Peter K. Haff (1944–2024) — in memoriam

Peter K. Haff (1944–2024)

I was so sad to hear about the recent death of Peter Haff. I had heard about his illness a few months before and had been dreading the moment that I would receive the final news. He died on 3 February from brain cancer, aged 79.

In case you don’t know the name, Peter Kirkland Haff was Professor Emeritus of Geology at Duke University, USA, where he had worked since 1988 in the field of geomorphology, working especially on the flow regimes of sand and the dynamics of dune formation. But in recent years he had become widely known — far outside his field of physical geography — for his contribution to the work of the interdisciplinary Anthropocene Working Group, and most particularly for his development of the concept of the ‘technosphere’. In this work, Peter drew on his deep understanding of the physics of planetary processes to develop new ways of thinking about technology ‘as a geological phenomenon’, as he memorably put it: as an interconnected planetary subsystem, comparable to the hydrosphere and biosphere, that operates according to its own endogenous laws of development, and its own kind of inhuman agency and purpose.

For more on Peter’s life and reputation, you can see Duke University’s announcement of Peter’s death here, and a more personal account of his life and legacy from his son Jesse here. [Edit: and now some super reminiscences by Dan Richter on Peter’s intellectual courage and brilliance, including his ‘principle of intellectual trespass’ and the verb ‘to Peterhaff’, in the AWG Newsletter here.] But in this post for Another Planet I want to pay tribute to Peter’s genius as a creative thinker, through teasing out the influence he had on my own work — and indeed on the very concept of Another Planet.

I first met Peter in October 2014, at A Matter Theatre, one of the exciting, interdisciplinary events organised by the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) in Berlin as part of their Anthropocene Project. I was invited to A Matter Theatre to do a couple of sessions — a performance of a new piece of mine they had commissioned, ‘The Martian Book of the Dead’, and to have an onstage conversation with artist Tomás Saraceno and art historian Molly Nesbit. But just as memorable for me was meeting Peter, who had his own onstage conversation with media theorist Eric Hörl at the event, in which they explored the similarities and differences between Peter’s idea of the technosphere and Hörl’s idea of neocybernetics and ‘general ecology’.¹

I immediately saw how interesting and intellectually curious Peter was. I remember engineering a conversation with him by making sure to sit next to him when we boarded the minibus that took us from the Hotel to the HKW in the morning. This was the start of a long and productive exchange of ideas about the nature and evolution of technology, that lasted right up until when Peter started to get ill in 2023. And this long exposure to his ideas — and his very intellectual style — had a huge influence on my own approach to planetary thinking.

But before talking about Peter’s ideas about the technosphere, I want to mention another side of his work that has had less attention, but was and continues to be hugely influential on my own work — his reconceptualisation of the movement of matter, and especially solid terrestrial matter, as a planetary phenomenon.

Planetary mobilities

Two articles of Peter’s were massively influential on my own thinking in this area. In his 2010 article ‘Hillslopes, rivers, plows, and trucks’, Peter presented imaginative ways of looking at the motion of all things that move within the extended body of the earth — whether fluid or solid, living or non-living, natural or artefactual — using the same vocabulary and explanatory framework.² For example, he showed how the categories of fluid dynamics, such those of diffusion and advection, can be used to develop a rich and contextually nuanced understanding of patterns of movement amongst any kind of entity that moves in and on the earth — whether it be sediment, migrating animals or passengers and goods on transport systems.

In the ‘Hillslopes’ paper he also proposed a way to measure and compare the movement of matter in the Earth across all our conventional categories, using a single metric of ‘mass action’, calculated as the product of mass delivered multiplied by distance travelled and by average speed, and measured in kg·m²/s. To use the phrase made famous by the sociologist C. Wright Mills, through such devices he thereby helped to ‘make the familiar strange’ — to look at things that we take for granted, such as the building of metalled roads and railways, in a strikingly different way: as geomorphological phenomena comparable to the carving of river courses. In this he was totally in tune with the spirit of Another Planet, especially that aspect of creative estrangement that we tried to capture in the word ‘another’ — not surprising, given the influence that Peter’s style of intellectual inquiry had on the very way that we conceived of the blog from the outset.

