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The Human Scaffold

How Not to Design Your Way Out of a Climate Crisis

Josh Berson author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:University of California Press

Published:27th Apr '21

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

The Human Scaffold cover

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.

“Berson's mind is on display in all its brilliance and eccentricity. Be prepared. . . . Berson's analytical discernment of contemporary culture burying ourselves with ‘stuff’ and mindlessly devouring the world's natural resources rings with descriptive eloquence. . . . Keep writing, Josh Berson. We need you." * National Catholic Reporter Online *

ISBN: 9780520380486

Dimensions: 210mm x 140mm x 20mm

Weight: 408g

248 pages