest Editor, and Guest Editor), and Reviewer for national and international research projects.

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Survival on Earth: An Introductory Chapter for the Book Avelino Núñez-Delgado

Abstract In this introductory chapter, while taking into account the overall theme of the Book the scientific editor includes reflections on the matter, with special focus on questions regarding life on Earth, and specifically on human beings. Keywords Life · Environmental concerns · Humans

1 Why Life? It is a fact that living beings need reproduction, duplication, or multiplication, and survival, to last as species for thousands or millions of years. But, in addition, it could be that life has originated, and has lasted, exists, and will continue to exist in the future, just because it entails the successful multiplication of specific groupings of atoms and molecules (those that correspond to each surviving species). In the beginning, starting with subatomic particles and growing from there in size and certain aspects of complexity, the groupings that are successful (because they last and are more frequent) are manifesting and adapting, leaving their mark and being detectable. To note that indicated in a website hosted by the Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire (CERN): “According to most astrophysicists, all the matter found in the universe today (including the matter in people, plants, animals, the earth, stars, and galaxies) was created at the very first moment of time, thought to be about 13 billion years ago” (see https://www.exploratorium.edu/origins/cern/ideas/ bang.html). Also, complementary details can be found at a site hosted by the Imperial College London (https://www.imperial.ac.uk/humanities/webdesign/2012/nickygutt ridge/html/page4.htm) and at a website by The Particle Adventure (https://particlea dventure.org/). So, quarks and leptons could be seen as primordial particles, and the so called “Standard Model”, describing fundamental forces in the universe, would contain the rules followed by nature to “play” with them. After the most fundamental A. Núñez-Delgado (B) Department of Soil Science and Agricultural Chemistry, Engineering Polytechnic School, Campus of Lugo, University of Santiago de Compostela, Lugo, Spain e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 A. Núñez-Delgado (ed.), Planet Earth: Scientific Proposals to Solve Urgent Issues, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-53208-5_1

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groupings, a series of chemical elements were formed, presenting some stability and durability over time. Among them hydrogen and helium, which undergoing fusion and fission, respectively, are two of the elements that are successful in their prevalence as constituents and sources of energy in myriads of stars in the galaxies and overall universe. In the specific case of our planet, and at the present time, some of the mixtures of atoms and stable simple molecules even allow us to interact (for example, with the gases that we inhale contained in the air), as we do with some other molecular groupings in physical states other than gaseous, as is the case of liquid water. The conditions of the surface of the planet have varied throughout several thousands of millions (billions) of years, as well as the molecules that have prevailed being stable in the presence of diverse conditions and radical changes. Some of them existed at some point and still exist, although in different proportions at each geological era, such as N2 , CH4 , O2 , or CO2 . Its existence is a thermodynamic and kinetic success for those substances. In fact, before moving forward we could ask ourselves not only why these molecules have existed and exist, but also why quarks, leptons, and all those considered in the standard model have existed and exist, instead of other subatomic particles, but science has found that in the known universe and particularly on planet Earth, these particles, atoms, and molecules have been and are successful in terms of existence and prevalence. And, regarding atoms and molecules, science tells us that they are stable when they reach a state of minimum energy, although sometimes the fact that a chemical reaction gives rise to a stable molecule under certain environmental conditions is not spontaneous, rather needing catalytic substances that “flatten the peak” of the necessary activation energy. In the state of minimum energy are also groupings of atoms that have given rise to silicon compounds such as silicates, which, either as minerals or grouped as part of rocks, dominate much of the inanimate (non-living) planet Earth. But, even the minimum energy states seem to harbor certain secrets and contradictions with respect to the postulates of classical physics, as in the case of the so-called “time crystals”, as can be seen in a website hosted by the Max Planck Society (https://www.mpg.de/16401528/world-sfirst-video-recording-of-a-space-time-crystal). The fact is that certain atoms and certain molecular groupings of few atoms have been and are successful, at the level of Earth and/or other parts of the known universe. And on our Planet, some molecular groupings have become more complex over thousands of millions of years. Specific molecular groupings gave rise to the existence of proteins and nucleic acids, which in our known world are the key to the duplication and multiplication of repetitive messages that contain codes that allow the developing of life. Prions, viruses, bacteria, synergistic groups in syncytia and biofilms, … What allows mutations (potentially involving modifications in some of the encoded genetic instructions) leads to changes taking place in successive generations of living beings (or genetic materials, of the kind of prions, not considered standard living beings), some of which may facilitate better adaptation and greater multiplicative success. When organisms are relatively simple and multiply rapidly, in a short time it may be possible to see a process of adaptation that facilitates their success. In the pandemic

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of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome–Related Coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2) we can find examples. Any case, microorganisms are a consolidated starting point in the success of life.

2 Genetic Mutations that Favor Survival, Multiplication and Adaptation Are Prevailing in Humans? Starting with eventual precursors, then with microorganisms, life has evolved, and a myriad of micro and macroscopic living beings has been developing on our planet; and they have been also affected by mutations causing changes and adaptations. But, in human beings, some economic and social changes may have greater weight on the success in the survival, multiplication and adaptation of the species than genetic mutations. And not only what gives rise to a higher reproductive rate could be what guarantees greater success for the species in the medium and long term. On the one hand, it would be possible that a progressive reduction in the reproductive rate, caused by social and demographic movements, life options, or other reasons, could make it easier for the Planet to be more sustainable in the medium and long terms and therefore for the human species to endure in the longer term. On the other hand, related to life, the pain perceived by macroscopic organisms endowed with nervous systems is part of the mechanisms that facilitate its persistence and adapting behavior, because they warn that damage is beginning to occur that could lead to death. Other living organisms have other risk detection systems that can trigger movements or reactions to move away from the sources of aggression, or minimize them (see for instance Haruta & Kanno, 2015, at the website: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4462920/ and Ramanujan, 2006, at the website: https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2006/05/researchers-discover-how-bac teria-sense-their-environments). So, being macroscopic, having a central and peripheral nervous system, and being human, what evolutionary advantage does it entail? And, on an individual level, can a conscious human being see that consciousness as an evolutionary advantage? The truth is that social and cultural aspects, and the transmission of information regarding the previous technological and scientific knowledge, as well as intensive interaction and communications among subjects, suppose for humans a potential path of change that in practice can be much faster than any natural genetic mutation at the level of the human species. Another thing would be that, precisely based on scientific knowledge and technology, series of genetic mutations carried out by humans themselves could be introduced, aimed at achieving specific changes that could have substantial repercussions in short periods. The reason to implement these “artificial human-made mutations” could be health, or protection against environmental aggressions, or several other threats. And these eventual “technically based mutations” would be clearly faster than the natural ones.

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3 Final Reflections Today, most humans consciously or unconsciously tend to survive, with impulses to endure in a certain way through new generations. Socially, it may seem somewhat strange that the acquisition and transmission of knowledge through generations has allowed that humans could kill a large part of the life in the Planet (and, particularly, human life) by means of weapons of mass destruction. It is also curious that, despite the tendency to survive, adapt and persist in future generations of descendants, humans take risks of making their survival (and of other living beings) more difficult and less probable due to environmental pollution, including the effects on accelerated climate change (see for instance the website for the 6th IPCC Report on Climate Change 2021, at https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/ and also that for Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability, at https://www.ipcc. ch/report/ar6/wg2/ and the 2023 Synthesis Report at https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/ syr/). Could it be then that something fails in the social mechanism that should facilitate human durability, and the health of the environment that is essential for this? Is this form of cultural and social “mutation” a variant that leads to failure rather than success (a wrong “mutation” in that sense)? Or is it really that the fact that the human individuals that inhabit the planet would be less protects the persistence of the species in the long run, and therefore the mechanism of social and cultural “mutation” in this line would be successful? In principle, everything that makes the environment in which we live more aggressive and inhospitable seems negative to me. And, especially, given that we (and many other living beings) cannot avoid having a nervous system and suffering (and not only physically, but also on a psychological level), my a priori position is that it is justified that we continue to dedicate our best and greatest efforts to avoid or reduce suffering, to the extent possible, without considering the potential benefits to the species from eventual future human population reductions. In fact, there are estimates that there will come a point where the number of humans will stop increasing, and that stability will be reached. Perhaps it would be a kind of equilibrium, but it could be somewhat misleading, or contradictory. My option as soil scientist and environmental scientist is to take care with soil, to take care with the whole environment, and to take care with life. Maybe it could be a good choice. This Book was conceived with that aim, and I would like to deeply thank all the authors that have participated, as well as reviewers and the technical staff at Springer-Nature, for contributing to reach a successful result. My final thought to be included here is that, in the end, living and being conscientious of life and the universe is a rare privilege, and I am grateful for it (Fig. 1).

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Fig. 1 The Cosmic Calendar. Source Wikimedia Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/ File:Cosmic_Calendar.png

References Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire (CERN). https://www.exploratorium.edu/origins/ cern/ideas/bang.html Haruta, S., & Kanno, N. (2015). https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4462920/ IPCC. (2021). Report on climate change. https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/ IPCC. (2022). Report on climate change. 2022: Impacts, adaptation and vulnerability. https://www. ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg2/ IPCC. (2023). AR6 synthesis report. https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/syr/ Imperial College London. https://www.imperial.ac.uk/humanities/webdesign/2012/nickyguttridge/ html/page4.htm Max Planck Society. https://www.mpg.de/16401528/world-s-first-video-recording-of-a-spacetime-crystal Ramanujan, K. (2006). https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2006/05/researchers-discover-how-bac teria-sense-their-environments The Particle Adventure. https://particleadventure.org/

Pandemics: The Challenge of the Twenty-First Century Jordi Serra-Cobo and Roger Frutos

Abstract Humans are part of the biosphere and thus human health is closely related to animal health and to the environment. All human infectious diseases originated from animals. This initial contact generates the primary case. However, from this and the index case, the first person displaying a disease, there is an evolution and adaptation in the human population. Searching for the pathogen in the wild is delusional and futile. It does not exist yet. Medicine cannot prevent or stop an epidemic/ pandemic. It comes too late. What allows for a disease is societal and only two stages can be targeted. The first ones, the amplification loops leading to the emergence, are difficult to eliminate since they impact the normal life. The second, the animal/ human interface leading to the primary case are easier to control. However, the main problem is the dynamic of contact. The massive growth of the human population is generating deforestation and land conversion to accommodate and feed the human population. All species impact the environment they live in. Humans are no exception and besidedeforestation, they generate pollution and loss of biodiversity. These are the first visible markers of excessive human pressure. This increases animal/human contacts and pushes animals to human settlements. It strongly increases the probability of pathogen transmission. The high human population density and mobility further increases the probability of transmission of the disease within the human population. The system is purely probabilistic, and the main driver is the growth of the human population. What must be controlled is the size of the human population. Education and public awareness are essential for efficient birth control. If not, epidemics/pandemics will occur more and more and will play its natural role of population control. This is the main challenge of the twenty-first century.

J. Serra-Cobo Department de Biologia Evolutiva, Ecologia I Ciències Ambientals, Universitat de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain R. Frutos (B) Intertryp, UMR17, CIRAD, Montpellier, France e-mail: [email protected] Faculty of Medicine-Ramathibodi Hospital, Mahidol University, Bangkok, Thailand © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 A. Núñez-Delgado (ed.), Planet Earth: Scientific Proposals to Solve Urgent Issues, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-53208-5_2

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Keywords Deforestation · Biodiversity loss · Pollution · Human population growth · Environmental impact · Epidemic · Pandemic · Emerging diseases · Animal/human interface · Birth control

1 Introduction Humans are part of an extremely complex biosphere in which a multitude of relationships have been established between living organisms and their environment. Therefore, we should not be surprised that human health is closely related to animal health and to the environment. Human viruses, emerging or not, are of animal origin. For example, one can cite Human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), Dengue virus (DENV), Measles virus (MV), Chikungunya virus (CHIKV), Monkeypox virus (MPXV), Zika virus (ZIKV), Middle East Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus (MERS-CoV) and severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). More than 80% of human disease outbreaks are caused by emergent or re-emergent virus infections with zoonotic origin. It has been estimated that more than 99.5% of potentially pathogenic viruses which could be transmissible between animals and humans are unknown (Quer et al., 2022). Human populations have suffered from epidemics since ancient times. For example, measles first appeared around 2500 years ago and evolved from a livestock virus (Düx et al., 2020). Severe outbreaks of black death occurred in the years 541 and 542 and were caused by the Yersinia pestis, a bacterium transmitted by fleas carried by rats (Haensch et al., 2010). The 1918–1919 flu pandemic, also known as Spanish Flu, killed between 50 and 100 million people worldwide. It was caused by a strain of Influenzavirus A, subtype H1 N1 , probably caused by recombination between human viruses, pigs and birds that occurred during the years before the pandemic (He et al., 2019; Smith et al., 2009; Tsoucalas et al., 2016). Three major epidemiological transitions in human history have led to the emergence of unknown infectious diseases (McMichael, 2004): . The beginning of agriculture and livestock (5000–10,000 years ago). During this period, humanity came into close contact with domestic animals and their pathogens, increasing the likelihood of transmission and adaptation of microorganisms to humans (Cleaveland et al., 2001). Relatively large human communities were formed, making it possible for many people to become infected and for diseases to spread (Wolfe et al., 2007). . Exchanges between the first Eurasian civilizations (1500–3000 years ago). During this period, human populations from Greece, the Roman empire, China, and South Asia living in different environments came into contact through commercial exchange and military conflicts. This exposed the respective populations to new pathogens and led to the arrival of vectors that could transmit new diseases.

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. European expansionism. This took place during the last five centuries and led to the transoceanic spread of infectious diseases which were often lethal for naïve populations. An example is the colonization of the American continent, which brought human populations with a different epidemiological history into contact and contributed to the spread of infectious agents such as influenza and measles. The situation was dramatic in pre-Columbian America when, at the end of the sixteenth century, only 10% of the inhabitants who were there before the arrival of the conquistadors had survived. On the island of Santo Domingo about 3,770,000 inhabitants lived there in 1493. In 1518 there were only 15,600 people left (Guerra, 1988). What is the current situation? We are currently starting the fourth transition, the one caused by accelerated globalization, widespread environmental impacts, growth and expansion of the human population, and climate change. These accelerating global changes have led to the emergence of new zoonoses. The last two decades have been characterized by the emergence of three coronavirus diseases, i.e., SARS, MERS and COVID-19, having a dramatic impact on the society (Frutos et al., 2021a). The emergence of an infectious disease is an accidental process or in other words a very low probability event resulting from the sum of low probability independent events. Currently, we are increasing the probability of occurrence of these events. Environmental factors such as changes in land use and deforestation, human population expansion, changes in human behaviour or social structure, international travel or trade, microbial adaptation to mass use of drugs and vaccines and breakdown in public health infrastructure affect the emergence and spread of pathogens. The analysis of these changes should help us developing and implementing measures geared towards prevention in order to prepare for the epidemics that will emerge in the future.

2 Environmental Factors, Climate Change and Socioeconomic Factors Understanding viral epidemic processes requires to consider that humans are part of an extremely complex biosphere characterized by a multitude of interactions between living organisms and the environment. Currently these interactions are changing at an unprecedented rate, modifying thus the structure and functionality of ecosystems. This has consequences not only on biodiversity loss but also on human health. One of the qualities that defines the Anthropocene era (Myers, 2017) is the speed at which change occurs and the magnitude of such changes. We live in an increasingly globalized world, whether at a commercial, economic or pathogen distribution level. Most of these changes have an anthropic origin and may have an impact on the dynamic of pathogens and consequently on human health. These changes can modify the interactions between humans and host species of pathogens.

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The emergence of an epidemic depends on the dynamics of the pathogen, which in turn is influenced by external environmental and anthropogenic factors (changes to human behavior or social structure). The dynamic of pathogens is the result of the interaction between the characteristics of pathogens, the life history traits of host populations and environmental factors. It is a complex stochastic process (Gavotte & Frutos, 2022). The dynamics of the host species influence the pathogen dynamics while the pathogen uses the biology and ecology of the host to its benefit. The seasonality existing in many parts of the world (winter, spring, summer, autumn, dry and rainy seasons) determines the birthing periods, migration, gregarious behaviour and the torpor of species. Each of these aspects of the host life may affect population density, rates of contact between individuals and immune response, thus leading to spatiotemporal variations in infection dynamics (George et al., 2011; Hayman et al., 2013). The host fitness is important in an infection process. The fitness of individuals is influenced by the state of habitat conservation and stress level of individuals, which are important traits whenever ecosystem structures are changing. Viruses and host dynamics are relevant in terms of public health because they allow assessing the risk and orienting the choice of preventive actions to be taken. Surveys on the host dynamic lead to key information on demographic and epidemiological parameters (mortality, survival and turnover rates, colony size, immune lifespan, period of infections cycles, distribution of individuals infected in the colony, basic reproductive rate of virus, population threshold needed for an infection to spread). An example is the long-term longitudinal study on Lyssavirus hamburg carried out in a greater mouseeared bat colony (Myotis myotis) from Mallorca (Balearic Island, Spain). The longitudinal study conducted from 1995 to 2016 evidenced a cyclic Lyssavirus hamburg infection in spatial discrete subpopulations of M. myotis, without any significant increase in associated mortality of bats (Fig. 1) (Amengual et al., 2007). During the 22 years of survey, we observed periodic oscillations in the number of susceptible and immune bats. The delay between the waves were dependent on

% 80

Evolution of the percentage of Lyssavirus hamburg seropositive bats

60 40 20 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016

0 Year Fig. 1 Interannual variations of seropositive bats observed in a Myotis myotis colony from Mallorca (Spain). Results obtained together with H. Bourhy’s team from Institut Pasteur (Paris)

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the rate of inflow of susceptible bats into the colonies as a consequence of new births, immigration of naive animals from neighboring colonies, and expiration of Lyssavirus hamburg specific immunity in previously infected animals. When a sufficient fraction of susceptible individuals in the bat population was reached, the virus spreads again if infected individuals joined the colony (Serra-Cobo & López-Roig, 2017). The spatial structure of wild species populations where the pathogens are circulating is variable and may influence the dynamics of infection. Some wild species have a metapopulation structure consisting in spatial discrete subpopulations. Each of these subpopulations can have different groups of individuals from an epidemiological point of view: susceptible individuals being infected (S), those in a latency stage (between being infected and becoming infectious) (L), infectious (I) and immune (IM). Figure 2 summarizes the dynamic of a virus in a host population. The proportion of these groups in a subpopulation can vary widely, as can the risk of pathogen transmission. For example, a subpopulation in which the immune predominate is not at the same risk as another in which the infectious ones predominate. Environmental changes can alter the composition of these groups and change the dynamics of the pathogen and, therefore, the risk of transmission. There are many environmental changes that affect the dynamics of pathogens. Land modification, changes in vegetation patterns, increase demand for bushmeat (Fig. 3), deforestation, human population expanding and changes in distribution of host populations can affect virus dynamics. Also, these changes can increase contacts between host species and humans, livestock or pets. To this must be added the effect of climate change, which, among other things, may affect the spread of infectious diseases in new regions of the planet by affecting the distribution of host species and thus contacts with other species and humans. The loss, appearance or change in demography of one or more species in a given area can modify the dynamic of their pathogens and change the risk for public health. It is important to investigate the factors regulating the dynamic of the hosts and which could favour the circulation

Fig. 2 Compartmental model of the virus dynamic in a host subpopulation, where o is the survival rate, α is the mortality rate, i is the immigration rate, e is the emigration rate and γ is the incorporation rate of newborns

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Fig. 3 Bushmeat on sale in the Peruvian Amazonian region. Photo Marc López-Roig

of pathogens, i.e., period of the year when there are more infectious individuals, etc. (Serra-Cobo et al., 2013). One of the most important environmental changes currently taking place is deforestation, or rather land conversion, in tropical regions, whether to create space for new human settlements, land for pasture, crops or farming, or for commercial logging. The destruction of tropical forests is usually analysed in relation to the loss of biodiversity. In other words, the analysis focuses on the potential loss or reduction in numbers of the species that live in the area being deforested, and the destruction of their habitats. The consequences of deforestation can be far more unpredictable than they might appear at first glance. Deforestation does not necessarily lead to the loss of all species. Many adapt to the human environment where they find a good alternative, providing food and shelter, to their natural environment (Afelt et al., 2017, 2018a). Some animals abandon the deforested area in search of a new habitat, while others remain. The animals that remain in deforested region continue to look for food and shelter and may enter into the farms and houses in the newly created human settlements. This results in increased contacts with humans and the risk of contact with a zoonotic pathogen borne by these animals occupying the human habitat. The number of zoonotic viruses, both in terms of diversity and demography, was found to be a lot higher in anthropized rural areas than in the wild (Afelt et al., 2017; Gibb et al., 2020). Anthropization generates a highly diverse environment in the vicinity of humans. Wild animals of differing ecology can find in anthropized environments

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niches compatible with their roosting and hunting needs. Anthropized environments provide a mosaic of ecosystems, very close to each other, each one corresponding to the needs of a given group of species (Afelt et al., 2018a, 2018b). The rate of deforestation has been very high in Southeast Asia where 30% of the forest cover has been lost in the last 40 years (Afelt et al., 2018a, 2018b). Sri Lanka’s natural forest cover has dwindled from 80% to less than 16% over the last 100 years (Kariyawasam & Rajapakse, 2014). In Cameroon, hundreds of hectares of tropical forest are lost every year. In the Amazon, thousands of square kilometers of forest are lost every year. Rainforests drain massive amounts of water, which is then removed through evapotranspiration. Deforestation reduces this drainage, causing water to accumulate on the surface in pools and wetlands. This creates more areas where mosquitoes can lay eggs, leading to an increase in mosquito populations and a higher incidence of mosquito-borne diseases (Fig. 4). The construction of roads for transporting timber cut in rainforests also provides hunters with improved access to areas that were previously difficult to reach. Some authors argue that deforestation in Cameroon has led to increased trade in bushmeat, and thus to increased contact between hunters and wild animals (Wolfe et al., 2005). Various cases of infection have been found in hunters who had handled simian species infected with Ebola virus (Serra-Cobo, 2015). One of the key factors driving the bushmeat trade in Cameroon is the growing urban demand for meat. The desire

Fig. 4 Water ponds suitable for mosquito breeding resulting from deforestation in the Peruvian Amazon region. Photo Marc López-Roig

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of families in towns and cities for bushmeat consumption is a key factor driving overexploitation of wildlife in sub-Saharan Africa, with an increased risk of pathogens transmission (Fa et al., 2019). Africa has the fastest rate of urbanization in the world. Africa’s urban population is expected to increase from 395 million in 2010 to 1.339 billion in 2050, corresponding to 21% of the world’s projected urban population (Güneralp et al., 2017). One of the bush meat species is the pangolin. This species is also appreciated in pharmacology. Unfortunately, the trade has led to a drastic decline of the populations. Comparison of data from before and after 2000 indicates that the number of pangolins hunted has increased by approximately 150% (Ingram et al., 2017). It is estimated that 0.4–2.7 million pangolins are extracted annually from Congo Basin forests. However, environmental changes with a potential impact on human health also occur in industrialized countries. Although these impacts tend to be less severe, the modification of natural systems can affect the dynamic of host populations, causing thus changes in the dynamic of pathogens. Another aspect to consider that can increase the probability of contacts and pathogen transmission is poverty and conflicts. The lack of resources can force people to expand their range of activities in order to survive, pushing them into the rainforests where they are more exposed to zoonoses (Serra-Cobo, 2015). Danger in areas of conflict also pushes people to hide in forests. Unsanitary habitat is another key driver, if not the most important. Animals, in particular rodents, are colonizing such poor housing bringing pathogens with them. The elimination of unsanitary habitat should be the first target of any action aiming a reducing the risk of human disease emergence. The mobility of people has increased a lot of in the years before the COVID19 pandemic. With more than a billion international travelers every year, infected individuals could potentially spread zoonotic diseases anywhere in a connected world. Figure 5 summarizes three great challenges that humanity will have to face during the twenty-first century: epidemics, climate change and increased human population. However, one must notice from now on that human population growth is the leading threat causing the other threats. The increase of the world population produces the greatest impact on natural systems with already described consequences, i.e., biodiversity loss, deforestation, bushmeat trade, impact on dynamic of host and their pathogens. The increase of human activity produces more global trade and more human movements with more opportunity to pathogens spread. One must notice that in the case of Aedes-borne diseases such as dengue, Zika or chikungunya there is a shift in paradigm. Humans have become the vectors, bringing the viruses over very long distances and infecting local population of mosquitoes which in turn will transmit the viruses to local human populations. Another additional aspect is that if vector-competent mosquitoes are present, it is because they have been transported, and are still transported, worldwide owing to global trade. In addition, climate change will lead to significant migratory movements. Armed conflicts also produce movements of people. It should be borne in mind that the vaccination coverage is not homogeneous throughout the world. There are populations with great ratios of susceptible individuals who are

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Epidemics

Temperature rise Change in rainfall regime Increased risk of fire Rising sea levels

Biodiversity loss

Impact on the dynamics, the biological cycle and the distribution of living beings

Changes in composition of communities of living beings

Greater number of settlements and urbanizations

Human movements More food resources

Introduction of new vectors and pathogens

Changes in pathogen dynamics and risk of transmission

Impact in human health and welfare

Global trade

Increase the world population

Different vaccination coverage Increase in people susceptible to pathogens

Human activity/Population increase

Natural systems

More extreme weather events

Human systems

Climate change

Deforestation

Impact in health and welfare of pets and livestock

Fig. 5 Diagram of the three challenges and their consequences that humanity will have to face in the twenty-first century

thus more prone to infections. Increased human population also involves greater consumption of resources and a greater environmental impact. The climate change affects the natural systems and the human systems. Climate change affects the rainfall regime and increases the risk of wildfires which is another main cause of deforestation. These changes modify the relationships between living organisms and their environment and can thus affect the pathogens dynamic. The climate change also produces extreme weather events that have a strong impact on hosts species but also on the dynamic of pathogens and human society.

3 Global Health and Planetary Health The main traits of our society are mobility, globalization and human population growth. Every species is impacting its environment, and the human species is no exception. However, considering the size of the human population and its extension and mobility all over the planet, the impact is considerably enhanced. There are no more boundaries between public health, one health, global health and planetary health. They are simply different magnification scales of the same continuum. The whole system governing the emergence of pathogens in the human population is probabilistic. It is only based on the probability of encounter and probability of

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compatibility (Gavotte & Frutos, 2022). The primary driver is the growth of the human population while the secondary driver is the mobility of humans. In a probabilistic system, these two parameters can explain all subsequent events. However, this is also true for other major threats to the planet such as deforestation, pollution, or loss of biodiversity. They are all correlated but not necessarily linked by causation. This is a major pitfall in many narratives: there is correlation but not causation. The causative factor of all these phenomena is the same: the growth of the human population. This is why deforestation, loss of biodiversity and emerging diseases are correlated, they have the same cause. These main threats follow exactly the same probabilistic patterns but are not occurring at the same pace and in the same way. The human population stayed before the twentieth century below a billion individuals and for most of its history far below that level. The human population moved from around one billion at the beginning of the twentieth century to eight billion today, in only 123 years. It took the Homininae seven million years to reach one billion individuals on Earth and only 123 years to multiply this number by eight. The twentieth century also witnessed an immense increase in the capacity and speed of long-distance mobility. According to the latest estimates, there are approximately 100,000 flights per day worldwide. This number includes all types of flights, including passenger, cargo and military aircraft (https://www.trip.com/ask/travel-que stions/how-many-flights-per-day.html). Together, these changes created the threats currently hanging over humanity’s head. All species impact their environment during their life and it is simply a matter of number. The more people, the higher the impact. With systematically more and more people being present on the planet, there is a need to house them and thus to deforest or dry wetlands to build villages and cities. It is very hard to live in highly hostile environments like deserts or ice caps. Not to mention that most of the planet is made of oceans. Therefore, the impact is focused on lands which are habitable and thus hosts of biodiversity. The growing human population must be fed and thus crop fields, rearing and pastures must be created in addition to settlements. This additional impact is also by definition on the limited habitable and arable surface on Earth and comes also at the price of deforestation and land conversion. The growing human population must find an occupation to live and therefore factories and other facilities must be built in this same habitable land. This is not the end because fields and cities as well as cities between themselves must be connected. Therefore, an extensive communication network must be built, and energy must be generated. The communication network nowadays is no longer only local but international, with “international standards”, increasing thus the impact. There is no longer any local context. There is a natural demand towards progress and better material conditions worldwide, so called development, but this comes at a cost of a higher impact on the environment. The United Nations have developed a set of 17 Sustainable Development Goals, which is an excellent and deeply needed initiative. However, it carries its own contradictions since further development will obligatorily increase the impact on the planet. The truth is that there is no sustainable solution to a continuous development but only “less impactful” intermediate solutions. Resources and space are limited and there is nothing we can do about that. Global health and planetary health are very important issues.

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They are a lot more comprehensive than One Health and more capable of rendering the real complexity of the context. A major consequence of the global development is pollution, whether it is gas, plastic, chemicals, or any other pollutant. Pollution is perhaps the most immediately and global life-threatening consequence of development. This is clearly wat should be addressed as a priority because the society can do something to reduce it, primarily by cleaning, but mostly by developing new biodegradable materials and by working on people education and awareness. We need, and we can, change the society. What is human made can be changed. The other threats are inherent to the growth of the human population, and little can be done, despite speeches and dreams. There is no possible, at least not ethically acceptable, way to reduce the size of the human population and the pression it applies on the environment. One major reason which should be addressed in priority is the lack of education on birth control. Our objective as a global society should be to reduce the birth rate worldwide. We must thus acknowledge the consequences on biodiversity loss and deforestation which are inevitable. The other main threat for humans is the emergence of epidemics and pandemics. COVID-19 was a strong reminder that this risk is real. Although the main driver is also the growth of the human population, this issue is more complicated to apprehend because the dynamic is more complex and composite with a stochastic dimension (Gavotte & Frutos, 2022). Conversely, deforestation and loss of biodiversity are deterministic, thus immediately visible, processes. This complexity led to confusion between correlation and causation and to the development of unrealistic scenarios making the emergence of diseases a consequence of deforestation and loss of biodiversity (Lawler et al., 2021; Platto et al., 2021). The emergence of epidemic/pandemic diseases is not a consequence of deforestation of loss of biodiversity but simply the result of higher contacts and mobility due to the rise of the human population. Deforestation and loss of biodiversity are simply markers. They are the immediately visible effects of human pressure, not the cause of epidemics. Human pressure will also increase the risk of epidemics/ pandemics but in a more indirect, delayed and not immediately visible way leading thus to the false interpretation that deforestation and loss of biodiversity are the cause. Water ponds created by a decrease of water drainage following deforestation is one example. This increases the mosquito population and therefore the likelihood of transmission of vector-borne diseases to the human population (Fig. 3). Pathogens and in particular viruses, we are not considering here opportunistic microorganisms but true pathogens, are microorganisms which have evolved specifically to infect hosts and use them to feed, replicate and disseminate. Very often the host is manipulated by the pathogen to permit the transmission, the best-known example being the rabies virus. There is a global dynamic of circulation of pathogens which are moving from one host to another simply upon contact. This dynamic of encounters is random by nature although strongly facilitated by the capacity of the pathogens to manipulate the host’s behavior and generates a contact. It remains nevertheless stochastic and probabilistic in nature (Gavotte & Frutos, 2022). This is where the human pressure comes into action. The increasing growth of the human population and the need for land conversion for housing, food, etc., strongly increases the probability of contact and thus of primary transmission from animals to humans. Deforestation and land

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conversion are also additionally and indirectly increasing the probability of contact by pushing wild animals to the human environment. When their natural environment is destroyed many wild species find shelter and food in the human environment. The mosaic rural environment is particularly attractive as it provides acceptable niches for various species (Afelt et al., 2017; Gibb et al., 2020). As a consequence, many species which would have never been in contact in the wild are now sharing the same space in the human converted land and in immediate vicinity of human populations (Afelt et al., 2018a, 2018b). Potentially zoonotic viruses have been found to be twice higher both in diversity and number in rural human habitat than in the wild (Gibb et al., 2020). If rural environments are the most likely place for primary cases to occur, densely populated urban areas are places where epidemics emerge (Frutos et al., 2022). Index cases, i.e., the first patients to display the symptoms to a disease, are found in cities where epidemics emerge. Infections and diseases are two different phenomena which should be distinguished. However, both are strongly driven by high population density through a probabilistic process. The emergence of a disease is following the introduction of a pathogen into the human population and its evolution within, and it occurs owing to societal events. The process of disease emergence is also probabilistic and there is a threshold, the outbreak or epidemic threshold, which must be crossed before an epidemic can start (Hartfield & Alizon, 2013). This threshold is simply the minimum number of persons to be infected simultaneously in a given place for the virus to statically easily find new hosts in the human population. Moving from a low-level circulation to crossing the threshold requires for the virus population to be quickly demographically amplified. This takes places in what is called “clusters” or else “amplification loops” (Frutos et al., 2022), in other words societal events characterized by a high population density, high promiscuity and mobility. What causes the disease is biological, i.e., the pathogen. However, what causes the disease to emerge is societal (Frutos et al., 2022). This is by definition very susceptible to human population density and the higher this density the higher the probability of contact and transmission. This leads to the well-known cyclic probabilistic dynamic of pathogen transmission. When a host population is high, the probability of contact and thus transmission is also high, leading to epidemics and death of part of the population. When the population density decreases, the probability of contact and transmission decreases along and when the outbreak threshold is crossed downward, the epidemic stops. The population will start a novel upward dynamic, and the cycle will start over. This is a well-known purely probabilistic mechanism of population regulation which also applies to humans. The progress of modern medicine, hygiene and urbanism have allowed the human population to grow considerably without being affected by this cyclic mechanism of regulation of the population. However, there is a limit, even though we don’t know yet what this limit is. A population cannot grow indefinitely and the combined effects of deforestation, land conversion, pollution and degradation of the environment necessarily resulting from the growth of the human population will obligatorily lead to an increase of population density in urban areas. The human population is not, and cannot be, evenly distributed and is largely concentrated in urban areas. There is a continuum between

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the places where the environment is degraded to sustain the growth of the population and the places where this growing population mostly located. This continuum between the rural and the urban worlds is the perfect link between the places where the contamination occurs, the former, and the places where the diseases will emerge, the latter. Diseases will always emerge, by definition, where the human population displays its highest density, potentially leading to a high number of deaths. However, this is not even the end of the process because owing to the very high mobility characterizing our modern society, the passage from epidemic to pandemic is very easy and the opportunity of containing an emerging disease is lost from the very beginning.

