The Planetary

EDITED BY NILS GILMAN

BERGGRUEN PRESS

Publisher: Nicolas Berggruen

Editor: Peter Mellgard

Design: Ross McLain

Copy editor: Melodie Monahan

Fact-checker: M. Oakes

Printed in Belgium by Die Keure

ISBN 979-8-9914102-0-5
Contents
Preface
8 NICOLAS BERGGRUEN

Introduction
11 “THE CONDITION OF PLANETARITY”
NILS GILMAN

I. Technoscience
35 “PLANETARY SAPIENCE”
BENJAMIN BRAT TON

57 “EXTRAPLANETARY CONDITIONS”
CLAIRE ISABEL WEBB

77 “PLANETARY PLATFORM AUTOMATION“

STEPHANIE SHERMAN

II. Philosophy
101 “PLANETARY DEEP TIME AND HUMAN AUTONOMY”
NICCOLÒ MILANESE

115 “PLANETARY METAPHYSICS”

BORIS SHOSHITAISHVILI

133 “CO-BECOMING: A PLANETARY VIEW INSPIRED BY EAST

ASIAN PHILOSOPHIES”
SONG BING

III. Policy
153 “THE PLANETARY CONSTITUENT”
DAWN NAK AGAWA & LAURA RYAN

169 “PLANETARY SUBSIDIARITY”

JONATHAN BLAKE

183 “PLANETARY PRAGMATISM”

LORENZO MARSILI

Conclusion
199 “PLANETARY REALISM”
NATHAN GARDELS

210 COMPANION READINGS

6

Contributor Biographies
NICOLAS BERGGRUEN is the founder and chairman of the Berggruen
Institute. He sits on the boards of the Museum Berggruen in Berlin
and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. He is a member of the
International Councils for the Tate Modern in London, the Museum
of Modern Art in New York, and the Fondation Beyeler in Basel, as
well as of the President’s International Council for The J. Paul
Getty Trust in Los Angeles.

JONATHAN BLAKE is an associate director of programs at the Berggruen

Institute, where he directs the research projects and wider
research agenda for the Planetary Program. He is also an associate
editor of Noema. With Nils Gilman, he is the co-author of Children
of a Modest Star: Planetary Thinking for an Age of Crises (Stanford University
Press, 2024) and author of Contentious Rituals: Parading the Nation in
Northern Ireland (Oxford University Press, 2019). He previously held
research positions at the RAND Corporation, Columbia Global Policy
Initiative, and the Chumir Foundation.

BENJAMIN BRATTON is the director of the Antikythera program at the

Berggruen Institute and a professor of philosophy of technology
and speculative design at the University of California, San
Diego. His research spans the philosophy of technology, social
and political theory, computational media and infrastructure, and
speculative design. He is the author of several books, including
The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty (MIT Press, 2016), The Revenge of
the Real: Politics for a Post-Pandemic World (Verso, 2021), The Terraforming
(Strelka Press, 2019), and Dispute Plan to Prevent Future Luxury Constitution
(e-flux/Sternberg Press, 2015). He is a visiting professor at the
European Graduate School, New York University-Shanghai, and SCI_
Arc (the Southern California Institute of Architecture).

NATHAN GARDELS is the editor-in-chief of Noema and a co-founder of

the Berggruen Institute. He was previously the editor of New
Perspectives Quarterly, which began publishing in 1985. With Nicolas
Berggruen, he is the co-author of Renovating Democracy: Governing in the
Age of Globalization and Digital Capitalism (University of California Press,
2019) and Intelligent Governance for the 21st Century (Polity, 2012).

NILS GILMAN is the chief operating officer and executive vice president
at the Berggruen Institute and a deputy editor of Noema. He was
an associate chancellor at the University of California, Berkeley,
a research director and scenario planner at the Monitor Group
and Global Business Network, and at various enterprise software
companies, including Salesforce. His most recent book, with
Jonathan Blake, is Children of a Modest Star: Planetary Thinking for an Age of
Crises (Stanford University Press, 2024).

LORENZO MARSILI is an activist philosopher and writer. The founder of

transnational political NGO European Alternatives and the cultural
institution Fondazione Rizoma, his research and political work
focus on defining and promoting futures beyond the nation-state.
He was the founding editor of the independent journal Naked Punch
Review in London and Beijing and his books include Il Terzo Spazio
(Laterza, 2017), Citizens of Nowhere (Zed Books, 2018), La tua patria
è il mondo intero (Laterza, 2019), and Planetary Politics (Polity Press,
2020).
 7

NICCOLÒ MILANESE is a philosopher and writer. He is a founding director

of European Alternatives, which explores and promotes democracy,
equality, and culture beyond the nation-state. At the European
University Institute, he is one of the convenors of the Forum on
Transnational Democracy.

DAWN NAKAGAWA is the president of the Berggruen Institute. Since

joining as the Institute’s first employee, Dawn helped it grow
into an organization with global reach and influence. Previously,
she was the executive vice president of the Pacific Council on
International Policy.

LAURA RYAN is a senior manager for research at the Berggruen Institute.

STEPHANIE SHERMAN, a writer and strategist focused on socio-speculative

systems design, is an associate director of Antikythera and the
director of the Narrative Environments Program at Central Saint
Martins, University of the Arts London. She formerly led the
City Design Studio at the Royal College of Art in London. She is
a member of Autonomy, a think tank on the future of work, and
produces radio broadcasts on mobility and movement with Radio
Espacio Estacion, an online nomadic translingual radio station.