An extract from Peter’s (2010) table comparing the sheer size of different phenomena of motion in the Earth, from the jet stream to automobile transport.

A couple of years later, Peter published a second paper on the topic of motion as a geological phenomenon, ‘Technology and human purpose: the problem of solids transport on the Earth’s surface’.³ In this new paper he did conclude by suggesting that the sustained motion of solid matter in the earth (as opposed to it depending on gravitational gradients (slopes again) or piggybacking on fluid motion) only became possible with the advent of ‘human purpose’. But in carefully setting up the arrival of human-created powered transport and its supportive infrastructure as a unique, transformative event in planetary history (and a constitutive element of the Anthropocene), at the same time he gave us some profoundly generative ways of situating this event in a far more inclusive, much-more-than-human story of Earthly motion.

The very description in the paper’s title of ‘solids transport’ as a ‘problem’ was already a powerful provocation to thought. Unlike fluid matter, which readily moves when there is an applied energy gradient, Peter pointed out that solid matter (unless it is broken up or ‘discretised’) has to move en masse, in a motion that typically involves overcoming both friction (e.g. in moving along the ground) and form resistance (e.g. in passing around obstacles of a similar scale). Peter points out that animals (and their later offshoot of human technology) overcame these challenges to large-scale, sustained solids transport in the Earth through three main innovations — rotary motion (limbs and wheels), infrastructure (paths and roads) and internal power (muscles and engines).

But to whom or what was this resistance a ‘problem’ to be overcome, anyway, and in what way was it a problem? Was it just a problem for humans and other animals, who might want and need to move stuff around? Or, as I felt Peter was hinting, is the resistance that planetary conditions make to solid motion a problem for the Earth — an Earth that is in a sense following imperatives to degrade energetic and chemical gradients, that is trying to explore the space of possibility created for it by the conditions of its formation in the deep past, and that is trying to find an arrangement of its parts that achieves both of those most effectively?

I sought to build on Peter’s ideas in my own work on mobility as a planetary phenomenon. His analysis of the movement of animals, humans and artefacts as if they were physical phenomena akin to jet streams and avalanches gives us license to reverse the direction of the comparison — to look at nonorganic motion such as sediment flows and oceanic currents as already containing within themselves many of the features that we think are only found in the motion of living, perhaps conscious beings, and of any artefacts they might design and create. Thus in my 2016 paper ‘Planetary mobilities’, I was really simply following Peter’s lead when I proposed my own ‘approach to mobilities that makes no a priori distinctions between the abiotic (non-living, physico-chemical processes), the biotic (organic life) and the technological (artefacts, tools and machines), and that treats all mobilities in the Earth as emergent phenomena generated by a planet organising itself under the constraints of physical laws and imperatives’.⁴

Peter’s influence was also clear a few years later, in ‘How to dismantle a bus: planetary mobilities as method’, originally devised as a performance on a moving bus for the 2018 conference True Oil.⁵ This time, in interaction with my fellow conference delegates, I focused on how to analyse a single particular moving entity as a ‘geological’ or as I would put it ‘planetary’ phenomenon — in this case a bus, conceived as an assemblage that included its human driver and passengers, and the eddies in the air that it carried along with it. Inspired by Peter’s work (and I think subconsciously by Jan Zalasiewicz’s The Panet in a Pebble),⁶ I used the everyday example of a bus to demonstrate that a full analysis of any moving entity inevitably opens out into the deep-time story of the Earth.