4 Roadmap for the Future We are the product of this extraordinary life story that began some 4 billion years ago, but not the ultimate product, only one product among others. For the first time in the planet history there is a species that is capable of understanding and even modifying and regulating the functions of the natural world, whether in terms of our environment or ourselves as a species. This places enormous responsibility on our shoulders, and we must learn how to manage it. The solution is not easy since the problem is very complex. But to solve a problem or a complicated situation, the first thing to do is making a good diagnosis to find out what is causing the problem and find the most appropriate counteractions. Until now, we have approached the epidemics from a medical point of view only. However, while it is essential to do so and the work done by health professionals is magnificent, often at great personal sacrifice, this does not stop an emerging pandemic. When medical action is taken, it is too late, and the pandemic is already causing major economic and social impacts (Frutos et al., 2021b). Medicine takes care of patients and manages disease by limiting the number of sick and dead people. However, this does not allow for effective prevention (Frutos et al., 2021b). The COVID-19 crisis has shown that the only way to avoid collapsing the health system and to get the epidemiological indicators to decrease was to confine entire populations at a very high social and economic cost. So, the most effective way to minimize the human, economic and social costs is to manage the occurrence of the disease, not the disease itself. We need to reorganize our epidemic/pandemic warning and prevention system to act before the disease emerges. The treatment of sick patients and the containment of the epidemic/pandemic with restrictive measures are unfortunately necessary when the disease has already emerged. It is important to devote more effort to the prevention and not wait to act when the disease is already here. Changes are needed in those aspects of human activity that favor the appearance of epidemics. The rapid and extensive alterations to the natural systems that our species is producing have global consequences, including human health, by modifying the circulation of pathogens in wildlife. We have to learn that there are limits to our activities in a very interconnected and finite world, in which some natural resources are running out. There is nothing in nature that grows indefinitely. It is also necessary to take precautions in the exchange of goods

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that can transport disease vectors (mosquitoes, ticks) or pest species such as the Asian wasp or the boxwood caterpillar that produce imbalances in native ecosystems. A good example can be found in the study carried out in the Canary Islands on mice coronaviruses (Monastiri et al., 2021) and in which the presence of murine coronavirus was verified. Bioinformatics analyzes showed that the most likely origin of this virus was relatively recent and European. In the Canary archipelago there is an important maritime transit, especially with Europe. Mus musculus is not a species native from the Canaries and it is not difficult for mice to arrive on the different islands as a result of the aforementioned maritime transit. The murine coronavirus does not affect humans, but in addition to mice it can affect some species of local fauna. The effect is global. We can easily understand that. However, at the end there are only two questions to ask: what can we do and can we succeed? The first question, i.e., what can we do, is rather simple to answer. We must draw an objective picture of the situation to identify where a preventive intervention can be conducted. Medicine cannot prevent, or even stop, an epidemic or a pandemic (Frutos et al., 2021b). Medicine is syndromic in nature which means that it starts only when symptoms can be clearly associated to a given disease. When symptoms become visible, it is far too late. The pathogen has already spread everywhere. Looking for the pathogens in the wild to try identifying “human pandemic pathogens”, mostly viruses, before they spread into the human population is futile and delusional (Frutos et al., 2021b). The pathogen triggering an epidemic has evolved in the human population and has become adapted to the human host. It simply does not exist in the wild or more precisely, it does not exist yet (Frutos et al., 2021c, 2022). The enormous resources spent today on this approach are simply wasted. There are only two stages were something can be done, and they are the stages where the societal dimension is involved. The first stage is the amplification loop where the pathogen population is amplified up to the level of the outbreak threshold leading to an epidemic (Frutos et al., 2021c, 2022). These amplification loops, from a dynamic standpoint, also known as clusters, from a static standpoint, are societal events where a high concentration of people is present at the same time and the same place. The solution would be to limit the size, frequency and co-occurrence of such events. Even if it is present, a pathogen will not trigger an epidemic if it cannot cross the outbreak threshold. Keeping the pathogen population under the outbreak threshold would then be a good solution. However, it will affect the society and freedom of people which may lead to reluctance in implementing such measures. Furthermore, this outbreak threshold also depends on the transmissibility of the pathogen. A highly transmissible pathogen might be able to trigger an epidemic at a lower threshold. Each pathogen is different and thus it might be difficult to correctly assess the threshold and the limitations on collective events. Nevertheless, there will be an effect on the current way of life, and it must be accepted. Total safety cannot be obtained with total freedom. The second stage at which actions are possible is the human/animal interface where the primary case occurs. Being located in rural areas, it will impact less the society as a whole since most of the population live in urban areas. Furthermore, the objective is not to change the way of life or restrict societal events but instead to

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improve housing and infrastructure to prevent wild animals from getting in permanent or frequent contact with human. This might be easier to implement than preventing amplification loops and more readily accepted since it goes with an improvement of the human habitat. These preventive actions are both meant to prevent key steps, contact or amplification, to occur. They represent investment for the “non-event”, for a key event in the dynamic of disease emergence “not to happen”. The objective is to implement actions which are not visible. It is a political choice often not favored as politics is based on visibility, but it is an essential choice. The answer to the second question, i.e., can we succeed, is unfortunately not optimistic. It is clearly no. The whole dynamic of disease emergence being probabilistic, if the human population keeps growing the global impact on the environment will obligatorily increase as well. Disease emergence is the last in the series of event triggered by the human population growth, but all global health issues are linked. Pollution, deforestation, loss of biodiversity and emergence of diseases are all correlated and have the same cause. Other pandemics will occur, the gravity of which will depend on the transmissibility and virulence of the pathogen. Until now humanity has been lucky since all diseases having emerged since the Spanish Flu of 1918–1920 have been rather moderate but luck does not last forever. The increased human pressure put on the environment and the higher human population density are increasing the probability of occurrence of a catastrophic event. We don’t know when and we don’t know whether it will be a series of still moderate diseases which will slightly decrease the human population or a highly virulent pathogen that will take a massive toll at once. What we know is that it will happen. It is a matter of probability. We should be ready for it. We are on the verge of a major global change, as various biological, social, and economic indicators seem to show. It will be important to change our relationship with the natural environment and devote more effort to research, biodiversity conservation and education, in particular with respect to birth control and limitation of the growth of the human population. Acting on the main driver, i.e., population growth, is the best way to prevent nefarious consequences. If not, our society should accept its fate and rediscover the value of the antic wisdom: Memento mori.

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M., & Kark, S. (2021). The COVID-19 pandemic is intricately linked to biodiversity loss and ecosystem health. The Lancet Planetary Health, 5, e840–e850. McMichael, A. J. (2004). Environmental and social influences on emerging infectious diseases: Past, present and future. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B: Biological Sciences, 359, 1049–1058. Monastiri, A., Martin-Carrillo, N., Foronda, P., Izquierdo-Rodriguez, E., Feliu, C., López-Roig, M., Miquel, J., Ar Gouilh, M., & Serra-Cobo, J. (2021). First coronavirus active survey in rodents from the Canary Islands. Frontiers in Veterinary Science, 8, 708079. Myers, S. S. (2017). Planetary health: Protecting human health on a rapidly changing planet. Lancet, 390, 2860–2868. Platto, S., Zhou, J., Wang, Y., Wang, H., & Carafoli, E. (2021). Biodiversity loss and COVID-19 pandemic: The role of bats in the origin and the spreading of the disease. Biochemical and Biophysical Research Communications, 538, 2–13. Quer, J., Colomer-Castell, S., Campos, C., Andrés, C., Piñana, M., Cortese, M. F., GonzálezSánchez, A., Garcia-Cehic, D., Ibáñez, M., Pumarola, T., Rodríguez-Frías, F., Antón, A., & Tabernero, D. (2022). Next-Generation sequencing for confronting virus pandemics. Viruses, 14, 600. Serra-Cobo, J. (2015). Factores ecológicos y socioeconómicos de la epidemia del Ébola. In O. Mateos & Tomàs (Eds.), Detrás del Ébola: un enfoque multidisciplinario para un problema global. Edicions Bellaterra. Serra-Cobo, J., López-Roig, M., Seguí, M., Sánchez, L. P., Nadal, J., Borrás, M., Lavenir, R., & Bourhy, H. (2013). Ecological factors associated with European bat Lyssavirus Seroprevalence in Spanish bats. PLoS One, 8, e64467. Serra-Cobo, J., & Lopez-Roig, M. (2017). Bats and emerging infections: An ecological and virological puzzle. Emerging and Re-emerging Viral Infections: Advances in Microbiology, Infectious Diseases and Public Health, 6, 35–48. Smith, G. J., Bahl, J., Vijaykrishna, D., Zhang, J., Poon, L. L., Chen, H., Webster, R. G., & Peiris, J. S. M. (2009). Dating the emergence of pandemic influenza viruses. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 106, 11709–11712. Tsoucalas, G., Kousoulis, A., & Sgantzos, M. (2016). The 1918 Spanish Flu Pandemic, the Origins of the H1N1-virus Strain, a Glance in History. European Journal of Clinical and Biomedical Sciences, 2, 23–28. Wolfe, N. D., Daszak, P., Kilpatrick, A. M., & Burke, D. S. (2005). Bushmeat hunting, deforestation and prediction of zoonotic disease emergence. Emerging Infectious Diseases, 11, 1822–1827. Wolfe, N. D., Dunavan, C. P., & Diamond, J. (2007). Origins of major human infectious diseases. Nature, 447, 279–283.

The Living-Planet Imperatives: Mandatory Interrogation and Redesigning of Development Universally: An Argument from Environmental Realism Giridhari Lal Pandit

Abstract The confluence of crises, dominated by COVID-19, climate change, and conflicts, are creating spin-off impacts on food and nutrition, health, education, the environment, and peace and security, and affecting all the SDGs. (UNO’s SDGs-2030 Report 2022, https:// unstats.un.org›sdgs›report›2022)

How can we transform our deeply troubled world into a wiser world, i.e., a world which stands united against global and regional challenges confronting humanity and earth? How can we transform the technology-driven knowledge inquiry itself so that the academic institutions of learning, research institutions/laboratories, government organizations, and international institutions, among other institutions, are transformed, and driven by a culture of wisdom inquiry (Pandit in Philosophies 6:90, 2021)? It is imperative to work for such a world, if we want authentically and unitedly to address the biggest challenges including the anthropogenic global warming driven climate change. In particular, we must address the challenges of (i) limiting the average rise in temperatures to 1.5 °C; (ii) saving the lives of billions of people already being impacted by the continued rise in greenhouse gas emissions, and (ii) coping with threats to food production, water supplies, human health, national economies, and, above all, to the living planet earth itself. The kind of world being envisaged here would be the most appropriate place to address the most urgent problems of safe-guarding of human well-being interests that have been seriously undermined by the unending race for nuclear weapons globally. It will go a long way to free humanity from continued race for proliferation of nuclear weapons, and from the looming totalitarian catastrophes such as a nuclear war (Pandit in Philosophies 6:90, 2021). Not only the current totalitarian regimes in our world but the increasingly failing international institutions such as the UNO, and its agencies, on the one hand, and the unending world-wide competition for the proliferation and deployment of nuclear weapons, on the other, need to be correctly G. L. Pandit (B) Department of Philosophy, University of Delhi South Campus, New Delhi 110021, India e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 A. Núñez-Delgado (ed.), Planet Earth: Scientific Proposals to Solve Urgent Issues, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-53208-5_3

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gauged and addressed as the greatest danger signals at the planetary levels. They endanger not only the humanity’s future and human well-being interests themselves but the future of the war-ravaged ecologically challenged earth. Keywords Addressing world challenges · Culture of wisdom inquiry · Wiser world · World transformation · Environmental nesting and asymmetries of resilience

1 Introduction Indisputably, fossil-fuel emissions alone have increased carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere by about 30 percent since the start of the Industrial Revolution in the late 1700s. …The inevitable result of pumping the sky full of greenhouse gases is global warming … the earth’s mean temperature has risen at least 0.6 degree Celsius (more than one degree Fahrenheit) over the past 120 years, much of it caused by the burning of fossil fuels. (Karl & Trenberth, 1999, p. 102).

What do the climate change challenge and SDGs-2030 signal to us? They do not merely signal the need for a new speciality of academic and technocratic interest, which could help in finding quick-fix solutions to problems faced by the living planet and humanity. Climate change threatens our water supplies, coastlines, forests, and economy. It signals the urgency of regional and global initiastives, together with an urgency for opening up of new frontiers of interdisciplinary research, which could correctly answer the fundamental question: What kind of living planet, and what kind of world, are we going to leave for the future generations? The United Nations Framework Convention on climate change binds 179 governments with a commitment to mitigate climate change by reducing/preventing greenhouse gas emissions while remedying the damages already caused by the human impact on global climate. Paradoxically enough, the latest picture is alarmingly more complex. Today’s foremost agenda before humanity is how to rescue the SDGs 2030 themselves from the multiple crises engulfing the world (Krisen, die die Welt verschlingen). The SDGs 2030 agenda was adopted by all the members of the UNO in 2015. According to the UNO’s SDGs-2030 Report 2022, multiple crises are putting the SDGs 2030 at risk, along with what these goals were believed to achieve, viz., survival of humanity itself. It laments that there is a reversal of years of progress in eradicating poverty and hunger, improving health and education, providing access to basic services. And, it indicates which hotspots call for urgent action so as to rescue the SDGs 2030 themselves. The main problem is how can we reduce the greenhouse gas emissions which contribute to climate change. Most of them come from human activities, like burning fossil fuels for transportation/energy. The greenhouse gases trap heat in the earth’s atmosphere, causing a greenhouse effect. As greenhouse gases increase, the earth’s

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surface temperature also rises, diminishing the glaciers and ice sheets, raising the sea levels, and increasing the droughts and forest fires. On top of all these challenges, one might wonder why the world history has been marked by violent and bloody anthropogenic global turbulences/catastrophes. Until the 24th February 2022, our thoughts and actions were concentrated on the catastrophic Covid 19 pandemic. In a world which is divided against itself, more than three years after the virus first emerged, we have turned a blind eye to the priority of investigating the anthropogenic causes of Covid 19 pandemic, i.e., the inconvenient truths that must lie behind it (Pandit, 2021). Although it is true that the WHO has been pressing China to share its information about the origins of COVID-19. On the other hand, Russian aggression in Ukraine on the 24th February 2022 showed that there may be more anthropogenic catastrophes in store ahead. Supported by the NATO and the EU member-states, as Ukraine has been, the catastrophe in Ukraine has had a world-wide impact in all fields. What is most tragic for humanity is that there exist already enough turbulent hotspots in the world complicated by the prospects of the nuclear stockpiles passing into the irresponsible hands. One could go on and on counting other kinds of geo-political turbulences that threaten international peace and security on our fragile living planet earth. Just think of those countries and regions that are aspiring for development. Think of their populations, their men, women and children. They are struggling to meet their basic needs while coping with totalitarian regimes in their own countries. Examples are not far to seek. Amidst the just alluded to global turbulences/catastrophes, we are witness to the accelerated technological advancements with heavy investments in unregulated AI research, on the one hand, and some estimated 15,000 or more nuclear weapons stockpiled by many countries, big and small, on the other. We are not able either to know or predict how these advancements might cause major shifts in the global scenarios of social, economic, political and military landscapes. The military landscapes in question include the self-annihilating nuclear weapons, i.e., self-annihilating for both humanity and the living planet. As we have noted at the very outset, the other greatest threat to both humanity and the living planet earth comes from the anthropogenic global warming driven climate change. The threat to the planetary ecosystems is likely to accelerate the global turbulences/catastrophes on large scale, in many directions. In this kind of situation, it is imperative to work with an ecologically oriented philosophical/methodological framework for formulating detailed strategic response to some of these alarming challenges before humanity and the living planet earth. Such a framework would enable us to embed the imperatives of SDGs 2030, if correctly designed within an ecologically challenged earth, in the methodological imperatives such as the following (1–10): 1. Imperative of inclusive growth, i.e., the 8th goal in the SDGs 2030: Without inclusive growth, it is not possible to overcome the evils of poverty, unemployment and structural violence. Nor is it possible to achieve sustainable development goals. It is a key to environmental justice, in so far as it can help in safeguarding of nature’s ecosystems.

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2. Imperative of putting in place wisdom inquiry driven academic institutions of learning: Being the major source of discovery, new technology, and new generations of scientifically trained people, the universities and research institutions/laboratories are in need of urgent transformation. The kind of institutional transformation this entails is not negotiable in view of the ambivalence of scientific and technological progress. On the contrary, this transformation can facilitate interrogation of science and technology development policies and investments themselves. 3. Imperative of accelerated collaboration between the humanities and the sciences: Addressing the problems of public and political understanding of the urgency of interdisciplinary/transdisciplinary research in order to effectively deal with the ecological degradation of the planet earth. 4. Imperative of multi-disciplinary knowledge resources dynamics: Employing the multi-disciplinary knowledge resources dynamics strategically in shaping and implementing the innovative policies with regard to sustainability goals, e.g., the 17 UNSDGs 2030 and beyond. 5. Imperative of interrogating the dogmatic approach of environmentalism: Interrogating environmentalism as a dogmatic approach to the issues and challenges of environmental management in the context of adverse human impact on the planetary environment. 6. Imperative of redesigning the models of development: Until now SDGs have been exclusively conceived and designed for humanity, instead of the living planet Earth as a whole. One might, therefore, ask why are they formulated exclusively with reference to the present and future generations: Why are they conceived exclusively with reference to GDP and HDI, but not human wellbeing interests taken in their ecologically widest sense? What about nature’s well-being interests themselves? Can securing of human well-being interests make sense outside the ecological-environmental context of nature’s wellbeing interests? The answer is in the negative (Beck, 1992; Easterlin, 1995; Gwartney & Lawson, 2007; Pandit, 2023, 1995, 2013, 2016a, 2016b, 2020a, 2020b, 2021). It is not surprising if this fundamentally flawed approach has universally resulted in one-sided measures of GDP, HDI and SDGs-2015, followed by the SDG-2030. It is no surprise if the world is embroiled in consumerism, in regional and global war mongering, in competitive investments in nuclear weapons Bazzars, and in accelerated-domestication of nature, in total disregard to the vulnerabilities of the fragile living planet Earth (Pretty, 2007). 7. Against creative destruction as an imperative of development: As a corollary of (6) above, the scale on which the 2020 Corona Pandemic caused destruction world-wide is perhaps unprecedented in world history. How is this kind of destruction different from “creative destruction” as Schumpeter (1976) designated the innovation-driven unemployment? How easy and simple is it to see the cracks in Schumpeter’s economic thought, if we consider how many Doctors were lost while the patients in hospitals across the world were being treated against the Corona Virus in all its newer variants? To take another example,

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how many schools, colleges, universities, think-tanks, and other institutions of learning have been forced to go digital? The digital webinars have taken over everywhere, accelerating digitalization regionally and globally. School children have been taught to hold their smart phones all the time in their hands, resulting in their extreme addiction to smart phones. Is it not an example of creative destruction in the educational institutions? If a Pandemic has all the features of Schumpeter-type “creative destruction” destroying the existing order and propelling a new order into existence, then there is something seriously wrong with Schumpeterian innovation considered as a key to economic progress. 8. Imperative of Redesigning development within the environmental nesting strategies of environmental realism, that are supported by 1–7 above, at least as a first step, so as to ensure planetary justice (Arrighi, 1994, 2010; Holling, 1986). 9. Imperative of moving beyond the business-as-usual models: “If discovery is to come to the aid of our great global challenges in climate change, poverty, and disease, we have no choice but to become much better at linking discovery, innovation, and entrepreneurship (Sharp, P. A. 19 December 2014, p. 1469).” 10. Imperative of bringing in over-arching regulative development ethics: In order to set the principles and priorities of investment in science and technology within the highest ethical and ecological standards for development, regulative development ethics with teeth, instead of institutional ethics-advisory bodies, is an imperative. Being far from exhaustive, these imperatives raise many questions regarding alternative growth models for combating climate change, for securing efficient resource use, infrastructure investment, and innovation with reduced greenhouse gas emissions and climate risk. The question is how can we reset the trajectories of change within the knowledge-based climate economies (KBCEs, Pandit, 2013, 2016a, 2016b, 2017)? The trajectories call for a deeper analysis of the following three kinds of scenarios in competition with one another: a. the world of de-growth focusing on social justice and ecological balance of nature; b. the world of limitless green growth within the KBCEs, landing us all in technological totalitarianism; and c. the world of limitless economic growth that promises prosperity to one and all but brings environmental ruin to the life-supporting ecosystems and ecosystemservices, the global warming-driven climate change and biodiversity-loss being a manifestation thereof . A fourth type of growth scenario as a better alternative cannot be ruled out in this context. This entails a path between the innovation-driven limitless green growth (ILGG) and green growth without technological totalitarianism (GGWTT). This path is distinguished by the indicators that go beyond the GDP as a measure of the market value of all final goods and services produced in the economy for a given year. This fourth scenario will be shown to have among its consequences (i) the delivery of environmental justice and (ii) the promotion of sustainable development, thereby

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improving the quality of human life while living within the ecological limits of the Earth’s ecosystems, taking into account the future generations. Within the KBCEs, this kind of research is expected to shape the future rationalchoice-based initiatives in innovation against the global challenges. It is also expected to throw light on how best the humanity might turn the growth (dis)-course and its trajectories around so that it becomes rational, globally and regionally, to promote trade-offs between the green growth and prosperity in many dimensions that are not solely determined by the GDP. Thus, this chapter explores those problems of development which would not even find proper formulation if one assumes that there must a single agenda for all countries to develop and to manage natural resources. Our major assumption here is that there can be, and should be, alternative frameworks for designing development for different countries, depending on the regional and cultural contexts of development. Imagine a future scenario of scientific and technological progress where the human condition on earth may well be improved not by accelerated growth but by a kind of de-growth (Jackson, 2009) and de-domestication of nature (Pandit, 2013). Imagine a slowing down of economic expansion and a decrease in consumerism, returning us human beings back to a relatively more stationary world and to a more natural life, bringing us closer to nature (Heisenberg, 1989, p. 494). In such a de-growth scenario, as we might call it, which principle(s) could guide us in the process of adaptation to a more stationary world? Which principle(s) could guide humanity in its dealings with environment and natural resources, in understanding and interpreting scientific progress and, above all, in deciding the priorities of technological innovation? In this chapter, ‘domestication of nature’ refers to clearing of land and water resources for agricultural production, for raising of cattle, for infrastructure development, and for other forms of mass-production, leaving a large destructive footprint. As a consequence, these very resources become unavailable for environmental nesting/ habitation by diverse species, adversely impacting biodiversity. De-Domestication, in the present context, signifies deceleration of domestication by evolving strategies of sustainable development which leave land and water resources for environmental nesting by diverse species, thereby making a contribution to long term conservation of natural resources and habitats. On the other hand, the overall HDI (human development index) is calculated, as per UN standard procedure, as the mean of three subindices: life expectancy (based on life expectancy on birth), literacy (based on literacy rate and school enrolment), and standard of living (based on per capita income). Thus, HDI offers a measure of human development that is more comprehensive than the measures based solely on per capita income. We may want to put as much of science and technology as possible for use at the service of SDGs 2030. But the technology-driven domestication of nature cannot be our future policy, even if we know by now that domestication as a phenomenon is an inevitable consequence of development. Instead of domestication, it is the policy of development by environmental nesting within ecological environmental realism which should guide us both in the development and use of new technologies. Following environmental realism as a policy, we will still doubtlessly have to cope with domestication of nature as a consequence of the technologies we choose

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to deploy for development. While we avoid domestication as a policy, by opting for De-domestication, we would be safeguarding human well-being interests and nature’s well-being interests by saving nature from the onslaughts of accelerated domestication as a totalitarian policy.

2 From the Lisbon Strategy 2000 to Ecology of Knowledge It is remarkable how at the beginning of the twenty-first century, just twenty-two years ago, at its Lisbon Summit 2000 (Clemenz, 2007; Gilbert, 2011; Krcek, 2013), the EU set the goal of transforming itself by 2010 into “the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world capable of sustainable economic growth with more and better jobs and greater social cohesion.” The declaration set the agenda of scenario-building for knowledge production in the service of sustainable future for the EU-member countries. One could also say that it set the scenariobuilding for the transfer of knowledge to other economies of the world which are willing to benefit from trade with the EU. In this context, it is often debated: What is knowledge? Philosophers are famous both for asking this question and for answering it, as if knowledge was something which behaves independent of scientific, cultural, social and economic contexts. For thousands of years, different philosophical traditions have argued for contextindependent boundaries of knowledge. Their main aim had been to distinguish it sharply and decisively from (systems of) belief and other bodies of information that could be excluded from it by employing appropriate criteria. With some exceptions, this is also true of the dominant traditions of twentieth century and contemporary schools of philosophy and epistemology (Pandit, 1983, 1991; Pandit & Dosch, 2013). Thus, in today’s information society, it has become fashionable to debate: How is knowledge different from information? Could not the two be taken as synonymous, particularly in the context of globalization, i.e., in the context of our knowledge of markets for knowledge (Clemenz, 2007)? Markets for knowledge deal in knowledge as a tradable public good, as a resource with a dynamic which is highly context-dependent. Knowledge in this sense is not, therefore, as homogeneous as the philosophical schools of epistemology hold it to be. It is the assumption of context-independence of knowledge, on which the most epistemologies have been built, which is responsible for this divide between philosophy and the sciences on the issues so crucial to grasping the knowledge resources dynamics (Krds), particularly in the free-market economies trading in public goods and services. So, how is information different from knowledge? Is it possible that this is not a correct way of asking the questions concerning knowledge? Information and communication behave more like infra-structure, just as the roads, railways, airways and their sign posts do function across the globe, across different geographical areas and regions. However, like infrastructure, the flow of information, which always comes at a price, requires enabling environments. Unlike information and beliefs, scientific theories and problems as the developmental structures/resources of knowledge do

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not necessarily have to reside in some body’s mind (Pandit, 1991; Pandit & Dosch, 2013; Popper, 1972). While a belief without an owner, like information without a receiver, makes no sense. Economists take knowledge resources (K-resources) to be the same as information resources, when they engage in discourse on knowledge economy. They need to be reminded of the fundamental question which is rarely asked:

2.1 What is It Which Can Sustain All that Which Sustains Humanity and Biodiverse Life on Our Earth? As to the future of humanity, in final analysis, it is the knowledge environments for improvement of knowledge which sustain a society, an economy and the world as we keep making and remaking it. As to the life in general, it is the universal interconnectedness across nature, and across the universe, which sustains earth’s ecosystems including all life across these systems. And, it is environmental nesting across nature’s ecosystems, in which humanity is embedded, which sustains our world including us (Pandit, 2007b, 2012, 2013, 2016a, 2016b, 2017). If knowledge and information were the same, there would be no need for science and basic research. The question which we should ask is this: What is the structure of (scientific) knowledge? More than information in the ordinary sense, knowledge requires enabling environments. In order to be developed, transferred and used as a valuable resource for sustainable development, and for generating further/ new resources, beyond knowledge itself, there must exist enabling environments. K-resources are, e.g., indispensable for sustainable development, for organizing economy, society and policy in the most sustainable mode. K-resources are necessary for wise investment in sustainable development; for developing technology; for developing interdisciplinary research frontiers; for building up interfaces across the disciplinary walls and boundaries, while we address the following problem: How can the context-dependent K-resources dynamics interface with development ethics, to develop efficient sustainable solutions to the problems confronting society and humanity in the 21st century? Will there be fundamental limitations to their interface-building strategies that originate in the K-resources themselves?

3 The Poverty of Environmentalism Various organizations working for environmental protection, conservation and sustainable development remain committed to an environment-awareness movement known as environmentalism. Environmentalists believe that any economic and technological development will be sustainable only if it takes the environmental impacts into account, without taking it for granted that the environment itself would be able

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to absorb any shocks whatever. In order to follow the environmental impact assessments seriously, we must know which environments/environmental changes we are mainly concerned with. Without this knowledge, we cannot know what is and what is not in human interest, and in the interest of the environment that sustains us. The same question arises about the very forms of our thinking regarding nature and environment. Given that the damage done to the environment through human activity is not in the best human interest itself, one might interpret the issues of environmental protection, and conservation, as issues of protection of our own human interests. Although this interpretation sounds like a truism, it does not state the whole truth. This is exactly the case with environmentalism which emphasizes the issues of environmental protection and conservation in so far as the solutions offered are thought to be invariably in our own larger human interest. The environmental interests as such are either ignored or treated as if they were the sort of externalities to be excluded from serious human-interests-studies. But given the asymmetries of the interactions between humans and earth’s wide-ranging, diverse and self-sustaining ecosystems, all that which is in the best interests of earth’s natural environment is also in the best human interest. While not everything which we may think to be in the best humaninterest need be in the best interests of nature herself (Pandit, 2013, 2016a, 2016b, 2021). Environmentalism (Magdoff & Foster, 2011; Milton, 1993) must not be confused with environmental realism (Pandit, 1995), which I am going to consider in the next section below. As we have noted, environmentalism is a world-wide conservationist movement which is socially committed to securing a viable future for mankind. It has gained momentum and visibility since late 1960s. Today it has assumed the form of an ideology which the environmental activists propagate through the government policy statements, television documentaries, press reports, commercial advertising and pressure-group campaigning. Generally speaking, environmentalism is concerned with human domination of earth, i.e., with an ascendancy of the shortterm human interests over the long-term interests. It is habitually being overlooked that earth’s environmental resources are definable by numbers that stay relatively constant as compared with the exponential growth of the living systems and the irreversible changes in the environment being caused by the technologically and industrially oriented human activity. Environmentalism represents the approach of how best humans may act in self-interest, given that the damage done by us humans to the natural environment is not in our long-term self-interest. If environmentalism emphasizes issues of environmental protection and conservation, it is because these issues are thought ultimately to relate to our collective well-being and self-interest only. The reality of the environment, independent of our human well-being interests, i.e., reality, fragility and complexity of earth’s ecosystems as such are treated as if they did not matter. And, as if these could be excluded from serious study of human interests themselves. Thus, environmentalism encourages the human interests versus environmental interests divide. It encourages the over-riding dominance of human interests over nature’s interests, separating man from nature, where we are instead in urgent need of an effective unified framework for studying the human and non-human well-being interests as a unified agenda (Pandit, 1995).

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The question which we must now ask is whether we are not really in need of a unified framework for studying the environmental and human well-being interests together instead of dealing with them in a fragmented way which only fosters a great divide between them, and between nature and culture. Recent studies (Meadows et al., 1972) have shown that there is a need for an ecological turning around of the fundamental questions so that the human-modified ecosystems, the terrestrial life-support systems, their finite nature, and the future generations yet to be born, are taken into account while framing and implementing the policies of economic development and calculating the costs and benefits thereof. The disciplinary frameworks of environmental physics, ecological economics and environmental ethics are beginning to assert themselves increasingly wherever we are faced with externalities arising from human activity itself. But they themselves are in need of some kind of integration. There is a growing realization that the new knowledge, or the new technology, we are really in need of is not that with which we may continue to alter the terrestrial ecosystems beyond recognition in the name of development. We need a well-integrated interdisciplinary framework for environmental and human interests-studies, i. e., a framework which does not give rise to externalities. Think of the externalities which arise because we tend to view nature with its limited environmental resources as a means of production to feed the indefinitely growing economies and populations. Resorting to biotechnology in order to feed the world population, currently at 8 billion, which is expected to cross 8 billion by 2025, may be necessary, given the limited land suitable for agriculture. But this does not imply an unrestricted technological optimism in dealing with every environmental and human problem that arises now or in the future. Technological optimism, the doctrine that technological development is the ultimate problem-solver, is akin to totalitarian doctrine, particularly when we cannot turn a blind eye to the fact that moral progress tends to lag behind technological progress. The question is why should mankind simply sleep and wait until the population grows to the unsustainable size of 11 billion by 2100, as scientists have warned? Why should humanity not act now instead of allowing environmental damage beyond the ecosystemic regenerative and absorptive levels? In this scenario, one thing is very clear. Allowing moral progress to lag behind technological progress and economic progress is no way of dealing with the problem of uncertainties and limits that characterise the human condition on the finite living planet Earth. Arguing for a sustainable economy, the American economist Herman E. Daly says that it requires a steady state economy: one whose throughput remains constantly at a level that neither depletes the environment beyond its regenerative capacity nor pollutes it beyond its absorptive capacity (Daly, 1980). As against this, most of the modern societies follow the opposite doctrine, viz., technological optimism, with most conventional economists defining the goals of a healthy economy in terms of a stable and high rate of growth. Technological optimism entails continual and unlimited economic growth in which technology assumes a rather totalitarian role in dealing with any environmental problem of the future whatever. The sooner we realise that there are recognizable limits to economic growth, and that not every environmental problem resulting from human impact has a technological solution,

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the better. We would be then in a better position to pay attention to the externalities which have arisen in the course of economic development under the influence of technological optimism. On closer analysis, these will turn out to be the problems of intergenerational and interspecies equity and sustainability which are either being completely ignored or interpreted as solvable by means of additional growth.

4 Environmental Realism (Umweltrealismus): The Way Forward to Environmental Justice A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in.—Greek proverb Ecology can serve as a framework for addressing many questions relevant to management, but there are constraints on this process. For example, the speed of scientific inquiry rarely matches the urgency of environmental problems. In addition, the complex nature of most environmental problems precludes simple solutions that can be easily applied to many sites. (McPherson & DeStefano, 2003, p. 135)

As early as 1995, my book Von Der Ökologie Des Bewusstseins Zum Umweltrealismus: Die Wiederentdeckung Menschlicher und Nicht-Menschlicher Interessensspharen (Pandit, 1995) appropriately carried a dedication to Mother earth. Mother earth, or nature, has taught humans wisdom that we call culture. Consciously or unconsciously, we also call culture by other designations, particularly when we think of our language as our mother tongue. Think of how children learn to transform their nascent world (entstehende Welt) into their mother tongue in no time when they are still very young (Chomsky, 1967). In the context of today’s global challenges, it is imperative that humanity moves from the wisdom of culture yet another step forwards to a culture of wisdom inquiry (Pandit, 2021). Arguably, this is possible only by interrogating the wisdom of culture and knowledge inquiry embedded in it. One of the ways of doing this is by asking the following question while adopting the perspective of eco-environmental realism/Umweltrealismus (Pandit, 1995, 2021): In order that nature and her ecosystems keep sustaining the earth’s wonderful bio-diversity including us humans, i.e., the top species, what should be the basic principles of a culture of wisdom inquiry with which it could uniquely help in sustaining the nature’s ecosystems themselves?