BORIS SHOSHITAISHVILI is a science studies scholar with a background in

evolutionary biology, comparative literature, and ancient Greek
epic poetry. His work focuses on the relationship between the
Earth sciences, globalization, and collective identity.

SONG BING is a senior vice president of the Berggruen Institute and

director of the Institute’s China Center. Previously, she was a
senior executive with Goldman Sachs China for over a decade. She
is the co-editor of Gongsheng Across Contexts: A Philosophy of Co-becoming
(Palgrave Macmillan, 2024).

CLAIRE ISABEL WEBB directs the Berggruen Institute’s Future Humans

program, which investigates the histories and futures of life,
mind, and outer space.
8

Preface
We introduce this book in the hope of offering a point of focus and
inflection for the creation of a new cross-cultural, interdisciplinary,
and global discourse on the Planetary — a new school of thought
concerning what Nils Gilman calls “the condition of planetarity.”
The initial chapters discuss the technoscience of how
we came to understand this condition — how it was disclosed
to us. Benjamin Bratton’s concept of “planetary sapience”
highlights that the Earth has recently evolved a new technological
exoskeleton that is rendering the planet as a whole into a kind
of sensory and cognitive organ. Claire Isabel Webb suggests
that exploring conditions of life beyond Earth — both the
conditions under which Earthly life might thrive beyond our
planet and what sorts of other, non-Earthly life forms may exist
— is causing us to reconsider the nature and meaning of life here
on our home planet. Stephanie Sherman proposes that what is
emerging are planetary-scale automated platforms capable of
not just reestablishing the biosphere’s homeostasis but also neo-
cybernetic control of evolutionary processes.
The second part considers the Planetary as a philosophical
event. According to Niccolò Milanese, the planetary represents a
profound challenge to Enlightenment ways of thinking about time,
which in turn demands fundamentally new narratives about the
human in relation to the planet. Boris Shoshitaishvili explores
the metaphysical nuances between several such narratives,
focusing on categories like Gaia, the noosphere, and the
Anthropocene. And Song Bing suggests a fruitful reconsideration
of various Chinese philosophical traditions, in particular the value
 9

of relational ontologies of co-becoming.

The final part considers what these technological and
philosophical visions imply for what Hannah Arendt referred to
as the vita activa, that is, the engagement in politics and policy
designed to enact change. Dawn Nakagawa and Laura Ryan
propose new forms of political identity rooted in multispecies
constituencies rather than a nationally delimited citizenry as
a new basis for legitimating new institutional architectures of
governance, which Jonathan S. Blake explains are necessary in
order to effectively address planetary challenges. These proposals
amount to a pragmatic approach to planetary cooperation rooted
in what Lorenzo Marsili describes as a new vision of universalism
which, if successful, would create a novel form of what Nathan
Gardels (following former California governor Jerry Brown)
calls a “planetary realism” that is not simply about competition
between sovereign states, but rather a new basis for cooperation.
Many of the governance ideas we propose here may seem
wild, perhaps even utopian. There’s certainly no guarantee we
will get there. Indeed, the world today seems to be moving in the
opposite direction. But this is the point of philosophy: to engage
in what Friedrich Nietzsche called “untimely meditations.” If this
volume helps people learn to speak of “planetary challenges” in
the same natural way that starting in the 1990s we began to speak
of “global challenges,” that in itself will mean success.

­— NICOLAS BERGGRUEN
 INTRODUCTION • 11

The Condition Of
Planetarity

NILS GILMAN

The Planetary is at once a technoscientific object, a philosophical

event, and a call to new forms of governance. This volume
introduces the Berggruen Institute’s interpretation of this
emergent analytic and political category.
As a technoscientific object, the term “planetary” typically
refers to Earth-scale biogeochemical processes, systems, and
phenomena. The Earth, in other words, is an intricate web of
ecosystems, with myriad layers of integration and interaction
between various geophysical systems and living beings — both
human and nonhuman — that must be understood as a totality.
Scientific holism is not a new or unusual idea. Within
the Western scientific tradition, it is often associated with
12 • Nils Gilman

the work of the polymath natural philosopher Alexander von

Humboldt, who proposed the concept of Naturegemälde — that
is, nature as a living whole. But in recent decades, a holistic
understanding of planetary phenomena has been accelerated
by new planetary-scale technologies of perception1 — the rapidly
maturing and integrating megastructure of sensors, networks,
and supercomputers that together are rendering various
planetary systems more and more visible, comprehensible, and
foreseeable. This recently evolved exoskeleton — in essence a
distributed sensory organ and cognitive layer for the planet —
is fostering fundamentally new forms of what Benjamin Bratton
calls planetary sapience,2 which is stimulating new questions for
scientists and researchers. Exobiology, psychology, microbiology,
epidemiology, and especially Earth system science and systems
ecology, all emphasize the lateral and vertical forms of physical
and cognitive integration between systems and creatures.
Everything from gut health to the search for habitable planets is
now being framed in terms of holistic views of planetary-scale
biogeochemical processes.3
The concept of the Planetary also signifies an irruption
into philosophy. Just as the works of Nicolaus Copernicus and
Charles Darwin put forth scientific discoveries and shattered
traditional notions of the uniqueness and exceptionalism of
mankind, the Planetary marks a fundamental and perhaps even
deeper break from anthropocentrism. By transforming how we
see our own position on the planet, the Planetary emphasizes
our interpenetration and co-becoming4 with other creatures as
well as abiotic things and processes. The Planetary also discloses
the limits of direct human subjective experience of fundamental
 The Condition of Planetarity • 13

