When Édouard Le Roy, Vladimir Vernadsky and Teilhard de Chardin started to describe in the 1920s how the "noosphere", the sphere of the human mind, grows into the geosphere and the biosphere, they were already talking about something very real. Yet until today we continue to talk as if our global systems for communicating and exchanging thoughts are somehow immaterial and other-wordly. Today's "clouds", in which our data are kept safe, create the metaphor that information turns ethereal once it is stored. Yet the opposite is true. With a multitude of cables, electromagnetic interventions and very material computers, the noosphere is a geological reality of increasing volume and it is increasingly a part of Anthropocene nature. This is what Anthropo-scene #2, on the Indonesian island of Bali, shows: A new species of vine-like plant which could be aptly called Liana noospherica by a new, yet-to-come breed of naturalists that give the new entities of the noosphere scientific names.

This is the second in the Anthropo-scene series. For the first post, click here

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