Abstract
In his landmark “State of the Planet” speech in 2020, UN Secretary-General Guterres said what many scientists believe: “The state of the planet is broken” (Guterres 2020). This language reflects a view of global processes as functional in the sense that components have roles to play in the working of the planet as a whole. For example, scientists describe the thermohaline circulation as a “conveyor belt” that moderates global temperatures (Broecker 2010); polar ice as a planetary “air conditioner” (Urban 2020); and rainforests as “biotic pumps” driving water cycles and atmospheric circulation (Pearce 2020). This perspective has significant normative and teleological elements, suggesting that the components should operate to contribute to the planet’s ability to sustain some goal-state. If they cannot, the planet is “broken.” This view raises obvious philosophical problems. Widely accepted assumptions about the place of teleological and normative concepts in science seem to bar these functional ascriptions from use in large-scale systems, restricting scientific work on global processes to a mechanistic idiom. Yet normative and teleological ideas are widespread in global environmental sciences. They appear mainly in metaphorical forms, including functional metaphors of artifactual design, such as the examples above or organicist metaphors likening the earth to an organism, agent, or community. The prominence of these metaphors in scientists’ research publications and public statements reflects a growing sense among some scientists that recent discoveries of ubiquitous interdependencies and feedback between geologic, thermodynamic, ecological and biological processes reveal the empirical inadequacy of the relatively simple mechanistic picture of the planet and its atmosphere that has guided modelers over the past few decades. Significant predictive failures—including the persistent underestimation of the pace of global-scale change—underscore the limits of this picture and the urgent need for conceptual models that fully capture the import of these discoveries. Some scientists have responded to this need by developing approaches that take a functional perspective (looking at Earth as an integrated functional system of some kind) or an agent perspective (examining the roles of responsive living systems in global processes). These approaches offer a multiplicity of key concepts, from “global ecosystem services” (Costanza et al., 2017) to “planetary boundaries” (Rockström et al., 2009); from “planetary health” (Whitmee et al., 2014) to “Nature-based solutions” (Seddon et al., 2020). Yet we lack a clear and consistent framework that clarifies and assesses how these various ways of thinking about global functions, norms, and goals respond to fundamental philosophical challenges, and shows how they can be integrated with one another—a “geofunctional” framework. Choices between perspectives on global change and stability have potentially consequential implications for scientific knowledge-making. Different perspectives offer different heuristics, which affect the models researchers develop and the evidence they deem relevant. The mechanistic, functional and agential perspectives focus attention on different aspects of the systems they are applied to. These perspectives are not always exclusive and can be complementary. The question is where each can be most illuminating, and how to combine them. To address these questions, a geofunctional framework is required.