categories such as space and time, as Niccolò Milanese

explores in his contribution to this volume. Indeed, planetary
processes impinging upon us unfold over timescales that may
be comprehensible to humans only by metaphor.5 Terms such as
Gaia, the noosphere, and the Anthropocene represent efforts both
scientific and philosophical to understand this complex holism, as
Boris Shoshitaishvili explains in his essay in this volume.
In its methodological holism, planetary thinking disrupts the
category of the clearly bounded, monadic individual and instead
underscores how every creature and system is interlaced with
a constellation of others.6 Such a conception portends the end
of methodological individualism — the notion of the individual
subject, which for centuries has formed the cornerstone of both
liberal political theory and much Western social science.7 The
very definition of “the human,” as defined since René Descartes
as distinct from brute but unchanging nature on the one hand
and unthinking machines on the other, is increasingly subject
to both empirical and philosophical scrutiny — an investigation
accelerated by a growing awareness of planetary phenomena such
as global warming. This “crumbling of the conceptual distinction
between humankind and nature,” as the philosopher Masatake
Shinohara has argued elsewhere, “allows us to consider the realm
of the human as a small part of the natural world.”8
Connected to this methodological holism, the systems
theory and neo-cybernetics that subtend much philosophical
reflection on the Planetary emphasize not so much alterity
as relationality.9 Here, too, philosophers are taking cues from
scientists. For example, radical new theories, such as “loop
quantum gravity,” developed by the physicist Carlo Rovelli and
14 • Nils Gilman

others, assert that reality as such does not consist of a (vastly

large but finite) set of “things” uniquely ordered in time and
space, but rather is an endless relational network of processes and
events.10 Taking a holistic view of the biogeochemical evolution
of Earth also radically refigures how we envision the emergence
of (and our search for) extraterrestrial life. As astrobiologist
Michael L. Wong and his colleagues have observed, the hunt for
lively exoplanets involves treating exobiology and exogeology
as a single “tapestry,” a “twine” that recognizes “the patterns
engendered by the coevolution of biological and geological
forces.”11 As Claire I. Webb’s contribution to this volume further
details, the technoscientific exploration of life in outer space —
both the immense difficulty of Earth life thriving off-planet and
the imagination of and search for radically different forms of
life elsewhere in the universe — is fundamentally reshaping our
appreciation for the existential requirements of life here on our
own planet.
What modern technoscience is disclosing with ever
greater precision, and modern philosophy is just catching up to,
mirrors the long-held metaphysical intuitions of many religious
and cosmological traditions. Indeed, virtually every traditional
religion and Indigenous epistemology, forged before or outside
the modernist rupture of the human from nature, has emphasized
human embeddedness in nature and the need to respect and
sustain the Earth. Thus the Planetary makes room for engaging
and integrating Western philosophy with Indigenous and non-
Western thought, including Eastern philosophies, as Song Bing’s
contribution to this volume attests.12
What’s more, such radical innovations in technoscience
 The Condition of Planetarity • 15

and philosophy manifest as deeply disruptive to politics. Modern

political institutions are almost universally erected upon a
foundation of assumptions that are being systematically revealed
as untrue. Philosophically, if the monadic liberal subject is an
ontological fiction, then how is it possible to maintain fealty
to anthropocentric (much less ethnocentric) conceptions of
democracy? Practically, if our greatest challenges are planetary in
scope, then how can governing institutions focused on arbitrarily
bounded national states possibly address them? Indeed, what
today is sometimes called “the polycrisis” takes place in the
shadow of the Planetary.13
Considered as a political category, the Planetary is best
understood in contrast to the concept of the global.14 As Nathan
Gardels has put it: “Globalization was about markets, information
flows, and technology crossing borders. The planetary is about
borders crossing us, embedding and entangling human civilization
in its habitat.”15 In other words, whereas “the global” is about the
intentional movement and processes of human things — money,
ideas, goods, services, etc. — and the management of the relations
between sovereign national states in the context of those flows,
“the Planetary” is about things that trespass human borders and
intentions. An accelerated carbon cycle, biodiversity loss, and
zoonotic viruses all have profound impacts on the well-being of
humans and other creatures but are neither defined by human
political borders nor limited to particular national territories.
At the same time, however, human activities are perturbing
each of these planetary-scale phenomena — whether it is fossil
fuel-driven carbon-loading of the atmosphere driving climate
change and oceanic acidification; or the expanding urban/wildlife
16 • Nils Gilman

interface triggering the emergence of new zoonotic diseases such

as SARS, Ebola, or Covid-19; or how agro-industrial chemicals
are interacting with our bodies and minds. Together with other
human-induced planetary effects, such as biodiversity loss, oceanic
plastics, or space junk, we face a radically different and new sort of
challenge than the problems arising from globalization.16 Whether
or not geologists can agree that these disruptions warrant the
designation of a new geological era called the Anthropocene,17
they undoubtedly demand dramatic new forms of governance,
which will in turn entail novel forms of politics.