I also drew extensively on Peter’s geological approach to motion in chapter 6 of the 2021 book with Nigel Cark, Planetary Social Thought, which situated the emergence of wheeled transport amongst central Asian nomadic herders around 3,000 BCE as a geohistorical event — not just in the way it helped establish the preconditions for the future Anthropocene explosion of powered transport, but also within the larger story of the ‘mobility revolutions’ of the Earth through which the planet learned to move solid objects in new ways.⁷

Technology as a new ‘sphere’ of the Earth

Now, the technosphere. Of course, Peter wasn’t the first thinker to propose we look at technology as constituting a new sphere of the Earth (see here for a good summary by Andrew Nikiforuk of the related proposals of earlier thinkers such as Vladimir Vernadsky, as well as a thoughtful reflection on the profound implications of Peter’s own ideas). But Peter’s writings on the topic were significant for bringing a deeper, more reflective approach to technology into the heart of Anthropocene science, but also for the way he focused more than earlier thinkers on the material and energetic aspects of technology as a phenomenon.

His 2014 breakthrough paper on the topic, ‘Technology as a geological phenomenon’, situated technology within the story of how the Earth developing its series of planetary subsystems or as he calls them ‘geological paradigms’, such as the hydrological cycle, atmospheric circulation, plate tectonics and biological processes. This enables him to find both commonalities between these older paradigms and the technosphere and, but also examples of the latter’s distinctiveness. Note here that he uses the distinctive features of the technosphere not to disqualify but to clarify it as a geological phenomenon — specifically, to strengthen the idea that it is becoming a quasi-autonomous sphere, appropriating mass, information and energy from other Earth spheres, but also creating new problems for the Earth, not least in its poor ability to recycle its own waste.⁸

His 2016 ‘six rules’ paper in Anthropocene Review expanded on a disturbing implication of the earlier article, which had provided an important counterweight to that strand of thinking about the Anthropocene that saw it as an epoch in which humanity was thought to be turning into a conscious, steward or manager of the planetary ‘life support system’.⁹ Since the components of any planetary subsystem that achieves paradigm status have limited autonomy except in the terms dictated by that paradigm, and since humans as living beings were being increasingly co-opted by and incorporated into the operation of the technosphere, the ideas that human beings have significant agency over the future of the planet is probably greatly exaggerated.¹⁰

“The Anthropocene Illusion is the belief that agency is a property exclusive to humans and is lacking from technological artifacts and systems. This results in the misimpression that the technosphere is solely a human creation.” Drawing by Peter Haff.

In a more recent book chapter, ‘The technosphere and its relation to the Anthropocene’, Peter expanded on the core ideas of the ‘six rules’ paper.¹¹ He clarified his more-than-human concept of agency — both granting it to more-than-human systems, but in the same gesture all but taking it away from human beings in the Anthropocene epoch.

Each self-organising system, he wrote, has its own regulative agency, by which it pursues its intrinsic purpose of ensuring its own persistence. Then, its parts ‘inherit their own type of regulative agency from the system, acting as if they were trying to support the system’s intrinsic purpose’ — a dynamic that he argued is true of the technosphere. In turn, ‘enabling and guiding the functional purpose of its parts is the system’s provisional agency’. So, just as the parts of a self-organising system are compelled to behave in ways that support the persistence of the system, so too does the system tend to adopt dynamical states which support the role played by its constituent parts.

Peter concludes ‘that there are no purely technological answers to … the challenges humans face in the Anthropocene’. But on the other hand Peter is not wholly fatalistic about the future trajectory of technology and thus of the Earth. He argues that humans can, within limits, steer the technosphere — but only if they are clear-eyed about what the technosphere is. And the most crucial step in addressing the challenges of the Anthropocene, he argued, is ‘for humans to recognise that the technosphere has agency, and that that agency is not the same as our own’.

