The Human Scaffold: How Not to Design Your Way Out of a Climate Crisis

by Josh Berson

Overview

Humanity has precipitated a planetary crisis of resource consumption—a crisis of stuff. So ingrained is our stuff-centric view that we can barely imagine a way out beyond substituting a new portmanteau of material things for the one we have today.

In The Human Scaffold, anthropologist Josh Berson offers a new theory of adaptation to environmental change. Drawing on niche construction, evolutionary game theory, and the enactive view of cognition, Berson considers cases in the archaeology of adaptation in which technology in the conventional sense was virtually absent. Far from representing anomalies, these cases exemplify an enduring feature of human behavior that has implications for our own fate.

The time has come to ask what the environmental crisis demands of us not as consumers but as biological beings. The Human Scaffold offers a starting point.

 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520380509
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	03/23/2021
Series:	Great Transformations , #2
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	248
File size:	10 MB

About the Author

Josh Berson has held appointments at two Max Planck Institutes—Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, and the History of Science—and at the Berggruen Institute, where he was inaugural USC Berggruen Fellow in the Transformations of the Human. He is the author of The Meat Question: Animals, Humans, and the Deep History of Food and Computable Bodies: Instrumented Life and the Human Somatic Niche.

Table of Contents

List of Figures
Preface: Living Epiphytically
Kansha

1. Treadmills
2. Scaffolds
3. Equilibria
4. Landscapes
4boro. Landscapes and Scaffolds
5. Ditch Kit

Postscript: Foaminess
Glossary
Notes
Sources
Index

Editorial Reviews

Berson's mind is on display in all its brilliance and eccentricity. Be prepared. . . . Berson's analytical discernment of contemporary culture burying ourselves with ‘stuff’ and mindlessly devouring the world's natural resources rings with descriptive eloquence. . . . Keep writing, Josh Berson. We need you."

National Catholic Reporter Online