The Condition

The combination of the intellectual development of the concept

of the Planetary, the intensification of anthropogenic effects
on the planet, and the construction of technology capable of
sensing those effects reveals the condition of planetarity. Using
the term “planetarity” here underscores that this condition is
both an ontological transformation and an epistemic break with
modernist understandings of the human position on the planet.18
The phrase “condition of planetarity” alludes to the
geographer David Harvey’s magisterial book The Condition of
Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change
(1989). Harvey took the concept of postmodernism — originally
developed by architecture critics in the 1970s and then abstracted
into a theory of information and knowledge by the philosopher
Jean-Francois Lyotard — and explained its emergence in the
context of the transformations in the late capitalist economy that
today are often labeled “the neoliberal turn.” Whereas Lyotard had
 The Condition of Planetarity • 17

famously described “the postmodern condition” as defined by “an

incredulity toward metanarratives” (above all the emancipatory
metanarrative of Marxism), Harvey inverted the argument by
showing how much postmodernism as a cultural phenomenon
was really a reflex response to material transformations in a
globalizing economy that abstracted and alienated labor ever
further from the consumer. What Lyotard and Harvey shared,
however, was a belief that postmodernity was a condition — that
is, not just a new epistemological frame but an actual shift in how
people live, work, and play.19
The Planetary, even more, represents such a condition.
A “condition” in philosophical terms derives from Immanuel
Kant’s concept of the Bedingungen der Möglichkeit — that is, “the
conditions of possibility.” For Kant, the conditions of possibility
are the physical framework within which action can take place —
both enabling action and setting its limits. A condition does not in
itself cause things to happen, but rather it sets the terms within
which things can happen. Planet Earth thus forms the primal
ontological frame within which any human and nonhuman action
becomes possible: everything about how we live, work, think, and
politic is defined (quite literally) by this planet’s horizons. We
cannot live anywhere else, except in a brutally constrained way.
There is, as the saying goes, no Planet B.20
The condition of planetarity exposes the narcissism of
anthropocentric framings of planetary systems. Consider The
Human Condition (1958), in which Hannah Arendt observed
that “In addition to the conditions under which life is given to
man on earth, and partly out of them, men constantly create
their own, self-made conditions, which, their human origin and
18 • Nils Gilman

their variability notwithstanding, possess the same conditioning

power as natural things.”21 For Arendt, the terrestrial condition
was the stable backdrop against which the political drama of
the human played out. But the Anthropocene, philosophically,
illuminates the collapse of the distinction between our “self-made
conditions” and “the conditioning power of natural things.” The
natural order of the planet cannot be treated as the stable stage for
the human drama; rather it has destabilized to the point where it
is increasingly dictating the terms of the drama. As Bruno Latour
put it in one of his last works, “[T]he physical framework that the
Moderns had taken for granted, the ground on which their history
had always been played out, has become unstable.”22 The stage
itself is shaking, and the pettiness of the human dramas playing
out upon it has become all too apparent.
Even if it has only recently been disclosed by growing
planetary sapience, the condition of planetarity is and always has
been an ontological fact — that is, an empirical statement about
our place inside the planet’s biogeochemical feedback systems.
Acknowledging this condition entails facing the fact that humans
cannot thrive unless the ecosystems we inhabit are themselves
thriving. However, growing planetary sapience is also revealing
dynamic transformations to the details of this condition — the
damage we have done by treating the planet as an endless font of
resources and a bottomless sink for waste. We can see now the
folly of promethean ambitions to control and master, as well as
our fiduciary duties toward Planet A.
 The Condition of Planetarity • 19

Two Epistemes Of Planetarity

Within the emerging conversation over the condition of planetarity,

there exists a fundamental schism, one that is epistemic but also
of direct practical importance.
On the one hand, there are the followers of the literary
theorist Gayatri Spivak, who coined the term “planetarity” in
the late 20th century.23 For Spivak, “planetarity” implies a way
to refuse the “custodianship of our planet,” which she sees as a
continuation of colonialist logics that have long silenced voices
of the poor and marginalized (the subaltern): “Planetarity is a
gesture of protest, a skeptical rejection of models that attempt
to flatten all peoples, living beings, and ecosystems within a
totalizing organizational logic.”24 In the philosopher Jeremy
Bendik-Keymer’s words, “Spivak intends the term ‘planetarity’
to point to the negation of our epistemic representations of the
planet as a unified field.”25 Or as the sociologist Jennifer Gabrys
put it, “the point is not to generate an evasive figure, but rather to
thwart an engagement with the planetary that hinges on uniform
epistemic representations.”26
For philosophers in this register, planetarity represents
a relationship to the planet characterized by unknowability —
specifically, that there exists an unbridgeable epistemic limit
to technoscientific knowledge of the planet. “Modern ways of
imagining the earth as a totality,” wrote the scholar of English
and environmental humanities Elizabeth DeLoughrey, “derive
from colonial histories of spatial enclosure.” Resisting what she
calls “the militarism of the satellite gaze or the techno-fixes of
climate change” requires “embracing the contradictions of alterity
20 • Nils Gilman

and the limits of human knowledge.”27 In this view, the “complete

interconnectedness” of the planet proposed by scientific holism
threatens to continue “forms of imperial control.”28 Expressing
doubts about the scalability of computational modes of
envisioning the planet, design theorists Michael Richardson
and Anna Munster instead propose to follow William James’s
injunction to pluralize planetary thought by including artistic and
Indigenous representations of the Planetary.29
Such representations may orient our imaginations toward
possibilities that we otherwise only intuit vaguely, but they have
a tendency to plead for the continued relevance of the spiritual or
the a-rational against the expanding compass of technoscientific
reason.30 For Spivak herself, the planet “is mysterious and
discontinuous—an experience of the impossible” for which she
refuses to offer “formulaic access” and which instead demands a
“prayer for planetarity.”31
Consider the “constructive theologian” Catherine Keller,
who in 2019 called forth “a vein of vivid transdisciplinarity in
which theology itself may offer politically useful transcodings
between the religious and the secular” as opposed to “‘ancient
schemes’ of religion within politics,” which “now come buried
within modern schemes of politics trapped in economic schemes,
and wrapped within the planetary scene of climate change.”32
All this recalls Oliver Wendell Holmes’s wry criticism of William
James just after his death: “[H]is wishes led him to turn down
the lights so as to give miracle a chance.”33 Such thinkers adopt a
normative position with respect to the technoscientific episteme
of planetary perception that mirrors Lyotard’s normative view of
modernist metanarratives, namely that we should adopt a posture
 The Condition of Planetarity • 21

of incredulity if not outright refusal.

