"It was introduced by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin in 1922 in his
Cosmogenesis"
- - - - - -
"a postulated sphere or stage of evolutionary development dominated by
consciousness, the mind, and interpersonal relationships (frequently with
reference to the writings of Teilhard de Chardin)."
this was part and parcel the sixties, the seventies and into the eighties
The noosphere is the planetary sphere of mind or thinking layer of planet
Earth. To grasp the idea of the noosphere we must elevate our consciousness
and open ourselves to the most general, elemental and cosmic principles of
life on Earth.
As the mental sheathe of the planet, the noosphere characterizes mind and
consciousness as a unitary phenomenon. This means that the quality and
nature of our individual and collective thoughts directly effects the
noosphere and creates the quality of our environment—the biosphere.
As the Earth’s “mental sheathe,” the noosphere represents the breakthrough
to a new consciousness, a new time and a new reality arising from the
biospheric crisis. This is known as the biosphere-noosphere transition.
Just as the biosphere is the unity of all of life and its support system,
the noosphere is the unity of all mind and its thinking layers. In this way
the noosphere can be understood as the sum of the mental interactions of
all life.
The Noosphere - literally, “mind-sphere” or Earth’s mental sheathe - is a
word and concept jointly coined by *Édouard Le Roy*, French philosopher and
student of Henri Bergson, Jesuit paleontologist *Pierre Teilhard de
Chardin,* and Russian geochemist, *Vladimir Vernadsky*, in Paris, 1926. At
the root of the primary definition of noosphere is a dual perception: that
life on Earth is a unity constituting a whole system known as the
biosphere; and that the mind or consciousness of life - the Earth’s
thinking layer - constitutes a unity that is discontinuous but coextensive
with the entire system of life on Earth, inclusive of its inorganic support
systems. A third critical premise arising from the first two is that the
noosphere defines the inevitable next stage of terrestrial evolution, which
will subsume and transform the biosphere.
“An orthodox Marxist view of the inevitability of global collective human
agency transforming the world politically and economically requires only a
modest conceptual leap to collective human agency as a driver of
environmental transformation.”
“Considering these and many other major and still growing impacts of human
activities on Earth and atmosphere, and at all, including global, scales,
it seems to us more than appropriate to emphasise the central role of
mankind in geology and ecology by proposing to use the term ‘anthropocene’
for the current geological epoch. The impacts of current human activities
will continue over long periods.”
It was this that revived the idea of the Anthropocene as a possible new
geological time period and re-entered it into the scientific vernacular.
Crutzen followed up the idea two years later with a paper
<http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v415/n6867/full/415023a.html> in the
journal Nature.
In this study, he distinguished his idea from the older notions of an
anthropogenic age by suggesting that it started around 1784, at around the
time when James Watt designed the steam engine — and when polar ice records
show that concentrations of carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere
started to rise.
Now, the Anthropocene was presented as a dramatic rupture in the entire
Earth system, write the authors. They said:
“The effect of finding historical precedents is, inadvertently or
otherwise, to deflate the Anthropocene concept, reading the Earth’s future
into its past and diminishing its significance and novelty as just another
manifestation of a long line of thinking; whereas in fact the Anthropocene
represents, according to those who initially put it forward, a dangerous
shift, and a radical rupture in Earth history.”