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Mankind, too, with all its institutions and activities – let us call it the anthroposystem – is a dualistic holon. One, be it said though, that has made use of a unique and extremely accelerated growth to achieve extraordinary changes. It has in fact broken through or shifted countless boundaries. Prior to cultural evolution, man was, as a “normal animal,” part of a local or regional East African ecosystem. But in the Pleistocene the ancestors of today’s humans, making use of growingly complex technology that culminated in the artifice of fossil energy use, cast off the shackles of their savannah system and, by tapping into material and energy flows, were virtually plugged into all of the Earth’s ecosystems. However, growth, complexification, and globalisation of the emerging anthroposystem as well as of many of the sub-systems that have constantly emerged in the context – including e.g. states, confederations of states, financial, economic, and information systems – have deprived mankind of some of its more important features: above all its sense of dependence on higher-order systems as well as for the limits to growth.
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