I would have loved to write with Peter, but he told me that, when he was chasing down the ideas that he was most deeply committed to, he much preferred to write alone. However, he was of course a co-author on many of the AWG papers — most relevant being probably ‘The Scale and diversity of the physical technosphere’, which concluded that the mass of the ‘summed material output of the contemporary human enterprise’ was around five orders of magnitude larger than the combined human biomass — but also that its sheer diversity probably outstripped the diversity of the biosphere across the Earth’s history to date.¹²

After his appearance at A Matter Theatre in 2014, Peter’s concept of the technosphere was adopted as the theme and title of HKW’s next project, Technosphere, which ran from 2015 to 2019. But in truth I felt that many of my colleagues from the social sciences and humanities (SSH) were wary of Peter’s approach, given its firm grounding in the physical sciences. I felt that although SSH colleagues were very happy to take the technosphere concept into productive speculative areas, their resistance to his specific arguments grounded in physics and geomorphology tended to cut them off from the huge creative potential that I perceive in his methodological choice to bracket off of all that we think is unique and defining about human beings (consciousness, intention, culture, history, politics, ethics, etc.) and to ask instead: what if we approach the technosphere — the built environment, energy infrastructure, the physical economy, but also the culture that supports it — as if it were a natural, indeed geological, phenomenon.

The result was a vision of ‘the human enterprise’ as being propelled mainly by a kind of inhuman, systemic, agency, one that not is really in harmony with human interests or conscious intention. Peter’s geophysical method thus converged in its results with some positions in the philosophy of technology — but also with themes from science fiction and horror.

A few of my papers and performance pieces drew heavily on Peter’s ideas about the technosphere. ‘Viewing the technosphere in an interplanetary light’ speculated that the evolution of the technosphere displayed many characteristics familiar from the study of biological evolution, perhaps giving us clues about its future direction.¹³ ‘From tools to technosphere’ accentuated the similarities that Peter identified between the biosphere and the technosphere, imaging them both as examples of a possible wide range of self-complexifying ‘late planetary spheres’.¹⁴ The performance piece ‘The Onomatophore of the Anthropocene’ ends up with the judgement of the Galactic Commission on Planetary Ages that the Earth is leaving the planetary aeon of organic life, and entering ‘the Phanerotechnic: the aeon of technological life, of organised inorganic matter, which in the deep time of the main sequence will surely be succeeded by the Aoratotechnic, the aeon of invisible machinery, of pure organisation, when technology will finally shed its material form’.¹⁵

In 2018 Peter started his own blog, Being Human in the Anthropocene. I asked him whether he was using it to work towards the book-length exploration of his ideas that I really craved, but he said not. He never took the blog as far as I had hoped, but it is a good place to find some of his later thoughts, getting into the detail of his thinking — and his funny little cartoons like the one above. I also saw a couple of drafts of a paper he was working on, theorising the accelerating tendencies of the technosphere as a systemic property — I hope it gets published sometime.

I was sad that my ‘Twilight of the Machines 2023’ video was finished too late for Peter to see it. It is a mythological account of the past, present and future conclusion of the human-technology relation, as if told by an unknown being in the far future. In this new version of my tale, I reshaped the narrative — partly because of recent developments in Artificial Intelligence, but also very much under Haffian influence. In Act 4 of the piece, the machines team up with each other in intrigues and cabals and machinations, and seem to rebel against the humans that made them, producing unintended consequences for humans and non-humans. But it turns out that the machines finally leave for another world where they can pursue their own machinic destiny, free from any dependency on the human animal. I so wanted to debate this version of the ending with Peter.

Adieu

I don’t know which world Peter has gone to. I hope it is one that is truly hospitable for such a great soul. But I suspect that he has gone wandering: his Twitter feed (another good place to get a sense of the man) shows his last ever Tweet from June last year, with a quote from historian William Eamon: ‘Tourists never really leave home; they bring home with them. Only wanderers discover the world’.

In the meantime, those he has left behind must continue his work — he has left us with some great tools, and it is up to us to pick them up, to wander, and to discover the world anew.