Environmental realism (Umweltrealismus) is about an asymmetry between nature’s well-being interests and human well-being interests (Pandit, 1995, 2013, 2016a, 2016b), assuming that the former are inclusive enough to include the latter, but not vice versa. Think of nature’s ecosystems and universal interconnectedness across nature/universe, on the one hand, and of Homo sapiens, i.e., the top species, on the other (Pandit, 1995, 2007b, 2012, 2013, 2016a, 2016b, 2017, 2021). The asymmetry of well-being interests between the two can be ignored only at our own peril. The very existence and survival of humans, along with the invented environments in which most modern societies live on earth, are not necessary for the

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continued existence of the living planet earth, other things remaining the same. However, on the other hand, a continued survival of humanity without the life support of earth’s ecosystems is totally inconceivable. There is an asymmetrical relationship between humans and nature, i.e., between culture and nature, which cannot be broken (Pandit, 1999b, 1999d). More importantly, this asymmetry has consequences for our nature policy that cannot be ignored: Humanity’s dependence on nature is total; while nature’s independence from humans is quite evident. Of course, the same may hold true regarding other forms of life on earth. This principle of asymmetry can be very generally formulated relative to all forms of existence on earth as follows: Wherever these forms of existence are governed by the structure–property correlated part-whole relationships, the whole is conceivable without the part but not the part without the whole. Unlike environmentalism, environmental realism is also about environmental justice. It is the key to answering the above fundamental question by raising two further questions. First, what kind of order in nature is naturally inherited by the species Homo sapiens? In other words, what kind of order exists in the universe in which earth and its ecosystems participate and flourish (Pandit, 1995, 2001a, 2001b, 2001c, 2006, 2007b, 2012; 2013, 2016a, 2016b, 2017, 2020a, 2020b, 2021)? And, second, over and above the order in nature which we have ecologically inherited, what kind of regulative order is imperative to regulate and control the accelerated domestication of nature (ADN) by humans in the name of development by “creative destruction” (Pandit, 2013, 2016a, 2016b, 2021)? The latter question is all the more important to foster sustainable life and sustainable development on the endangered planet earth (Pandit, 2012, 2013, 2016a, 2016b, 2017). It is of crucial importance to identify the kinds of principles and the kind of conceptual framework which can address these twin tasks. The most crucial concepts, i.e., principles, in the conceptual framework of environmental realism, that are being developed for this task are the twin concepts of (i) environmental nesting chains that keep growing in the web of life across nature and (ii) environmental nesting strategies as a planetary imperative for sustainable development (Pandit, 2007b, 2016a, 2016b, 2021). We know that global warming, climate change, sustainable development, ecosystem resilience, biodiversity loss, knowledge-based climate economy, knowledge and technology transfer, and scientific progress without moral progress, pose some of the greatest challenges to humanity as well as to the host planet earth. Today’s frontiers of interdisciplinary research, both basic and applied, need urgently to address these and other challenges. As a subject of interdisciplinary research, complex human interactions with the terrestrial surface of the earth assume crucial importance for every science, if only because of humanity’s ecological footprint becoming increasingly larger and larger for the finite planet earth. Environmental realism views earth, and is ecosystems, as our finite environmental nest. What are its implications for the ecology of consciousness? As regards our developmental activities and their impacts on earth’s ecosystems, what is the key to sharing earth’s finite resources sustainably and equitably? Any ecological-politicaleconomic model of growth and development of a KBCE must compete with rival models before it can be accepted for implementation within a particular region,

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society or country. This poses the question what general principles, i.e., selection principles, should we impose on a growth model so as to be able to pick it up for implementation. First and foremost, a growth model must show sufficient promise for delivery of environmental justice and for making the modern risk society less risky. This is imperative, particularly in the context of the complex history of adverse human impacts on the environment, of abuse and misuse of science and technology, and, worst of all, alarmingly rising green-house gases. They pose the following problem: How can we secure sustainability in development and ecological balance of nature at the same time? Arguably, it is the principle of environmental nesting which can play a key role in the context of sustainable development (Pandit, 1995, 1999a, 1999b, 1999c, 1999d, 2000a, 2000b, 2001a, 2001b, 2001c, 2006, 2007a, 2007b, 2007c, 2012, 2013). This principle itself can be understood in two ways. First, as a basic principle of biodiversity and ecosystem dynamics found at work in nature, it can be understood as a strong reminder how different species across the bio-diverse world of our host planet earth survive and thrive by nested dependencies among themselves. This refers to the natural processes of environmental nesting by building the nests and establishing food-chains as part of ecosystem dynamics. In this sense, the principle of environmental nesting is a basic principle of bio-diversity and ecosystem dynamics. And, second, in the case of the species Homo sapiens, this principle can be articulated, developed and deployed as a strategic normative principle within the growth model to help us regulate the interactions between humans and the environment, and to shape them into sustainable and non-destructive interactions. Any violation of the principle of environmental nesting in its latter sense would result in considerable harm to the balance of nature. And, any harm done to the balance of nature by engaging in “creative destruction” of earth’s ecosystems would, in its turn, demand environmental justice. As a method of studying the trade-offs between different possible-worldscenarios/models, it is imperative to find out how strongly the humanity’s (i) pursuit of scientific knowledge and (ii) its self-interested arrogant ways of using that knowledge exclusively for promoting the human dominance of the planet are correlated. As the next step, we might strategically rethink our world and scientific rationality, resorting to strategic scenario-building with which we could (i) improve the human condition on earth, say by reducing poverty; (ii) save the humanity from those very consequences which its own (un)wise (ab)use of nature’s ecosystems has had for earth and its biodiversity; and (iii) ensure intra-and-intergenerational equity. On the other hand, environmental realism serves as a research tool to explore the question of nature policy as a wider framework, for pursuing public policy regarding ecosystem resilience (Pandit, 1995, 2013), opening up a new approach to climate change, beyond the traditional environmental (resource) economics (Pandit, 1995, 1999a, 1999b, 1999c, 1999d, 2000a, 2000b, 2001a, 2001b, 2001c, 2006, 2007b, 2012, 2013). A nature policy would help the policy makers in a better understanding of the methodology of model-based scenario-building and its role in optimistically exploring the global futures for humanity and the world, for the future generations and, above all, for the earth’s ecosystems themselves. Accordingly, the problem

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of figuring out how and where exactly can the public policy parameters interface with the basic parameters of a nature policy as a long-term Earth-Stewardship is taken here seriously. Environmental realism also offers a framework for articulating environmental justice, building an ecology-economy-society-science interface and signalling urgency for striking a balance between the rationalities of technology driven knowledge inquiry and wisdom inquiry (Maxwell, 2010, 2012; Pandit, 2012). The humanity’s survival and environmental justice for earth are not separable from each other. It is imperative to understand how accelerated domestication of nature in the name of “creative destruction” changes earth’s ecosystems, degrading them and aggravating climate change, while accelerating biodiversity loss. In what follows, I will propose and defend the following thesis: The twin-concepts of (i) environmental nesting chains that keep growing at different levels in the web of life across nature and (ii) environmental nesting strategies conceived as an imperative for sustainable development are of unquestionable importance in addressing the climate change challenge. There is a need to develop environmental realism as an approach to environmental challenges of the 21st century. In particular, there is a need to go far beyond the usual concerns of the environmentalists, policy makers, technocrats, economists, human rights activists, governments and NGOs, in order to ask how it might be possible to develop an integrated/unified framework for environmental and human well-being interests-studies, i.e., for forms of knowledge and action within a new wisdom inquiry driven methodological framework. (Pandit, 2021, 2023)

In a nutshell, in order for the nature’s ecosystems in our terrestrial environment to keep sustaining the top species, viz., the Homo sapiens, we must find our way to those principles and policies that can help in sustaining the resilience of ecosystems themselves, the environmental nesting model of environmental realism being the best example of such principles (Pandit, 1995, 2007a, 2007b, 2007c, 2013, 2016a, 2016b, 2021; Wood, 2009).

5 Biodiversity as Nature’s Wisdom-in-Design (Wis-Design): the Norm and Universality of Wis-Design Diversity When seen through the lenses of environmental realism, we find wisdom-in-design (henceforth wis-design) universally present everywhere across the ecosystems of the living planet earth. Evidently, earth has evolved a wis-design as part of the evolutionary process. It is, as it were, omnipresent in its enormously diverse ecosystems. We humans, the top species, would not have been here on the living planet without the universality of this wis-design in nature/earth. We would not have been here without the planet earth’s wis-design sustaining us despite the large disruptions taking place from time to time within us as the top species, and within the vastly diverse oceanand-earth-ecosystems themselves. Arguably, nature’s wis-design is inclusive of what the ecologists call bio-diversity. The question is what do we, and what can we, learn from nature’s wis-design-diversity? Similarly, there is an urgent need to understand

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how bio-diversities of our planetary eco-systems are correlated with the cultural diversities, showing a positive relationship. At the very core of ecosystem resilience there are interactive living systems across the earth’s bio-diverse world participating in the interconnectedness of environmental nesting. Only the top species, the Homo sapiens, is an exception in so far as it has a ‘progressive’ and ‘disruptive’ record of engaging in ruthless domestication/ colonization of nature in pursuit of self-interested domination of nature. If we ask what likely scenarios the next 50 years would be unfolding for the troubled humanity on the troubled planet earth, as it were, one scenario leading to the other, no continuous and harmonious transitions can be envisaged or expected. The main reason is that disruptions have occurred in the past and they will occur in the future, making the transitions from one kind of scenario to the other discontinuous and disharmonious. There is no such thing as smooth scenarios-transitions. In particular, developments of technology regimes are prone to cause disruptions. We often hear it being lamented that there is nothing left of “nature”, because there is nothing that does not carry the human footprint which has proved very destructive over the past so many centuries. For example, in the Alpen, the human footprint is at least five to seven thousand years old. If it is true that there is nothing, or very little, of “nature” left in our world, something that may correspond to what we like to call “nature”, then it is highly misleading to speak of “human-nature interactions”. This raises the question: What are we then referring to, when we refer to “nature”, and to “human-nature interactions”, which we would like to see going on for a selfrepair? The answer is to be found in the ecology of consciousness (Pandit, 1995, 2007b). After having destroyed nature “successfully”, humanity will continue to be haunted by “nature” as something that may be called a collectively and individually felt absence. One might also refer to it as the “ghost of nature”. In this sense, in the ecological discourse, “nature” ironically refers to a deeply felt absence of all that beauty and diversity which was there but which lies now in ruins. This has serious implications for any kind of meaningful scientific discourse on “nature” and on “human-nature interactions”, particularly for ecology, ecological economics, political economy, science-and-technology studies, and knowledge resources dynamics (Pandit, 2016a, 2016b). First, with the loss of “nature”, we can be certain that we have also lost knowledge of nature as a valuable resource. To retrieve that lost knowledge of nature, we have no other option than to use the concepts of “nature” and “human-nature interaction” as constructs. Second, this methodological constraint reduces “nature” as a concept to a theoretical concept that demands the formulation of a theory of nature. A theory of nature which uses the concept of “nature” as a construct and which addresses the task of re-building “human-nature interactions” as a self-repairing project will be incomplete without a robust nature policy as regards the question how best to secure nature’s well-being interests in harmonious balance with the pursuit of human well-being interests (Pandit, 2013, 2016a, 2016b, 2017, 2021, 2023).

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6 Technology Driven Knowledge Inquiry: Ambivalence of Scientific Progress What lessons can we draw from an ecologically challenged earth, if the blue planet is to continue to host a vastly complex bio-diverse world, including the seemingly vast and powerful oceans that are equally endangered by our arrogant exploration and exploitation of their resources? The answer to this important question will depend on how far the sciences and technology, on the one hand, and the STS-disciplines as an indispensable part of knowledge-resources dynamics, on the other, are able to serve human well-being interests. It will also depend on whether the STS-disciplines can resist turning into the warring ideologies at the hands of their practitioners (Segerstrale, 2000). It is the scientific discoveries that allow industry, market and society to benefit through technological innovation, generating jobs and triggering economic growth and prosperity, inviting more and more of urbanization and globalization. But scientific and technological progress based on scientific discoveries teach us how limited and finite earth’s resources are. Equally alarming, it is the warning signals of past decades, viz., the depletion of earth’s resources, and the anthropogenic climate change due to greenhouse gas emissions-driven global warming, that are telling us to heed how dangerous our blind faith in human ability to conquer nature, all to our exclusive advantage, can be. What is worse, spectacular progress of science and technology tends to make us human beings, notably scientists, technocrats, philosophers, corporates, governments and politicians, highly arrogant, given our past achievements. Given this ambivalence of science and technology, they allow themselves to be abused, in the belief that any problem that arises in the way of limitless growth can be overcome. It can be overcome either now or in the future, by increasing the resources of knowledge and technological innovation. This sets a context of hubris, where it is relevant to ask the following question. How crucial are STS-disciplines to the sustainability issues and challenges? Arguably, the human applications of science and technology are the single greatest source of threat to sustainability at a global level. They are so poorly understood because of our very poor understanding of the human and social dimensions of science and technology. Ethics of science and technology are increasingly turning out to be the most important frontiers in STS disciplines on the one hand and in research and development policy on the other. Therefore, it is imperative that ethical issues are not only articulated but rigorously debated. This means that when the scientists and philosophers talk of economic, technological and scientific progress (henceforth ETS progress), they can no longer get away from the questions relating to the inculcation of values of wisdom and moral progress. Above all, the ambivalence of science must be recognized and addressed, as Werner Heisenberg (1989, p. 494) urged us. But what were Heisenberg’s own ethical concerns like? Where exactly do science policy and human and environmental interests get interconnected? Did Heisenberg indicate a way of improvement, given that human activity has regional and global impacts on environment?

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Briefly stated, Heisenberg was one of the very few leading scientists who were ahead of their times in conceptualizing this problem with a remarkable insight and clarity. The problem of ambivalence, as he perceived it, has many levels of complexity, as it were, enfolded into it. The paradox of all paradoxes is that it is scientific and technological progress which controls moral progress and not the other way round. Approaching the new situation optimistically, as Heisenberg (1989) did, he believed that it “reveals new and unexpected dangers, and these dangers should be considered as a challenge requiring our response.” These questions assume deeper significance in the context of what Heisenberg (1989, p. 494) aptly called ambivalence of scientific and technological progress. Elaborating on the ambivalence of scientific progress, Werner Heisenberg (1989) argued as follows: In recent years the hope for general progress has lost the convincing strength it had fifty or hundred years ago. It is true the progress of science and technology has been beneficial in many respects, but at the same time it also has had damaging effects, e.g., on our environment, on our relations to art, on our style of life, which cannot be ignored. In short: we have now learned the ambivalence of science. The same progress of medicine, which saves the lives of innumerable sick people, may give rise to overpopulation and starvation. By science-and-technology we certainly change the conditions of life on our planet, but we seem to be less certain, whether the total sum of benefit and damage will be positive or negative. This is a new situation, it reveals new and unexpected dangers, and these dangers should be considered as a challenge requiring our response. Let me first say which reactions on the new situation we should try to avoid: We should not draw the rash and radical conclusion that science and technology are unnecessary in future, are rather harmful than useful, and should generally be replaced by interests in entirely different activities. It would be equally wrong, if we would try to belittle the dangers, to forget about the damages to our environment, and would go on with scientific and industrial expansion as ever before. What is needed is, on the contrary, a careful study of the causes of danger, an application of the old principle of trial and error to the new task. In many cases the dangers may be met by new inventions or discoveries, in others it may be necessary - especially in the highly civilised countries - to reduce some of the artificial comforts of our present status and return to a more natural life. In any case, looking into the future we should expect that the economic growth will become gradually slower and will eventually come to a stand-still, and that this will be an advantage, not a drawback to our living conditions. This latter point is most essential: The term "living conditions" implies our environment, our psychological situation, our ease of life, our freedom from too many obligations, and in this respect living conditions may well be improved by slowing down economic expansion. (Heisenberg, 1989, p. 494)

Heisenberg (1989, p. 494) considered it imperative to think of those principles that could teach us how to draw significant limits to our blind confidence in science and technology, if not to science and technology themselves (Hebeisen, 1997; Pandit, 1995; Schwarzburger, 1998). A remarkable insight such as this is highly admirable for its far-reaching consequences not only for science education but for research and development, i.e., R&D., and sustainable development itself. Thus, to turn Heisenberg’s insight around, we might ask two fundamental questions. First, whether it is possible to draw limits to science and technology as the most important factor of knowledge resources dynamics? In other words, whether

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it is possible to draw limits to knowledge resources dynamics that drives development in the economic as well as human rights dimension? And, second, whether it is possible to draw limits to our scientific arrogance – as reflected in science, society, industry, university and political economy – which Heisenberg very aptly refers to as ‘blind confidence in scientific progress’. Focusing on the second question, Heisenberg argues as follows: The guiding principle in this process of adaptation to a more stationary world will be the necessity to consider any special progress in science or technology as a part of the whole, as something that cannot be separated from the general problems of our way of life, our environment, our political behaviour. This obligation - to keep in mind the unavoidable connection or interplay between all actions - will set and should set limits to our blind confidence in science and technology, but not necessarily to science and technology itself. The solution of these problems requires a great effort, perhaps a rather radical change in our way of thinking, but this effort will to some extent again involve science and technology, not as a goal but as a tool. In this sense we should understand the lesson we have just learned on the ambivalence of scientific progress. (Heisenberg, 1989, p. 494)

I find Heisenberg’s statement remarkably rich in the following sense. The future of humanity might depend more on striking the trade-offs between accelerated progress through scientific discoveries and technological innovation and decelerated progress by returning to a more natural life and by slowing down economic expansion than on anything else. But this kind of strategy could work only if we develop the above guiding principle further along the following lines: As regards science and technology, as well as STS-disciplines, the less scientific arrogance there is in our actions and policies the more likely are we to heed those principles that can guide us in most wisely prioritizing the applications of science. It would not be unrealistic or unreasonable to gauge the indicators of scientific arrogance from a look at the public image of science. In this context, we may readily agree with Steven Rose and Lisa Appignanesi (1986) that “The public image of science and technology links both with unemployment, not leisure; with weapons of mass destruction, not limitless cheap power; with pollution, not increased health; and with increasing control over and intervention within human life itself, not an extension of human liberty. Pace C. P. Snow, it is not so much the future, but radioactivity, which is in the bones. And it is not just the bones of men, but of women and children. At the same time some of the old certainties about the objectivity of scientific knowledge have been challenged (Rose & Appignanesi, 1986, pp. 3–4)”.

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7 Rethinking the Growth-Discourse and Trajectories: Trade-Offs Between Prosperity and Green Growth The Growth economy, however, is driven by hubris, by an arrogant presumption that we possess knowledge that we do not in fact have, and by a fatally flawed understanding of the economy and its relation to the environment. And as the Greek tragedians knew, hubris can destroy us. (Gorringe, 1999, p. 60) Rising inequality isn’t about who has the knowledge; it’s about who has the power. —Paul Krugman Useful measures of progress and well-being must be measures of the degree to which society’s goals (i.e., to sustainably provide basic human needs for food, shelter, freedom, participation, etc.) are met, rather than measures of the mere volume of marketed economic activity, which is only one means to that end. (Costanza et al., 2009, p. 1)

Within the global and regional knowledge-based climate economies (KBCEs), how wisely can we set the twenty-first century’s trajectories of growth, as regards urbanization, land use, and energy-transition systems, i.e., the three social-economic systems that are considered to hold the key to multiple economic, social and environmental benefits, and to the SDGs 2030? To answer the question, we must not only turn to the key drivers of change in the next few decades: the increasing linkages between efficient resource use, infrastructure investment, growth of knowledge and innovation-driven growth, with reduced emissions and reduced climate risk. We must also address the issue of how central are the STS-disciplines (science and technology studies-disciplines) to sustainability research. Amidst a host of challenges, notably the global-warming-driven climate change and biodiversity loss, the dynamic complexities of growth must be viewed, first, from the perspective of science and technology-driven innovations and, second, from the perspective of the ecological limits that the finite planet earth sets to all human activity. In the context of recent developments and debates, three kinds of scenario call for a deeper analysis, to begin with (Marglin, 2008; Norton, 2003; Our Common Future, 1987). The first scenario, a world of consumption-driven limitless growth measured in terms of value, simply assumes that there can be no prosperity without growth fuelled by the accelerated domestication of nature’s (ADN) ecosystems, exploitation of ecosystem services and accelerated urbanization (Kareiva et al., 2007; Hepburn & AlexBowen, 2012; Holling, 1986; Pandit, 2013, 2021). As is becoming amply evident from the anthropogenic global-warming driven climate change, this model reflects a flawed understanding of the economy in relation to the natural resources, inevitably bringing global environmental ruin to those very ecosystems and ecosystem services on which it depends. The global environmental ruin, in its turn, demands quick-fix business solutions in terms of more and more of science-and-technology-driven innovation and entrepreneurship. In their turn, they viciously fuel totalitarian consumerism that is itself fuelled by technological totalitarianism. The biggest of all problems which the model in question runs into is that it can secure neither the ‘sustainable, equitable and dignified lives for 9 billion people between now and 2050 (Jackson,

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2009)’ nor environmental justice to earth’s ecosystems that inevitably suffer from irretrievable loss of resilience (Roberts, 2012; Pandit, 2013). No surprise, if this model is increasingly losing its ground, sending out the warning signals to the developed countries, the developing economies and poor countries alike. What is increasingly becoming objectionable is that the model approaches economic growth, quality of life and intergenerational equity with the classical assumption that the sum of all products and services produced in a given country, i.e., gross domestic product (GDP), is the key indicator of prosperity. First, this kind of approach must ignore the costs incurred through the adverse environmental impacts of economic growth, even though these are clearly visible in all economic activity. Think of ADN, overexploitation of productive land and other natural resources, the expansion of impervious surfaces known as soil sealing, deforestation, urbanization, globalization, destruction of bio-diversity, air pollution, noise, and the poisoning of ground water. And add to that the most serious flaw of the GDP viewed as an indicator of prosperity, viz., that it does not ‘separate the goods and bads of economic activity’. Second, since the GDP does not factor in the destructive consequences of ADN, it is highly questionable whether it can be taken as a reliable indicator of prosperity or quality of life and societal well-being. Third, and more importantly, however, if the finiteness of the natural resources puts stringent limits to expansion of economic activity, i.e., economic growth and societal prosperity, then the research communities interested in building and testing the models of sustainable development have no option but to rethink growth and development scenarios of the future by giving up some of the cherished assumptions regarding the nature of economic activity and economic growth themselves. We must rethink the very nature of interaction between development and natural environment within a KBCE. The good news is the second scenario on the horizon emerging as a world of de-growth or zero growth. It triggers considerable optimism with regard to an urgently needed economic rethinking as regards economic growth, freedom, prosperity, sustainable development and environmental justice (D’Alisa et al., 2014; Jackson, 2009). The de-growth model is premised on the recognition of the planetary ecological limits that make limitless economic growth unsustainable. Amidst the ecological drag on growth on the one hand and the CCC on the other, while modelling growth it is imperative to search for trade-offs between de-growth and prosperity. As a study in Earth-Stewardship and Ocean-Stewardship, there are two kinds of scenario in this context that deserve attention, viz: (i) a Jackson-type (Jackson, 2009) de-growth scenario together with a dedomestication scenario of returning us humans back to a relatively more stationary world (Heisenberg, 1989); and (ii) a scenario of jellyfish ascendancy (Roberts, 2012) as a scenario of scientific arrogance-driven ADN. The latter involves increased flows of fertilizer and sewage into the oceans that increase the frequency of harmful algal blooms, intensify oxygen depletion, create more dead zones, and set the stage for the jellyfish ascendancy. Far more alarming, however, is the high prospect of the oceans continuing to be choked with toxic

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contaminants, if we do not give up the comforts that the technology based modern urban life promises us, i.e., if we remain as wasteful as we are now. Consider a third scenario which may be described as a world of green growth within the KBCE, an agenda of managing climate change, environmental justice and prosperity, based on the recognition that economic growth measured in terms of the GDP (growth in employment, growth in capital stock and technical progress) cannot continue indefinitely. Yet, despite there being limits to the material resources of economy, today’s KBCE opens up new growth horizons that will permit the developed and developing countries to promote innovation-driven growth indefinitely. A continuously growing KBCE may be called an ‘intellectual economy’, since conventional growth in the capital stock is replaced here by growth in intellectual capital, i.e., ‘green growth’ driven by the limitlessly increasing linkages between discovery, innovation and entrepreneurship. Even if the material resources of economy show a stationary state at some point in the future, the green growth curve can be promoted indefinitely. But it is its single biggest drawback that it will inevitably turn the world of innovation-driven growth into a world driven by technological totalitarianism. In such a world the top species will no more be represented by the humans themselves but by the machines/robots. This brings me to the research goal regarding an alternative growth model: How to develop, as a single unified agenda, the developmental-environmental discourse about managing climate change and sustainability, while aiming at the elimination of global poverty? How to conceptualize and articulate its imperatives which can force us to revisit the dominant capitalist economic beliefs and practices? Already, Garret Hardin (1968), among others (Daly, 1980; Meadows et al., 1972), drew the world’s attention to the environmental imperatives for rethinking all human activity in relation to the resources of our host planet’s life-support systems. These resources are being impacted adversely by us everywhere, i.e., across the oceans, land, water, air, food, species, forest cover, entire ecosystems, and ecosystem services, and nonrenewable resources. Since the environmental imperatives may be violated only at the peril of the environmental collapse called “The Tragedy of the Commons”, as top species we owe it to ourselves, to the living planet earth, and to the future generations, to re-visit the pervasive belief in the capitalist economic system: That individuals and societies can gradually but constantly increase their wealth and consumption in order to lead a good life. But notice that economic growth, when it is an increase in quantity, cannot be sustainable indefinitely on a finite planet, more so on an ecologically challenged planet. While economic development may be sustainable only if it is an improvement in the quality of life without necessarily causing an increase either in poverty or in the quantity of resources consumed. Since limitless economic growth within an ecologically challenged finite planet is impossible (Comeliau, 2002; Jackson, 2009), it is the discourse on quality of life and environmental justice (Armstrong, 2012) that ought to take over to reshape our search for alternative models of growth and development. As indicated above, we must remember that growth models should be as much about good life in a good society as about employment, job creation, stagnating wages, rising inequality, poverty and externalities. The task of addressing

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the problem of how to turn the growth (dis)course as well as its trajectories around so as to secure green growth with de-domestication of nature’s ecosystems can no longer be postponed and neglected (Pandit, 2013, 2016a, 2016b).

8 The World-Unravelling Problem-Solving Rationality of Wisdom Inquiry (WUPSRWI) The lover of wisdom, the philosopher, desires and seeks wisdom but does not possess it.— Socrates

It is true that wisdom inquiry as different from knowledge inquiry is conspicuous by its absence in our deeply troubled world that we have built over the millennia. In particular, this has disastrously prevented the fields of education, research, culture and development from taking a proper and balanced care of the human well-being interests (Pandit, 2020a, 2020b, 2021). In diverse fields of developmental activity, sheer absence of wisdom inquiry driven institutions (WIDIs) makes our world such an impoverished world. In fact, it is a world where diverse kinds of local, regional and international institutions are driven by the business models based on technologydriven knowledge inquiry, on the one hand, and ETS progress, on the other. No surprise, if in this world “the speed of scientific inquiry and ETS progress rarely match the urgency of tackling the environmental problems (McPherson & DeStefano, 2003, p. 135).” By implication, we might start wondering whether all the countries, big and small, that make our little world on the host planet Earth, are not in reality underdeveloped. Because they are solely oriented towards market-driven ETS progress. No doubt, in our knowledge inquiry driven world, concepts of development and human well-being receive a different interpretation altogether. They receive an interpretation which is essentially different from the one which these very concepts would receive in a wisdom inquiry driven world, enriched with the WIDIs (wisdom inquiry driven institutions). As regards the academic institutions of learning, and the institutes devoted to research and development, they are powered by the rituals of knowledge society in a sense to be considered presently. But it is never late to turn our knowledge inquiry driven world around and make real a possible transition to a wisdom inquiry driven world (Pandit, 2012, 2016a, 2016b, 2020a, 2020b, 2021, 2023). In other words, if we care to implement wisdom inquiry to bring about institutional change, with each country taking the initiative for baby steps to transform and reorient its institutions, the concepts of development and human well-being would themselves undergo radical change. They would assume a new ecological significance and ethical urgency. First, in a wisdom inquiry driven world all the nation-states would appear as more or less badly underdeveloped countries. Second, in such a world it would be imperative to redesign development. Third, the setting up of new and reformed institutions at all levels, regional and international, would fulfil the huge task of institutionalization of an over-arching wis-design improvement science (Pandit, 2021, 2023). Problems of human well-being interests

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and nature’s well-being interests would not only assume highest ecological priority but shift themselves to the forefront of research and development. And, fourth, the planetary imperatives and constraints of development would be laid bare ushering in a theory of sustainable development for humanity and the living planet earth as a whole. In this context it might be argued that the convergence model, i.e., convergence of life sciences with engineering, physical, mathematical, and computational sciences, is a very good model for addressing various kinds of global challenges (Pandit, 2016a, 2016b; Sharp, 2014). But this model is silent on the possible role of ethics and wisdom inquiry in the challenging task of forging strategic linkages between discovery, innovation and entrepreneurship (Pandit, 2016a, 2016b, 2020a, 2020b, 2021). Therefore, it should be made clear that convergence of the various sciences on the challenging global frontiers is not enough. It is not enough for meeting the global challenges, even within a KBCE. Ethical principles and WUPSRWI must also play their dynamic roles in building a new world with a reduced climate change risk. Concerted efforts are needed in this context to bring ethics and WUPSRWI into play in the re-integrated sciences scenario, more so in terms of knowledge resources dynamics (Pandit, 2016a, 2016b, 2020a, 2020b, 2021). Often, we take it for granted how our world and the institutions meant to run it are nurtured by the traditional wisdom of culture (TWC), viz., the world’s diverse cultures and their value systems, many of them unfortunately disappearing, or already disappeared, like the world’s many dying species and languages (Pandit, 2021). The humanity must now be so guided as to dynamically move forwards to a WUPSRWI, if it is to negotiate its future prospects and trajectories under the global challenges it is confronted with now. Hopefully, WUPSRWI, if implemented as envisaged here, would facilitate transition to a new world with new priorities for human wellbeing and for the well-being of nature’s over-stressed ecosystems (Pandit, 1995, 2007b, 2010a, 2010b, 2012, 2013). It is imperative, particularly for the developing countries, to redesign the trajectories of economic growth and human development, including scientific and technological development, within the WUPSRWI. There is no alternative to fostering a harmonious, dynamic and life-enhancing interaction between culture, ecology and biodiversity. But what does WUPSRWI exactly refer to? To put it very briefly, in the past philosophical traditions it had been simply assumed, without stating it explicitly, that in their search for knowledge the different sciences would take into consideration TWC. TWC finds a mention in the oldest definition of philosophy as love of wisdom. After several thousand years, particularly in the context of modern science, one is prompted to ask where is the TWC to be found in the sciences that have an in-built efficiency to produce highly fragmented knowledge of the universe. Not only is knowledge taken for granted as final truth. Fragmented knowledge allows its ambivalence easily to be misused and abused, depending on what kinds of interests are at play, once knowledge and discovery are moved from universities and research institutions into society and industry. In short, reductionism of fragmented knowledge flourishes everywhere (Pandit, 2007b, 2010b; Whitehead, 1923).

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What about the WUPSRWI? While thinking of today’s global challenges we must rethink our approach to education, global population explosion, humanity’s ecological overshoot, destruction of the planet’s carbon sinks, urban life-style-based overconsumption, over-production of goods and services, anthropogenic global warmingdriven climate change, the challenge of designing carbon free green technologies, and the challenge of green growth within the KBCE. All of these are already ample evidence, first, how science and technology, instead of being an exception, have themselves become a part of the larger problem. And, second, how the uses and abuses of science thrive because of the predominant forces of power and arrogance (Heisenberg, 1989). However, a consensus among the academics and scientists across the disciplinary boundaries is growing in favour of the view that concerted efforts in terms of WUPSRWI are urgently needed so that the integrating sciences can learn a lesson how to foster healthy change in all fields of human activity and in all directions (Maxwell, 2010; Pandit, 2007a, 2007b, 2010a, 2010b, 2012). In the preceding discussion, I have indicated how important it is to move from the convergence model to the rationality of knowledge resources dynamics that might help humanity to hammer out rational and wise solutions to global challenges. Should such a development take place in the next 30 to 50 years, the TWC that had originated in ancient cultures, philosophical texts, compositions and world-views might have a chance to come back to life within the WUPSRWI. In final analysis, however, it seems that in moving from convergence to the rationality of knowledge resources dynamics, we are still moving from the TWC to WUPSRWI. By TWC, as I have already indicated, I am referring to a knowledge environment in the universities and research institutions that is nurtured by local interactions. While sounding optimistic, such an approach receives considerable support from the unexpected quarters, viz., ethics and WUPSRWI (Maxwell, 2010; Pandit, 2007a, 2007b, 2010a, 2010b, 2012, 2020a, 2020b, 2021) that have emerged on the humanity’s intellectual horizon for steering it through the twenty first century towards its future goals. To put it in a nutshell, WUPSRWI tests the sciences not by their power to produce knowledge but by their promise for interface-building so as to hammer out rational and wise solutions to problems of living in a world that is witnessing accelerated risk, negative externalities and environmental injustice. The rationality of WUPSRWI driven sustainable development teaches us how humanity might learn to work with, and not against, our planet; how it might learn to cultivate and inculcate a new culture with values of intergenerational equity. Thus, I have argued that beyond the rationality of convergence in the lifesciences’ horizon, what the academic institutions of learning, research institutions and universities need most is a strategic interdisciplinary interface-building that can be best advanced and understood through a new model that I have proposed to call knowledge-resources dynamics (Pandit, 2016a, 2016b, 2017, 2020a, 2020b, 2021).

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9 Myth and Reality of Creative Destruction: Was Schumpeter off the Target? Is unemployment an example of creative destruction? According to Cleaver (1997), “Unemployment is not a natural phenomenon. No creatures in the wild are unemployed – you do not see any birds or animals lying idle. Nor are people in tribal or agricultural societies ever unemployed. In the Middle Ages mass unemployment was unheard of. There was simply too much to do: crops to be harvested; cloth to be woven; stone to be quarried, shaped and placed in construction. Today, in poorer parts of the world, in those remote corners untouched by so-called modern civilization, you will not find anyone unemployed either. No. Unemployment is solely the creation of modern, industrial society. It is not natural. It is not even man-made. Unemployment is rich-man-made (Cleaver, 1997, p. 60).” What happened when the world’s first industrial revolution took place in Great Britain, when urbanization as a result of industrialization spread from its shores across Europe and from there further overseas, when international trade blossomed, bringing more and more people into the money economy? People moved from the land into the growing industrial centres. New products, new processes, new sources of power were created and with them revolutionary changes imposed on society. Factories were built requiring modern workforces. Cities grew. Transport and trade links were forged that brought in sources of supply and facilitated the distribution of final products. And the enormous increases in wealth that were accumulated fed increasing populations, trade and investments of global proportions. (Cleaver, 1997, p. 60)

How wrong was Schumpeter (1976)? According to Schumpeter (1976), profitdriven manufacturing, process and product-innovation as economic processes of organizing resources set in a process of creative destruction. Creative destruction is an evolutionary process that punishes, i.e., destroys, the less efficient ways of organizing resources at all levels. In this sense, creative destruction creates unemployment for those whose manufacturing units are thrown out and replaced by new ones, bringing in new jobs with new employees. Consequently, the curve of economic progress, growth and higher standards of living is at the same time destructive and tortuous. In his book “Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy” Joseph Schumpeter (1976) wrote as follows: The thesis I shall endeavour to establish is that the actual and prospective performance of the capitalist system is such as to negate the idea of its breaking down under the weight of economic failure, but that its very success undermines the social institutions which protect it, and “inevitably” creates conditions in which it will not be able to live and which strongly point to socialism as the heir apparent. My final conclusion therefore does not differ, however much my argument may, from that of most socialist writers and in particular from that of all Marxists. But in order to accept it one does not need to be a socialist. Prognosis does not imply anything about the desirability of the course of events that one predicts. If a doctor predicts that his patient will die presently, this does not mean that he desires it. One may hate socialism or at least look upon it with cool criticism, and yet foresee its advent. Many conservatives did and do.