To be sure, epistemic humility is all to the good, but modesty
should not be allowed to deliquesce into despair. The governance
challenge of planetarity is quite literally without precedent.
However much some may wish to blame Western technoscience
for having paved the way for the planetary polycrisis, it is also only
a better technoscience that can possibly allow us to restabilize.
We should, of course, be wary of proposals for easy
“technological fixes” and of “techno-solutionism” to problems
of great complexity. But it is also essential to recognize that
more and better technology, especially if deployed in recognition
of the condition of planetarity, will be crucial for addressing
planetary challenges. Technology alone is almost never enough,
but technology will be an element of practically every Pareto-
efficient proposal for improvement. As Charlene Sequeira,
Prateek Shankar, and Tim Maly at the Rhode Island School of
Design (RISD) have observed, the interaction of technology and
human thought has “resulted in the emergence of tremendous
new sensory capabilities, which are as much an opportunity as
they are a risk.”34 In this respect, the challenge is to maintain
epistemic optimism and a bias toward pragmatic action without
succumbing to a credulousness about technology as an apolitical
panacea. The solution to the problems produced by technoscience
is (and can only be) more and better technoscience.
In contrast to the Spivakians, these other thinkers treat the
condition of planetarity as defining a new design space for action
within the biogeochemical framework of the planet.35 Instead of
using the idea of planetarity as a way to critique contemporary
scientific practice and to foreclose the possibility of technological
22 • Nils Gilman

intervention, thinkers in this vein, such as Benjamin Bratton

and Stephanie Sherman in this volume, offer a more ambitious
epistemology that emphasizes the cognitive and control
possibilities that are both instantiated and enabled by planetary-
scale computational infrastructure.36
Astronomers Adam Frank, Sara Walker, and David
Grinspoon, for example, argue that the macro-goal should be
to move from our present “immature technosphere,” which is
only able to represent the condition of planetarity, to a “mature
technosphere,” that is, one that acts recursively to steer planetary
phenomena — or at least to mitigate planetary disruptions and
destructions.37 Likewise, the polymath Stewart Brand, who
pioneered holistic and systems-based planetary thinking back in
the 1960s, has always emphasized the need for optimism and the
value of technology, more recently in Whole Earth Discipline: An
Ecopragmatist Manifesto (2009).38 The broader goal, as the RISD
scholars put it in an earlier draft of their manifesto, is “to create
an experimental zone for planetary thinking around governance
and relational theory for entangled futures.” Pace the Spivakians,
there is no choice but to embrace the responsibilities of planetary
stewardship and care, albeit in a form that eschews presumptions
of superiority or postures of domination.
But if we abjure the epistemic despair and techno-
pessimism of Spivakian renditions of the Planetary, we should
also be skeptical of views of the Planetary that seek to render
it as an ideological successor to globalization. If globalism was
the ideological reflex of globalization as an emergent process,
planetarism might seem like a cognate relation of the Planetary.39
But this would be a mistake. Whereas globalization was a
 The Condition of Planetarity • 23

historical process defined in contrast to more localized forms of

human interaction and interdependence, and thus a claim about
historical change, the Planetary highlights a perdurable reality —
much like Copernican cosmology or Darwinian evolution. While
it may be reasonable to take an ideological position for or against
a change in the human historical condition, it is nonsensical
to take an ideological position with respect to an ontological
condition. One may lament the ontological fact of planetarity,
much as Caliban raged at not seeing the image of his own face in
the mirror, but one cannot be ideologically for or against it.

Governing In The Face Of Planetarity

The condition of planetarity emphasizes the interconnectedness

of human communities and ecosystems across the globe,
highlighting the need for collaborative and holistic approaches to
addressing complex problems.40 It suggests that solutions to these
challenges can only be reached via cooperation and coordination
among nations — and among species. But it also demands that we
think beyond national boundaries and consider the implications
of policy actions in both global and planetary terms. Already
more than 30 years ago, the sociologist (and leading theorist of
globalization) Anthony Giddens anticipated that safeguarding
planetary systems would mean thinking about completely new
scales of policy intervention:

Since the most consequential ecological issues are

so obviously global, forms of intervention to minimise
environmental risks will necessarily have a planetary basis.
An overall system of planetary care might be created, which
24 • Nils Gilman

would have as its aim the preservation of the ecological well-

being of the world as a whole. A possible way of conceiving of
the objectives of planetary care is offered by the so-called “Gaia
hypothesis” put forward by James Lovelock. According to this
idea, the planet “exhibits the behaviour of a single organism,
even a living creature.” The organic health of the earth is
maintained by decentralised ecological cycles which interact to
form a self-sustaining biochemical system. If this view can be
authenticated in analytical detail, it has definite implications
for planetary care, which might be more like protecting the
health of a person rather than tilling a garden in which plants
grow in a disaggregated way.41

