University of California Press
The Human Scaffold: How Not to Design Your Way Out of a Climate Crisis Volume 2
Key Metrics
- Josh Berson
- University of California Press
- Hardcover
- 9780520380486
- 8.3 X 5.6 X 0.8 inches
- 0.85 pounds
- Science > Cognitive Science
- English
Secure TransactionBook Description
Humanity has precipitated a planetary crisis of resource consumption--a crisis of stuff. So ingrained is our stuff-centric view that we can barely imagine a way out beyond substituting a new portmanteau of material things for the one we have today.
In The Human Scaffold, anthropologist Josh Berson offers a new theory of adaptation to environmental change. Drawing on niche construction, evolutionary game theory, and the enactive view of cognition, Berson considers cases in the archaeology of adaptation in which technology in the conventional sense was virtually absent. Far from representing anomalies, these cases exemplify an enduring feature of human behavior that has implications for our own fate.
The time has come to ask what the environmental crisis demands of us not as consumers but as biological beings. The Human Scaffold offers a starting point.
Author Bio
Josh Berson’s work addresses the technological scaffolding of sensorimotor habits over epochs of 10 to 100,000 years. Previously he was visiting researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences. At the Berggruen he’s been finishing a new book, Ditch Kit: How Humans Adapt to Environmental Change. His forthcoming book The Meat Question (MIT Press, 2019) examines human nutrition strategies over the entire 2.8-million-year span of humanity’s tenure on Earth. His 2015 book Computable Bodies (Bloomsbury) won the 2016 PROSE Award in Language and Linguistics.
Source: Berggruen Institute
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