This document discusses several frameworks for conceptualizing humanity's relationship with the Earth and the environment in the context of the Anthropocene era. It summarizes scenarios from different groups for how global socioeconomic systems and the Earth system may evolve. It argues that the dominant economic frameworks rely on an incorrect view of opposing relationships rather than complementary ones between systems and their environments. Alternative paradigms outlined include panarchy, the triumph of the commons, planetary security, and cosmobiopolitics.

1. La Quatrième Voie
Les politiques de la Terre
face à l’AnthropocènePatrick DEGEORGES

3. The Allegory of Good and Bad Government, Ambrogio Lorenzetti,
Sienna, 1338-1339

6. Global
Scenario
Group

8. Millenium Assessment Scenarios

10. Efficient High – Tech /
Global
Environmentally
Proactive
Community first
Security first /
Differenciation
Economy - First
Global Economic
Convergence
Sustainability- first
Global Integration
with the Earth-System
Fortress World
Order From Strength
Breakdown
Global Orchestration
Adapting Mosaïc
Techno-garden
MAE - scenarios Global Scenario Group
Market Forces
Policy reform
Eco-communalism
New Sustainability
Paradigm ?
SRES – scenarios
A1
A2
B1
B2
Regional Focus
LocalConventional
Low- Tech / Regional
Environmentally
Reactive
WBCSD - 1997
“First Raise Our Growth!” (FROG!)
Geopolity
Jazz
1st Horizon / 2nd Horizon / 3rd Horizon

11. The economic system and the Earth-
System constitute different levels of
organization
The environment of a given open system
is of a different and more inclusive level
of relation (or LOGICAL TYPE) than the
system it supports
Under state and 'private' capitalism,
capital dominates labor potential, and
labor potential is consequently used to
exploit land. But 'land' (photosynthesis)
stands for our life support system, the
biosphere, and capital can be produced
only by the creative capacity of human
beings. Thus, since land is the source or
'ground' of labor potential, and labor
potential the ground of capital, then the
Imaginary and commoditized hierarchy
invented and imposed by capitalism is
precisely the inverse of the real one.

12. Imaginary trade-offs
$
Techno-
Science
Putting 'system' and 'environment' into
a bilateral and one-dimensional EITHER/ OR OPPOSITION
with each other
By means of which extremely significant aspects
of actual relationships are (temporarily) neutralized
A double
process of
'flattening out' and
symmetrization
of non-symmetrical
relations and the
turning a real
hierarchy upside
down

13. $
$
$
Our socioeconomic
system
has just
discovered
to its amazement
that
it has been
an open system
trying
to behave like a
closed one
The neoliberal version of three-
centuries-old Imaginary and ideological
myth of 'man's mastery over nature’
shows that ignorance of the
context happens to be
one of our most highly developed
cultural value
$
.
Human economic relations are relative to the long-range survival of the
(social/political) system one is in; and this at another level is relative
to the constraints of the organic environment (which includes humans-
as-organisms). This at another level is relative to the constraints of the
inorganic environment; which in turn is relative to
the constraints of local or planetary (positive) entropy ...'; and so on.
A militarized conception of Security is now part of a larger cultural momentum, one
that has become a central and defining existential component of human life

14. • All major industrial nations need to “work together in
how to transition away from oil and fossil fuels in
general,” the report concludes, warning: “The alternative
is conflict.” Industrial civilization will need to “evolve”
into “a lower energy consumption profile with less
complexity,” based on a “complete restructure of the
demand side of energy requirements.”
• Right now, though, “no one is preparing for this,” said
Hagens. “Not only are we speeding, but we are wearing
energy blind-folds at the same time. But the momentum
of our current system forces us to have conversations
about a bigger system not a smaller one—so the correct
and valid plans and blueprints are not discussed… It is a
perfect storm—and when the waters recede we are
going to have smaller, simpler and more local, regional
economies.”

17. Earth
Planet
(Non social )
Sustainability
based on
cybernetic
techno-science
World
(Social)
Globalisation
based the
« immunity »
of the economy
Image of the Globe
World socio-
political
order
based on human
history
Ex. « Econophysics » of finance
Ex. Policy design for keeping
within « planetary boundaries »
Ex. « Capitalism
vs the climate »

18. The logic of trade-offs inherent to
the discourse of Globalisation is
based on the epistemological error
that allows our culture to deny the
complementary relationships on
which it depends, and consequently
to view both 'horizontal' relations at
a given level, and 'vertical' relations
between levels, as single-level
relations of (binary) opposition.
Imaginary and either/ or relationships
remain dominant in such a way that in
general our system's both-and
(cooperative) relations are derived
from the either/ or socioeconomic
reality, rather than from the
socioecological imperative of 'both
system (at one level) and environment
(at another)' to which the either/ or
must ultimately be subordinate if the
system is to survive.
Logic of the Included Third
Globalisation
Earth
Planet World
LR1
What is real for us in reality are
the products of the punctuation
and the organization of reality by
the activities of society in history.
In the relationship between
society and nature,
inadequate, inept, or imaginary
punctuations may lead to
extinctionA Non-A
T
LR2
Te: Excluded Third
⏧ ⏧
Planet World
Te
A Non - A
Ti : Included Third
Ti
Earth
Sustainability
Globalisation

19. Mutation
Panarchy /
Homeotechnics
Triumph of
the commons
(Social-ecological
Cohesion)
Planetary Security
(Political Change)
Global Market
(Free-Trade)
Politics of the Earth
Fortress World
Order From Strength
Breakdown
Global Orchestration
Adapting Mosaïc
Techno-garden
MAE - scenarios Global Scenario Group
Market Forces
Policy reform
Eco-communalism
New Sustainability
Paradigm
SRES – scenarios
A1
A2
B1
B2
Sustainability
Geopower /
Heterotechnics
WBCSD - 1997
“First Raise Our Growth!” (FROG!)
Geopolity
Jazz
1st Horizon / 2nd Horizon / 3rd Horizon
Earth
Planet
Globe
World
To speculatively open the potential to
fundamentally rethink
the subject positions given to humans
« To explore the Nomos of the Earth, there is no other instrument than the
tiny range of patterns provided by management and governance. The
universalization of a provincial definition of what it is to be a human has
made the research for multiple solutions appear impossible. » B. Latour
Patrick Degeorges – La Quatrième Voie

20. Mutation
Panarchy
Triumph of
the commonsPlanetary Security
(Political Change)
Global Market
(Free-Trade)
Cosmobiopolitics
Plutocene
Sustainability
Geopower
Plantationocene
(Socio-ecological
Cohesion)
Chthulucene
(Haraway)
Ecozoïc (Thomas Berry)
Anglocene
Algocene (Gaïa 2.0)
Gaïa/
Parliament of Things
(Latour/Stengers)
Gaïa (Lovelock)
Biogea (Serres)
Technosphere
Homogenocene
Space-ship Earth
(Buckminster Fuller)
Agrilogistics
(Morton)
Sloterdijk’s
Spherology
Indigenous
Cosmovisions (Pachamama)
Eco-marxism /
World - Ecology
Dark Ecology (Morton)
Thanatocene
Eco-fascism Political Ecology
Transhumanism
Posthumanism
Earth Law
Symbiotic Gaïa (Margulis)
Ecopolis
Politics of the Earth
Eremocene (Wilson)
Mesocene
Cité écologique
Patrick Degeorges – La Quatrième Voi