What would governance look like if the condition of

planetarity were central rather than ancillary to human political
self-­
conceptions? How would we act differently if we took
seriously humanity’s profound integration into Earth’s planetary
systems, from the microbiological scale of zoonotic viruses and
gut microbes to the macrosystemic scale of the planet’s changing
climate? What would change as a result of humans being revealed
not as masters of the planet but as part of it?
Among other ambitions, this volume proposes that
governing in the face of the condition of planetarity demands a
new sort of global political project that requires fundamentally
new sorts of political institutions. We need to reconceive the basis
for universality in a new pragmatic frame, as Lorenzo Marsili
argues in his contribution.
From the condition of planetarity flows a political-ethical
throughline: Our governance institutions should promote
habitability in order to enable multispecies flourishing. The idea
 The Condition of Planetarity • 25

of habitability contrasts with the concept of “sustainability” that

guides much of global governance today, in particular as embedded
in the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, which
have been at the heart of the international system’s economic
development and environmental governance strategies since the
beginning of the 21st century. Whereas the sustainability concept
implicitly suggested that nature be seen and treated as something
separate from humans — as a standing reserve of resources and
“ecosystem services” to be managed and responsibly harvested for
human benefit — the idea of habitability begins from a scientific
understanding of human embeddedness and inseparability from
nature. The focus of the Planetary, therefore, is on creating the
conditions for the continuity of the entire web of life in which
humans are inextricably embedded.
There are at least two dimensions to a politics of planetarity,
both of which reflect the decentering of the human that the
condition of planetarity reveals. First, it is a politics that must
encompass the voice and ambitions of not just the subaltern
but also the nonhuman. Second, it is a politics that exceeds the
hegemonic modern institutional vessel of politics, namely the
sovereign nation-state.
Appreciating the condition of planetarity means rejecting
the Aristotelian tradition that claims only humans (can) engage in
politics. Much of this tradition was based on the claim that politics
is in its essence a linguistic activity, which in turn rested on the
also false belief that only humans have “language.” Here, too, new
technologies of perception have undermined such philosophical
certitudes. As the philosophers Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka
observe, “[A]nimal languages in general are far more complex and
26 • Nils Gilman

variable than humans ever imagined, as is increasingly revealed by

new technologies for listening to bats, birds, whales, elephants, and
others.”42 With properly tuned instruments it becomes possible to
hear nonhuman others, from whale songs and primate gestures
to the collective expressions of insect colonies and forests —
presuming we deign to listen.43
Our awareness of the condition of planetarity forces us to
reimagine the entire architecture of our governing institutions.
As Bendik-Keymer has put it, borrowing a term from the political
theorist Stefan Pedersen, the political “imaginary” of the
Planetary “begins by thinking about how we can govern ourselves
in a way that makes our feedback loops with the Earth sustainable
for us and for the extant order of life on Earth, irrespective of
national territories or sovereignties.”44 We need to imagine a new
form of constitutionalism (or perhaps post-constitutionalism)
that reflects our post-individualist, multispecies ontological
reality. This, in turn, will entail the development of a new kind
of political actor, what Dawn Nakagawa and Laura Ryan in their
contribution to this volume call a “planetary constituent,” as
opposed to the ethnocentric concept of the national citizen or
the anthropocentric concept of the cosmopolitan “citizen of the
world.”
This insight reveals why the current architecture of global
governance, based on multilateral member-state governance
institutions where sovereign national states gather to promote
their separate interests or ideologies, is simply unfit for addressing
planetary challenges that, by definition, exceed the scope of
territorially bounded interests or ideologies. As Jonathan S. Blake
argues in his contribution to this volume, what we need are new
 The Condition of Planetarity • 27

“planetary institutions” that, instead of remaining beholden

to superseded anthropocentric and nationalist categories
and commitments, are designed directly to address planetary
challenges while remaining accountable to their multispecies
constituencies. Such a vision may sound literally wild, but it
inevitably follows from an honest and fearless confrontation with
the condition of planetarity.45
How can such ambitions be realized? What is required is
the intellectual courage to relinquish old assumptions and the
political will to experiment with unfamiliar forms of governance.
Some of this will involve the development of extraordinary
new governance capacities, likely enabled by or instantiated
through emergent cognitive infrastructures offering prodigious
possibilities for communication, coordination, and automation,
such as those envisioned in Sherman’s contribution to this
volume. Without endorsing either accelerationism or techno-
solutionism, we can still recognize that the planetary polycrisis
presents no political option but a Flucht nach vorne.
28 • Nils Gilman

Notes
1 Claire Isabel Webb, “Technologies of Perception: Searches for Life
and Intelligence beyond Earth,” PhD diss., MIT (2020). https://
[Link]/handle/1721.1/12902, as well as in this volume.

2 Benjamin Bratton, “Planetary Sapience,” Noema (June 17, 2021).

[Link] as well as in this
volume and in a forthcoming MIT Press monograph.

3 See, for example, Angela Sessitsch, et al., “Microbiome

Interconnectedness throughout Environments with Major Consequences
for Healthy People and a Healthy Planet,” Microbiology and
Molecular Biology Reviews 87, no. 3 (2023): e00212-22; and Michael
L. Wong, et al., “The Process We Call Earth: Relationships between
Dynamic Feedbacks and the Search for Gaiasignatures in a New
Paradigm of Earthlikeness,” Perspectives of Earth and Space Scientists 5,
no. 1 (2024): e2023CN000223.

4 Bing Song and Yiwen Zhan, eds., Gongsheng Across Contexts: A Philosophy of
Co-Becoming (Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan, 2024).

