The Technosphere and Earth Stewardship - Earth Stewardship: Linking Ecology and Ethics in Theory and Practice - page 266

faculty was based on very broad job descriptions, yet resulted in all tenure-track
hires being in economics and other social sciences. Neither the departures nor hires
were explicitly related to the dominance of the SES framework in the thinking of
most faculty and students, but we, the authors, believe that indirectly it was a signifi -
cant contributor. More than anything else, recognition of this pattern has led the two
of us and many others to think seriously about the cascading infl uence of the con-
ceptual framework we employ, and whether one focused on an SES approach is an
adequate refl ection of real world dynamics and an effective tool to generate sustain-
able management strategies.
We propose that infrastructure should be considered as one of three equally
important domains in a new conceptual framework: social, ecological, and tech-
nological/infrastructural system ( SETS ; see Ramaswami et al. 2012 for a similar
suggestion for curriculum development). Infrastructure currently is inadequately
dealt with in the SES or CHANS frameworks or when it is richly considered, as
by engineers or urban planners, it is often done in relative isolation from the
social and ecological systems. Infrastructure is defi ned as the basic physical
(hard) and organizational (soft) structures needed for the operation of a society
or enterprise. The term typically refers to the technical structures that support a
society, such as roads, bridges, water supply, sewers, electrical grids, telecom-
munications, and so forth, and can be defi ned as the physical components of
interrelated systems providing commodities and services essential to enable, sus-
tain, or enhance societal living conditions.. Here we are also including the tech-
nological systems associated with the services provided and the institutions that
manage the hard infrastructure and associated technologies (communication sys-
tems such as the internet or cell phone systems being clear examples). It might
be preferable to use the term 'technosphere' to refer to this combination of infra-
structure and technological systems.
Technosphere is defi ned as the part of the physical environment affected through
building or modification by humans (McGraw-Hill Science Dictionary).
Infrastructure (or more broadly the technosphere) is clearly recognized as important
in any conceptual formulation, but most often considered as a secondary part of the
social system or in the case of green infrastructure as a component of the environ-
mental system. This modest level of interest in infrastructure by SES scientists
works against their infl uencing major decision-makers in society. Infrastructure is
where investment focuses. When a community plans for the future and for a more
sustainable world, new infrastructure and technological systems are at the center of
the image. Moreover, infrastructure serves many purposes, often mediating the
interactions within and between the social and environmental domains. Whether or
not infrastructure is within the social domain or a domain in itself as in our SETS
conceptual framework would not be important if all of these systems were thought
of in the same terms and as having the same dynamics and underlying principles of
operation. Our argument here is that they do not, and that there is a signifi cant intel-
lectual misalignment between those of us who deal, respectively, with the social,
environmental, and infrastructural subsystems that acts to inhibit our understanding,
management, and planning for the future.