The Sphere of the Mind: Reviving the Noösphere Concept for Ecological Anthropology

As we enter the 21st Century with the words "globalization," "world development" and "global extinctions" ringing in our ears, it behooves us to revitalize a concept that has lain dormant for a while. The "noosphere," broadly interpreted, is the world transformed by humans and human thought. It is produced and maintained by increasing complexity of human interaction in cultural, social, biological and physical environments. It is often defined as 1) the biosphere transformed by human knowledge and action, and 2) the (quasi-spiritual) intermeshing of human thought and belief into a unified whole. Though historically these two uses of the term noosphere have developed along somewhat separate paths, for ecological anthropologists a great part of the utility of the noosphere concept is precisely in this dual definition. By oscillating between a materialistic and an ideational interpretation of human thought we gain insight into the fundamental relationships between humans and the non-human world. It is through consensus and everincreasing networks of structured belief systems that we manage to impact the non-human world in such pervasive ways. This sets up a dialectical or feedback relationship between our collective thoughts of the world and our collective action in the world. In other words, it takes increasing organization of consciousness to affect the world as we do. Of course this is not a novel insight; anthropologists, sociologists, political economists, geographers and historians have been investigating the nature of sociality for decades and a select group of these have focused on the relationships between social groups and biophysical environments. The novelty of the noosphere is in its scope of reference. It encompasses the globe.3 The noosphere concept is explicitly anthropocentric. It provides an heuristic tool for navigating the awkward transitions between individual human cognition and coarser scales of human aggregates: the kin group, the community, the tribe, the nation, the world community. The noosphere concept sits at the top of this scale and it explicitly asks us to view humans and their environments in an holistic, global perspective. The noosphere is necessarily emergent: it is more than the sum of individual human consciousnesses. It only exists through relationship between consciousnesses. Bateson and Bateson (1987:105) play with the idea that consciousness itself "...has to do with relationships between subsystems" at the level of the mind and communities of minds. Using this definition, the noosphere represents the most inclusive of related subsystems, a kind of emergent consciousness itself. This kind of (admittedly ambitious) conceptual development is useful to us in ecological anthropology because we suffer from a poverty of concepts that express holism, emergent properties, complexity and connection, yet we are asked increasingly to deal in realms at the global level and with issues that require just such conceptual tools. The word "noosphere" was developed in a meeting of several exceptional minds in France during the 1920s (Samson and Pitt 1999). Pierre Tielhard de Chardin, a Jesuit priest and scientist, the philosopher Edouard Le Roy and the Russian geochemist Vladimir Vernadsky were inspired to search for an interdisciplinary, globally oriented conceptualization of human relationships after witnessing the horrors of the First World War. From Greek, "noosphere" is literally the "sphere of the mind." Tielhard de Chardin described the noosphere in his Phenomenon of Man (1959:202) as "a new layer, the 'thinking layer', which since its germination at the end of the Tertiary era, has spread over and above the world of plants and animals. In other words, outside and above the biosphere there is the noosphere" (Figure 1). Both Tielhard de Chardin and Le Roy invested a spiritual significance in the noosphere, using the concept to try to reconcile the old split between the material and the ideational, the body and the mind, the physical world and human consciousness, science and religion (Samson and Pitt 1999). …