New name, new platform

Greetings! The summer break was a little longer than I expected but gave me the chance to review my plans for the newsletter. The result of that is moving from Substack to Ghost and changing the name to Technosphere Earth along the way (more about that later).

I began 2025 with the aim of independent publishing, the result of mounting frustration with writing for mainstream news and media. Substack seemed the obvious choice as I was subscribed to a bunch of excellent newsletters. It's very easy to setup and manage, and it's free. Unfortunately the more I saw, the less I liked. The integration with Apple payments and so locking in writers to the platform, the focus on the Substack app and social media, and the continued promotion of far-right content was in the end just too much. I didn't want to invest time and effort into building a newsletter that I could not fully control, or do so with a platform that is problematic.

So here we are on Ghost, an open access, independent and funded by members publishing site. The membership is important. I along with all other writers pay a monthly fee for the service. This means there are no investors' appetites for growing profits that need to be sated, and so, hopefully, we can just get on with writing and growing readerships. I think the fee is worth it and I'm happy to incur that cost. That said, I am going to open up options for paid membership. That's because I want to work with a researcher and editor. And they need to be paid! This may work out, we may get enough paying subscribers to produce a reasonable rate for this work. Or it may not - it's a punt.

If you are able to afford a paid subscription, and if you want to support my work that way then please sign up here. If you cannot, then please be assured that everything I write for this newsletter will be open access and free forever. So you won't be missing out.

Finally, a new name. I've been fascinated by the concept of the technosphere for a while. In 2019 I wrote a long read about the technosphere for The Conversation. I attribute the concept mainly to two people: US geoscientists Peter Haff, who sadly passed away in 2024, and Carsten Herrman-Pillath, Permanent Fellow at the Max Weber Centre for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies, Erfurt University, Germany. I think the technosphere could help us better understand not just how the Earth works, but how we work, how people and planet can be understood as different elements of a single system. I still have plans to write a book about this. This newsletter will report on some of that, as well as serving as a wider, and let's be honest rather eclectic mix of reviews, commentary and musings about net zero, overshoot, climate science, sustainability etc....

Let's see where this takes us.