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By virtue of both our intelligence and the tools of dominance over mother-nature, we the top species are an emergent negative externality to those very ecosystems which sustain us, exactly as the cancer cell proliferates within the host organism. This point is echoed more forcefully by the following question posed by the ecologist Erazim Kohak (Kohak, 1998; Kuznets, 1934; Lane, 2000; Lincoln, 2006): Can culture – and that means the human way of being, in freedom rather than in instinct or custom – be compatible with nature? Or put it differently: Can the Earth afford humans – or is the human race an aberration, a cancerous growth which overflows its limits and destroys the host organism. (Kohak, 1998, pp. 273–284)?

The most challenging task facing us today is how to minimize our capacity to do harm to the very ecosystems which sustain us in our daily life and activity. In one word, ethics is about the risks, limits, norms, choices, possible improvements, and self-restraint. In so far as the planet earth’s resources are limited, the top species, i.e., Homo sapiens, being just a part within that whole which we call nature, must exercise self-restraint while domesticating nature and eating up her resources. Absence of ethics in all situations in which public policy and human activity are bound to adversely impact nature’s resources as well as the environment implies the dominant presence of arrogance. As if nature was unlimited in her resources and the humans had the prerogative to eat them up.

10 Time for Passionate Earth and Ocean Stewardship “There is an old adage, much loved of self-help books, that says “today is the first day of the rest of your life.” If we change course by a few degrees now, it will take us to a very different place in 50 years’ time from where we are headed now’. (Roberts, 2012)

Nothing short of an earth-stewardship and ocean-stewardship, as part of an interdisciplinary environmental-change-and-sustainability-research, is needed to understand the coupled human–environment systems, in their fragility as well as dynamics (Chapin et al., 2022). As soon as we sight a tree, we think of the birds building their choicest nests on its branches and we are never tired of looking for them, more so when the birds are singing. On little reflection, our imagination is always filled with images of environmental nesting as a fundamental process underlying the universal interconnectedness across living nature. Thus, trees and birds symbolize diverse interactions within the diverse ecosystems, e.g., the forests, agricultural lands, orchards, and the like, that sustain life including us.

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With the issues of accountability and environmental justice still hanging unresolved, consider the kind of damage that the humans have been able to cause to the host planet earth and the environment. It tells a tragic story of how ruthless the top species has been in cutting the very branch of the “tree of life” on which its existence depends. In other words, the story is tragic because the humans have shown a unique ability to pursue their own interests at the cost of the nature’s well-being interests. On closer attention, the two kinds of well-being interests are asymmetrically related to each other in the following manner. Pursuit of nature’s well-being interests guarantees a healthy pursuit of the narrower human well-being interests, but not the vice versa. Our individual and species-wide arrogance surface most powerfully in the territorial wars that are still arrogantly being fought in today’s world, as if it was not enough to have already fought the World Wars I and II. In particular, it is difficult to explain to children why the Russian war broke out on the Ukrainian soil on the 24th February 2022. This war is the latest example of the species-wide arrogance-driven war-mongering. It is not only barbarous but also more sickening and devastating than the Covid-19 that caused the Corona Virus Pandemic 2020. The world is still trying to recover from it. Notice, therefore, how because of the species-wide arrogance, people cannot unite in the same manner against the well-identifiable enemy in a war. As they have done and are still doing against the invisible enemy, i. e, the Corona Virus Pandemic 2020. The most important question is whether the world has become wiser over the past so many centuries, given the accelerated ETS progress? Has it become less dangerous even in the last few decades? Scientists have been warning that the world population is expected to be eleven billion by 2100. Air pollution has been increasing by more than 8% over the past decade. Over 80% of urban inhabitants are exposed to unsafe levels of air pollution: the increase in air pollution and the emission of increasing levels of carbon dioxide. Are we not lagging far behind in avoiding the rise in dangerous levels of global warming? Frantically engaged in an AI arms race, designing planes and weapons with AI-technologies, as the governments of individual countries are, the investments in projects directly beneficial to the human well-being interests, such as improved medical screening, seem to have a somewhat lower priority. Equally important, in this essay, I have argued from environmental realism how the top species Homo sapiens might finally shed its arrogance. How it might work passionately for rescuing the endangered earth from the climate change catastrophes. And, as an important consequence thereof , how that might also help save the “global nuclear weapons Bazaar” from the hazards of a Nuclear War (Pandit, 2020a, 2020b, 2021). Finally, how important is the question of accountability of individual countries and societies that have been arrogantly ‘competing’ in committing ruthless collective crimes against nature and environment? With agreements after agreements, how the political classes and the governments across the globe have failed in their collective obligations to seek justice that may be called planetary justice? Consider, e.g., the following question: Has the humanity learnt anything from how or why the SDGs-2015 failed to take off? This question raises another question

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as follows. Are the UNSDGs-2030 most likely to meet the same fate? The answer to the latter question is in the affirmative, given the dominance of BAUM-driven market institutions and activities on our finite planet earth. Dogmatically/uncritically committed to BAUM-driven market institutions and activities, how such activity not only dominates on our planet, but puts institutions as well as us to dogmatic slumber, lending a temporary and superficial sense of contentment, despite its negative externalities. Notable examples of negative externalities are global warmingdriven climate change crises and other kinds of vulnerabilities knocking at the doorsteps of humanity. For example, consider, how, in effect, the BAUM-driven market institutions and activities prevent us from repaying our debts to nature. And how irresponsible the human activities and civilizations on our host planet earth have been, and continue to be. The most crucial question is whether the UNSDGs-2030 can be achieved even in the long term without working passionately for planetary justice. If we do not heed the warning signals that keep coming from different directions and different disciplines, as an already endangered top species with an endangered earth, we will have only one option for survival, viz., the option of accelerated development of technologies against technologies ad infinitum. But as an option it is not as simple as it might appear to be. If science and technology have landed our planet earth and us in the present global crises, why should accelerated investment in more and more technology be the answer? On the contrary, working with technology against technology as a global or regional policy entails not only final good bye to the imperatives of basic life-style changes and land-use changes as a possible response to coping with the climate change challenge. It also entails an open invitation to technology as a style of life, i.e., as a style of living with negative externalities without the exit gates. The model of green growth that the humanity urgently needs to put in place to promote an innovative, creative and dynamic interface-building at the politicaleconomic-environmental, ecological-social and academic-scientific levels of developmental thinking, more so in the global South, will be tested by its promise to manage climate change, deliver planetary justice and eliminate global poverty within a KBCE. If sustainability and planetary justice are to steer economic growth in the future, then it is imperative to reign in new models to guide humanity to meet the multifarious challenges that are already sounding alarm bells at its door-step. More importantly, it has become imperative to distinguish between ‘growth’ and ‘development’, as the environmental discourse builds up a new context for revisiting our old beliefs and practices (Gwartney et al., 2022). Economic growth, when it is an increase in quantity, cannot be sustainable indefinitely on a finite planet. But economic development, when it is an improvement in the quality of life without necessarily causing an increase in the quantity of resources consumed, may be sustainable. If limitless economic growth within a finite planet is impossible (Comeliau, 2002, Jackson, 2009), it is the discourse on quality of life that should shape our longterm policy goals. Garret Hardin (1968) in his classic article, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” and others (Meadows et al., 1972, Daly, 1980) drew the world’s attention to the building up of the environmental context as a context of imperatives for

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rethinking all human activity in relation to the realities of our host planet’s lifesupport system, that have been impacted adversely by us everywhere—oceans, land, water, air, food, species, forest cover, entire ecosystems and ecosystem services and non-renewable resources. The building up of the environmental context of imperatives that can be violated only at the peril of the environmental collapse called “The Tragedy of the Commons” demands that we owe it to ourselves and the future generations to re-visit the pervasive belief in the capitalist economic system. This is the belief that individuals and societies can gradually but constantly increase their wealth and consumption in order to lead a good life. Heeding the Aral Sea ecological catastrophe clarifies the main point.

11 International Political Economy of the Environment: What Should Our Priorities Be? Wealth, if limits are not set for it, is great poverty.—Epicurus

The title of my article implies that there must be something fundamentally wrong, i.e., ethically as well as ecologically abusive, as regards our shared and collective strategies and theories of development. This, in turn, entails an urgency of drastic interrogation and transformation of the assumptions that underlie our development strategies. All our regional and international institutions are a product of how these very assumptions must have evolved over time, becoming deep-rooted in us and in academic institutions of education, science and technology. A fundamental transformation of these institutions themselves is, therefore, imperative, more so in the context of the political economy of the environment. Arguably, humanity’s number one enemy is the individual and collective speciesspecific arrogance that may be endemic to Darwinian evolution itself. As a matter of individual habit, and social and cultural upbringing, often our arrogance is publicly presented as wisdom. There are warning signals that the top species, i.e., the Homo sapiens, must lose no more time in showing its readiness to learn how to shed its arrogance at all levels. I am here referring to the arrogance of treating the planet earth as if it was our privately owned property. As if , all of us have a right to abuse its abundant natural resources. And, as if , we are born with a right to trigger bloody wars over these very resources as soon as they are totally depleted and degraded. On the contrary, it is imperative that we learn to treat earth as a family, where the top species has the obligation to hold itself accountable for its own deeds. Unless we shed our arrogance at all levels, our basic assumptions of development and public good are bound to remain fundamentally flawed. This is very much true of the UNSDGs-2030, as it was true of the unfulfilled UNMDGs 2015 (Pandit, 2014). International political economy of the environment (IPE) studies the interrelationship between politics and economics specifically, notably the political bargaining over economic issues, seeking best options for investment in sustainable development. All these must be accorded a top priority among other measures that may be

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necessary towards the goal of Earth Stewardship. The biggest challenge in this context is “how the humans and nonhuman beings must co-evolve with global markets, climate change, world trade, or transnational/multinational governance (Luke, 2001, p. 232).” After all, quite ominously though, it is true that “economy and society, culture and politics, science and technology have all acquired environmental qualities as society engulfs nature, economy channels ecology, and human organisms beleaguer all environments (Luke, 2001, p. 232).” More generally speaking, what we call environment signifies “nature” domesticated by human beings in all conceivable ways. Environment is, Timothy Luke (2001) argues, a result of environing as a physical act of enveloping, enclosing, encircling, surrounding, circumscribing, or ringing around something. Again, as Timothy Luke (2001) aptly puts it: “to environ a site or a subject is to beset, beleaguer, or besiege that place or person” (Luke, 2001, p. 231): The ties between IPE and the environment assumed considerable importance in the 1990s, because so much of the world’s ecology had deteriorated during the past ten, thirty, or fifty years. (Luke, 2001, p. 230)

This deterioration, in fact, has spread at such an accelerated speed that it has become imperative to adopt a strategic critical approach to IPE and the environment so as to unravel the mechanisms of ecological destruction across the globe. Formulating the problem-situation most eloquently, Timothy Luke points out: After the Industrial Revolution, nowhere in the world holds out against machines: technology is everywhere. After the two World Wars, few places around the world hold on traditional formulas of authority: democracy is spreading everywhere. After the Cold War, nowhere in the world seriously holds forth as a real alternative to the market: capitalism is everywhere. (Luke, 2001, p. 230)

The message can be quite unambiguously stated as follows: “Improving the understanding of IPE as a scholarly discipline is one response to this new context, because the dysfunction of markets and states is, strangely enough, a key component of the contemporary world system’s environmental crisis (Luke, 2001, p. 230).”

12 Epilogue: Obstacles to Inclusive Growth How do we view and rate this world? How do we view its complex interdependencies and its widely spread diversity of resources, capabilities, ideologies and governance system? Is the existing global governance system able to operate effectively and to ensure peace and stability? If not, do we need to rebuild and redesign a new global governance system? If going for a new governance system is an option, how inclusive should it be? Should it not take care to deliberate on strategic forms of inclusion and

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exclusion: Which countries to include and which to exclude, as a first step of redesigning initiative? Must not the “rogue states” wait until the new design is in its proper place, with peaceful countries with good record as the founding members? Commitment to inclusive growth, i.e., 8th goal in the UNSDG’s 2030, is easier said than done. Going by the past experience, should we just keep harping on inclusive growth, using jargon instead of designing effective policies and wise strategies that could deliver the results? This raises the question how complex is the challenge of inclusive growth, regionally and globally? Can we define it and reduce it to a simple formula? What is it that could spell out the drivers of inclusive growth? How interconnected are the drivers of inclusive growth, if there are any well-identified drivers? How crucial is free access to fundamental human rights for achieving inclusive growth? And how important is the strategy of identifying obstacles to inclusive growth prior to identifying the drivers of inclusive growth? If you look at the UNSDGs 2030, you will notice that they implicitly hint at the obstacles to inclusive growth in the individual countries across the world. This raises the question why no attention has been paid to the huge task of identifying the major obstacles to inclusive growth across the world. It is imperative to make a beginning in that direction. What are then the major obstacles to inclusive growth, regionally or globally? If we could identify obstacles to inclusive growth, the way to finding solutions in terms of the drivers of inclusive growth would become easier, if not simpler. Let us go back in time and ask the following questions. What happened to the UNMDGs (UN Millennium Development Goals) 2015? They were to be fulfilled by the year 2015. But that did not happen in spite of the UN and its worldwide agencies and partners spending huge budgets on their implementation and on awareness campaigns. Let us go further back in time. What happened to the 1948 UDHR (UN declaration of fundamental human rights)? The only thing that has happened is the mushroom growth of human rights commissions (HRCs) across the world. But we know how pathetic the human condition of human rights is in our world after 75 years of the declaration. The UN and the individual countries have failed to implement them and guarantee free access to them (Pandit, 2014). Consider how rampant is the child abuse across the world and how rampant are the crimes against women. It is true that the individual countries and their huge bureaucracies have ensured regular violation of the fundamental human rights in order to justify the hierarchy of bureaucracies in the form of human rights commissions under the UN Human Rights Commission. All this feeds on huge budgets that maintain huge self-seeking bureaucracies. Coming back to the unfulfilled UNMDGs 2015, the UN and the member-countries took recourse to SDGs 2030, smartly covering up their failure by a new declaration. But no concerted effort was made to identify the obstacles to inclusive growth. No doubt, over the past 75 years, the UN and its agencies have acquired bloating bureaucracies. We must remember that bureaucracies, wherever they mushroom up, must seek their own empowerment. Don’t be surprised, if regional and international bureaucracies turn out to be a primary obstacle to the agenda of inclusive growth. Most of the time these bureaucracies remain preoccupied with the filing of reports of massive human rights violations in the individual countries.

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It has been well-said that the developed and developing world alike need fresh ideas for the purposes of designing better welfare states and tax systems. The rights of people to move from one country to another need to be thoroughly reviewed, redefined and properly regulated. The need for new thinking does not mean that we have to ignore the lessons of history. The twenty-first century brings some challenges which we have not seen before. Most worryingly it brings the challenge of anthropogenic global warming driven climate change. But it is also known for the prospects of intrusive new technologies of the mind. The inequality of opportunity and the discontent it drives are not new. Nor is the unhealthy concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the few. That is why it is worth dusting off the 19th-century ideas from the vigorous competition policy to the taxation of land and inheritance. How can we come out of the following paradoxical situation? Among those who are seriously concerned with rethinking human development, and with sustainable development, there is a growing realization, more so in the midst of accelerated urbanization worldwide, that the standard of life is not synonymous with quality of life. It is not even an indicator of the quality of life and freedom. This also applies to the quality of life of children. Children born in highly developed and rich countries do not automatically enjoy a high quality of life and development (Pandit, 2007a; Unicef Report 14 February 2007: http://.org.uk/presswww.unicef/newsdetail.asp? news_id=890). How do we then articulate quality of life, whether in the case of children worldwide or in the case of world’s societies and their economies? And how do we, at the same time, prioritize the issues of sustainable development? In view of the challenges of accelerated domestication of nature (ADN), urbanization and population explosion, can humanity afford to pursue developmental goals by ecological overshoot, ignoring the perils of an ecologically challenged earth? Rethinking development, rethinking scientific and economic rationality, in this essay I have argued for design-change where humanity can work its way forwards to a new design, and find its way to a better world. A better world refers to a scenario where public policy on ecosystem resilience, on development and nature policy interplay significantly in securing the goals of sustainability at different levels of problem-solving that might be strongly correlated with one another (Pandit, 2013, 2021). Within the new design, it will be the wisdom-inquiry driven institutions and STSdisciplines (Pandit, 2008, 2012, 2021) which will shape the strategies we can afford for rebuilding our world, given the ecologically and environmentally realistic basic assumption that: Securing nature’s healthy ecosystems can greatly help in securing the well-being interests of the species Homo sapiens in many dimensions, without the reverse holding true. (Pandit, 2021)

To put it, then, in a nutshell, if we are serious in addressing humanity’s dilemmas of development in the midst of anthropogenic global warming driven climate change, it is imperative to investigate the innovative and inclusive paths to sustainable development. Thus, our universal mandate should be to secure planetary justice for the

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planet earth’s bio-diverse world, which is as much challenged by global warmingdriven anthropogenic climate change as by the alarmingly accelerated domestication of nature, itself driven by hubris and human greed. The sooner the humanity acts to take all the steps that are imperative to meet the present and future challenges, the better it will be for the future generations. In order to act now, there is only one option. As a global community, we cannot afford to confront one another. The challenges that we face know no boarders. Let us face them rationally and cooperatively together, whether these are climate change challenges, challenges of demographic change, those of inequality and education, those of scientific arrogance, those of knowledge-based climate economy (Pandit, 2015a), or those of totalitarian regimes bent on violating the living planet imperatives. Department of Philosophy University of Delhi South Campus, New Delhi 110021, India Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung Institut fuer Philosophie, Freie Universitaet Berlin, Berlin 14195, Germany; and Institut fuer Theoretische Physik, Fakultaet Physik und Astronomie, Universitaet Heidelberg, Heidelberg 69117, Germany Visiting Professor Institute for Social and Economic Change, Centre for Ecological Economics and Natural Resources, Bangalore 560072, India Life Member International Ernst Cassirer-Gesellschaft, Philosophisches Seminar der Universität Hamburg, Hamburg 22297, Germany Acknowledgements The author thanks the Editor Prof. Avelino Núñez-Delgado (University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain) for the invitation to contribute this chapter to the Springer book entitled “Planet Earth: Scientific Proposals to Solve Urgent Issues”; and for forwarding an anonymous referee’s comments on a previous draft of the chapter. The author thanks Prof. Hans Guenter Dosch, Dr. Eduard Thommes, and Dr. Elmar Bittner, Institut fuer Theoretische Physik: Universitaet Heidelberg, for receiving their unfailing support and encouragement; Prof. Lisa Osbeck, Department of Anthropology, Sociology, and Psychology: University of West Georgia. USA, for her helpful comments on a previous version of the text; Mr. Rahul Kumar Soni (Delhi University, South Campus) for technical support; and Karola Stutzki (Berlin), Neera Pandit, Neeraj Pandit, Rashmi Pandit, Sara Pandit, and Sushma Jad, for their unfailing moral support. Dedication The author dedicates this chapter/essay to the Memory of long-time friend Alfred W. Reichert, Berlin (20.02.1946 - 01. 10. 2023). Institutional Review Board Statement Not applicable Informed Consent Statement Not applicable Conflicts of Interest The author declares no conflict of interest/competing interests. Funding This research received no external funding

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Abbreviations SDGs 2030 wis-design WIDIs WUPSRWI

KBCE De-Domestication ADN STS-disciplines GGWTT ILGG K-resources Krds BAUM-driven market institutions and activities EU HDI GDP ETS progress

Sustainable Development Goals 2030 Wisdom-in-design Wisdom inquiry driven institutions World unravelling problemsolving rationality of wisdom inquiry Knowledge based climate economy Decelerated domestication of nature’s ecosystems Accelerated Domestication of Nature’s ecosystems Science and technology studiesdisciplines Green growth without technological totalitarianism Innovation-driven limitless green growth Knowledge-resources Knowledge resources dynamics Business-as-usual-model driven market institutions and activities European Union Human development index Gross domestic product Economic, technological and scientific progress

Selected Bibliography Armstrong, A. (2012). Ethics and justice for the environment. Routledge. Arrighi, G. (1994). The long twentieth century; money, power, and the origins of our times. Verso. Beck, U. (1992). Risk society: Towards a new modernity (260 pp). Sage. Translation by M. Ritter of Risikogesellschaft: Auf dem Weg in eine andere Modern. Suhrkamp Verlag (1986). Brundtland, G. H. (1987, February 27). Address at the closing ceremony of the eighth and final meeting of the world commission on environment and development (pp. 1–7). Chapin, F. S., Weber, E. U., Bennett, E. M., et al. (2022). Earth stewardship: Shaping a sustainable future through interacting policy and norm shifts. Ambio, 51, 1907–1920. https://doi.org/10. 1007/s13280-022-01721-3

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New Technological Directions for a Sustainable Development and Sustainability Mario Coccia

Abstract One of the fundamental problems in modern economies is high carbon emissions and diffusion of pollutants from industrial activities focused on fossilbased energy that increases atmospheric greenhouse gases, particulates and other atmospheric pollution that generate detrimental effects on climate, environment and health of human and animal population. This study confronts this problem by detecting emerging technologies that improve the utilization of natural resources to support a sustainable development by reducing negative effects of industrial and human activities on atmosphere, hydrosphere, biosphere and the total environment and the transformation of low-carbon economies and societies. Results here show new and emerging technologies with a high sustainability perspective for producing renewable energy and supporting the decarbonization for a transition and sustainable development, such as technologies for offshore wind turbines, carbon capture storage, cellular agriculture and blockchain. Hence, findings here bring us to suggest new technological directions that can guide the industrial, economic and social change in a perspective of One Health (health of people, animals, and ecosystems) that can lay the foundations for a sustainable development directed to the longrun goal of, whenever possible, a CO2 -free global economy for beneficial effects for total environment and human society. Keywords Environmental pollution · Climate change · Resources depletion · Renewable energy · Human development · New technology · One Health · Sustainability · Sustainable Development

M. Coccia (B) CNR—National Research Council of Italy, IRCRES-CNR, Turin Research Area of the National Research Council Strada delle Cacce, 73, 10135 Torino, TO, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 A. Núñez-Delgado (ed.), Planet Earth: Scientific Proposals to Solve Urgent Issues, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-53208-5_4

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1 Introduction The study concerning the human impact on the environment begins in 1860s (Marsh, 1864). Scholars argue that the environmental change, driven by human and technological development, has increased since the first industrial revolution, such that a new geological epoch is proposed, the Anthropocene, which indicates a huge and predominant impact of human activities on Earth and atmosphere (Crutzen & Stoermer, 2000; Zalasiewicz et al., 1990). Ruddiman (2003) maintains that the onset of Anthropocene is 6000 years-ago with a rise in the CO2 , whereas Crutzen and Stoermer (2000) and Steffen et al. (2007) argue that the onset of the Anthropocene is with the industrial age in the Eighteenth Century and with the acceleration of climate change from 1900s (cf., Bowman et al., 2011; Glikson, 2013; Steffen et al., 2007). Foley et al. (2013, p. 83) point out that from 1780s period also begins the growth of human population and carbon emissions and consequential growth of atmospheric CO2 levels, generating the so-called ‘great acceleration’. Chin et al. (2013, p. 1) affirm that the impact of human activities on environment is due to urban development, population growth, polluting industrialization, etc. (Coccia, 2014; Coccia & Bellitto, 2018). In fact, the industrialization of Europe, North America and emerging countries (e.g., Brazil, Turkey, India, etc.) is generating economic growth but also aspects of unsustainability that generate climate, environmental and sociodemographic change (Steingraber, 1997). Constant et al. (2014) argue that environmental pollution and economic growth have a positive correlation. This relation is associated with a progressive urbanization and population growth that cause more consumption, resources depletion, and as a consequence, environmental pollution. Overall, then, population growth, technological development, mass production and consumption, and resources depletion engender negative effects on ecosystems and human health (Coccia, 2021a, 2021b). In the presence of the negative impact of human activities on natural resources and total environment, one of the fundamental problems is the detection of solutions that can reduce environmental pollution and O2 consumption for more sustainable socioeconomic systems. The goal of the contribution here is to analyze and show technological trajectories that may reduce global CO2 emissions and other factors of climate change to support new ways to deliver sustainable development and low-carbon economies and societies.

2 Theoretical Framework: Current Situation and Projection Ayres (1998) argues that fossil fuels and radical technological innovations are fundamental drivers of human development (Coccia, 2015b, 2017, 2020a, 2020d, 2021c; Sterner et al., 1998, p. 254). Industrialization in the post-World War II is based on coal, natural gas, and petroleum-based feedstocks (cf., Campbell, 2002), which have generated economic growth and several innovations in heavy organic

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chemical industry, synthetic materials and petrochemicals (Ayres, 1990a, 1990b; Coccia, 2009). However, industrialization and technological transformations are also main drivers of urbanization, poor air quality and high environmental pollution with emerging pollutants that pose increasing risks to people and ecosystems (cf., Núñez-Delgado et al., 2023; Belpomme et al., 2007). Meadows et al. (1972) argued that the natural resources of the Earth and the overall world ecosystem may not sustain economic and demographic growth rates well beyond the 2100s, even with technological development. The interrelated factors of this prediction are: high population growth, deterioration of agricultural production, depletion of non-renewable resources, high industrial production and mass consumption with consequential environmental pollution. The Club of Rome’s report (Meadows et al., 1972) also suggests that the human society can create an ecosystem on Earth to indefinitely live if it imposes limits on the utilization of natural resources, and fosters the recycle of materials directed to a sustainable development that meets the needs of present and future generations, conserving at the same time the planet’s life support systems (Núñez-Delgado et al., 2022). Adam (2021) discusses the forecasting by United Nations that global population will grow to reach roughly 11 billion by 2100s. In 2014, the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria suggests that the world population is likely to peak at 9.4 billion around 2070s and then will fall to 9 billion by 2090s, whereas the University of Washington in Seattle (USA) asserts that global population will peak at around 9.7 billion in 2060s, and then will decline to about 8.8 billion by 2100s. The different results of these demographic projections are due to the uncertainty in the long-run change of fertility rates and population numbers associated with unforeseen events, such as pandemics of new vital agents (e.g., SARS-CoV-2 and similar coronaviruses), conflicts, natural disasters, etc. (Coccia, 2020a, 2020b, 2021a). In this context, high population growth generates some critical effects in socioeconomic systems (Global Change, 2022): increase of the extraction and consumption of natural resources (fossil fuels, minerals, woods, water); high urbanization; high production and consumption of goods; tons of waste dumped on the planet; high air and environmental pollution, pathogenic microorganisms in the environment; etc. (Núñez-Delgado et al., 2021a, 2021b, 2021c). Some of these factors are main drivers of climate change and global warming. In fact, many countries focus on cheap fossil fuels to support their economies, especially in the presence of pandemic crisis or international crises (e.g., wars), but carbon emissions for fossil fuel consumption and related environmental pollution may support a + 5 °C of warming by 2100s also with thawing permafrost (Hausfather & Peters, 2020; Moss et al., 2010; Tollefson, 2020). Long-term effects of this climate change on the total environment (given by atmosphere, lithosphere, hydrosphere, biosphere, and anthroposphere) cause (IPCC, 2007, 2013; NASA Global Climate Change, 2022): the growth of the length of the frost-free season (and the corresponding growing season) because of heat-trapping gas emissions, the average growth of precipitation, the droughts and heat waves are projected to become more intense, the growth of intensity, frequency and duration of hurricanes, the increase of global sea level likely by more than 5 inches and it is projected to rise another 1–10 feet by 2100s because of melting land ice. In short, the climate is changing in ways that induce

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increasing risks to people and ecosystems. Scholars suggest that to cope with ongoing climate change, future societies have to be more resilient and better adapted to deal with extreme environmental and social threats (Campbell, 2002). Ali et al. (2021) show a positive relation between natural resource depletion and environmental degradation in developed countries, whereas renewable consumption of energy has a negative influence on environmental deterioration. The studies show that current models of economic development have many factors that support environmental pollution and deterioration (Coccia, 2019a). In this context, the World needs solutions and resolutions directed to prepare for, and limit future climate change, reduce negative interactions between natural and social systems, and support the challenge of sustainability for improving environment and wellbeing of people. Hence, human society has caused main environmental and atmospheric damages with a decline of atmospheric O2 and now nations should take actions to reduce CO2 emissions, contaminants, waste and environmental deterioration for fruitful implications of One Health (SCRIPPS O2 Program, 2024). Next section presents the methodology to detect, whenever possible, sustainable technologies that deliver sustainable development and that may mitigate in the long run the climate change and natural resources depletion for a global sustainable future and conserving the planet’s life support systems.

3 Research Methodology • Sources and Sample The study uses data of Scopus (2022), a multidisciplinary database covering journal articles, conference proceedings, and books. Scopus (2022) database also includes patent records derived from different world-wide patent offices. The window of “Search documents” in the Scopus (2022) database is used to identify scientific documents and patents having in article title, abstract or keywords the terms described in Table 1 that are main sustainable technologies according to current literature of environmental and sustainability science (Anastopoulos et al., 2023; Coccia, 2023; Gonzalo et al., 2022; Li et al., 2022; Wang et al., 2022; Balaji & Rabiei, 2022; Elavarasan et al., 2022; Chapman et al., 2022; Gadikota, 2021; Bapat et al., 2022; Moritz et al., 2022; Esmaeilzadeh, 2022; Strepparava et al., 2022). Data are downloaded on 30th March 2022. Scientific products (articles, conference papers, conference reviews, book chapters, short surveys, letters, etc.) and patents are basic units here for scientific and technology analyses (Coccia et al., 2021, 2022, 2023; Jaffe & Trajtenberg, 2005) that can explain the interactions between natural and technological systems, and how these interactions can affect the reduction of environmental pollution and support the achievement of sustainable development and of one or more of the Sustainable Development Goals. • Measures

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Table 1 Queries and data analyzed for scientific and technological analyses Queries of research on sustainable technologies

Data analyzed and type

“Offshore wind turbine”

6978 document results 3791 patent results

“Aluminium battery”

228 document results 1033 patent results

“Green hydrogen”

1000 document results 172 patent results

“Blue hydrogen”

77 document results 198 patent results

“Carbon-negative technologies”

34 document results 10 patent results

“Floating photovoltaic systems”

76 document results 43 patent results

“Carbon capture and storage”

7005 document results 1204 patent results

“Thermal energy storage”

15,573 document results 8888 patent results

“Blockchain technology”

10,768 document results 7848 patent results

“Cellular agriculture”

81 document results 21 patent results

“Clean steel production”

92 document results 28 patent results

“Wave power systems”

78 document results 341 patent results

The scientific development of sustainable technologies considers: – Number of articles and all scientific products acquired from the search queries described in Table 1 for all technologies under study; the year 2022 is excluded because ongoing, without affecting the statistical analyses on the evolution of trends. This study also analyzes patents that indicate inventions and potential innovations and show the evolution of new technological trajectories that affect the challenges of sustainability (cf., Jaffe & Trajtenberg, 2005; Coccia, 2022a): – Number of patents originated from the search queries described in Table 1 for all technologies under study to detect the technological trajectories; the year 2022 is also excluded here because ongoing and the analyses of data do not affect the detection of trends.

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• Data analysis procedure and specification of models Descriptive statistics of data described in Table 1 are: mean, standard deviation, skewness and kurtosis coefficients to check the normality of distribution and if variables are not normal, it is applied a logarithmic transformation to have normality and perform appropriate parametric analysis for robust and consistent results. The tool “Search documents” in Scopus (2022) provides a time series of document results and patents by using queries indicated in Table 1. Firstly, trends of research field/technology i at time t are visualized with the following model (1): Log yi,t = a + b time + u i,t

(1)

– yt is scientific products or patents of technology i; t = time – a is a constant; b is the coefficient of regression; ut = error term – log has base e = 2.7182818... Secondly, the evolution of sustainable technologies to detect future projections is analyzed with a model of technological diffusion in which the number of patents (Y) is a function of the number of scientific production (X) over time (cf., Sahal, 1981). This approach provides the relative rate of growth that shows how sustainable technologies under study evolve over the course of time. To operationalize this technology analysis, the model measures the effects of the accumulation of scientific research (publications) on patents’ growth of technologies directed to the challanges of sustainability. The model has the following assumptions: (1) Technological system has two elements, X (publications) and Y (patents) (2) Let Y (t) be the extent of advances of a technology Y at the time t measured with patents and X(t) be the extent of scientific production underlying the advances of a technology Y. Suppose that both X and Y evolve according to a S-shaped pattern, such a pattern can be represented analytically in terms of the differential equation of logistic function. The logistic model provides a symmetrical Sshaped curve with a point of inflection at 0.5 K; a1,2 are constants depending on the initial conditions, K 1,2 are equilibrium levels of growth, and b1,2 are rate-of-growth parameters (variable 1 = Publications, variable 2 = Patents). After some mathematical transformations (cf., Sahal, 1981), it is possible to express the differential equation of logistic function in terms of a simple linear relationship (log–log model 2): logY = log A + BlogX

(2)

A = constant; B is the evolutionary coefficient of growth that measures the evolution of technology Y (patents) in relation to scientific production X.

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This log–log model (2) has linear parameters and the value of B in the model (2) measures the relative growth of Y in relation to the growth of X and it indicates different patterns of technological evolution as follows: • B < 1, whether technology Y evolves at a lower relative rate of change than X; the whole system of sustainable technology has a slowing down evolution over the course of time. • B has a unit value: B = 1, then Y and X have proportional change during their evolution. In short, when B = 1, the whole system here has a proportional evolution of its elements: publications and patents (growth). • B > 1, whether Y evolves at greater relative rate of change than X; this pattern denotes disproportionate advances of technology Y that has an accelerated evolution (of patents) over the course of time. The relationships of models under study here are analyzed using the Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) method for estimating the unknown parameters in regression models. Statistical analyses are performed with the IBM SPSS Statistics 26® .

4 Results and Discussion First, data are transformed in logarithmic scale to have normality in the distribution of variables for appropriate parametric analyses and for a better visual representation of trends. Model (1) is used to visualize the trends of publications and patents of sustainable technologies. In particular, Fig. 1 shows the scientific development of different sustainable technologies, whereas Fig. 2 shows the evolution of sustainable technologies based on patents. Interaction of publication and patent data (cf., Figs. 1 and 2) are analyzed with model (2) to assess the relative rate of growth of these technologies over time.

