The Human Semiotic Footprint: Semiotic Dynamics and Ecological Process Flows in the Human Ecology
In 1997, Mathis Wackernagel and William Rees co-created the idea of the ‘ecological footprint’ as a measurement that compares rates of human resource consumption and waste generation with the biosphere’s rates of resource regeneration and waste assimilation. The ecological footprint is the “biologically productive space required to produce the resources and absorb the wastes of a given population, organization, or product using prevailing management and technology.” The ‘ecological footprint’ refers to a geographical space with its distinctive boundaries. However, the setting of the boundaries of a system is not as straightforward question of physical measurement, but a process of semiotic intervention and negotiation. I propose the idea of the human semiotic footprint not just as a conceptual refinement of the question of boundaries and their setting and definition. More fundamentally, I argue that the human semiotic footprint is a conceptual framework for understanding the ways in which human systems of meanings and meaning-making practices are, dually, semiotic and material systems that serve to catalyse and to direct flows of matter, energy, and information in socially organised ways that affect the life sustaining capacity of the human ecology.
I develop the idea of the human semiotic footprint in order to show that the ways in which humans live in, act on, and change the human ecology, for good and for ill, are not independent of the ways in which historically evolved semiotic systems enable us to interpret and to act on the world we live in and share with many other living beings. Rather than the view that our meaning systems are nonmaterial means for example of ‘representing’ a material world that is detached from persons and society, I argue in the perspective of ecosocial semiotic theory that semiotic practices and relations are materially embedded in and constitutively a part of the ecological process flows that they constrain, enable, shape, direct, define on many different though interacting scalar levels. Our human meaning systems collectively and individually constitute the human semiotic footprint that organises and manages how the biocapacity of persons and populations utilizes and exploits ecological resources.