ABSTRACT
For most of human history, people lived in spatially very confined places. But over the last several centuries humans have increasingly acted in, and mapped, much larger, and increasingly global spatial scales. The geographical is most commonly linked to the political in these Earth formulations because they descriptively characterize problematic, even catastrophic, aspects of the contemporary planetary situation. Problem-ridden images of the new Earth inexorably point toward particular solutions and their attendant political practices and authorities. The pessimistic ecologist Garrett Hardin also likens the human situation to a lifeboat, but posits multiple lifeboats, each adrift in a pitiless and dangerous sea. The rapid and accelerating growth of communications and computing technology, greatly stimulated by Cold War R&D, produced yet another entire family of new Earth globality formulations centered on information, consciousness, and intelligence. In this large and diverse intellectual landscape, there are at least four roughly distinct variants of minded Earth images.