References

1. Erich Hörl (2023) ‘A thousand ecologies: the process of cyberneticization and general ecology,’ in The Whole Earth: California and the Disappearance of the Outside, ed. Diedrich Diederichsen and Anselm Franke, Berlin: Sternberg Press, pp. 121–31.
2. Peter K. Haff (2010) ‘Hillslopes, rivers, plows, and trucks: mass transport on Earth’s surface by natural and technological processes,’ Earth Surface Processes and Landforms, 35(10), pp. 1157–66. http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/esp.1902.
3. Peter K. Haff (2012) ‘Technology and human purpose: the problem of solids transport on the Earth’s surface,’ Earth Syst. Dynam., 3(2), pp. 149–56. https://doi.org/10.5194/esd-3-149-2012.
4. Bronislaw Szerszynski (2016) ‘Planetary mobilities: movement, memory and emergence in the body of the Earth,’ Mobilities, 11(4), pp. 614–28. http://doi.org/10.1080/17450101.2016.1211828.
5. Published as: Bronislaw Szerszynski (2020) ‘How to dismantle a bus: planetary mobilities as method,’ in Handbook of Research Methods and Applications for Mobilities, ed. Monika Büscher, Malene Freudendal-Pedersen, Sven Kesselring, et al., Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, pp. 398–409. https://doi.org/10.4337/9781788115469.00047.
6. Jan Zalasiewicz (2010) The Planet in a Pebble: A Journey into Earth’s Deep History, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
7. Nigel Clark and Bronislaw Szerszynski (2021) Planetary Social Thought: The Anthropocene Challenge to the Social Sciences, Cambridge: Polity. https://politybooks.com/bookdetail/?isbn=9781509526345.
8. Peter K. Haff (2014a) ‘Technology as a geological phenomenon: implications for human well-being,’ Geological Society, London, Special Publications, 395(1), pp. 301–9. https://doi.org/10.1144/sp395.4.
9. Will Steffen, Paul J. Crutzen and John R. McNeill (2007) ‘The Anthropocene: are humans now overwhelming the great forces of nature?,’ Ambio, 36(8), pp. 614–21. https://www.jstor.org/stable/25547826, p. 619.
10. Peter K. Haff (2014b) ‘Humans and technology in the Anthropocene: six rules,’ The Anthropocene Review, 1(2), pp. 126–36. https://doi.org/10.1177/2053019614530575.
11. Peter K. Haff (2019) ‘The technosphere and its relation to the anthropocene,’ in The Anthropocene as a Geological Time Unit: A Guide to the Scientific Evidence and Current Debate, ed. Jan Zalasiewicz, Colin N. Waters, Mark Williams, et al., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 138–43. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108621359.
12. Jan Zalasiewicz, Mark Williams, Colin N. Waters, et al. (2016) ‘Scale and diversity of the physical technosphere: a geological perspective,’ The Anthropocene Review, 4(1), pp. 9–22. https://doi.org/10.1177/2053019616677743.
13. Bronislaw Szerszynski (2017) ‘Viewing the technosphere in an interplanetary light,’ The Anthropocene Review, 4(2), pp. 92–102. http://doi.org/10.1177/2053019616670676.
14. Bronislaw Szerszynski (2019) ‘Von den Werkzeugen zur Technosphäre [From tools to technosphere],’ in Technosphäre, ed. Katrin Klingan and Christoph Rosol, Berlin: Matthes & Seitz, pp. 48–63. https://archiv.hkw.de/de/media/publikationen/2017_1/2017_technosphaere.php.
15. Published as: Bronislaw Szerszynski (2015) ‘The onomatophore of the Anthropocene: Commission on Planetary Ages Decision CC87966424/49,’ in The Anthropocene and the Global Environmental Crisis, ed. Clive Hamilton, Christophe Bonneuil, and François Gemenne, London: Routledge, pp. 177–83.