5 Stephen J. Gould observed that the concept of deep time is only

humanly comprehensible by way of metaphor: Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle:
Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time (Boston: Harvard
University Press, 1987).

6 Scott F. Gilbert, Jan Sapp, and Alfred I. Tauber, “A Symbiotic

View of Life: We Have Never Been Individuals,” The Quarterly Review of
Biology 87, no. 4 (2012): 325-41.

7 As the concept of the monadic individual is unmasked as myth —

we are all multispecies assemblages — the question then becomes
how to recast conceptions of self, worth, value, and being on
a post-liberal, post-human basis. The work of Rosi Braidotti,
Karen Bakker, and Katherine Hayles is particularly valuable on
this topic. For an overview, see Francesca Ferrando and Shraddha
A. Singh, “Philosophical Posthumanism and Planetary Concerns,”
in Globalization and Planetary Ethics: New Terrains of Consciousness, eds.
Simi Malhotra, Shraddha A. Singh, and Zahra Rizvi, (New Delhi:
Routledge India, 2023), 29-36.

8 Masatake Shinohara, “Rethinking the Human Condition in the

Ecological Collapse,” The New Continental Review 20, no. 2 (2020):
190, 196.

9 See, for example, Yuk Hui, Machine and Sovereignty: For a Planetary Thinking
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2024), as well as
Song Bing’s contribution to this volume.

10 Carlo Rovelli, The Order of Time (London: Penguin, 2018).

11 Wong, et al., op cit.

12 Epistemological pluralism mirrors the growing recognition of the

diversity of intelligences, as Michael Levin recently observed:
“What folk psychology and prescientific concepts of minds and
intelligence took for granted, the field of diverse intelligence
is developing into mature science, opening the door for us
to grow up as a species as we learn to recognize kin in novel
embodiments.” See Michael Levin, “The Space of Possible Minds,”
Noema (April 17, 2024): [Link]
bridge-toward-diverse-intelligence/.
 The Condition of Planetarity • 29

13 Historian Adam Tooze popularized the term polycrisis in the

early 2020s, by which he meant simultaneous and escalating
problems in the realms of politics, economics, and society
that since the global financial crisis that began in 2008 have
been amplifying each other worldwide, but especially in North
Atlantic democracies. See Adam Tooze, “Welcome to the World of
the Polycrisis,” Financial Times (October 28, 2022). [Link]
[Link]/content/498398e7-11b1-494b-9cd3-6d669dc3de33. And “The Last
Dystopia: Historicizing the Anthropocene Debate in a Multipolar
Age: Polycrisis” (lecture, Princeton, Princeton, NJ, November
10, 2023). [Link]
lectures-human-values-adam-tooze-0. Interestingly, however, the
term was originally coined in 1993 by the philosophers Anne-
Brigitte Kern and Edgar Morin in their book Terre-Patrie (Paris:
Seuil, 1993) in reference specifically to the causal imbrication
of various “vital” human and ecological concerns. As Morin and
Kern argued, “Il n’y a pas un seul problème vital, mais de
nombreux problèmes vitaux, et c’est cette intersolidarité complexe
de problèmes, d’antagonismes, de crises, de processus incontrôlés
et de crise générale de la planète qui perpétue le problème vital
numéro un.”

14 Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Planet: An Emergent Humanist Category,”

Critical Inquiry 46, no. 1 (2019): 1-31.

15 Nathan Gardels, “The Third Great Decentering,” Noema (April 5,

2024). [Link]

16 See, for example, Dawn L. Rothe and Victoria E. Collins,

“Planetary Geopolitics, Space Weaponization and Environmental
Harms,” The British Journal of Criminology 63, no. 6 (2023): 1523-38; and
Columba Peoples and Tim Stevens, “At the Outer Limits of the
International: Orbital Infrastructures and the Technopolitics of
Planetary (In)security,” European Journal of International Security 5, no. 3
(2020): 294-314.

17 David Adam, “Ditching ‘Anthropocene’: Why Ecologists Say the Term

Still Matters,” Nature (March 14, 2024). [Link]
articles/d41586-024-00786-2.

18 It is important to underscore the distinction between “planetary

conditions” — that is, a planet’s biogeochemical realities
(as disclosed by technoscientific apparatuses of planetary
perception) — and “the condition of planetarity,” which represents
the philosophical reflection, particularly with respect to the
human, prompted by the technoscientific disclosure of planetary
conditions.

19 Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge

(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984 [1979]); David
Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural
Change (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1990).

20 Mike Berners-Lee, There Is No Planet B: A Handbook of the Make or Break Years

(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2019).

21 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago

Press, 1958): 9.

22 Bruno Latour, Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climate Regime
(Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2017): 3.
30 • Nils Gilman

23 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak first proposed the term “planetarity”

in a 1997 lecture, “Imperatives to Re-imagine the Planet,” which
was then printed in Imperatives to Reimagine the Planet, edited by Willi
Goetschell (Berlin: Passagen, 1999). She discusses the term in
“‘Planetarity’ (Box 4, WELT),” Paragraph 38, no. 2 (2015): 290-92.
The term “condition of planetarity” was coined by literary critic
Christian Moraru in “Critique and Its Postnational Aftermath:
Dialogism and the ‘Planetary Condition,’” Criticism after Critique:
Aesthetics, Literature, and the Political (New York: Palgrave Macmillan US,
2014): 99-112. For more on Spivak’s conception of planetarity, see
Boris Shoshitaishvili’s entry in this volume.