Fig. 1 Trends of research outputs for technologies directed to sustainability. Note: to show better the trends, the period starts from the year 1990

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Fig. 2 Technological trajectories for sustainable ways based on patents. Note: to show better the trends, the period starts from the year 1998

Table 2, using the coefficients of regression of model (2), reveals that sustainable technologies that have B > 1 (i.e., accelerated pathway of technological evolution directed to the challenges of sustainability, values in bold) are: • • • •

Offshore wind turbines Carbon Capture storage Cellular agriculture Blockchain technology.

Instead, sustainable technologies that have B < 1, a slowdown of technological evolution, are: • • • • •

Wave power systems Green hydrogen Blue hydrogen Aluminum battery Thermal energy storage.

Other technologies do not a significant coefficient B, and as a consequence are not considered. In particular, the coefficient B > 1 in models of the evolution of sustainable technologies (Table 2) suggests a disproportionate (accelerated) growth of these technologies over time (based on patents): they can affect future sustainability with consequential economic and social change, decreasing the negative consequences on people and ecosystems. In particular, these technologies directed to the challenges of sustainability are described below to clarify their potential applications that limit environmental pollution: • Offshore wind turbines. Wind power can be onshore (land) and offshore (sea) based on the location of the wind farm. Offshore wind farms generate more power, less environmental impact, and have the possibility to be of larger size (Gonzalo et al., 2022). This technology offers promising perspectives for the future sustainability. In fact, these technologies are a main source of renewable energy moreover, cost production and maintenance of wind power technology decrease

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Table 2 Estimated relationships of patents on scientific production of sustainable technologies Sustainable technologies

Coefficient B

Constant A − 0.968**

F-test

R2

391.65***

0.949

Offshore wind turbines

1.062***

Floating photovoltaic systems

0.309

0.840*

2.750

0.282

Wave power systems

0.840**

1.160***

7.680**

0.220

Green hydrogen

0.584***

0.101

45.840***

0.741

Blue hydrogen

0.542*

0.956***

6.330*

0.297

Carbon negative technologies

0.039

0.383

0.015

0.004

− 0.063

0.379

0.046

0.005

Clean steel production Aluminum battery

0.600***

2.295***

19.710***

0.461

Carbon Capture storage

2.280***

− 9.730***

165.090***

0.920

Thermal energy storage

0.935**

0.036

319.330***

0.870

Cellular agriculture

2.760*

− 6.650*

374.610*

0.990

Blockchain technology

1.220***

− 2.100**

317.030***

0.990

Note: log–log model. Dependent variable: Patents of sustainable technology i; Explanatory variable: publications of sustainable technology i; *** significant at 1‰; ** significant at 1%; * significant at 5%. F-test is the ratio of the variance explained by the model to the unexplained variance. R2 is the coefficient of determination. Bold Numbers indicate sustainable technologies with B>1 (accellerated growth)

with learning processes, and their efficiency and reliability increase, favoring the economic sustainability of this industry. Wang et al. (2022) argue that from 2005 to 2019, wind power technology has experienced a significant development with over than 1100% increase in global cumulative installed wind capacity, achieving about 651 GW at the end of 2019. This development is due to a wind industry that is moving to offshore solutions, since the wind speed in offshore locations is steadier and stronger and there is more space available at sea to install powerful wind turbines compared to the land. Li et al. (2022) show that coastal communities can have energy savings with the support of a hybrid offshore wind and tidal stream energy generation system. • Carbon capture storage. Balaji and Rabiei (2022) argue that Carbon Capture Storage and Utilization (CCUS) is a key technological process used for the reduction of carbon emissions and support a sustainable transition from traditional

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power sectors to low-carbon industries. In this context, carbon-dioxide pipelines are important technologies for proper and safe deployment of CCUS infrastructure. Elavarasan et al. (2022) analyze European areas and argue that in achieving climate neutrality, various decarbonization policies should be directed to district heating network with bio- and geo-thermal energy resources that highly favors clean heat transformation scenario. In addition, new technologies of hydrogen utilization and CCUS can pivot climate neutrality in sectors that are difficult to decarbonize. Gadikota (2021) maintains that a main goal in science and society is new chemical processes that can reduce the carbon intensity of energy and foster resource conversion processes. Diverse interventionist technologies to capture current CO2 emissions, reuse and store CO2 continue to be developed, but a main aspect across different technologies is the role of inorganic solid carbonate transformations using anthropogenic CO2 and the development of predictive controls over these pathways. Chapman et al. (2022) argue that to keep global temperature increase below 1.5° because of greenhouse gas emissions, it is more and more important the achievement of carbon neutrality. This sustainable goal can be achieved with new technologies that include hydrogen materials, bio-mimetic catalysts, electrochemistry, thermal energy and absorption, carbon capture, storage and management and refrigerants (Anastopoulos et al., 2023; Coccia, 2023; Coccia and Bontempi, 2023). Of course, this goal needs a global policy based on multidisciplinary international collaboration between countries to foster the diffusion of sustainable technologies and limit future climate change that poses increasing risks to people and ecosystems. • Cellular agriculture. Agricultural energy uses and practices generate about 1% of CO2 emissions and 38% of methane emissions, the latter mainly from livestock production. Carbon emissions can be reduced through more sustainable farming practices, such as with regenerative agriculture that enhances soil carbon storage and protects biodiversity, with new agroecological systems, with emerging cellular agriculture, etc. (Cho, 2022; Pronti & Coccia, 2020, 2021). Moreover, current food production systems have to cope with the growth of world-wide population that is predicted to achieve about 10 billion by 2100s (Willett et al., 2019). In the presence of a growing demographic trend and more demand for protein food, human society needs of new models and approaches of agricultural and livestock production to supply nutritious food, preserving whenever possible sustainability challenges directed to reduce deforestation, CO2 emissions, climate change, environmental pollution, emerging diseases, etc. (Coccia, 2020b, 2022b, Pronti & Coccia, 2021). Cellular agriculture can be a main approach for new food agriculture systems. Cellular agriculture, vertical urban farming, and digital agriculture associated with traditional means can support an industrial change to transform food agriculture and manufacturing systems to be resilient, to satisfy increasing demand of food worldwide and sustain planet’s life support systems (Bapat et al., 2022). This systemic transformation from conventional agricultural systems to a sustainable cellular agriculture is based on new cell-cultivation technologies to produce animal products. The study by Moritz et al. (2022) argues that the economic and policy stakeholders are aware of the changes that are needed in these ways,

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nevertheless a large-scale industrial change from conventional to the cellular agriculture system may not be a plausible solution in the near future, as well as are needed studies of the interaction between these new products and people’s health to avoid current unknown effects leading to disorders and increasing diseases. • Blockchain technology. Environmental, social and economic sustainability issues are challenging the nations. Blockchain is a disruptive technology that could fundamentally generate industrial change to support innovative efforts and an enabling technology transfer to create a sustainable and clean global future (Coccia, 2017d, 2017e; 2018c; 2020c; Howson, 2019). Blockchain is not limited to digital currencies and can be used in several industrial sectors, such as healthcare, supply chain management, digital rights management, energy, and public governance (Hughes et al., 2019). Blockchain platforms use a decentralized network of distributed nodes to validate transactions and maintain the system’s data integrity (Centobelli et al., 2021). Thus, a chain of blocks, containing operation information, avoids a central repository or middleman to complete transactions. Although blockchain technology may create several benefits, its application in specific sectors, such as healthcare, is still in their early stages (Esmaeilzadeh, 2022). For instance, in the presence of the problem of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 2050s, one of the solutions is the integration of an increasing number of distributed renewable energy sources into energy supply systems: from the conventional topdown flow of electricity (with large powerplants covering all power demand) to decentralized systems in which energy is created and stored at the end-user level (Javid et al., 2021). This industrial change in energy systems can support a local energy market (LEM) in a specific location such that energy customers are inter-related with producers to trade energy on a market platform. In particular, a LEM based on the usage of a blockchain technology, associated with internet of things, provides new potential infrastructures for decentralized market architectures directed to deliver user-friendly tools that are basic for customers to engage in a wise energy consumption process (Strepparava et al., 2022).

5 Conclusions and Future Perspectives Technological change supports human development, but it also generates resourceconsuming, environmental deterioration and health issues in society (Coccia, 2015a, 2021b, Coccia & Bellitto, 2018). To put it differently, human activity and development induce anthropogenic environmental effects increasing risks to people and ecosystems. Some scholars consider the relationship between human development and environmental impact as an inverted U-shaped curve –environmental Kuznets curve—because technological change increases the environmental pollution in the early stages of economic development, but beyond some levels of national wealth, wealthier geographical areas can lead to environmental improvement with sustainable technologies and environmental policies and regulations (Ansuategi

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et al., 1998; Coccia, 2021a, 2021b; Stern, 2004). Current capitalism model has positive sides but it is also the source of high rate of utilization in natural resources, mismanagement of both renewable and nonrenewable resources, of social and economic inequality, of environmental pollution and of manifold risk factors for cancers/diseases (Baumol et al., 2007, Coccia, 2021b). Meadows et al. (1972) argue that in conventional environmental analyses, the issue of a shortage or depletion of natural resources is due to overpopulation (Malthusian approach). The Royal Society of London suggests the need “to develop socio-economic systems and institutions that are not dependent on continued material consumption growth” (Sulston, 2012; cf., Coccia, 2019b). The solution of these problems of capitalism and continuous development is to regulate high levels of capital accumulation to mitigate the degradation of the environment at a global level and the climate change. The organization of economic system should be directed to the diffusion of sustainable technologies in local, regional, and global ecosystems to preserve a healthy biosphere for all people (Magdoff, 2013; Magdoff & Bellamy Foster, 2011). The World can experience in future a period of great tension internationally for energy issues, conflicts and consequences of climate change, such that the transition to sustainable energy systems and technologies for a ‘One Health’ that will represent an important goal to improve the interactions between natural, technological and social systems for conserving the planet’s life support systems (Coccia, 2018d, 2023). Countries have to support the rapid development of renewable energy sources and sustainable technologies to reduce risk factors of next social, economic and political tensions, fostering the transition from conventional to sustainable energy systems. Moreover, since urban and national conditions can likely deteriorate still further for energy, economic and social issues, a sustainable World needs resolution approaches to foster low-carbon economies, clean industries and new sustainable communities based on an equilibrium between environment, natural resources and human society in a context of One Health: a model of ecosocialism for a better cooperation to deal with resource limits (Aidnik, 2022; Adaman & Devine, 2022). In addition, the reduction of the negative impact of human activity on ecosystems should be also based on new industrial policies to support sustainable technological innovations for cleaner production, sustainable products, services and consumption (cf., Khan et al., 2022; Coccia, 2009; Sterner & Coria, 2012). Overall, then, technological change is a human activity that has a main role for human development and wellbeing, though it is generating environmental pollution and climate change with negative impacts on ecosystems and people. However, some negative effects can be removed in the long run with new sustainable technologies and new socioeconomic systems directed to reduce CO2 emissions. In brief, human activity should be engaged in sustainable technological innovations and development of lung-run perspectives to reduce coal and petroleum-based economies and, as a consequence, the negative environmental impact for the real well-being of present and future generations. According to Linstone (2010, p. 1417): “the global future will strongly depend on our willingness to take near-term action for a sustainable long-term future” (cf., Rosen, 2010).

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This study has tried to provide, through empirical evidence, a verisimilitude or degree of closeness to true technological trajectories for future sustainable development and sustainability. However, we know that other things are often not equal over time and space, because technological development, human conflicts, continuous production and high resource depletion have an infinite set of true consequences on environment and human society, such that no results will be true in all situations. Despite some limitations, the results presented here illustrate critical technological trajectories for sustainable development and mitigation of climate change. The description of these directions of sustainable technologies here can provide new knowledge having numerous implications for decision making of policymakers and funding agencies regarding sponsoring specific research fields and technological trajectories as well as design incentive systems that can accelerate the development of sustainable socioeconomic systems (Coccia, 2017b, 2018a, 2018b, 2019c). Nevertheless, these conclusions are of course tentative. Future research should consider new data when available, and apply new approaches to reinforce and refine proposed results directed to explain the evolution of sustainable technologies in society. Hence, there is need for much more research in these topics of environmental and sustainability research because of complex confounding and situational factors that affect the interactions between natural and socioeconomic systems to clarify new ways to deliver sustainable development and sustainability in turbulent society.

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Reversing Ruins: Artistic Interventions for Recovering from Disaster Capitalism Federico López-Silvestre, Sandra Alvaro, and Guillermo Rodríguez Alonso

Abstract This chapter aims to reflect on the artistic narratives and practices that have marked a shift from the ontopolitical rigidity of the Anthropocene to a possible response or Neganthropocene in the last twenty years. Against the backdrop of the emergence of an environmental awareness and the first artistic manifestations to respond to the harmful environmental impact of the positivist rationality associated with industrialisation and capital, this chapter links landscape and political ecology to present a typology of the most common landscapes to be depicted by European creators in the twenty-first century. These artists, who have long been drawn to the signs of catastrophe or global collapse, have found inspiration in the intensive exploitation of organic resources, the geologies of disaster associated with mining, the air pollution caused by industry, property speculation and global maritime trade. The act of documenting and drawing attention to degraded landscapes, industrial ruins and ground-zero disaster sites is combined with the design and proposal of new ways of inhabiting the damaged environment and of collectively organising human, animal and plant societies to bring about change. Keywords Art · Landscape · Anthropocene · Capitalocene · Ecosofy and Ethico-aesthetics · Neganthropocene

F. López-Silvestre (B) · G. R. Alonso Department of History of Art, Universidade de Santiago de Compostela (USC), Galicia, Spain e-mail: [email protected] S. Alvaro Department of Art and Musicology, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB), Bellaterra, Spain © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 A. Núñez-Delgado (ed.), Planet Earth: Scientific Proposals to Solve Urgent Issues, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-53208-5_5

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1 Introduction. From the Capitalocene to the Neganthropocene: On Twenty-First Century Artistic Narratives1 The Anthropocene is more than just a geological era or an indicator of anthropic action on ecosystems around the world (Gemenne & Rankovic, 2021); it is also a challenge to the imaginary, a political battleground and an arena for emotional reorganisation. It is a mythology that situates the catastrophe and ruin of the present on the horizon of the capitalist realism that has dominated global post-Fordist society (Fisher, 2016; Han, 2022). The Anthropocene is the product of an immensely toxic global ‘organology’ in which human perception and memory and the projection into the future that enables the enactment of individual and collective will depend on nonhuman factors; more specifically, on a technology subjected to the calculation and standardisation of capital (Stiegler, 2018). This organology inevitably shuts down all possibility. Although the origin of the Anthropocene is disputed, there is no speculation as to its future. The Anthropocene is structurally entropic; it is a process of homogenising disorder that obliterates the proliferation of difference, both physical singularity and the biodiversity and cultural and collective diversity that make complex, open futures possible. As a result, it situates us on the edge of the thinkable and obliges us to face the paralysing vertigo of the end of the world. Given the significance of the dominant socioeconomic model, this era is also known as the Capitalocene (Moore, 2016; Klein, 2014). The term ‘Capitalocene’ refers to the fact that capitalism is such an aggressive economic system that it has transformed the planet’s ecology by imposing optimised production as the only possible value and purpose and by spreading around the world, dragging it towards what appears to be an inescapable collapse. The question raised by artists and other contemporary thinkers is how to escape the Anthropocene and salvage the possibilities hijacked by the rigidity of integrated global capital and its modes of allocation in order to revive a curative era termed ‘Neganthropocene’ by Stiegler (2018). Here, art both triggers and contributes to a creative ontogenesis, or, in the words of Guattari (1989), an ethico-aesthetic rearticulation of the relationships between the ecological, social and individual registers. These existential territories are not established spaces; rather, they are eternally precarious and capable of bifurcation. Environmental ecology shows us that anything is possible, from the worst disasters to the most flexible adaptations. Ecosofy cuts across the existential territories and multiple cartographies (scientific, technological, economic, social, ethical and anthropological) that allow us to grasp the present and the non-possibility of the future, leading to a pragmatic rethinking of processes to make the world habitable again. Against this backdrop, experts regularly debate whether all art emerging in this context may be called ‘ecological art’. Their arguments fall on a spectrum ranging 1

Project: “Landscapes and Architectures of Chance Counter-history of the Landscape in the Latin Europe (1945-2020)” (DEPARQ). Cod.: PID2020-112921GB-I00. Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación—Government of Spain.

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from narrow stances such as that of Parreño (2015), who states that, in order to be considered ecological art, an artist’s work must focus thematically on the interdependence of life forms, the link between biodiversity and stability in ecosystems, and the limited raw materials on Earth, to more open positions such as that of Morton, who argues that “all art is ecological” (Morton, 2021). Philosophically speaking, it is true that all art is part of something that transcends it and situates it within the complex web of relationships and practices that produce the environment. In recent years, numerous exhibitions and artistic manifestations have showcased the complex relationships between capital and the ecosystem and their negative impact on the future of the landscape, encompassing projects based on different perspectives and practices. In Spain, one example is A Balea Negra, which was curated by Pedro de Llano at the Vigo Museum of Contemporary Art (MARCO) in 2013 and is inspired by the Prestige oil spill off the Galician coast in 2002, challenging the ideal of progress and the impacts of global trade and energy dependence on human and non-human ways of life. While A Balea Negra represents an artistic condemnation of the effects of capital on the environment, more recent artistic works have aligned themselves with Donna Haraway’s proposal and focused on the possibility of resurgence or of making life possible amid the ruins of the present. This approach takes the form of new relationships, both epistemic—ways of knowing—and ontic—ways of creating multispecies environments with non-humans—referring not so much to technological apparatus as to the fellow species in the biosphere with whom we share the planet’s future. Examples include the Eco-visionarios project created by Fundación EDP/MAAT, the Royal Academy of Arts and Matadero, which was exhibited simultaneously in several different countries between 2019 and 2021; Critical Zones, curated by philosopher Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel at the ZKM at Karlsruhe, Germany, in 2020; Future Live, held at Laboral in Gijón in 2020, and Ciencia Fricciones, organised at the CCCB in Barcelona in 2021. To a lesser degree, the main exhibition at the 2022 Venice Biennale, The Milk of Dreams, could also be added to this list. Rather than enumerating the infinite artworks that are born of the current cultural and natural ecosystem or explore environmental issues in some way, it would be easier and more productive to review the landscapes and ruins produced by interactions between capital and ecology that are most commonly depicted in twenty-first century art. Just as geologists continue to search for their ‘golden spike’—a geologic marker where the earth’s strata reveal the critical point at which entropic agents began to modify the planet and the interdependence between human activity and the biosphere—by focusing on these landscapes we will examine the different artistic narratives and responses emerging in continental Europe in the twenty-first century and marking a shift from the ruins of the Capitalocene to the budding Neganthropocene. To this end, our aim is not to develop a framework to distinguish between the artworks situated in either era. Instead, this chapter will present a typology of the most frequently depicted landscapes and ruins to show how they have been used by artists: in some cases, by way of condemnation; in others, as an exciting project, and, in most cases, as part of a more ambiguous, playful, procedural approach.

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Given our focus on landscapes, it would be useful to consider the concept in greater depth before continuing. It took forty years for the continental theory of landscape to shift from the aesthetic stance held by the architects of La Villette in the 1980s to an approach more closely aligned with political ecology. Within the theoretical context of France and Spain, a timeline comprising three main phases may be drawn up to cast light on this shift and its important repercussions around the world. (a) In the late 1980s and early 1990s, after fifty years in which the question of landscape had been buried by scientific geographers in areas such as geomorphology, demography and econometrics, who viewed it as inappropriate to this new science due to its purportedly subjective nature, a group of philosophers, geographers and architects (who came together at a series of research proficiency courses initially called Jardins, Paysages, Territoires that were taught at the National School of Architecture Paris La Villette) began to seriously advocate a return to landscape. They include authors such as Augustin Berque, Alain Roger and Bernard Lassus. During those years, Berque (1995) insisted that the word paysage had originated among French painters in the sixteenth century, Roger (2007) wrote a bestselling essay arguing that it was these very artists who had trained our gaze and Lassus (1994) emphasised the distance between the eye of an aesthete and landscape designer and that of a biologist specialising in ecology. Today, it is striking to observe how Roger distanced himself (sometimes quite rightly) from the ‘verdolatry’ with which Berque (1991) critiqued (not unfoundedly) the work of Serres (1995) and how Lassus was enraptured by the iridescence of oil at the port. For Lassus, the iridescence caused by the pollution in the water could be beautiful because the beauty of the landscape and whether or not the landscape was polluted were two separate considerations. (b) Meanwhile, during the 1990s and early 2000s, the question of landscape shifted towards a more engaged perspective. Pierre Nora’s Les Lieux de Mémoire, a series of publications released in France in the late 1980s and early 1990s that focused on heritage and cultural sites, were especially pioneering. The last of Nora’s publications came out in 1992, coinciding with the UNESCO World Heritage Committee’s decision to adopt the concept of ‘Cultural Landscapes’ to refer to a set of landscapes with unique heritage value (Nora, 1992). The aim was to protect threatened cultural sites by starting to consider not only the great history of landscape paintings, gardens and palaces but also places with significance for people’s social identity and memory. In Spain, authors such as Joan Nogué and Javier Maderuelo drew attention to this cultural dimension in La Construcción Social del Paisaje (2007) and Paisaje y Patrimonio (2010). (c) Over the course of the twenty-first century, the situation has evolved. These changes were triggered in large part by the major crises caused by the recession (2008) and the pandemic (2020–21), as well as by the relentless advance of posthumanist thought led by authors such as Haraway.2 Despite being almost 2

Although the terms ‘posthumanism’ and ‘transhumanism’ have been used interchangeably since Hayles published her well-known book How We Became Posthuman (University of Chicago Press,

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marginal in the 1980s and 90s, stances such as that of Gilles Clément suddenly came to the forefront at La Villette during the major exhibition held there in 1999, which was accompanied by the book Le Jardin Planétaire (Clément, 1999). If we were to pinpoint a key institutional hub where this emerging environmental stance based on concern for other living beings began to take shape, it would be ENSP in Versailles. This is where Clément taught for many years, interweaving ecological issues with matters relating to agronomy and gardens. The work of another lecturer on the doctoral courses at ENSP and close friend of Clément, philosopher Gilles A. Tiberghien, links the narrative of reconnecting with nature—echoing Clément’s La Vallée and 1960s art and culture (Tiberghien, 2017: 127–143)—to the return to ecology that is central to the twenty-first century, while exploring the fears present in the Anthropocene and the emergence of the new Ministères de la Transition Écologique. It is no coincidence that both Tiberghien and Jean-Marc Besse, editors of the ENSP journal Les Carnets du Paysage, have now opted to add the subtitle Revue de Projet, d’Art et d’Ecologie Politique. By linking the issues of landscape and ecology and adding a political dimension to the notion of ecology, this recent theoretical current coming out of ENSP circles is becoming a model for future work. It sets an example by restoring the vital critical balance between nature and ideas. On the one hand, this approach is based on the premise that, as human beings, we too are nature but we are only a part of nature (Descola, 2012; Tiberghien, 2017). On the other hand, by introducing a political dimension, it also makes it clear that it is we humans who create narratives and projects about nature and that these must be scrutinised in order to develop the negotiated, social capacity to effect change.

2 Background: The Origins of Anthropocenic Awareness Before embarking on our overview of the different types of critical landscapes that are present in our era, we will first summarise the historical background leading up to them. Between 6 and 9 August 1945, the atomic bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki brought an end to the biggest war in human history, concluding a century marked by armed conflict and an era in which human domination over nature was symbolised by nuclear fission, or the alteration of the very atomic structure of materials 1999), subsequent publications such as Rosi Braidotti’s The Posthuman (2013, Polity Press) have opted for the term ‘posthumanism’ to refer to a post-anthropocentric humanism that, echoing feminist and decolonial thought and monistic philosophies, rejects human exceptionalism and categorical distinction from other species and emphasises the importance of coexistence and hybridisation to ensure the planet’s sustainability. Shared by authors such as Haraway and Latour, the term has become more prevalent in the English-speaking world than other terms like ‘transhumanism’, which, since the publication of works such as those by Nick Bostrom (Human Enhancement, 2009; Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies, 2014), has come to be used primarily to refer to attempts to improve the human condition and organism using technological prostheses.

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by human activity. The famous quote from Bhagavad Gita, cited by Robert Oppenheimer—“Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds”—foreshadowed an emerging awareness of humans’ power over the environment, triggering an era of unprecedented technological progress known today as the Great Acceleration. The Great Acceleration is characterised by a growing human population, changes to natural processes and the production of new materials, including minerals, plastics and organic contaminants (Lewis & Maslin, 2015). The impact of modern development on the environment began to become apparent in the first half of the twentieth century. Between 1935 and 1938, drought and soil impoverishment caused by extensive maize cultivation triggered the Dust Bowl in the United States, which compounded the effects of the Great Depression and led to famine and one of the largest migration movements in American history. In Europe, London was engulfed by the Great Smog, a dense black fog produced by industries burning fossil fuels around the city that caused 4000 deaths in 1952. Alongside the atomic blasts in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, these were some of the worst environmental disasters to be triggered by economic development in the early twentieth century, yet despite the number of victims and the financial losses incurred, their impact on the Earth continued to be ignored. Excluded from the political and scientific pacts that govern relations between humans, the Earth is the forgotten victim of objective violence (Serres, 1995).

2.1 Post-War Avant-Gardes and Nature (1960s and 70s) The art world quickly responded to the violent impact of rational progress on the human and non-human environment. Pierre Restany and the ‘Nouveaux Réalistes’ positioned themselves 40 degrees above the Dadaist avant-garde, anti-art as a response to the failure of positivist reason and the ossification of all established vocabularies, considering the world as the fundamental Great Work from which to draw fragments endowed with universal meaning (Restany, 1978). These specific images featured organic sectors of modern activity. Cities, factories and mass production appeared in Arman’s accumulations and assemblages and in César’s compressions as dispositions of the detritus of a destructive, consumerist activity. Meanwhile, Gustav Metzger’s Auto-Destructive Art, demonstrated on London’s South Bank on 3 July 1963, was conceived as a “form of public art for industrial societies” (Metzger, 1961). In it, smoking factory chimneys appear behind wounds opened up on the canvas by applying corrosive liquids to demonstrate “the power of man to speed up and carry out the processes of the disintegration of nature” and the destructive impact of modern machinery and weapons. The Situationists also drew attention to the modern adventure as the human appropriation of nature, the automatic outcome of the blind growth of modern-day power, as an untheorised hypothesis giving rise to the void of early twentieth-century thought and the failure of a revolutionary project that has succeeded neither in rationalising nor impassioning human life, an alienated progress that subjects human beings to scheduled leisure time rather than

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liberating them and has led not only to more precarious living conditions but also to a concern for survival in the face of issues—nuclear weapons, overpopulation and material deprivation in many parts of the world—that the spectacle of capital is unable to overcome (Situationist International, 1963). “Pollution is in fashion” on a sick planet as a result of the bureaucrats in power and their forecasting and calculation systems (Debord, 2022). The destruction of the processes characterising industrial society and capital was embodied by the new ‘performance’ genre at the international Destruction in Art Symposium (DIAS) organised by Gustav Metzger in 1966 with the participation of artists with links to the international Fluxus movement, whose aim was to connect the destructive processes of the happening with the destruction occurring within society. During this period, expressions of Land Art or Earthworks also emerged; the movement was related to conceptual art and postformalist aesthetics, situated closer to performance art than to the dissolution of the logic of the monument brought about by the avant-garde (Krauss, 1978). Hans Haacke, Walter de María, Robert Smithson and Robert Morris produced complex open-air installations, critiquing ecological romanticism and the urbanisation of nature taking place in the clearly defined spaces designated as natural parks (Tiberghien, 2012), which were later described as being of “outstanding universal value from the aesthetic or scientific point of view” (UNESCO, 1972). In these constructions in and with nature, the creative act lay in the natural process that they helped to trigger in the face of aesthetic perception rather than in the physical attributes of the intervention. The crack of the lightning in De María’s Lightning Field (1977), the slowly growing grass in De Haacke’s Grass Grows (1967–69) and the inexorable movement of the stars in Robert Morris’s Observatory (1971) are all examples of the way in which nature’s potential and agency were harnessed in these works.

2.2 Environmental Art and Emerging Awareness (1980s and 90s) Land Art coincided with a dawning environmental awareness: Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring about the environmental harm caused by the indiscriminate use of DDT was published in 1962, followed by Population Bomb by Paul R. Ehrlich and Anne Howland Ehrlich in 1968, which drew links between human population growth and environmental limits and began to lay the foundations for the concept of sustainability. This awareness came at a time of significant social mobilisation, with movements in the United States fighting for civil rights, peace and nuclear disarmament. In Europe, the May 68 events marked the culmination of this period. Within these movements, the first environmental groups were established. Friends of the Earth was founded in 1969, followed by Greenpeace in 1971. The creation of the Environmental Defence Fund in the United States and its victory in the Senate, which brought about a ban on the use of DDT, is particularly noteworthy as it triggered a

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wave of environmental laws in the country. In Europe, the United Nations Environmental Program was established in 1972 and the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment was held in Stockholm in 1973 under the slogan ‘Only One Earth’. The legislation passed by the organisation included the Convention on the Prevention of Marine Pollution by Dumping of Wastes and Other Matter (1972), the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (1973) and the Convention on Long-Range Transboundary Air Pollution (1979). Meanwhile, UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation), which was founded in 1945 to promote peace and dialogue between cultures, ratified the Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage in 1972, emphasising that natural and cultural heritage was threatened with destruction not only by natural causes but by changes to social and cultural life. The Convention defines natural heritage as natural sites or precisely delineated natural areas that constitute the habitat of endangered species, which are of outstanding universal value from the point of view of science, conservation and beauty (UNESCO, 1972). Under this new international agreement, all national governments were required to identify and conserve natural areas of interest to supplement the work of the World Commission on Protected Areas, which is responsible for maintaining and updating the list of natural parks that was created in 1959 with help from the International Union for Conservation of Nature. The IUCN was the first international environmental foundation and was founded in Fontainebleau in 1949 following a proposal by the director of UNESCO at the time, Sir Julian Huxley, to provide the organisation with a scientific foundation. It specialises in studying the impact of human activity on the natural world, making natural parks valuable not only in terms of identity and culture (the landscape where a culture develops) but also in terms of preserving biodiversity. The contributions made by the IUCN include the creation of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) in 1961, the Red List of Threatened Species in 1961 and the World Conservation Strategy in 1980. Despite acknowledgement of the risks of progress for the environment, not only in developing countries but all over the world, a series of accidents occurred from the 1980s onwards that revealed the inadequate nature of existing international agreements in a context in which economic activity had become globalised and large corporations operated supranationally. Among these catastrophic events, three in particular stand out for their terrible consequences. First, the accident in 1984 at the Union Carbide insecticide factory in Bhopal, the capital of Madhya Pradesh province in India, which released 32 tons of toxic gas into the air. Second, the accident at Chernobyl nuclear power station in Ukraine in 1986. Third, the breach of a mining dam belonging to Swedish company Boliden in Azanalcóllar in Spain, which had a devastating impact on Doñana National Park, one of the largest nature reserves on the European continent. The 1980s and 90s saw the catastrophic failure of environmental policies to counter the economic interests of the global corporations whose activities posed a threat to the planet, contributing to the depletion of the ozone layer by using CFC gases indiscriminately in industry and to global warming by emitting CO2 gases.

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Journalist and activist Naomi Klein attributes this failure to a shift towards a probusiness policy based on creative entrepreneurship and pacts with industry among environmental groups (Klein, 2014). By abandoning their ideology or submitting to the dominant ideology of the market, the largest environmental groups and institutions are able to access financial support from the major corporations that are polluting the planet. As a result of this unlikely coexistence, polluting companies influence the solutions proposed and this has given rise to environmentally disastrous policies, such as the use of gas as a bridge fuel in the energy transition and the expansion of fracking. More regrettable still is the fact that these policies play down the issue of climate change, classifying it as a technical problem, and disregard the role of social dynamics in environmental degradation. Faith in technology as a miraculous solution with retroactive powers has replaced social movements and collective action in proposing new ways of life. Taking up the critique of the impoverishment of life in industrial societies that was initially voiced by the Situationists, Félix Guattari described an integrated world capitalism whose centres of power have been decentralised and whose scope has expanded from the production of the material environment to the production of signs. Economic semiotics—the submission of all value to profit—coincides with a semiotics of the subject or the production of a standardised individual and the hijacking of desire by the consumer market (Debord, 2022; Guattari, 1989). The development that has accompanied the Great Acceleration has brought about a deterioration of individual and social ways of life, as well as of the environment. Capital emerges as the producer of a depotentialised sociality and psyche that is ineffective outside market mechanisms and normativity and hinders emancipation movements. The market-based normativity that would lead to the failure of economic policy is particularly apparent in the European Union’s Emissions Trading System (ETS), a mechanism established to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. Between 3 and 14 June 1992, the Earth Summit was held in Rio de Janeiro in Brazil to mark the twentieth anniversary of the first conference on the environment in Stockholm. The 1992 summit focused on the worsening imbalance in the biosphere, the threat to biodiversity and climate damage, which has been euphemistically termed ‘climate change’. The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) defines climate change as a “change of climate which is attributed directly or indirectly to human activity that alters the composition of the global atmosphere and which is in addition to natural climate variability observed over comparable time periods” (United Nations, 1992). The objective of the Convention was to stabilise greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere “at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic (human induced) interference with the climate system” “within a time-frame sufficient to allow ecosystems to adapt naturally to climate change, to ensure that food production is not threatened and to enable economic development to proceed in a sustainable manner”. The Kyoto Protocol adopted on 11 January 1997 was intended to implement the Framework Convention on Climate Change by committing industrial countries to limiting and reducing their greenhouse gas emissions. It was not until 2005 that a system was designed to put the Protocol into practice: the European Union’s Emissions Trading System (ETS), which seeks

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to resolve the issue through a market system based on carbon credits. Measures such as improving energy efficiency in factories, planting trees and producing low-carbon energy were rewarded with carbon credits, which could be traded and purchased by the top polluting companies. Far from reducing emissions, the ETS became a lucrative system that eventually collapsed due to overexploitation, with huge numbers of carbon credits being issued. Naomi Klein observes that “we have not done the things that are necessary to lower emissions because those things fundamentally conflict with deregulated capitalism, the reigning ideology” (Klein, 2014). In this era, ‘environmental art’ embodies the civic engagement that was sidelined by the authorities. As well as engaging in the aesthetic depiction of natural processes, ‘environmental art’ also has a more ecosophic dimension, seeking to establish new social relationships with the environment by contributing to the protection and regeneration of local communities and places affected by issues relating to the impact of human activity on the environment. One example of this type of artistic intervention is the exhibition curated by Barbara C. Maltinsky at Queens Museum of Art in New York in 1992: Fragile Ecologies: Contemporary Artists’ Interpretations and Solutions (Phillips, 1993). Among the artworks on display is Breathing Space for the Sava River, which is the product of a lengthy participatory process to document and remedy the pollution of the Sava River in Yugoslavia between 1988 and 1990, led by Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison, a pair of artists who had been committed to the environment since the 1970s with their project to make earth in response to environmental challenges. Revival Field by Mel Chin (1990–93) combined art and science to cultivate plants that were capable of absorbing heavy metals and regenerating contaminated soils. The 1980 Ocean Landmark Project was a sculpture made from recycled coal fly-ash blocks, which controlled the rise of the tides and provided a habitat for marine fauna. Finally, Flow City by Mierle Laderman Ukele is an example of the art committed to caring for the environment that the artist proposed in Manifesto For Maintenance Art 1969! The project consisted of taking visitors to a pavilion in a transit area at a port to watch the daily process of managing the city’s waste.

