Cybernetics in the Anthropocene’s Wake: Reframing Global Transformations Through the Emergent Human–Earth System

Abstract

The Anthropocene has been a powerful conceptual lens for exploring the coupling of humans and the Earth system. While fostering a rich transdisciplinary discourse, its grounding in bounded geological time and emphasis on disruption has often reinforced the nature–culture divide and tended toward a dystopian outlook. This paper proposes that more optimistic reformulations can follow a shift from “epochal thinking” to systemic emergence. Drawing on archaeology, paleoecology, and complex adaptive systems, we argue that global challenges are symptoms of underlying historical dynamics within what we describe as runaway and creative human–environment systems, interrelated forms defined by feedback, adaptation, and co-evolution. We propose a cybernetic reframing of Anthropocene debates that shifts attention to systemic transformation, emphasizing changes in feedback architectures, distributed cognition, and ecological memory across human–environment systems. A deep time case study of Central European forests illustrates how coupled human–environment systems cross thresholds of vulnerability when governance fails to engage with distributed feedback and ecological memory embedded in soils, species assemblages, and historical practices. The case demonstrates how adaptive capacity and learning emerge cybernetically across human and nonhuman components, offering a framework for navigating global challenges.