The Technosphere and the Mississippi River
In the criss-crossing of infrastructure that winds in and along the Mississippi, one can easily make out the manner in which technical systems have come to have a major impact on the flow, scale, and existence of the river. In this excurse, geologist Peter Haff discusses how the infrastructure embedded in the Mississippi demonstrates the salience of his own terming of planetary-scale technology: the technosphere.
The Earth is wrapped in a dense network of interlinked humans, devices, and built structures: This is the technosphere. Its component parts, including individuals and technological artifacts, require energy to function, material for growth and repair, and information to coordinate needs with supply. The volume and quantity of materials and energy required to drive the technosphere’s high-energy metabolism can be provided only by dedicated pathways over which resources can be transported. As one of the major arteries of transport supporting the metabolic requirements of the technosphere, the Mississippi River is an important part of this network.
Wood River Refinery looking west towards the Mississippi River.
It is useful to look at the relation between the technosphere, the Mississippi River, and its associated human community from the perspective of certain generic physical rules that apply to any system (in this case, the technosphere) and its various parts (the Mississippi River and the community).
i) The rule of performance, that the parts of a system must act in a way that supports the system metabolism. The Mississippi, as one part of a wider system, must behave in a way that supports the metabolism of the technosphere, that is, the energetic and material processes that define that system. One way it does this is to transport essential materials and goods over long distances from suppliers toward users.
ii) The rule of provision, that a system must ensure its parts follow the rule of performance. The Mississippi respects the rule of performance, because the technosphere creates conditions that enable the river to do so, for example, by placing goods and materials on barges and offloading them at their destination. The technosphere also acts to influence river flow via the construction of levees that fix the width and course of a channel that otherwise would seek its own route. The technosphere further ensures—through incentives, regulations, and threats in the workplace—that the human parts of the extended Mississippi community (see next paragraph) follow the rule of performance, that is, they support the functioning of the technosphere.
iii) The rule of reciprocity, that parts of a system tend to directly interact only with other parts of a roughly similar size. Interaction between the technosphere, the river, and individual humans is mediated through reciprocal contact between parts of roughly comparable size, often within sequences of parts of increasing or decreasing scale. For example, provisional forces of the global technosphere filter down from its larger components, such as state and federal governments, through corporations and agencies, to local businesses, municipalities, and departments, and finally to individual elements of the human community spread out along the river—including engineers, boatmen, laborers, scientists, regulators, real-estate agents, and politicians. This rule helps to obscure the dominant influence of large, external forces on the actions of individual humans, creating the illusion that day-to-day life on the Mississippi is mostly a local affair.
iv) The rule of agency, that every system has an intrinsic purpose—to survive—and that the causal effects of pursuing that purpose propagate through the system to affect even its smallest part. The global technosphere is too large and complex to be under the control of any human or organization. Its behavior is guided instead by an impersonal, intrinsic purpose—to survive. Survival means the maintenance of its ability to consume energy and materials, which the technosphere seeks to do through the rule of provision. For the Mississippi River and its associated community of humans, the intrinsic purpose of the technosphere is a source of distant, impersonal causes that propagate along the river’s reciprocal networks, reappearing as local causes affecting human life along the Mississippi. For example, at the local level, the owner of a restaurant in New Orleans lays off one of her waiters. At the larger scale, global events stimulate governmental decisions on international trade policies affecting the regional soy crop in the Midwest, with effects that propagate through the network to impact jobs along the Mississippi, causing the restaurant owner to lay off the waiter.
But what about the river itself? The river was here long before the technosphere, and if the technosphere collapsed and humans vanished from the scene, the river would continue its course to the sea. Is the Mississippi really a part of the technosphere, then? One answer is that a part can be shared between systems, in this case between the technosphere and the hydrosphere. Thus, the river follows the rule of performance with respect to both the technosphere and the hydrosphere, in the latter case, for example, by coordinating its transport of water with the many tributaries that drain into the Mississippi Basin. Alternatively, if one thinks of the technosphere as an organism (although it does not reproduce or evolve though Darwinian evolution), it functions somewhat as a parasite on the Mississippi, redirecting part of the river’s metabolism to its own ends.
A number of academic studies have related to the idea of humans as contingent parts of a larger system of relevance in understanding the Mississippi as a component of the technosphere:
Werner and McNamara investigate the circular interaction between the Mississippi landscape (river and floodplain) and the built environment (such as levees), as mediated by human and institutional behavior, with a focus on the New Orleans region. Here, activity in one sector (for example, flooding on the river) tends to modify activity in the other (for example, the construction of levees). This occurs in a continuing, dynamic cycle of change, similar to that expected from the interplay of the rules of performance and provision. 1
Lazarus and Goldstein argue for the utility of including real-time human interventions, such as bulldozing—a small-scale technospheric process—in models of landscape change during extreme events like flooding and coastal erosion. Such interventions would support a feedback loop of human-landscape-human action and response. 2
Finally, I have elaborated on the technosphere and on some of the generic rules discussed above. 3