2.3 Landscapes of the Anthropocene Between the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, global disasters began to be more visible and the human race, more interconnected than ever thanks to the spread of new technology, became a tectonic plate whose local actions had global repercussions (Serres, 1995). The practical disappearance of the Aral Sea in 2014 due to mismanagement of water resources to irrigate the huge cotton fields in the Ferghana Valley in the 1960s brought about the formation of the Aralkum Desert and the end of the traditional way of life in this fishing region in what is considered to be the first ecosystem to experience complete collapse. The threat to the Great Barrier Reef in Australia from ocean acidification caused by increasing CO2 emissions in the atmosphere; the rapid spread of vortices of plastic waste, creating

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islands of floating garbage in the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans; the recent COVID-19 pandemic, a zoonotic disease linked to the disappearance of wild species’ habitats and the international trade in wild animals, and the fires that swept across the Amazon in 2019 and strike different green areas of the planet every summer, as well as climate change, are just some of the phenomena that show how inadequate it is to protect sites of universal value and how it is our very survival on Earth that is in jeopardy. Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer’s article Have we entered the Anthropocene?, which appeared in the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme newsletter in 2000, put a name to the catastrophe of our era, which was already being pondered by thinkers such as Isabelle Stengers and Michel Serres, bringing multiple voices from different disciplines together around a common concern: how the myth of modern progress and human exceptionalism had dismissed the Earth’s limits and our undeniable dependency on our planet. The urgency of the current situation has led to the revival of social movements. In 2018, young people around the world walked out of their classrooms and hit the streets, coming together around the slogan ‘There is no Planet B’ and following young Swedish activist Greta Thunberg in the Fridays for Future movement. In light of the failure of earlier environmental policies and the consensus among scientists that the window for action to bring an end to climate change had closed in 2017, political institutions have switched to a policy of urgent adaptation to the new climate conditions. The European Union has described climate change as the greatest challenge of our age and declared it to be one of its priorities, alongside energy efficiency, in order to minimise health risks and preserve biodiversity. Some of the measures adopted recently include the Green Deal (2019) and the Europe 2020 programme, which gave rise to the new European Climate Law (2021), and the New European Bauhaus, which is a programme of incentives to reimagine and transform the economy, adding a cultural, creative dimension to the Green Deal. Amid this new awareness of the global threat to our planet, artists have joined philosophers and scientists in committing to epistemological and ontological change. They aim to move away from the separation between nature and culture and the binaries that have characterised contemporary thought, allowing the Earth to be viewed as a mere object at the service of the subject and a source of unlimited resources for use by humans. As we mentioned earlier, by following these artistic developments and linking the issue of landscape to political ecology, the ENSP journal Les Carnets du Paysage serves as a model upon which to base an initial taxonomy of landscapes in dialogue with the debates surrounding the Anthropocene. The journal features chapters and even entire special issues dedicated to: (a) Intensive agriculture, i.e. landscapes used for farming, crops and forestry, which, when exploited speculatively, destroy the world’s biodiversity; (b) Geologies of disaster, i.e. landscapes shaped by mining rather than urban waste, which cause appalling levels of pollution; (c) The air and landscapes created by power plants and the atmospheric pollution and radiation that they emit;

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(d) The landscapes of construction, which, when misused for nefarious purposes, lead to uncontrolled property speculation; (e) Transoceanic landscapes, on the surface and in the depths, produced by the global trade that is changing everything. The work of the artists who explore these landscapes is characterised by an awareness of the failure of the strategies of appropriation that have sought to subvert the system from within since the 1960s and by the posthumanist need to transcend the bounds of the human and cultural and embrace the Earth and non-humans, not as passive components or sites of new psychosocial relations but as agents with the capacity to create and flourish. The aim, therefore, is to show how their work oscillates between critique of the Capitalocene and proposals for the Neganthropocene, requiring radical creation and suggestions for new ways of life and narratives alongside critical work (Haraway, 2016).

2.3.1

Intensive Agriculture and Biodiversity

One of the concepts associated with the Anthropocene is the ‘sixth mass extinction’, which refers to the fact that the gradual loss of biodiversity on our planet is reaching unsustainable levels. The very idea of ‘biodiversity’ was suggested to make the impact of human activity on the natural environment and the species inhabiting it visible and measurable (Lévêque & Mounolou, 2004). The paradoxes between human agricultural needs and their effects on the planet and its biodiversity are explored in issue 25 of the ENSP journal Les Carnets du Paysage, which focuses on the topic of food (Nourriture). The impact of new, larger, globalised farms began to become apparent from the time of the first encounter between the Old and New Worlds. The arrival of the Europeans in the Caribbean in 1492 and the subsequent annexation of America gave rise to the first global transport networks. These networks allowed Europe to step outside its geographical borders and access affordable resources (raw materials and labour), which enabled economic expansion and industrialisation to take place (Moore, 2016). This period, which may be identified as the origin of the Anthropocene, witnessed the greatest human migration in history and the globalisation of food resources. Plants found in the New World, including potatoes and corn, began to be cultivated in Europe, while traditionally European crops such as sugar cane and wheat were grown in the New World. In conjunction with the arrival of domestic animals and parasites and the accidental transfer of species, this process triggered an unprecedented restructuring of life on Earth (Lewis & Maslin, 2015). As a result, a global ecology emerged whereby the natural environment was coproduced by the accumulation and power struggles that go hand-in-hand with capital. Over time, this encounter between capitalist accumulation and the natural world has brought about a potentially catastrophic crisis. By increasing humans’ dominance and capacity for exploitation, technological development has led to the extinction of species, wiped out by overhunting and overharvesting, and the destruction of entire ecosystems affected by pollution and displaced by human activity, including growing

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urban development and intensive monoculture farming. Some of the most alarming cases are the loss of tropical rainforests and the practical disappearance of the Aral Sea and the Fertile Crescent located between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, which is believed to be the cradle of the Neolithic Revolution and is now little more than a salty wasteland. Delving deeper into the relationship between nature and capital accumulation, Tsing cites the pine forests in Oregon that were planted intensively in the twentieth century and abandoned in 1989 as they were no longer profitable for the logging companies that had planted them (Tsing, 2021: 37–40). A similar phenomenon can be seen in Portugal, where the eucalyptus forests that were planted have been abandoned after destroying the local biodiversity because eucalyptus from Mozambique is cheaper and offers higher profits. However, the ruins left by capital may become a place of resurgence. This has been the case in the pine forests abandoned by the logging industry, where the pioneering Matsutake mushroom species (the ‘mushroom at the end of the world’) has flourished amid the ruins. Its gastronomic value brings precarious life forms an interspecies interdependence that proliferates in the interstices of uncontrolled accumulation. In this degraded environment, the Matsutake, a symbiont with the pine trees, and occasional gatherers, outsiders to the system, construct a way of life in partnership with this resurgent ruin. This complex encounter on the margins or in the abandoned territories of capital becomes compost; in turn, this compost makes it possible for new ways of life to rise up (Haraway, 2016), serving as a model for many contemporary artistic practices. Species protection had already emerged as a concern in 1970s social ecology, with the aforementioned book by Rachel Carson. In the cultural realm, another major turning point was Roger Payne’s Songs of the Humpback Whales, the bestselling environmental music album ever, which brought the emotional lives and complex communication systems of these large marine mammals to the ears of the general public. This led to the appearance of the famous slogan ‘Save the Whales’, greater public awareness and NGOs defending animal life and charismatic endangered species. The concern for species protection came onto the political agenda at the 1992 Earth Summit. As well as the Framework Convention on Climate Change, the Convention on Biological Diversity was also signed at the summit. It describes biological diversity as “the variability among living organisms from all sources, including, inter alia, terrestrial, marine and other aquatic ecosystems and the ecological complexes of which they are part: this includes diversity within species, between species and of ecosystems”. In the economic semiotics of Integrated World Capitalism, biodiversity is equivalent to a ‘gene bank’, which is an essential component in the development of an agricultural and pharmaceutical industry emboldened by biotechnological progress, and countries are granted rights to exploit the pecuniary potential of their biological resources. Contemporary artistic production has sought to draw attention to the biosphere and its non-human inhabitants, not as a resource but as part of an environment that fosters social and affective relationships. In this way, artists join the drive to reinterpret evolution led by Lynn Margulis and her theory of life as interdependence (Margulis, 1988), reflecting the complex sociobiological relationships between environments and human and non-human creatures and the need to preserve diversity for the future of the Earth in their projects.

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In his famous work Condensation Cube (1963–1968), Hans Haacke employed simple physical and chemical procedures—condensing the water vapour present in the air—to showcase the complex systemic relationships shaping our environment, while French artist Fabien Léaustic used similar processes to aesthetically convey the complex processes of living matter that govern and forge our environment yet go largely unnoticed. The installation Ruinas, presented at the Biennale Nemo held by 104 Paris in 2017, comprised a series of large transparent prisms populated by phytoplankton. Connected to a sprinkler system and heated by agricultural lights, the structures gradually shifted from a pale green colour to a dark green algal substance before breaking down, acting as a magnifying glass allowing viewers to observe the future of a landscape that is usually beyond the bounds of our perception. Other, more technically complex projects are situated within natural environments that have been affected by anthropic factors and use complex scientific measuring instruments to obtain data, which are then employed as artistic material for installations that reveal the complex relationships between humans and non-humans. One example is the work of Latvian artists Rasa Smite and Raitis Smits, entitled Atmospheric Forest. Taking place between 2017 and 2020 as part of the interdisciplinary project Ecodata-Ecomedia-Ecoaesthetics led by Yvonne Volkart in Basel (Switzerland), Atmospheric Forest converted data on volatile emissions from drought-stricken trees in Pfynwald forest into an immersive visualisation (Fig. 1). The virtual reality experience reveals a little-known fact: before dying, trees release a large part of the CO2 that they have sequestered from the atmosphere in the form of volatile compounds. Immersed in the odoriferous richness of a forest threatened by climate change, the complex relationships between human activity, flora and the atmosphere are transformed into visual and auditory stimuli. The sound installation by Marcus Maeder, Perimeter Pfynwald (2018–2020) (Fig. 2), is located in the same natural park and is the product of compressing the sound captured in four different biotopes in the park both spatially and temporally. The auditory experience showcases the seasonal changes occurring in the forest, the water babbling as the ice melts, the calls of the different animals inhabiting the forest throughout the year and a synthetic voice predicting the site’s future. As the humidity falls, the tone lowers, while rising temperatures push up the frequency until the sound exceeds the threshold of human hearing and silence falls, representing the end of all life. Whereas the projects described so far draw viewers in as part of the future of the biosphere affected by anthropic activity, other works explore the complex socioecological relationships underpinning the Capitalocene. Disasters such as the disappearance of the Aral Sea and the destruction of the Fertile Crescent not only jeopardise the planet’s biodiversity and sustainability, but also human and non-human ways of life. The extinction of multiple plant and animal species leads to imbalances in the atmosphere and the soil, as well as destroying traditional livelihood practices used by human communities that are rooted in the land, such as farming and fishing. Anna Tsing attributes these negative developments to the plantation system, which is linked to the economic semiotics of capital and its alienating practices. The plantation system views biotic components as resources or economic assets, which are exploited via a standardised, scalable system that destroys the inherent resilience

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Fig. 1 Rasa Smite, Raitis Smits. “Atmospheric Forest” (2020)/“Ecodata–Ecomedia–Ecoaesthetics” (2017–2021). (Purvitis Prize 2021 Final Nominees Exhibition 2021/The National Art Museum of Latvia). Photo Kristine Madjare. Image courtesy of the artist Fig. 2 Marcus Maeder “Perimeter Pfynwald a Soundscape Observatory” (2019 Installation view at Laboral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial Gijón). Image courtesy of the artist

of ecosystems, embodied by a constant remaking of habitable landscapes through interactions between multiple organisms (Tsing, 2017). The plantation stands for simplified ecologies designed to create value for future investments. This approach reflects an alienation from the environment whereby species are dissected from the numerous interspecies, multitemporal relationships that engendered and preserve them and come to be considered as resources or assets as part of a way of life based on homogenising market reproducibility (Tsing, 2021). In this way, the cultivation

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of capital overlooks the multiple, complex histories that created the ecosystem and play a part in its future. Some artists employ artistic experimentation to reconstruct these narratives and move beyond the single discourse of the semiotics of capital. One example can be found in the posthuman narrative of The Museum of the History of Cattle, which was created by Gustafsson & Haapoja in 2014 and exhibited at the Centro de Cultura Contemporánea de Barcelona as part of the Ciencia Fricción exhibition curated by Maria PTqK in 2021 (Fig. 3). Artist Terike Haapoja and writer Laura Gustafsson reconstruct bovine culture and explore its future as it comes into contact with human developments such as urbanisation, industrialisation and the market. Told from a non-human perspective, this tale of indignities recounts the role played by the bovine species in bringing about progress in the modern age as a beast of burden and source of food, while witnessing the shrinking and usurpation of its environment and the reduction of its genetic variation to a single species. In this story of multiple species, the success of social Darwinism and the eugenic practices associated with it, as well as the gradual advance of industrialisation and bioengineering, have reduced this companion species to an asset within the human food market, a reproducible product offering maximum returns, which has gone from inhabiting and evolving in the diverse countryside to decaying in the homogeneous, sterile landscape created by industries operating on a production line basis. This simplification based solely on the need to maximise returns poses a threat to the very survival of the human race. In an environment suffering wild fluctuations as a result of climate damage, this non-diverse species lacks the ability to adapt, compromising one of the most important human food sources on the planet. As well as plotting the complex relationships between humans and non-humans, a more positive approach to interspecies cooperation has also been taken in some ethico-aesthetic practices, including different landscape practices that seek to restore environments that are conducive to fertile diversity. This is the case of the Blue Garden project by French artist Olivier de Sépibus in partnership with the Réliefs association in 2019. In the artist’s previous project, Afleurer le Paysage, he conducted a nomadic investigation on foot, photographing and documenting local plants to produce an inventory of melliferous species. In the Blue Garden (Fig. 4), the plants are distributed according to their flowering season to create an environment for bees to colonise throughout the year, contributing to the spread of this pollinating species and to the future of the biosphere in environments where humans and non-humans coexist alongside one another.

2.3.2

Geologies of Disaster: On the Ruins of Mining Operations

Issue 29 of the ENSP journal Les Carnets du Paysage is dedicated to waste (Déchets). There are many different types of waste but waste from mines and quarries is especially visible and contains hugely dangerous chemicals. Contemporary artists have expressed an interest in quarries since the 1960s. In light of these environmental

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Fig. 3 Gustafsson & Haapoja. “The Museum of the History of Cattle. Historical Time”. Installation view. Image courtesy of the artist

Fig. 4 Olivier de Sépibus «Le Jardin Bleu». General view. Image courtesy of the artist

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disaster zones, numerous artists and critics have followed in the footsteps of Robert Smithson and focused on mining landscapes in Spain and Europe in recent years. Long before all this, the European tradition featured two euphemistic ways of depicting mining landscapes prior to the eruption of the crisis of the Anthropocene in the nineteenth century. According to Piero Camporesi, the most common approach was to describe these landscapes in a utilitarian manner, valuing them for the simple reason that “economic esteem takes absolute priority over aesthetic esteem” (Camporesi, 1995: 11–12). Yet there was also a more dreamlike approach, which appears to have originated with the miners themselves in an attempt to process the harshness of their world and even explain it in a rosier light to their children. Examples of the latter include folk tales and the Handstein mines found in cabinets of curiosities, where the precious metal extracted from the mines was used to create a miniature mining scene (for more information about the Handsteine made of central European mining operations such as those in St. Joachimsthal [Jáchymov] in Bohemia or in Innsbruck in the Tyrol, see: Silvestre, 2012: 93–106; Huber et al. 2005: 134–140; Huber, 1995: 58–67). Meanwhile, references to the mining landscape can also be found in the Far East in the work of seventeenth-century authors such as Yu Yonghe, a geographer and explorer from the Qing Dynasty who set off for Taiwan to find a vital ingredient for the gunpowder industry and ended up portraying the harsh reality of the Taiwanese sulphur mines in a poetic, dreamy light (Teng, 2004: 261–281). As we noted above, today’s problems have nothing to do with any of that. The sense of an impending end that stalks twenty-first century citizens—the shadow of the Capitalocene—elicits a very different gaze from artists and poets than the utilitarian or dreamlike visions seen in the distant past. The change began to become apparent in the nineteenth century. Compared with the idealised visions of quarries and underworlds in previous centuries, the nineteenth century brought with it Zola’s descriptions in Germinal (1885) and the landscapes of the Wieliczka salt mines in Galizia painted by Austrian artist Hugo Charlemont (1850–1939) for the Natural History Museum in Vienna (Jovanovic-Kruspel, 2019). In both cases, a hint of critique is already apparent, paving the way for the great narrative of the ruins of capitalism. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, endemic disease among mining communities and environmental disasters triggered by mining operations were the subject of increasingly bitter debate. In the twentieth century, Sebastião Salgado’s photographs in Serra Pelada may be viewed as heirs of Zola’s literary passages. Here, the target of critique is far broader than the Capitalocene or the capitalist model. The fact that the left-wing imaginary has always associated Western imperialism with miners’ living conditions—the way in which Chinese communist nationalism described the history of the Kaiping mines in China is relevant here (Carlson, 1971: 91)—does not imply that the left has consistently been capable of challenging the environmental damage caused by the exploitation of the Earth’s resources, as it focused instead on the mistreatment of workers. This is apparent from the ecological disasters occurring on both sides of the Iron Curtain throughout the second third of the twentieth century (Feshbach & Friendly, 1992: 101 for a description of the “toxic rust belt of mines” in the Ural Mountains).

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What we wish to emphasise here is that, for decades, mining scenes were the least common landscapes in environmental artworks. It was not until the major disasters in the USA (McNeill & Vrtis, 2006: 191–413) or the seventeen mine tailings dams to collapse in Spain since 1960, releasing millions of cubic metres of toxic sludge (Rodríguez Pacheco et al., 2021: 83–112), that a change of attitude occurred and artworks that followed in the footsteps of Robert Smithson in the USA began to appear. We might cite Smithson or Heizer here because their works explored the topic of mining and ravaged or postindustrial landscapes, as well as occasional environmental ideas that were not commonly discussed, but never resorted to ‘verdolatry’ and consciously rejected bucolicism in favour of neutral or barren aesthetics. The 389 pages of Smithson’s Collected Writings are proof of the extent to which abandoned quarries and mines consumed the artist’s attention from 1968 onwards. By way of example, in a famous text about Olmsted’s Central Park in 1973, he attempted to teach readers to see these spaces through different eyes, through the eyes of a child who knows that there is no better place to play than those huge, artificial, solitary valleys filled with sand and stones. In an almost Hegelian manner, he confessed that “Earth art” worships spaces destroyed by industry and mining and that his objective was to work on the “working sand quarry” on which he based The Broken Circle and Spiral Hill to leave it “cultivated or recycled as art” (Smithson, ‘Frederick Law Olmsted and the Dialectical Landscape’, 1996: 165). Although he prioritised “ruins in reverse” (Smithson, ‘A tour of the monuments of Passaic’, 1996: 72) and the kind of mental recovery that is capable of forgetting trauma in favour of playfulness in this artistic shift, his ideas were shaped by an environmental, social consciousness. If this were in any doubt, it is worth remembering that during one of his trips to Europe—which inspired his work Nonsite, Oberhausen, Germany (1968) (Fig. 5)—Smithson took an interest in coal and was keen to meet the Bechers, who chronicled the devastating crisis in the mining and industrial sector in the Ruhr Basin (Graziani, 2004: 87), and that one of his favourite poets was the great William Carlos Williams, the bard of New Jersey who lamented the mistreatment of the environment in Paterson, who Smithson met in person and always kept in his thoughts (Smithson, 1996: 233, 270, 284–285 and 298; on Paterson, the mistreatment of landscapes in New Jersey and Williams’s literature, see Lowenhaupt Tsing, 2021). In the same year as Smithson wrote his text—which was also the year of his death, 1973—the US Senate issued a series of guidelines for rehabilitating sites destroyed by mining, called ‘Land Reclamation’. The guidelines were quite generic and allowed for attempts to restore sites to their original state or to leave them in another “appropriate” state. In 1979, the King County Arts Commission in Seattle launched a project to rehabilitate devastated mining areas titled Earthworks: Land Reclamation as Sculpture and invited eight artists to carry out interventions at the sites: Herbert Bayer, Iain Baxter, Richard Felischner, Lawrence Hanson, Mary Miss, Dennis Oppenheim, Beverly Pepper and Robert Morris, who took over an old salt mine and did little more than refine it and purify its forms. Something similar can be seen in the 1981 project by Michel Heizer, who was given a “small” commission by the Anaconda Minerals Company measuring 1 km long and 120 m high. The piece did not become famous because Heizer never completed it but it is preserved for posterity in the photographic study

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Fig. 5 Robert Smithson. «Non-site»—December 1968, Oberhausen, Germany. Image courtesy of IVAM—Centre Julio González

Geometrical Land Sculptural, which reveals its immense size (Tiberghien, 2012: 119–135). In the context that is geographically closest to us and represents the main focus of this study—twenty-first century Latin Europe—the explorations by Eva Lootz and Diego Arribas are of particular interest. Although she has continued to take notes and record the phenomenon in the twenty-first century, Eva Lootz sets an example with her lengthy career. Her work dates back to the 1970s, when she began to produce what could be referred to as her ‘Wolfram diaries’, which were made up of notes, maps, drawings and scraps of odd materials. Quarries, tracks, simulated trading routes recreating ancient paths, mines such as those found at Monte Neme… She drew inspiration from the mining operations that were set up to harden German steel from 1918 and were particularly active during World War II. Lootz mapped the sites where the mines were located, without losing sight of the memory of the slave labour force taken there to work; during the Franco dictatorship, the regime’s political prisoners were forced to work in the mines (Solans, 2017: 112–144). As well as Lootz’s work, the collective projects coordinated by Diego Arribas are also relevant here as they feature other noteworthy elements. Besides the tradition of reflection and critique, there is also a tradition of simply looking on. Some of Smithson’s comments on quarries as playgrounds or picturesque places make it rather difficult to interpret his work solely from the perspective of environmental politics. At some points, he cites Cézanne and observes how he contented himself with depicting quarries such as the quarry at Bibémus (ca. 1890) in a way that was simply beautiful. The intent here is ironic but it would be a mistake to view contemporary artworks of quarries and mines purely as protest. Javier Tudela’s installation at Mina Menerillo in 2000 contains several intra-artistic allusions (critiquing the grand displays of Land

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Fig. 6 Javier Tudela. «Por favor, dos sillas para Narciso Tomé», 2000, Mina Menerillo, Ojos Negros, Teruel. Image courtesy of the artist

Art and the art of the past) and some manifestly contemplative elements (Fig. 6). The mine and the rainwater, and perhaps even nature as a whole, were already creating art before the artist’s intervention. Tudela’s project must be viewed through the same lens as the work produced in Spain in recent years by Diego Arribas. His projects all relate to the country’s lost mining heritage and to the artistic interventions that may be created in and with this heritage. Abandoned mines are more than just playgrounds: they are part of our history and examples of natural regeneration processes that it is important to showcase.

2.3.3

Invisible Dystopias: On Emissions and Radiation

Another two issues of the ENSP journal Les Carnets du Paysage (no. 36 and 41) are dedicated to Énergie and Air respectively. The selection of these themes reflects the importance of the issue of air pollution and, by extension, of nuclear contamination in current debates on the political ecology of the landscape. In this section, we will analyse the presence of atmospheres degraded by the energy industry, especially nuclear energy, coal and other fossil fuels, in contemporary art. Artistic interpretations of the impact of air pollution may be divided into two groups: those that focus on pollution caused by scheduled and/or desired emissions, primarily derived from burning fuel, and those that explore pollution caused by undesired emissions associated with accidents, spills and specific disasters. The material bodies of ruin, such

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as the numerous dismantled factories and mortally wounded ecosystems left to die, offer a framework for reflection and intervention in an artistic practice that fluctuates between condemnation of this ruinous state of affairs and suggestions of new narratives to reverse the ruins. Cartography and mapping are used to draw attention to the contamination and degradation, alongside speculative fiction that explores what it would be like to live in a world where the very air is toxic. As we noted in the Introduction, nuclear disaster has immense narrative power and has been the cornerstone of the environmental imaginary from the outset. The origin of the concept of the Anthropocene is closely linked to the issue of nuclear contamination and Crutzen, who coined the term, spent his career studying the depletion of the ozone layer and the consequences of nuclear disaster (Rodríguez-Alonso, 2017). In recent decades, the Fukushima disaster in Japan marked a new milestone in the history of nuclear disasters and came to be seen as a twenty-first century Chernobyl. The lack of transparency from the Japanese government (DeSoto, 2016) led many artists to feel obliged to document and record the disaster and its consequences for human, animal and plant life. To do so, they positioned themselves at the intersection between art, activism and the development of new epistemologies. This intersection is perfectly exemplified by the activist art and interventions coming out of the Fukushima disaster. Experimental architect Pablo de Soto sought to map the complex system behind the disaster at Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, drawing on Donna Haraway’s concepts of Chtulucene and string figures (Haraway, 2016). The aim here is to identify the ways in which the narrative of the Anthropocene is challenged when its most adverse manifestations appear and to see how nuclear disaster has brought art, citizen science and political activism together in unlikely alliances that seek to subvert official discourse. In the case of Fukushima, collective practices based on citizen cooperation, common politics, decolonialism and open-source technologies are a paradigmatic feature of the art of our era, as the success (or failure) of the latest Documenta (15) exhibition in Kassel demonstrates. The ‘ruangrupa’ art collective, which was responsible for the artistic direction of the exhibition, uses the concept of ‘lumgbung’ to refer to a collectivist, collaborative shift in the contemporary art system. Although nuclear exclusion zones operate like genuine black boxes, where all information is controlled by the government and any visual regime is hijacked to become mere representation, artists continue to strive to reintroduce the imaginary of destruction. In both Fukushima and Chernobyl, those ‘affected’ were erased: animals were contaminated and slaughtered, while clean-up workers were discarded and dehumanised. In response to the complex, multilevel nature of nuclear environmental disasters, the response of the state is akin to a necropolitics, based on institutional supervision of the slow deaths of people and animals. This official ‘erasure’ of disaster is exacerbated by the fact that nuclear radiation is uniquely unrepresentable. It is precisely this invisibility that gives rise to radiophobia, or the panic and paranoia that occurs following a nuclear disaster. Only radiation detection devices can give an accurate indication of contamination levels and they are not widely available. In response to widespread disinformation and lack

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of transparency, citizens have taken the initiative and developed their own technologies, information networks, radiation maps and databases, as well as building their own radiometers. The Safecast platform is a paradigmatic example of the spread of citizen science (Brown et al., 2016). Against this backdrop, art and science come together to tackle disasters. How can we represent an invisible danger? How can we document nuclear disaster? In response to this challenge, several artistic alternatives have emerged. Desolate landscapes have been the subject of multiple photo series: buildings crumbling due to the passage of time, huge heaps of radioactive waste and homes and shops frozen in time at the moment of the disaster. Wim Wenders’s Ground Zero (2013) photo series is one example, exploring Fukushima after the reactor exploded. When it comes to Cold War nuclear ruins, Nadav Kander’s photo series on Chernobyl (2004) and different nuclear ruins (Dust, 2011) are particularly significant. Yet beyond the absence of humans and the bleakness of the desolate landscape, there is something unrepresentable in all these photographs whose presence can nonetheless be sensed: an invisible radioactive breeze (Fig. 7). The series Fukushima No-Go-Zone by photographers Carlos Ayesta and Guillaume Bression is another example. In the series, the photographers invite the people displaced by the Fukushima explosion to return to the ravaged landscapes they once inhabited and to act as if nothing had happened, as if it were possible to continue to live in an apocalyptic landscape. The quest for alternative ways of portraying nuclear disaster besides these desolate landscapes is embodied by artists such as Florian Ruiz, who aims to depict the

Fig. 7 Carlos Ayesta. Fukushima no-go zone. Bression

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Fig. 8 Florian Ruiz. Fukushima invisible pain

effects of radioactivity in his series Fukushima: Invisible Pain by combining longexposure photographs with microsievert (Sv) radiation meters on the photographic film itself (Fig. 8). In the artist’s own words, the aim is “to capture the invisible pain of radiation”. Another example of an artist who strives to represent the invisible danger of radioactivity is Shimpei Takeda, who presented his photographic project Traces at the Fukushima Biennale. Seeking to ‘capture’ and ‘document’ the disaster, the project shares common features with Ruiz’s work. In his project, the photographer uses a photosensitive material (gelatin bromide) and exposes the film to the contaminated soil in Fukushima in a box without light for a month in an attempt to find traces of radiation. It is curious to observe how graphic artists and photographers tackle the issue of representing the unrepresentable nature of nuclear contamination, those traces of disaster that operate between the visible and the invisible. Only the most sophisticated technical methods are capable of revealing the visible effects of radiation immediately but, over time, contaminated ecosystems lead to mutations in the beings that have been exposed. With this in mind, scientific illustrator Cornelia Hesse-Honneger has spent decades documenting mutations in insects from Chernobyl. It is important to acknowledge that these strategies, which combine new, noninstitutional methods for disseminating data, activism (or artivism) and censure to give rise to alternative, counterhegemonic epistemologies, do not solely aim to critique or to establish new regimes of sensibility. They also seek to design strategies for intervention, regeneration and subversion, imagine post-disaster spaces and cartographies and reinvent the ruins of the nuclear Entropocene via a form of mapping that suggests subaltern epistemologies. Two projects, which are linked by a common thread that goes beyond the theme of nuclear disaster, are of significance here. In 2020, the Forensic Architecture collective presented the Cloud Studies project, which explores aesthetic issues relating to the quintessential atmospheric phenomenon, clouds, and ponders the politics of the air itself: in other words, it considers how a “toxic common” came to be created, made up

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of a series of “cloud formations that contain poison or are full of cement, construction materials, fabrics, garbage, household items, and sometimes even the remains of human bodies that have been blown up into the air”. The project documents and reflects on the violence conveyed by the air, from the cluster bombs falling on Gaza to the recent warehouse explosion in Beirut and the gases used by police forces around the world to repress attempts at subversion. The main focus of this forensic architecture and cartography is to identify the traces of environmental ‘crime’. This atmospheric commons is at once a scientific, political and artistic issue, echoing the complex nature of the Anthropocene itself. For some time now, the Manifest Data Lab collective has been building multiple networks between climate scientists and artists with the aim of reimagining disaster and condemning the policies underpinning the “atmospheric commons” (2022), combining scientific narratives and data visualisation with speculative fiction on the future of humanity. The air is understood as a realm where the sensory and the political collide and where geochemical processes, industrial infrastructure and animal societies come into contact with one another. Here, the aim is to challenge the narratives that link these atmospheric commons: “Using speculative mappings; animations, physical models and public workshops we chart the processes of planetary energy exchange that compose the atmosphere alongside the socio-technical assemblages refiguring it” (Manifest Data Lab, 2021). The Manifest Data Lab collective are keen to provoke discussion around the idea of ‘Who owns the air?’, which serves not only as a critique but also as a springboard for questioning the immediate future. Both projects argue for the urgent need to devise new ways of being in the world and new political, mental and natural ecologies (Guattari’s three ecologies) in a toxic, policed, commodified sociometabolic regime. The drive to document the ruins of the air is not limited to detecting the traces of disaster. With artworks that challenge the narrative of the Anthropocene, artists strive to imagine new futures. However, these visions do not entail creating new orchards or planning and organising degraded land; instead, they aim to “collect up the trash of the Anthropocene, the exterminism of the Capitalocene, and chipping and shredding and layering like a mad gardener, make a much hotter compost pile for still possible pasts, presents, and futures” (Haraway, 2016: 98). In reality, this is a response to the paradox inherent in attempts to regenerate the ruins of capitalism using the same methods, albeit more subtle, as those that caused the disaster in the first place: land-use planning, monetisation, revival of economic practices, recapitalisation, etc. Rather, the subversive act of any ruin is to host or foster unexpected lives and dynamics that elude any kind of planning, establishing alliances and deviant symbioses that have no place in proper governmental or institutional management. Ruins are not so much remains or nostalgic vestiges of the past as something that challenges us from the future. Therefore, many of these practices are used not only to highlight and re-embody in the realm of sensibility what had until now been the property of the scientific community—data, infographics, statistics and maps of disaster—but also to prepare modus operandi for a possible future. As we have already observed, many of these interdisciplinary collectives base their methodologies on collectivisation,

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reinventing the commons, establishing collaborative policies and advocating a ‘doit-together’ philosophy. In this context, the work of Tomás Saraceno and the Aerocene collective is particularly illustrative. Based on a critique that interacts with the work of the previous two collectives, their aim is to answer the question ‘How can we breathe again?’. Imagining what it might be like to live in a ‘post-fossil fuel’ era, Aerocene engage in a series of collective practices to design aerosolar sculptures (Fig. 9), which, instead of using combustion to induce movement, rise up as a result of the sun’s heat, floating on air currents and offering an ‘aero-nomadic’ way of inhabiting the landscape (cloudscape) without emitting CO2 gas. This collective, interdisciplinary project seeks to decolonise the air, propose new ways of inhabiting the sky, forge communities and combine science, technology, politics, ecology and art. On their website (aerocene.org), Aerocene provide diagrams showing how to build the sculptures, which are available in an open source format. Anyone who wishes to do so can download the diagrams and build ‘glocal’ communities around these performative practices. The initiative is also a tribute to slowness and ‘going with the flow’, countering what Virilio referred to as “dromospheric pollution”, or in other words, the domination of the “economy of speed” and instantaneity over the “trajective” (Virilio, 1995). Finally, our review of projects that seek to censure and revive aerial landscapes saturated with industrial pollution reveals a third type of artistic manifestation. Air is also a conduit for sound waves, so some creators have worked with sound ruins

Fig. 9 Tomás Saraceno. Aerocene. Solar Sculptures

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that serve as proof of this entropic degradation. Moving beyond mere noise pollution, which can be found in many of the Earth’s megacities, these projects explore the soundscapes of ruins and reveal an unexpected wealth of life. One example is Danish artist Jacob Kierkegaard’s documentation of the nuclear ruins at Chernobyl in 4 Rooms (2005) and Aión (2006). He positions microphones in different parts of the Chernobyl exclusion zone, recording the empty, desolate settings using different sound capture techniques. Then, by layering audio tracks, he creates a ‘drone’ filled with harmonics and ghostly vibrations. Combining sound installation and photography, Kierkeegard documents the memory of the disaster but also evokes the imperceptible “sonic microcosm” of the landscapes left by nuclear disaster as a gateway to new sensorialities, steering clear of any attempt to romanticise the ruins or indulge in fetishistic practices such as ‘ruin porn’.

2.3.4

Artistic and Property Speculation: On the Landscapes of the Urban Frenzy

Issue 32 of the ENSP journal Les Carnets du Paysage explores Le chantier: human construction sites and their landscape potential. In some regards, the construction sector must also be considered in association with the relentless processes of urbanisation and property speculation seen in the Anthropocene. As a result of its late development and mass tourism, Spain has been one of the European countries that has suffered most acutely from these processes. There is no more infamous example than the enormous hotel built at Algarrobico beach in the Cabo de Gata natural park. This is just one of hundreds of cases that everyone has heard of and that have been compiled in publications such as España Fea (Rubio, 2022: 163–165). If we return to the art world, we can see how critiques of uncontrolled urbanisation in the Capitalocene overlap with proposals for the Neganthropocene. This shift can be perfectly illustrated by comparing the critical projects by Almárcegui (2005), Schulz-Dornburg (2012) and Hans Haacke (2012) with more recent, optimistic proposals such as Life Pletera (2014–2018) that are emerging in Europe, and in Spain especially. Lara Almarcegui’s work in Rotterdam and later in other places such as Santiago de Compostela can only be fully understood by travelling to the Dutch city’s river port and exploring the 70 km that it covers; in other words, by coming face to face with the setting that inspired Almarcegui’s works and the tens of kilometres of shipping containers and wastelands linked to international trade at the second largest freight port on the planet. In essence, what Almarcegui demonstrates in her mapping of wastelands and ruins in Rotterdam and in other, much more picturesque locations such as Santiago de Compostela (Invitación a visitar o descampado de Fontiñas, in collaboration with CGAC) is that nothing that we see in urban settings is the product of a free flow of open-ended processes: instead, these settings are governed by visible and invisible networks of power and capital. In some cases, the focus is on private properties that are about to be built, which are dependent on flexible urban planning regulations, and in others, on plots of land crisscrossed by networks of wires, fibreoptic cables, pipes and underground gas pipelines, which give the impression of a

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wasteland engulfed by the undergrowth but are actually governed by clear interests (Almarcegui, 2005). Meanwhile, the projects by Haacke and Schulz-Dornburg explore more obvious, less subtle aspects of the same capitalist pressure that is present in urban speculation. In Castles in the Sky, Haacke (2012) described the huge urban developments built to the south of Vallecas in Madrid, which were left completely empty and deserted. Despite the development being located next to the city’s main ring roads and being seen from afar by millions of drivers each year, many of Madrid’s residents were shocked to see the images taken for MNCARS. Meanwhile, in Modern Ruins, SchulzDornburg (2012) zoomed in on vast developments of suburban houses and tourist villas, which were left unfinished in many cases due to the speculation crisis and the bursting of the property bubble in 2008. In both cases, the artists aimed to showcase ‘topographies of profit’ and contribute images to the narrative of the Capitalocene at a time when it was definitively taking hold all over the globe (Fig. 11). When the logic of ‘optimising developments’ is replaced by the logic of ‘optimising profits’, the system becomes unbalanced and spawns its own monstrosities, as the construction sector and property speculation have shown. This results in the ruins that capitalism continues to produce on a colossal scale. We have already mentioned the pine forests in Oregon, abandoned by the logging companies that planted them in 1989 (Tsing, 2021: 37–40), as an example of the ruins of capitalism. In Portugal, the eucalyptus forests that were planted have been abandoned because eucalyptus from Mozambique is cheaper and offers higher profits. These ruins are accompanied by the immense ruins created by the property sector. As Ramón del Castillo commented after seeing Schulz-Dornburg’s images: The ruins left by a property bubble are very different to those in industrial areas. The latter fall into disrepair after being used and evoke an economic past that was once viable (or at least appeared to be so) but that fell into decline, a thriving market that has since shrunk, a production model in the process of extinction. By contrast, the architecture of property speculation enters its ruinous state before it has finished being built and begun to be used (Castillo, 2019: 149–150).

The scene, so often depicted by contemporary filmmakers and novelists, takes on chilling overtones. What could have caused these ruins and made everyone disappear? The questions surrounding these sites may be considered from a psychoanalytical perspective, but, as Mark Fisher notes, they may also be applied “to the forces that govern capitalist society”. Why? Because “capital is at every level an eerie entity: conjured out of nothing, capital nonetheless exerts more influence than any allegedly substantial entity” (Fisher, 2016: 13). In short, the whole country and planet are subjected to the ruthless logic of an entirely metaphysical, deterritorialised capital that is far-removed from any use value or teleonomic or elementary economy—from the plantations grown to feed a family or a village and from the little houses intended to provide shelter for growing families—akin to a blind sculptor who perceives the ground we tread as nothing more than an oscillating exchange value dependent on trends, stock market wars and sociological developments. Against this backdrop, the classic ‘optimisation or improvement of certain exploitations’ in the agricultural, mining, energy and industrial sectors is outstripped by ‘implotations’ in property and

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Fig. 10 Julia Schulz-Dornburg. Modern Ruins, 2012. Image courtesy of the photographer

all kinds of other sectors, while the ‘explosive’ growth of the former is substituted by the ‘implosive’ growth of the latter. Neither of the two fit the idea of landscape that we are advocating here but the latter appear quite dystopian, as, rather like a bonfire at an immense contemporary potlatch, the rise of property assets available for large companies in the sector to sell lacks any purpose or objective beyond outpacing the competition, even if this means jeopardising the economy of huge countries if any or all of the adversaries should fall. In other words, the construction of property developments and the issuing of mortgage loans are intended not to produce something viable but to enable companies to show, with figures, that they are worth more than the next company, even if only temporarily. What lies behind this is either a visionless, molecular real estate and lending operation that, when combined, may trigger unexpected ‘bifurcations’ on a systemic scale or a ruthless warrior mentality where the only options are to win or die. Indeed, the fighting spirit of those who appear to have risen to the top blinds them to all else and the parties are gripped in a constant struggle, willing to do whatever it takes to be the ones left standing, moving their pieces as if on a battle board: they are driven by a compulsion that, like Han, we could consider thanatophilic (Han, 2022) and that has colossal repercussions. It matters little whether the pieces that they move are people or properties, whole cities, monocultures or factories; this is the art of war transferred to the world of finance. This world revolves around prestige and prestige is derived from both the capacity for infinite growth and the courage to burn it all

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down, although here we are talking about regions and countries reduced to mere figures and numbers. Contrasting with the overt criticism of the Capitalocene seen in the work of Almarcegui, Schulz-Dornburg and Haacke is the Life Pletera project, which was funded by the EU and launched in Torroella in Girona province in Spain in 2014. La Pletera is an area on the coast between the Els Griells de l’Estartit development and Garganta del Ter, in the middle of the Montgrí, Medes Islands and Baix Ter Natural Park. It is a large site, covering approximately 86 hectares, which is part of the Natura 2000 network. At the height of a wave of speculative development, a promenade and a large housing development that was originally designed to cover six blocks began to be built in the area in 1987. In the end, the project was brought to a halt and only one block was built as the urban development process was gradually abandoned over the course of the 1990s. Later on, in the twenty-first century, the area adjoining the Natura 2000 site was consolidated and La Pletera became a clear example in Catalonia of the ruins of speculative capitalism that we have talked so much about here. This is all well-known but what is most interesting about this example is the series of initiatives that have been successively implemented at the site since the Life Pletera project began. In the twenty-first century, La Pletera has served both to draw attention to the crisis of the model underpinning the Capitalocene and to demonstrate the potential of the Neganthropocene, so it is particularly relevant to examine the projects carried out in the area. We first heard about the project in 2017 at a seminar organised by the Observatori del Paisatge de Catalunya titled (Des)fer el paisatge. In our case, we were eager to speak about ‘Ruïnes a l’inrevés’, or the potential for germination and future regeneration that lies in all fallow land and wasteland (Silvestre, 2018b). Similarly, the new political actors and the different artists intervening in the abandoned space insisted on the potential held within the ruin (Sala, 2018). Back in 2017, a visit to the site left an impression of unnecessary destruction and a sense of crisis that was intimately linked to the narrative of the Capitalocene. Of course, “(des)fer paisatges” [(un)making landscapes] was a way of triggering a shift towards the possibility of “(re)fer paisatges” [(re)making landscapes]. This was necessary for one very simple reason. As Peran notes: “Areas abandoned by the production system create a kind of contested ruin, a space of remains shaped by the rivalry that emerges between its availability for informal purposes and the capitalist pressure to reinject it with a new productive vocation” (Peran, 2018a: 86). The project at La Pletera (Fig. 11) had a positive outcome because both the environmental dimension, which ultimately proved to be predominant (http://lifepletera.com), and the artistic interventions at the site over the years spoke the language of contemporary issues and eternal regeneration. It was fascinating to see how it took only a few months for the pandemic to achieve what environmentalists had struggled to do for years: as the traffic dwindled, urban areas were spontaneously reconquered and renaturalised by plants and animals. Both nature and play prove to be easy to accommodate: often, all they need is a patch of wasteland. Among the proposals made for Lloc, Memòria i Salicòrnies, the work of Joan Vinyes stands out in particular. He opted to preserve some of the remains of the ruin—more specifically, a series of columns left behind when the roundabouts on

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Fig. 11 Pere Sala. La Pletera, Torroella de Montgrí, Girona, 2020. Image courtesy of the photographer

the old urbanised promenade were demolished—in order to show their interactions with the natural ecosystem. The columns, which are buried in a staggered pattern, establish a two-way flow of time: as soon as they appear to be sinking, they emerge from the ground, evoking the movement of the dunes and the wetlands at La Pletera, which are constantly reshaped by floods and flows (Peran, 2018b: 141).

2.3.5

Large-Scale Dumping and Ocean Highways

Another two issues of Les Carnets du Paysage (23 and 34) explore: (a) the planetary deterritorialisation caused by the constant movement of living beings and people and by the non-stop trading of raw materials and other kinds of products, and (b) the ocean waters that withstand the impact of this intense activity. Earlier on, we mentioned that the air pollution caused by nuclear disasters led to a heightened perception of the dangers of the Anthropocene. These dangers are even more apparent in the oceans,

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where the vast majority of the nuclear and industrial waste emitted into the air ends up. Both directly, as in Fukushima, and indirectly, through geochemical cycles, radioactive waste in the seas and oceans has become the main stratigraphic indicator of the Anthropocene. Meanwhile, the increasing acidification of the seas is the direct result of pollutant gas emissions and negligent handling of industrial waste, which has led to an unchecked increase in heavy metals and microplastics in marine ecosystems. The appearance of large islands of plastic in the Pacific, known as garbage patches, is also symptomatic and has created a new landscape that constitutes a human, marine, organic and climatic assemblage (scholars are even starting to speak of a “novel ecosystem”, known as “neopelagic communities”, cf. Haram et al., 2021). Besides direct discharges of waste and fishing operations, anthropic activity in the oceans also takes the form of a huge network of trade routes, where large ships transport all kinds of products and materials, some of which are highly toxic. There is also an invisible network of submarine pipelines carrying oil and gas, which underpins a global energy economy (Starosielski, 2015). To borrow the terminology employed by Deleuze and Guattari (1987), we can see how the ocean— the quintessential smooth space—is transformed into a striated space crisscrossed by a whole series of trade flows, fishing routes, submarine cables, oil pipelines, gas pipelines, etc. These trade routes not only encourage the transport of resources and goods, but also of plant and animal species that travel around the world in their containers, producing all kinds of hybrid ecosystems. Often, these huge cargo ships are left to their fate, creating coastal landscapes dotted with industrial ruins. These aesthetic resources inspired Alejandro Alonso Estrella’s film Abisal (2021), which won an award at Mieres Under-60’ Film Festival in 2022. The film explores the lives of the ‘scrappers’, workers who, like ‘recycling bacteria’, are capable of reabsorbing the colossal amounts of waste produced by marine industrial activity. The scrappers have developed an entire mythology around these large vessels. This clearly illustrates how the ruins of the Capitalocene are symbolic as well as material and are influenced by collective narratives. Covered in rust and molluscs, the large ships washed up on the beaches exemplify the dual nature of the ruin, which serves as substrate for new lives, new mythologies and new assemblages. The constant dumping of plastic and other types of waste in the oceans is rapidly transforming the marine environment into a wasteland. Before it became apparent that industrial waste was transforming the seas and oceans into the biggest ruin of late capitalism so far, we were already familiar with another, more visible, more dramatic kind of disaster: large-scale accidents resulting in spills of hydrocarbons and other fossil fuels. On this matter, Allan Sekula’s photo series on the crises of industrial capitalism are particularly relevant. As well as photographing dockworkers at megaports around the world, Sekula also set his sights on the shipwreck of the Prestige cargo ship in 2002 off the Galician coast on the north-western edge of the Iberian Peninsula, a hotspot for global goods transport networks. In response to the disaster and the authorities’ negligent handling of it, an unprecedented citizen movement emerged to protest at the environmental impact of the disaster and mobilise

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Fig. 12 Allan Sekula. The Lottery of the Sea 2006. Image courtesy of MNCARS

tens of thousands of volunteers to clean the oil from the beaches (Fig. 12) (Sekula, Black Tide). By documenting maritime disasters and the lives of dockworkers and sailors, Sekula casts light on the peripheries of delocalised global capitalism. His work culminated in the film The Lottery of the Sea (2006), which was “designed as an essay based on research on several fronts, focusing on the idea of risk in the global economy and emerging forms of popular resistance” (Rodríguez-González, 2020). Sekula’s objective is to document the forgotten, liminal spaces of global industrial capitalism and the living conditions of sailors and dockworkers from a materialist perspective (Van Gelder, 2015). Whereas Sekula’s work has a strong element of censure of the Capitalocene, Maria Thereza Alves echoes Gilles Clément and appears to advocate a shift towards the Neganthropocene. Clément explores the promising concept of the ‘planetary garden’, while Alves focuses on graphic examples of how this garden has gradually been created. Global trade transports many more species around the planet than intended. In The Seeds of Change (1999-present), for example, Alves studied ballast flora, or the seeds that travel from America to Europe and other continents mixed with sand, stones and wood, which arrive in ports like Marseille (de Llano, 2017). These tiny plants begin to grow in the gutters at the ports. Most of them die, while the most well-known species become invasive; a third set neither take over and impoverish native ecosystems nor die, establishing relationships with potential symbiotic organisms and the environment. As Clément emphasises, all gutters are potential gardens. The difference between a garden and a wasteland is that the latter is much poorer by definition. Human monocultures covering millions of hectares are impoverished wastelands on the brink of disaster; with just one or two species covering

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entire regions, an epidemic could transform the whole region into a desert in one fell swoop. By contrast, more biodiverse ecosystems are far more resilient, as what some species are unable to withstand is perfectly tolerable and even useful to others. In a context of monocultures, there can be no doubt that the planetary garden is largely the product of human trade movements. As well as reconstructing unwritten histories of human culture, including from a postcolonial and decolonial perspective—as Alves suggests—these hybrid gutter ecosystems also function as reservoirs of unexplored biodiversity and richness (Clément, 1999). To conclude, we will reflect on landscape and sonic ruins, and on two artworks that are particularly significant in this regard: Kierkeegard’s Testimonium (2019) and Ursula Biemann’s Acoustic Ocean (2018). Kierkegaard’s work echoes the two projects on Chernobyl that were mentioned earlier. Once again, it consists of harnessing the soundscape of highly contaminated rivers, huge piles of rubbish and degraded industrial areas. The artist aims to position himself within the rubbish itself and record the infrasounds produced by our waste to cast light on something that is often hidden: the material impact of unchecked industrial production. Biemann’s work also embarks upon a sonic exploration of the unseen landscapes of the Anthropocene (cf. Biemann ‘Geochemistry & other planetary perspectives’ in Davis & Turpin, 2014), using ‘hydrophones’ and parabolic microphones below the water to probe the ‘sonic ecology’ of marine life (Fig. 14). Her work combines performance, video and installation, aspiring to trace the tentacular networks proposed by Haraway and Braidotti (2006) to develop multispecies and posthuman feminist narratives. A techno-organic, cyborg body—that of singer Sofía Jannok—attempts to break through into unexplored regions of the marine soundscape, forming an assemblage that is intended to transcend the critical distance between the scientist and their object of study and creating the sympoiesis proposed by Haraway as a posthuman co-evolution or co-creation.

3 Conclusion. On the Anthropocene ‘Scapelands’ The debate surrounding the Anthropocene is nothing new. Conceptually speaking, it echoes discussions around earlier concepts such as Verdansky’s ‘Noosphere’. It also reflects an awareness of the natural environment that began to take shape in the late 1960s in the science and art worlds. However, by contrast with earlier ideas and contexts, it points to a shift in mentality: we have reached a critical phase in the discovery of the natural ‘other’, alongside the feminine ‘other’ and the colonial subject in art, and an awareness of the ubiquitous ruin caused by a disastrous ‘organology’ in which the logic of globalised capital carries us towards inevitable catastrophe. The disaster of the Anthropocene is social and political as well as environmental, influencing individual modes of subjectivation or composition, a lack of future prospects and a paralysing depowerment of humankind. Whether it is ‘ecosofy’ or whatever underpins the theories on which it is based, contemporary art invents strategies to raise awareness of this trauma and assimilate it in order to bring about

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Fig. 13 Ursula Biemann. Acoustic Ocean. 2018. Image courtesy of the artist

a revival or, at the very least, an ability to learn to live with the ruins. It attempts to make the Anthropocene as thin a layer as possible (Haraway, 2016) and render the space habitable for any human or non-human that finds themselves wandering helplessly amid the landscape of future devastation. Against this backdrop, we have presented an overview of artistic narratives in these pages, most of which are from southern Europe, which encompass three strategies and track the shift from the ruins of capitalism associated with the Capitalocene to the ‘reversal of ruins’ and the Neganthropocene. This approach was necessary as to produce an acritical history of new landscapes of the Anthropocene as envisaged by contemporary artists would be to risk merely repeating the narrative handed down to us and drawing up long lists of dystopias and disasters, when the reality is that artists and landscape artists today have moved beyond this single critical register. In an attempt to break free from the ontopolitical rigidity of this impending end of a dying world, artists have spent the last fifteen years attempting to broaden the narrative on the Anthropocene (Crutzen & Stoermer, 2000) and the Capitalocene (Klein, 2014; Moore, 2016) with the help of conscious, critical responses from thinkers such as Haraway, with her Cthulucene (Haraway, 2016), and Stiegler, with his Negantropocene (Stiegler, 2018). This has triggered a shift from a utilitarian or oneiric/romantic appreciation of the landscape to strategies based on: (a) drawing attention to and censuring the degeneration of nature by the relationships of exploitation and accumulation imposed upon it by capital, and (b) demonstrating how nature is an active agent of unpredictable change and adaptation rather than a passive receptacle or resource. As we have seen, in the 1970s, Haacke, Robert Payne and Smithson portrayed the landscape not in terms of aesthetic appreciation but with all its complexity, degradation and historical social processes, raising the possibility of a ‘recycled’ landscape. It was not until the early twenty-first century

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that the different types of landscapes of the Anthropocene presented here spread and artists began to explore their ideas in the European context. The most recurring types of Anthropocenic landscapes employed by creators relate to: the impact of the spread of intensive agriculture on biodiversity; the impact of mining waste on land pollution; the role of the energy industry in air pollution; the impact of urban expansion and property speculation, especially in vast trading areas such as Rotterdam and in southern Europe, and finally, the catastrophic transoceanic landscapes created by global maritime trade, both on the surface and in the depths. Regardless of whether the strategies employed focus more on critiquing the Capitalocene or constructing a new Neganthropocene, there is no doubt that these artists all adopt a perspective that may be described as deriving from ‘political ecology’ rather than turning to the sugar-coated, aestheticist ‘landscape art’ of the past. Moreover, the emphasis on destruction and ruins ties in with an avant-garde conceptual movement that dates back to the emergence of surrealism and that we have referred to elsewhere as ‘dépaysage’ or ‘scapeland’. The ‘dépaysage’ or ‘scapeland’ of the wild avant-gardes was terribly critical of academic art and its obsession with classical beauty and of the real environment fostered by the institutions in rural and urban areas; their insistence on ruins was a clear symptom of their way of thinking (Silvestre, 2022). Then, as today, we encounter artists who find no joy in the bucolic gaze and who focus more on ‘de-landscapes’ than on ‘landscapes’, or in other words, on processes of decline or regeneration. Their perspective is always decidedly critical and closely linked to the ruins of our era. By way of conclusion, we might identify three key, recurring trends in the strategies employed by artists: (a) Firstly, we must highlight the work of the creators who render the invisible visible, re-establishing the Anthropocene in the realm of sensibility (Davis & Turpin, 2014). This includes works that use pollutants as a material of expression (oil, hydrocarbons, plastic, rubbish, waste) and projects that produce cartographies, maps and atlases of disaster. The aim here, of course, is to document and condemn ruin. The work of Léaustic, Maeder, Rasa Smite and Raitis Smits is particularly relevant as it explores processes of life that are beyond the bounds of our perception but in which we inevitably play a part and are constantly transforming. It is also worth mentioning the critique of the deterritorialisation triggered by capital in different ecosystems that can be found in the work of Sekula, Almarcegui, Schulz-Dornburg and Hans Haacke, as well as the censure of the damaging territorialisation of the landscape by mining and property speculation. Meanwhile, the atmospheric evidence of environmental crime is tracked by creators such as Forensic Architecture. (b) Secondly, artists propose all kinds of ‘speculative designs’, which is the term used these days to refer to art projects and works that explore new future fictions and alternative ways of inhabiting disaster. In a context where capitalism is reproduced automatically and entropically, the aim here is to invent different ethics and forms of savoir vivre and attempt to reverse the ruins of capitalism via negentropic reorganisation of the debris it has left behind (Stiegler, 2018),

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moving from merely critiquing and mapping to designing the new modes of existence required in these Anthropocenic settings (Haraway, 2016). Proposals that envisage how a different reality might flourish in gutters and wastelands, or how the landscape may be regenerated, can be found in the works by Alves and Gustafsson & Haapoja examined in this chapter. (c) Thirdly, the collectivising, co-creating aspect of these artistic practices is also fundamental. Co-creation not only relates to the posthuman impulse that prompts many artists to create with the help or in the company of plants and animals, but also to the other aspect that we highlighted at the beginning of this chapter in relation to the ‘political ecology’ endorsed by Les Carnets du Paysage. This political ecology requires collective action, as without daily participation by the human groups inhabiting each setting, no significant gains would be made and it would be impossible to sustain any progress over time (De Soto, 2016). In short, drawing on the societies that are present in the area where the artistic intervention is to take place and establishing new ‘commons’ is another of the most frequently employed artistic strategies, as the latest Documenta (15) in Kassel revealed. Some interesting examples of the creation of new collectives of enunciation and other cooperative networks between humans and non-humans to reterritorialise degraded environments can be found in the Life Pletera project and in Data Lab’s call for an atmospheric commons. To conclude, it is important to recognise that, in terms of the systematic interpretation and presentation of the strategies adopted by these artists and the singular, differentiated study of their specific practices, the contents of this chapter cover only a fraction of what is taking place in Europe and around the world. It is important to expand this study to encompass new works, deferring at all times to what creators and thinkers continue to imagine for this possible ‘alternative’ future. Acknowledgements With thanks to Eleanor Staniforth for her excellent translation.

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Nanomaterials in Biomedical Applications: Specific Case of the Transport and Controlled Release of Ciprofloxacin Guillermo Mangas García, Ventura Castillo Ramos, Cinthia Berenice García-Reyes, Ricardo Navarrete Casas, Manuel Sánchez Polo, and María Victoria López Ramón

Abstract Over the past 50 years, numerous systems and technologies have been developed to allow the controlled release of drugs for treating a wide range of diseases. The aim is to enhance the effectiveness of the drugs, especially those with low water solubility, and to achieve their localized administration, avoiding overdoses that may generate drug resistance. In order to be effective, new-generation carrier materials must be able to overcome the host’s physicochemical and biological barriers. The objective of this chapter is to review nanomaterials developed as carriers of ciprofloxacin, which is used to treat numerous infections but has a low water solubility that hampers cell permeability. They include metal–organic frameworks, silica nanomaterials with various morphologies, hydrogels, and other nanomaterials of interest used as carriers for the controlled release of ciprofloxacin. These materials have potential biomedical applications in the treatment of bone, dental, gastrointestinal tract, and urinary infections and in wound healing, among others. Keywords Controlled release · Ciprofloxacin · Nanomaterials · Metal organic frameworks · Silica nanomaterials · Hydrogels

G. M. García · V. C. Ramos (B) · C. B. García-Reyes · R. N. Casas · M. S. Polo Department of Inorganic Chemistry, Faculty of Pharmacy, University of Granada, Granada, Spain e-mail: [email protected] C. B. García-Reyes Faculty of Chemical Sciences, Autonomous University of Nuevo León, San Nicolás de los Garza, Mexico M. V. L. Ramón Department of Inorganic and Organic Chemistry, Faculty of Experimental Science, University of Jaen, 23071 Jaen, Spain © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 A. Núñez-Delgado (ed.), Planet Earth: Scientific Proposals to Solve Urgent Issues, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-53208-5_6

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1 Introduction Ciprofloxacin (CIP) is an antibiotic of the second-generation quinolone group, derived from quinoline (Fig. 1). CIP is one of the most widely used fluoroquinolones, and its main chemical properties are exhibited in Table 1. Its bactericide activity is mediated by the inhibition of topoisomerase II and IV, and it has a wide action spectrum against both Gram-positive and Gram-negative bacteria and mycobacteria (Flórez Beledo et al., 2013; Terp & Rybak, 1987; Zhang et al., 2018a, 2018b). The World Health Organization (WHO, 2021) includes CIP in the list of essential drugs for a basic health care system and was the 113th most prescribed drug in the USA in 2019, with almost 5.9 million prescriptions (ClinCal LLC, 2021). CIP is most frequently prescribed for urinary infections and pneumonia at oral doses that vary according to the severity of the disease, with the possibility of intravenous administration in more severe cases (Balfour & Faulds, 1993; Fass, 1990; Thai et al., 2021). It is usually administered in two daily doses (250, 500, or 750 mg each) for 7–14 days (Bergan et al., 1988; Campoli-Richards et al., 1988). However, in

Fig. 1 3D structure (left) and speciation diagram (right) of ciprofloxacin (García-Reyes et al., 2021)

Table 1 Chemical properties of ciprofloxacin IUPAC name

1-cyclopropyl-6-fluoro-4-oxo-7piperazin-1-ylquinoline-3-carboxylic acid

Molecular weight g/ mol

a Acid pKa

a Basic

331.35

6.09

8.62

b LogK ow

pKa

c Length-

width- height Å 0.28

13.1–8.2–2.5

pKa negative log-transformed acid dissociation constant; Kow octanol–water partition coefficient a Data from https://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/bioassay/781326#sid=103163904 (Settimo et al., 2014) b Data from Takács-Novák et al. (1992) c Data from Balarak et al. (2016)

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common with other antibiotics, the generation of resistances can reduce the bioavailability of the drug or inhibit its action (Rehman et al., 2019; Sanders, 1988; Thomson, 1999). The most widely described adverse effects of CIP are mild gastrointestinal disorders (e.g., nausea, vomiting, or diarrhea), with less frequent reports of mild central nervous system disorders (e.g., headaches, dizziness, or anxiety), generally in predisposed individuals (Arcieri et al., 1989; LeBel, 1988; Schacht et al., 1989). Ciprofloxacin hydrochloride has a solubility of 1.35 mg/mL in water at 25 ◦ C (Abioye et al., 2020) and is considered “slightly soluble” according to the United States Pharmacopeia and National Formulary (Takagi et al., 2006), impairing its cell penetration capacity and potentially reducing the effectiveness of its oral administration. Various technologies have been developed to administer drugs with low water solubility, including the utilization of excipients to improve their solubility (surfactants, complexing agents, lipid formulations, etc.) (Kawabata et al., 2011) and the employment of solid dispersion and reduced drug crystal size (Sun & Lee, 2015). More recently, nanomaterials have been used as carriers to enable the controlled release of drugs over time, which may resolve the bioavailability challenge, avoid the generation of resistances, and reduce adverse effects (Talan et al., 2004). This approach could be especially useful when doses cannot be administered in the usual way, as in patients with low blood flow in hard tissues (Narasimha Reddy et al., 2015). Drug-loaded nanomaterials offer multiple advantages for biomedical applications besides their nanometric size, including the possibility of their synthesis with different morphologies that mimic the targeted biological milieu and the ability to control their physicochemical properties and modify/functionalize their surfaces in a simple manner (Yun et al., 2015). They can potentially reduce the toxicity of certain drugs by optimizing the dose and avoiding their possible bioaccumulation in aqueous media (García-Reyes et al., 2021). However, nanocarriers must fulfill several crucial criteria before they can be employed in biomedicine, including: low or null toxicity for non-targeted cells; specificity and sensitivity to detect different biological signals; rapid response kinetics; and capacity to overcome biological barriers such as the bloodstream (Barenholz, 2012). A search of the SCOPUS database using the terms “drug release” and “nanomaterials” revealed a growing interest in the use of these materials to carry and release drugs over the past 15 years (2006–2021). The number of publications related to “drug release” and “ciprofloxacin” has also increased over the same period, as depicted in Fig. 2.

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Fig. 2 Number of studies published between 2006 and 2021. Data retrieved from www.scopus.com using the following search terms: drug release and nanomaterials; drug release and ciprofloxacin

2 Nanomaterials for the Transport and Controlled Release of Drugs A wide variety of nanomaterials synthesized in different ways have been proposed for the transport and release of drugs. This review focuses on metal organic frameworks (MOFs), silica materials, hydrogels, and other nanomaterials of specific interest for the transport and controlled release of CIP. MOFs are crystalline solids with a porous structure formed by a network of metallic centers linked by organic chains (Ramos et al., 2020; Yang et al., 2011). They have a large surface area of up to 7000 m2 /g (Khan et al., 2013) and an adjustable pore size, and they can be functionalized by the appropriate pre-selection of organic ligands and/or after its synthesis; hence, MOFs can carry a wide range of drugs of large molecular size for their subsequent release (Hasan et al., 2021; Sun et al., 2013). Silica nanomaterials and composites also have favorable properties for biomedical applications, including: a large surface area and pore volume; the ability to optimize particle and pore size, morphology, and crystallinity; and the possibility of their direct and simple functionalization and/or optimization post-synthesis. Furthermore, these materials are biocompatible and can carry both hydrophilic and hydrophobic substances (Singh et al., 2019). Hydrogels, formed by a three-dimensional network of hydrophilic polymers, can swell and retain water up to 10% of their weight while maintaining their structure (Bahram et al., 2016). The interweaving of their polymer matrix and their ability to swell explains their capacity to retain and release molecules. The potential for the biomedical application of hydrogels (e.g., in controlled drug release) is favored by

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their biocompatibility, mucoadhesion, and injectability and by the ability to control their phase transition according to the pH, temperature, or ion concentration in the medium, among other factors (Dimatteo et al., 2018; Gaharwar et al., 2014; Hoffman, 2012; Wechsler et al., 2019).

3 Metal Organic Frameworks (MOFs) There has been limited utilization of MOFs for the adsorption and subsequent controlled release of CIP. One MOF, ZIF-8, has a sodalite zeolite-type structure with Zn2+ ions as metal nodes and 2-methylimidazole as organic linker. It was directly impregnated with CIP by adsorption at doses of up to 21% in weight by Nabipour et al. (2017). They reported that more CIP was released in acid (97%) than in basic (83%) media due to disintegration of the material at pH 5, similar to the pH value of cancer cells, which is highly promising for the application of this nanomaterial in oncology. In a similar study, Nasrabadi et al. (2019) incorporated CIP in the porous cavities of Uio-66 at doses as high as 84% in weight. They found that the release of CIP was faster and more abrupt at pH 5, with the delivery of 85% of the drug, and was slower and more controlled at neutral pH, when 87% of the drug was delivered; they also reported higher antimicrobial activity for the drug-loaded material than for the drug itself (Fig. 3). Esfahanian et al. (2019) studied ZIF-8 functionalization with Fe3 O4 nanoparticles supported in polyacrylic acid (PAA) for CIP encapsulation and subsequent release. They synthesized the nano-composite Fe3 O4 /PAA/ZIF-8, which possesses the magnetic properties required for directed magnetic transfer, and they also described a faster and more abrupt release of CIP at acid pH due to disintegration of the ZIF-8 structure. Sohrabnezhad et al. (2020) prepared a composite structure using MgAl-layered double hydroxide (MgAl-LDH) as nucleus and Fe3 O4 nanoparticles as the outer layer of the material, which was functionalized with amino groups to strengthen interactions with CIP and increase control over its release. The hydroxyl groups of the nucleus formed by the MOF with divalent and trivalent cations and the porous Fe3 O4 nanoparticles contributed to the release of CIP being more controlled at pH ≈ 4, although faster than at neutral pH. Olawale et al. (2020) synthesized a MOF formed by metallic Cu2+ centers with glutamic acid as binding organic chain (Cu(Glu)2 (H2 O2 )]H2 O). It proved able to capture CIP molecules at multiple binding sites via physical and chemical adsorption mechanisms and by intraparticle diffusion, achieving an adsorption capacity of 95 mg/g at pH 6 and room temperature and being considered of potential interest to carry and release CIP under acid conditions.

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Fig. 3 Schematic diagram of the synthesis of Uio-66 and encapsulation of CIP for subsequent release

4 Silica Nanomaterials The synthesis of waste-derived silica nanomaterials has been proposed as a highly attractive and environmentally sustainable strategy. In this way, Araichimani et al. (2021) produced amorphous silica nanoparticles (50–80 nm) of high purity from rice husk biowaste by microwave-induced combustion (500 ◦ C). Testing of disks of these silica nanoparticles prepared with CIP showed an abrupt release pattern during the first few days (from the CIP on the surface) followed by a more controlled pattern during the next 15 days, attributable to interaction of the drug with -OH groups in the nanoparticles. This appears to be an ideal general release profile. Hussein and Kareem (2021) used the sol–gel method to synthesize silica nanoparticles sized 40–80 nm with pore diameter of 2.9 nm that carried up to 16 mg/mg CIP and released 98% of the load at 90 min in physiological medium at virtually neutral pH (7.4). Silica microspheres with modifiable physicochemical characteristics were also obtained by the spray-drying method, using simple inorganic salts as templates for SiO2 pores, being readily eliminated with water post-synthesis; they had a CIP loading capacity of up to 30%, which was delivered in a controlled manner (Belbekhouche et al., 2020). Another approach of biomedical interest is the preparation of hollow silica nanomaterials for doping with CIP. Gessner et al. (2018) synthesized hollow silica capsules for the amphiphilic transport and sustained delivery of drugs, creating mesopores with

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α-Fe2 O3 nanoparticles as nuclei that were coated with silica and subsequently eliminated by washing with hydrochloride. The CIP-loaded nanomaterial maintained a controlled release for 120 h in aqueous medium at pH = 6.5 and 37 ◦ C, which was more rapid during the first 10 h, demonstrating high efficacy to inhibit E. coli. Zhang et al. (2019) studied the functionalization of hollow mesoporous silica nanomaterial, incorporating Zn in CIP-loaded hollow nanoparticles supported on a matrix of polycaprolactone (PCL) fibers generated by electrospinning. The authors described potential applications in wound dressings and hair follicle regeneration, among other clinical procedures, due to the action of Zn and Si ions in the composite nanomaterial. In this regard, a role in deep wound dressing has been proposed for CIP-loaded electrospinning-synthesized nanofibers of chitosan/polyethylene oxide/silica, which released the drug over a period of 13 days (Hashemikia et al., 2021). Chitosan microspheres have also served as support structures for CIP-loaded silica nanoparticles, slowing release of the drug by 90% during the first 9 h (Hezma et al., 2020; Sobhani et al., 2017). Korzeniowska et al. (2020) used unmodified mesoporous silica (SBA-15, hexagonal disposition with ordered channels) synthesized by hydrothermal reaction to transport and release CIP. Release of the drug was influenced by the pore size of the material, being slowest with the largest pore size studied (7.1 nm), when the load capacity was smallest (13%), and faster and more abrupt with pore sizes of 6.7 nm or 4.4 nm, when the maximum drug load was higher (18%). According to the authors, this release behavior results from interaction between silanol groups of the silica material and carboxylic groups of the CIP. Sousa et al. (2018), functionalized SBA-15 with zinc oxide (ZnO) nanoparticles, increasing the CIP load adsorbed in aqueous phase up to 446 mg/g. Ghaith and Connolly (2014) demonstrated that calcination of SBA-15 yielded a slower and more controlled CIP release and that its functionalization with 3aminopropyltriethoxysilane (APTS) increased the load capacity and released the drug more quickly in comparison to unmodified SBA-15 over the study period of 120 h. There have also been reports of composite materials formed by 75% wt. SBA15 with 25% wt. chitin, which induced hydroxyapatite formation in the structure and exhibited rapid drug release during the first 24 h, with potential applications in the treatment of bone infections (Narasimha Reddy et al., 2015). Andrade et al. (2018) functionalized mesoporous silica with three-dimensional channels connected by calcium-doped spherical cavities with hydroxyapatite and 3-aminopropyltriethoxysilane (SBA-16/HAAPTES). This composite nanomaterial could be loaded with large amounts of CIP (31% wt.) and showed a rapid release profile during the first 8 h and a more controlled release profile over the next 50 h. This drug-loaded material showed a high affinity with bone tissues, making it an ideal candidate for bone infection treatments. In another study, silica nanoparticles were functionalized with calcium and loaded with CIP for application in the dental setting, synthesizing resins with the necessary mechanical properties to inhibit local bacterial growth (Zhang et al., 2018a, 2018b). Besides silica nanoparticles, other morphologies have potential applications in medical prostheses or implants, including mesoporous nano-silica films or coatings

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Fig. 4 Representation of CIP adsorption on silica nanoparticles (MCM-41) supported on a polymeric matrix formed by EC and PDMS

(Lensing et al., 2013). These can be modified or functionalized post-synthesis to optimize CIP release, which can be delayed for up to 60 days when coated with dioctyltetramethyldisilazane to induce hydrophobicity (Ehlert et al., 2011, 2013). Skwira et al. (2019a) coated mesoporous silica films with a mixture of ethyl cellulose (EC) and polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS), molding them by solvent evaporation and endowing them with hydrophobic properties that prolonged CIP release for 7 days and with a highly rough surface, ideal features for applications in bone. The material can also be coated with silica nanoparticles to prevent corrosion and favor controlled release of the CIP in the nanoparticles, as in the case of the multilayer-coated material (CIP/ polyallylamine hydrochloride/SiO2 /poly-allylamine hydrochloride) synthesized by Ji et al. (2020) using the spray layer-by-layer assembly method. Skwiraet al. (2019b) synthesized nanomaterials composed of silica and polymers to release CIP in the treatment of bone tissue inflammation (osteomyelitis). A composite formed by CIP adsorbed on silica (MCM-41) with a coating of EC and PDMS polymers evidenced high thermal stability and achieved controlled and sustained drug release for 30 days, demonstrating excellent cytocompatibility with human fetal osteoblasts (Fig. 4).

5 Hydrogels Li et al. (2014), synthesized a hydrogel by combining organic (Nisopropylacrylamide [NIPAM] and N,N’-methylenebisacrylamide [MBA]) and inorganic (attapulgite [ATP]) parts. The release of CIP, which lasted around 6 h, was favored by an increased amount of ATP in the hydrogel, which showed thermal sensitivity.

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Ghauri et al. (2021), developed a quaternary hydrogel film with two natural polymers (chitosan and guar gum) and two synthetic polymers to improve its mechanical properties. They reported that inclusion of the ligand reduced the swelling capacity from 170 to 70 g/g of water. The material was pH-sensitive, observing greater swelling at acid pH. CIP release was simulated in phosphate-buffered saline (PBS) and synthetic intestinal fluid (SIF) and was found to be continuous, delivering around 15% of the drug during the first 10 min and completing delivery of the whole load at 90 min in PBS and 70 min in SIF. Singh and Kumar (2018) created a biocompatible hydrogel based on organic polymers (oleifera gum and acrylic acid) that had antioxidant properties and was pH sensitive. The release of CIP in PBS lasted for 24 h. Prusty et al. (2019) produced a soy protein-based hydrogel and incorporated silver nanoparticles, all by chemical synthesis under mild conditions. Using this hydrogel, CIP release in PBS was higher at pH 7.4 than at acid pH and was favored by the presence of the silver nanoparticles, delivering 95% of the drug in comparison to 75% in their absence, attributed to an increased hydrophilic capacity that permitted diffusion of the CIP in the matrix. Singh et al. (2018) used psyllium or ispaghula husk to synthesize a hydrogel that released CIP for up to 24 h in acid pH; it proved to be biocompatible and to have good mucoadhesive properties, being proposed as a candidate for treating the gastrointestinal tract. Other hydrogels have been developed to release CIP under acid conditions, similar to those in the intestinal tract, based on sterculia gum, iotacarrageenan, and carboxymethylated guar gum gelatin (Ghosh et al., 2018; Padhi et al., 2016; Singh et al., 2014, 2016) (Fig. 5). Ebrahimi and Salavaty (2018), applied an ultrasonic method to synthesize a pH-sensitive hydrogel based on acrylamide and acrylic acid, observing greater CIP release, which lasted for up to 90 min, at basic versus acid pH. Dewangan et al. (2020) synthesized a synthetic polymer-based hydrogel with thixotropic properties, which changed to liquid phase upon agitation before starting to gel, improving its injectability. Release of the CIP load was maintained for up to 24 h, and the percentage load delivered depended on the baseline drug concentration, which influenced both the density of the polymeric matrix and the strength of the gel. García et al. (2016) synthesized a biocompatible hydrogel based on a dendritic monomer, describing it as an “intelligent” drug carrier. They concluded that its release of CIP would be favored in saline biological fluids, given that the presence of Na+ and Cl− ions increased the amount of CIP delivered over the 24-h experimental period. Steffensen et al. (2016) applied high pressures to synthesize silicon-based hydrogels in disc formats that were loaded with CIP, obtaining an inhibition radius of 24 mm for S. aureus.

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Fig. 5 Representation of CIP loaded in hydrogels of β-cyclodextrin/sterculia/carbopol

6 Other Materials of Interest Research has been conducted into other nanomaterials of interest for biomedical applications. For instance, electrospinning was used to prepare biodegradable polymeric nanoparticles that allowed the sustained release of CIP and could be useful for ear infections and other local treatments (Günday et al., 2020). Various techniques and substances have been used to synthesize ROS-sensitive nanomaterials of relevance in urinary tract infections, which are closely associated with oxidative stress. They were reported to release CIP in a more sustained manner, improving dose spacing and minimizing adverse effects (Song et al., 2021). CIP has also been loaded in gold nanoparticles, which have demonstrated good biocompatibility and may be useful against certain infections resistant to other antibiotics such as betalactams (Nawaz et al., 2021). Nanoparticles prepared from commercial starch by emulsification and subsequent cross-linking with sodium trimetaphosphate had a CIP loading capacity of 40%, using a coating technique (Shi et al., 2016). In another approach, solid lipid nanoparticles, especially those prepared with stearic acid, had the fastest release rate with immediate delivery of the largest amount of CIP in comparison to formulations using different emulsifiers, favoring their antibacterial effect (Shazly, 2017). CIP-loaded nanoparticles derived from polyglycolic acid, especially poly(lactic-co-glycolic acid), have been proposed to treat cystic lung fibrosis caused by pseudomonas aeruginosa, demonstrating a good drug encapsulation rate with high levels of compound biodegradability and biocompatibility (Günday Türeli et al., 2017). CIP-loaded ZnO nanoparticles have also been described as useful to treat infections caused by Staphylococcus aureus and Escherichia coli, exerting antibacterial activity in a dose-dependent manner (Banoee et al., 2010).

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7 Conclusions and Future Perspectives The development of nanotechnology over the past few decades has given rise to numerous systems designed to release CIP in a controlled manner, with potential biomedical applications. Nanomaterials based on MOFs, silica, hydrogels, and composites may be highly useful in the treatment of bone, dental, lung, gastrointestinal, and urinary tract infections because their physicochemical characteristics can be simply optimized and their morphologies readily tailored for adaptation to specific biological milieux. Nanomaterial-based systems are generally characterized by a more pronounced drug release in an initial stage followed by a more stable release over prolonged time periods. The main differences among systems are in the type of material used for their synthesis and in the total drug release and load time. To date, however, research has been limited to animal and in vitro studies, and there has been little progress to trials in humans. The optimization of “intelligent” nanomaterials that can deliver precise doses to target cells is a highly promising therapeutic strategy. Nevertheless, it is essential to test their safety and their capacity to overcome biological barriers in humans before they can be applied in a clinical setting. Acknowledgements The authors are grateful for the financial support of the FEDER/Junta de Andalucía (Project P18-RT-4193), the FEDER 2014-2020 Operative Program, and the Consejería de Economía y Conocimiento of the Junta de Andalucía (Project FEDER-UJA-1380629).

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Maximizing Phosphorus Recovery from Waste Streams Through Incineration Ario Fahimi, Bruno Valerio Valentim, and Elza Bontempi

Abstract Phosphorus (P) is a vital and irreplaceable nutrient for plants. As the world population continues to increase, so does the demand for phosphorus-based fertilizers to support intensive agricultural activity. However, the European Union faces the risk of supply of these fertilizers and the European Commission listed phosphate rocks in 2014 and then P in 2017 in the list of “critical raw materials”. Cattle manure has long been used as a fertilizer, but to reduce this dependence, it is important to find secondary alternative P supplies, which include sewage sludge and agricultural wastes such as aviary manure, but these cannot be directly used in soils. The incineration of these waste streams not only avoids environmental and health problems but also produces energy while generating P-rich ashes. To further explore this option, this chapter will compare the characterization and potential secondary applications of P-rich ash byproducts generated from fluidized bed incineration of laying hens’ manure at Güres Energy (Turkey) and from stoker incineration of poultry litter rice husks at Campoaves (Portugal). The use of combustion systems and various fuels to produce ash has long been studied, but the effects of these systems on the speciation of P in ash are not as well understood. In this study, global samples of bottom ash (BA), economizer fly ash (FAECO), and cyclone fly ash (FACYC) are characterized in detail chemically (proximate and elemental analysis), morphologically (microscopy and X-ray microanalysis), and mineralogically (X-ray diffraction). In addition, a novel approach to assessing the environmental impact of new technologies was developed based on the use of two parameters—embodied energy and carbon A. Fahimi · E. Bontempi (B) INSTM and Chemistry for Technologies Laboratory, Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering, University of Brescia, Via Branze, 38, 25123 Brescia, Italy e-mail: [email protected] B. V. Valentim Department of Geosciences, Environment and Spatial Plannings, Faculty of Sciences, Earth Science Institute-Porto Pole, University of Porto, Rua do Campo Alegre s/n, 4169-007 Porto, Portugal A. Fahimi Department of Mining and Metallurgical Engineering, Mackay School of Earth Sciences and Engineering, University of Nevada, Reno, NV 89557, United States © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 A. Núñez-Delgado (ed.), Planet Earth: Scientific Proposals to Solve Urgent Issues, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-53208-5_7

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footprint—and a dimensionless index—the ESCAPE index—that allows comparison of the environmental impact of selected substitutes and processes. Elemental analysis reveals that P concentrations in the ash samples are in the medium to low range of phosphate ores, and SEM analysis reveals the presence of phosphospheres and P-rich morphotypes in the fly ash. Analysis of Güres and Campoaves ash samples has revealed that P is mainly present as hydroxyapatite crystals, CaCO3 relics, and CaO, as well as Na–K-Mg phosphate, unburnt char, and silica phases. The high P content of these ashes makes them promising for recovery purposes. The ESCAPE approach was validated and found to accurately evaluate the environmental impact of P recovery techniques, with wet sulfuric acid-based processes being the most appropriate and thermal-reduction dry processes being less sustainable. Keywords Phosphorus · Ash · Laying hens’ manure · Poultry litter · P fertilizer · Sustainability analysis · Critical raw material · Circular economy

1 Introduction Phosphorus (P) is a vital nutrient that occurs mainly as orthophosphate (PO4 3− ) and is crucial for life on Earth, but the natural P cycle is increasingly out of balance due to human activities. The main cause of the “phosphorus dilemma” is the low efficiency of P flow in agriculture, which leads to mismanagement of these systems. Improving P flux efficiency depends mainly on secondary P extraction and retention along the P flux chain from phosphate rock. In 2010, an estimated 85% of global P consumption was used for food production (15.8–18.8 Tg P), and this figure is expected to increase by 51–55% by 2050 (Ashley et al., 2011). In order to meet the growing global demand for food and the increasing population, more land needs to be cultivated and agriculture intensified, leading to an increase in P fertilizer demand. Phosphorus is mostly present in oxidized form (P5+ ) in the form of the mineral apatite, which is poorly soluble under ambient conditions (Walton et al., 2021). Since the amount of bioavailable P in natural soil is limited, it is obtained by mining phosphate rock, which is the main raw material for the production of phosphate fertilizers (Vaccari, 2009). Exploration of phosphate rock has quadrupled in the last 80 years due to increasing demand for P fertilizers in agriculture. Despite the large reserves (about 69 billion tons), phosphate rock is very unevenly distributed around the world. As shown in Table 1, over 70% of phosphate reserves are located in Western Sahara and Morocco, home to less than 1% of the world’s population while China and India, which account for nearly half the world population, have many resources of their own. Despite this unbalanced distribution of P resources market volatility is the main reason for global P-fertilizers insecurity. For example, causing a 14-month price increase of 700% in 2008 and food riots in over 40 countries (Cordell & White, 2011).

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Table 1 Distribution of the 10 largest global reserves of phosphate rocks Countries

Reserves (million tons)

Production (million tons)

3200

85

50,000

38

1000

22

Russia

600

14

Jordan

1000

9.2

Saudi Arabia

1400

8.5

Brazil

1600

5.5

Egypt

2800

5

China Morocco United States

Vietnam

30

4.7

Tunisia

100

3.2

At the top right, the bar graph shows the production volume of each of the nations with the largest global reserves Updated recruited data from US Geological Survey (US Geological Survey, 2023)

The European Union Commission includes phosphate rocks and phosphorus is the list of critical raw materials due to their high level of supply risk and economic importance (European Commission, 2020), and are indispensable inputs for the European Union sector since relies almost exclusively on imports (The EU self-sufficiency indicator for P is currently 36% (European Commission, 2023)). Meanwhile, P fertilizer use efficiency (PFUE) (Alewell et al., 2020), i.e. the increase in P uptake by plants when P fertilizer is applied compared to the amount of P fertilizer applied P uptake by plants can be increased by long-term P fertilization, which will contribute to reduce P-fertilizer imports, and decrease environmental problems such as eutrophication of EU freshwater systems (Garske & Ekardt, 2021). However, the effects of P fertilizer management on PFUE are not well understood (Yu et al., 2021). Additionally, phosphorus recovery from waste streams has been identified as a necessary approach to meet future demand, sustain food production, protect the environment, and achieve greater autonomy by recycling P in agricultural waste products. In this sense, the European Commission has outlined a perspective on the circular economy, recommending that resources, including phosphorus, be kept in the value chain for as long as possible. As part of the 2015 Circular Economy Action Plan, the Commission has called for a revision of EU fertilizer regulations to recognize organic and waste-based fertilizers and reduce the need for mineral fertilizers (European Commission, 2015). Currently, only conventional fertilizers can be freely traded in the EU, but access to innovative fertilizers made from organic materials depends on mutual recognition between member states. The EU could replace up to 30% of its phosphate imports with extraction from biowaste, but current regulations hinder innovation and investment in the circular economy. The Commission’s “Fit for 55” package and the European Green Deal aim to reduce CO2 emissions and promote a fair, healthy and environmentally friendly food system (European Commission,

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2019; Smol et al., 2020). The Commission aims to reduce nutrient losses by at least 50% while maintaining soil fertility and reducing fertilizer use by 20%. The Commission’s EU Action Plan “Pathway to a Healthy Planet for All” aims to reduce pollution and promote a circular economy for P management by ensuring sustainable use of nutrients, stimulating markets for recovered nutrients, addressing nutrient pollution, and improving the sustainability of the livestock sector. The Commission is also revising the Urban Wastewater Treatment Directive and the Sewage Sludge Directive to improve the circular economy and reduce pollution in agriculture. A search of the Web of Science under the keyword “phosphorus recovery” shows that the number of publications on this topic has steadily increased over the past two decades. China and the United States have been the most prolific countries in publishing research on phosphorus recovery over the past 20 years, followed by several European countries such as Germany, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom (see Fig. 1). The most productive journals and influential papers were focused on topics related to wastewater treatment and resource recovery. Specifically, the Journal of Environmental Management was the most productive journal with 111 publications, followed by Environmental Science and Technology (97 publications), and Water Research (82 publications). Overall, this information suggests that phosphorus management is an increasingly important topic in the scientific community, with a focus on improving the sustainability of agricultural practices and protecting water quality. In the context of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) adopted by the United Nations in 2015, phosphorus management is important for several reasons to ensure: food security for the world’s growing population, which requires efficient use and recycling of phosphorus; water quality; using alternative P sources and adopting more efficient fertilizer production methods to reduce greenhouse gas emissions; the adoption of sustainable phosphorus management towards a circular economy that benefits both the environment and society as a whole (Wali et al., 2021).

Fig. 1 Frequency of publications on phosphorus recovery by country (in Publication Summary) from 1914 to 2023, according to Web of Science data

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The content of this chapter is part of project DEASPHOR (“Design of a product for substitution of phosphate rocks”) funded under the ERA-MIN Program of the European Commission: and supports the European Union’s efforts to reduce waste, energy consumption and environmental damage by developing novel circular business models. This work focuses on poultry litter an\d laying hens manure ash, who have a high phosphorus concentration but are often landfilled due to a lack of appropriate beneficiation and regulation regarding the use of these ashes in soil corrections. Thus, poultry litter and laying hens manure ashes were characterized, and approaches for its utilization are described elsewhere (Fahimi et al., 2020, 2022; Fiameni et al., 2021a). The environmental impact of the proposed recovery process was also evaluated in terms of embodied energy and carbon footprint by proposing a materials environmental impact assessment tool and providing a statistical analysis to support the proposed phosphorus recovery process (Fahimi et al., 2021; Fiameni et al., 2021b). A method for characterizing a new category of phosphorus-rich materials— poultry litter and laying hens manure ashes—and developing utilization strategies that do not generate waste were proposed. The goal is to maximize the percentage of phosphorus recovery, which is critical to the cost-effectiveness of processes designed in the lab that are ready for upscaling, minimizing the presence of elements such as zinc, which can be problematic for plant fertilizer application, and finally ensure that the benefits of environmental sustainability are realized.

2 Materials and Methods 2.1 Ash Samples Origin Poultry litter and laying hens ash samples were collected at Campoaves (Figueira da Foz, Portugal) and Güres Energy (Manisa, Turkey). These enterprise incinerators differ in the fuels and combustion technologies, resulting in contrasting challenges for the recovery and utilization of phosphorus. At Campoaves, the fuel used is a combination of wood chips and rice husk poultry litter, which is pre-dried before incineration. Fresh ash samples were collected from different spots: bottom ash was collected after falling in the water-cooling tank while fly ash was collected from the economizer and the cyclone hoppers. The proximate analysis of the same was made on the same day they were collected. At Güres Energy, the fuel source is a mixture of caged laying hens’ feces, eggshells, and feathers. Before incineration, this mixture is dried, gasified and burned in a fluidized bed reactor. The ash samples were collected from bottom ash and fly ash (economizer and cyclone) hoppers. These ash samples were labelled as follows: Campoaves, CA; Güres, GU; bottom ash, BA; economizer fly ash, FAECO; cyclone fly ash, FACYC.

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2.2 Proximate Analysis: Fixed Carbon, Volatile Matter, Ash Content To understand the incinerators’ combustion conditions, proximate analyses were performed on the Campoaves and Gures ashes to determine the content of moisture, ash (815 °C), volatiles (900 °C), and calculate the fixed carbon. Samples were weighed and heated in the furnace and their weight was recorded before and after heating to determine moisture and volatile matter content according to ISO 11722 and ISO 562 (ISO, 2013; ISO_10993–12, 2021).

2.3 Elemental Analysis Major oxides analyses were made elsewhere (Fahimi et al., 2022; Fiameni et al., 2021a), and the analysis shows that the SiO2 concentration is much higher in the Campoaves ash, which is due to the SiO2 layer in the rice husks used as litter for the chickens, while the CaO concentration is about five times higher in the Gures ash, which is due to the use of CaCO3 sand to bind S in the fluidized bed chamber and egg shells. Spectrophotometry measurements were conducted using a QE65000 spectrophotometer (Ocean Optics) in the Chemistry for Technologies Laboratory (Brescia) to determine the total P content in both Campoaves and Güres samples. The P content was found by solubilizing the ash sample with a mixture of sulfuric and nitric acids, filtering the solution, and measuring the extinction of the blue solution of phosphomolybdate at 700 nm wavelength. Minor elements including Cu, Zn, Sr, Ba, and trace elements including Ni, Cd, Au, Hg, As, Sb and Pb were determined using Inductively Coupled Plasma Mass Spectroscopy (ICP-MS) after digestion of ash samples with aqua regia.

2.4 Materials Characterization Crystalline phases identification and quantification including amorphous Various analytical methods were combined for the structural and chemical characterization of ash samples. X-ray diffraction (XRD) was used to determine the phase composition of the ash samples and the Rietveld method was used to quantify the crystalline and amorphous phases. X-ray diffraction analysis was performed at the University of Brescia using an X’Pert PRO diffractometer with a Cu-Kα anode (40 mA, 40 kV), and phases were determined using Philips X’Pert software and the open crystallography database (COD).

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Scanning electron microscopy (SEM) with energy-dispersive X-ray spectrometry (EDS) Scanning electron microscopy (SEM) in combination with energy dispersive X-ray spectrometry (EDS) was used for detailed imaging and semiquantitative chemical characterization of ash samples. The SEM–EDS analysis was performed on raw samples at Centro de Materiais da Universidade do Porto using a FEI Quanta 400 FEG ESEM /EDAX Genesis X4M in a low vacuum at 15 kV. The samples were mounted on polished blocks with double-sided carbon tape and coated with a thin carbon coating for analysis under high vacuum conditions. Experiments focused on surface morphology and phase identification by SE and BSE imaging and EDS semiquantitative analysis in representative areas. Finally, sequential X-ray fluorescence spectrometry was used for qualitative and quantitative analysis of elements in the ash samples. Micro-raman spectroscopy For micro-Raman analysis, the polished FAECO blocks were ground into particles with a size of 106 μm, while the 45–75 μm fraction of FACYC was prepared according to ISO 7404–2 (REF). Raman spectra were collected using a LabRAM spectrometer (Horiba Jobin Yvon, Kyoto, Japan) with a confocal aperture of 500 μm and a slit aperture of 100 μm. A Stabilite 2017 Ar + laser (Spectra Physics, Newport Corporation, Irvine, USA) at 514.532 nm and with a power of 200 mW was used for the excitation beam, which was focused on the sample with an Olympus × 100 objective (Tokyo, Japan). The number of accumulations and acquisition time were 10 and 1 s, respectively, to optimize the signal-to-noise (S/N) ratio. Fitting and including peak identification were performed using Fityk 0.9.8 and a pseudo-Voigt function (Stammeier et al., 2018).

2.5 Environmental Impacts Analysis Using Carbon Footprint by a Simplified Approach The ESCAPE (2023) method was used to evaluate the sustainability of P recovery technologies that use secondary raw materials (SSA) as a potential source of P. The index ESCAPE was calculated as a measure of sustainability. This index considers two parameters—embodied energy (EE) and carbon footprint (CF), which are highly correlated, and is crucial because it demonstrates its use case as a screening method, preliminary to life cycle assessments (LCA) (Fig. 2) (Wojdyr, 2010). The values EE and CF for the reagents used in the P recovery processes were taken from the CES Selector 2019 and openLCA databases. The energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions associated with each technology step were evaluated, and the index ESCAPE was calculated using a formula that considers the logarithm of the values EE and CF of the reference process (P recovery from phosphate rock) and the P extraction process from sewage sludge ash (SSA), as reported by Fahimi et al.

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Fig. 2 Position of the ESCAPE tool in the upstream phase of the life cycle of a material or process

(2021). Calculations were performed for the published laboratory/pilot/full scale technologies where all required data were available. When all required input data were not available, plausible assumptions were made to perform the index calculation ESCAPE. The process was considered as a steady state with unidirectional flow and constant mass flow of reagents at standard conditions (P = 1 bar, T = 25 °C). The energy demand and carbon footprint were estimated based on data from databases and the literature, where the energy demand and carbon footprint were zero for the residue material (SSA), 7.77 MJ/kg and 0.62 kg CO2 /kg for the phosphate rock, and 0.01 MJ/kg and 0 kg CO2 /kg for the circulating process water. The assumed mean value for P concentration was 8.45% for both phosphate rock and SSA.

2.6 ESCAPE in Design of Experiments Optimization Study An experiment optimization study was made with Campoaves ash samples containing high SiO2 and low heavy metal (Ni, Hg, Cd, As, Cr(VI), Cu, Pb, and Zn) concentrations. The experiments involved two leaching processes using HCl and NaOH/ H2 SO4 solutions, respectively, to recover P and SiO2 (Fig. 3) (Fiameni et al., 2021a). The procedure was optimized using an area-centered central experimental design with HCl concentration and liquid-to-solid ratio as factors (Table 2). The experiments were performed with 5 g of ash sample and stirred with the HCl solution for 2 h, and were conducted 17 times to investigate the optimal conditions for P recovery and minimization of Zn contamination.

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Fig. 3 Flowsheet of zero waste generation recovery method proposed by Fiameni et al. (2021a,2021b). The acidic pretreatment was optimized by DOE study for maximizing ESCAPE and P concentration and simultaneously minimizing Zn concentration

Table 2 Design of experiments parameters: input (acid concentration, L/S ratio) and output (P%, Zn concentration, ESCAPE index) for ash sample from Campoaves Std Order

Run Order

Conc HCl [mol/L]

L/S Ratio [mL/g]

P Conc % UV–Vis (825 nm)

Zinc Conc TXRF (mg/kg)

ESCAPE (a.u)

14

1

0.55

30

2.19

1522

−0.76

11

2

0.55

10

1.84

275

−0.43

1

3

0.1

10

0.03

0.22

−2.04

12

4

0.55

50

3.49

1510

−0.70

6

5

0.1

50

1.58

50

−0.78

5

6

0.1

50

1.74

60

−0.76

10

7

1

30

2.52

1225

−0.84

9

8

0.1

30

0.10

0.73

−1.87

4

9

1

10

2.95

1282

−0.34

8

10

1

50

3.02

1348

−0.96

7

11

1

50

2.89

1329

−0.98

2

12

0.1

10

0.03

0.14

−1.97

16

13

0.55

30

2.32

1666

−0.74

15

14

0.55

30

2.23

1243

−0.75

13

15

0.55

30

2.23

1614

−0.72

3

16

1

10

2.90

960

−0.37

17

17

0.55

30

1.83

1330

−0.82

3 Results and Discussion Proximate and elemental analysis The ternary diagram in Fig. 4 shows the results of proximate analysis of Güres and Campoaves samples studied. Ash content dominates the ash samples in the study,

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Fig. 4 Ternary diagram showing volatile matter (VM), fixed carbon (FC) and ash content (Ash) for the poultry litter ash samples studied from the Campoaves and Gures plants, as described by Fahimi et al. (2022)

while volatile matter and solid carbon values are low. An exception is the sample BA-CA, which has lower ash content and higher volatile components. Overall, the results show how different fuels and technologies affect the results of the proximate analysis and provide insight into the best combustion technologies and separation processes for these biomass fuels. The elemental analysis results are shown in Figs. 5 and 6 The P concentrations of the ash samples (Fig. 5) are in the range of medium to low grade phosphate ores, which are lower than the best sedimentary ores from Morocco or Jordan (Bontempi, 2017). In addition, Fig. 5 and 6 evidence that P is more concentrated in the fly ash, while the concentration of some trace elements increases downstream due to their volatilization and condensation when the gas is cooled (e.g., Se) and their occurrence in the form of fine particles. Mineralogical characterization Figure 7 shows the results of the XRD analysis of the ash samples used to determine the crystalline phases. In Güres, the predominant crystalline phases contain Ca, including hydroxyapatite (Ca5 (PO4 )3 (OH)), lime (CaO), calcite (CaCO3 ) and calcium hydroxide (Ca(OH)2 ). The CaCO3 , and small amounts of dolomite (MgCO3 ), are used as fluidizing be in the combustion chamber to capture S. The high Ca content, however, also results from the essential dietary requirement of laying hens, which is concentrated in their feces and combines completely with phosphorus to form hydroxyapatite. The Güres samples also contain other minor phases,

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Fig. 5 Total phosphorus determination by the colorimetric method with UV–VIS spectrophotometer

including a complex form of Si-bearing Na, K and Mg resulting in silica sand also used as fluidizing bed that combines with volatilized Na, K and Mg; Mg oxidizes mostly as periclase and is carried away by the flue gas; portlandite (Ca(OH)2 ), which is formed by the decomposition of calcite into lime and the subsequent interaction with moisture; finally, when comparing different ashes from Gures, the sylvite (KCl) contents are higher in the fly ash samples since Cl and K combine during the flue gas cooling and condensate on the surface of the fly ash particles. The mineralogical composition of Campoaves, due to the low Ca content, is mainly composed of arcanite (K2 SO4 ), sylvite (KCl), hydroxyapatite and other forms of P-bearingin BA, including tricalcium phosphate (Ca3 (PO4 )2 ) and Kstruvite (KMgPO4 (6H2 O)), which indicate low combustion efficiency. The crystalline phases Na-phosphate (NaH2 PO4 ) and sodium hydrogen phosphate hydrate (Na3 HP2 O7 (H2 O)) were found in Fiameni et al. (2021a) as residual phases in BA, but significant in CA FAECO and CA FACYC samples (see Table 3). Campoaves ashes also contain minor amounts of low-temperature (α-)quartz (likely a polymorph) and amorphous relics of the SiO2 composing the rice husks . In our analysis, the amorphous material dominated in the Campoaves samples. This was confirmed by a specroscopic analisys: we detected the presence of some bands in the Raman spectra (shown in Fig. 8) which are an indicator of an amorphous Ca-phosphate phase and hydroxyapatite, where a characteristic band around 960 cm-1 becomes sharper with increasing crystallinity (Stammeier et al., 2018). These results are consistent with XRD data and Rietveld refinement results demonstrating the presence of an amorphous phase (Fahimi et al., 2020) (Table 3 and Fig. 7). Morphological and structural characterization The results of morphological analysis are reported in Fig. 9. The Campoaves fly ash of both partially sintered rice husks and poultry excreta. Melting of the rice husk silica

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Fig. 6 Minor and trace concentration of ash samples from Güres (BA, FAECO, FACYC) and Campoaves (BA, FAECO, FACYC)

with P and other elements from the poultry excreta produces millimeter-sized P-rich morphotypes composed of newly formed crystalline and amorphous phases of P-Ca globules embedded in a silicate matrix containing K, Mg, and Ca (and residual Fe and Al). The fly ash produced at the Güres is composed of partially decomposed CaCO3 sand or bone fragments covered by a layer of sulfates and chlorides. The fly ash from both incinerators is also composed of phosphospheres, i.e. spherical morphotypes mainly composed of simple or complex phosphorus blebs. Due to the high Si content of the rice husks, Campoaves phosphospheres consist of P-K-Ca globules embedded in a Mg-Si-Al matrix, which is. No phosphospheres are detectable in the bottom ash from Campoaves, only RH relics and partially sintered precipitates (Fig. 9).

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Fig. 7 X-ray diffraction spectra with mineralogical qualitative phase identifications for Campoaves (a) and Güres ash samples (b)

Trace elements concern While the ash samples discussed in the study were found to be within the limits set by EU regulation for most trace elements as reported by Fahimi et al. (2022) (see Fig. 7), Zinc (Zn) was an exception, with concentrations exceeding the limit of 1500 ppm for the function category of fertilizers for nutrient uptake for plants. Exceeding the limit for Zn can be problematic because high levels of Zn in the soil can negatively affect plant growth and pose risks to human and animal health. Therefore, it is essential to ensure that Zn and other trace elements do not exceed the limits set by the EU regulation for the safe and effective use of poultry litter ash as fertilizer. This study suggests that beneficiation of the ashes or dilution can overcome the problem of exceeding Zn limits if the direct application as fertilizers is considered. Beneficiation involves the removal of impurities or contaminants from the ash, while dilution involves mixing the ash with other materials to reduce the concentration of trace elements. Both methods can help bring the concentration of Zn within acceptable limits and ensure compliance with the EU regulation. Given that, it is going to be crucial developing processes to recover nutrients like P from these categories of materials without neglecting the concern about problematic elements like Zn. Environmental impact evaluation The ESCAPE approach to evaluate of different processes for extracting P from secondary sources and phosphate rock was validated by comparing it with a reference process known as the “Rhône-Poulenc” process since this process represents more than 80% of the P extraction processes leading to the production of fertilizers.

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Table 3 List of crystalline phases and Rietveld semi-quantification of Campoaves and Güres ash samples BA

Campoaves

Güres

FAECO FACYC BA

FACYC FAECO

Phase

Amount (%)

Calcite [CaCO3 ]

/

/

/

28.97 18.06

Lime [CaO]

/

/

/

6.4

2.43