24 Tomiris Shyngyssova and Prateek Shankar, “No One Lives on the

Globe,” Jungle Publics (February 23, 2024). [Link]
com/p/no-one-lives-on-the-globe#footnote-6-141742840.

25 Jeremy Bendik-Keymer, “’Planetarity,’ ‘Planetarism,’ and the

Interpersonal” (blog), American Philosophical Association (September
10, 2020). [Link]
planetarism-and-the-interpersonal/.

26 Jennifer Gabrys, “Becoming Planetary,” e-flux (October 18, 2018).

[Link]
planetary/.

27 Elizabeth DeLoughrey, “Satellite Planetarity and the Ends of the

Earth,” Public Culture 26, no. 2 (2014): 261, 265.

28 Gabrys, op cit.

29 Michael Richardson and Anna Munster, “Pluralising the

Planetary: The Radical Incompleteness of Machinic Envisioning,”
Media+Environment 5, no. 1 (November 8, 2023). [Link]
org/article/87980.

30 Recognizing the condition of planetarity does not imply a woo-

woo celebration of “nature” as some noble form, much less a
valorization of the spurious concept of the “ecologically noble
savage” who supposedly lived in pristine ecological “harmony”
with nature. As Michael J. Rowland noted, “there is no evidence
in the archaeological, ethnographic, or historical records that
humans have attained this balance for more than a few centuries.”
(“Return of the ‘Noble Savage’: Misrepresenting the Past, Present
and Future,” Australian Aboriginal Studies 2 (2004): 8.) While various
epistemological traditions may have valuable ecological insights
to offer, particularly with respect to local environments in which
they were developed, none provides a golden key for unlocking the
challenge of promoting multispecies flourishing on a planet now
festooned with eight billion humans. On the history of the noble
savage myth in the West, see Tristan Søbye Rapp, “The Myth of the
Noble Savage,” Noema (July 9, 2024).

31 Spivak, Death of a Discipline (New York: Columbia University Press,

2003), 78, 102, 114.

32 Catherine Keller, Political Theology of the Earth: Our Planetary Emergency and the
Struggle for a New Public (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018),
6, 5.

33 Max Lerner, ed., The Mind and Faith of Justice Holmes; His Speeches, Essays,
Letters, and Judicial Opinions (London: Routledge, 1988).

34 Charlene Sequiera, Prateek Shankar, and Tim Maly, “What Are

Planetary Phenomena?” Polycene Design Manual. [Link]
design/What-are-Planetary-Phenomena.
 The Condition of Planetarity • 31

35 Rania Ghosn & El Hadi Jazairy, eds., The Planet after Geoengineering
(Barcelona: Actar Publishers, 2021). See also filmmaker Liam
Young’s “Planet Earth” and “Planetary Redesign” projects:
Christina Yao, “‘’I’m filled with dread’ over climate change says
Liam Young,” Dezeen Magazine (September 27, 2023). [Link]
[Link]/2023/09/27/liam-young-planetary-redesign-exhibition-
ngv-melbourne-interview/.

36 Benjamin Bratton, The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty (Boston: MIT,

2015).

37 Adam Frank, David Grinspoon, and Sara Walker, “Intelligence as a

Planetary Scale Process,” International Journal of Astrobiology 21, no. 2
(2022): 47-61.

38 Stewart Brand, Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto (New York:

Viking, 2009).

39 Stefan Pedersen, “Planetarism: A Paradigmatic Alternative to

Internationalism,” Globalizations 18, no. 2 (2021): 141-54.

40 The field of political ecology offers a rich vein for thinking

about these interconnections. For background, see Michael J.
Watts, “Now and then: the origins of political ecology and the
rebirth of adaptation as a form of thought,” The Routledge Handbook of
Political Ecology (New York: Routledge, 2015): 19-50.

41 Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford: Stanford

University Press, 1990), 170-71. I am indebted to Andrew Lakoff
for pointing out this early intervention into planetary thinking,
a decade before Paul Crutzen coined the term ”Anthropocene”
as a call to eco-political action or Spivak proposed the term
“planetarity” to argue against techno-engagement with ecological
systems.

42 Will Kymlicka and Sue Donaldson, “Doing Politics with Animals,”

Social Research: An International Quarterly 90, no. 4 (2023): 621-47.

43 See for example Pratyusha Sharma, et al., “Contextual and

combinatorial structure in sperm whale vocalisations,” Nature
Communications 15 no. 1 (2024): 3617. Such efforts are not without
their controversies; see Mark Ryanand and Leonie N. Bossert, “Dr.
Doolittle uses AI: Ethical challenges of trying to speak whale,”
Biological Conservation 295 (2024): 110648. Detecting and decoding
plant communications also represents an important frontier in
emergent planetary sapience; see François Tardieu, et al., “Plant
phenomics, from sensors to knowledge,” Current Biology 27 no.15
(2017): R770-R783; and Chiara Torresan, et al., “A new generation
of sensors and monitoring tools to support climate-smart forestry
practices,” Canadian Journal of Forest Research 51 no.12 (2021): 1751-
1765.

44 Jeremy Bendik-Keymer, op cit.

45 For proposed specifics, see Jonathan S. Blake and Nils Gilman,

Children of a Modest Star: Planetary Thinking for an Age of Crises (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2024) as well as Jonathan Blake’s essay
in this volume.
I. Technoscience
 35

Planetary Sapience

BENJAMIN BRAT TON

Consider a thought experiment: What if the famous Blue Marble

image of Earth taken by Apollo 17 astronauts was instead the Blue
Marble movie that portrayed the whole 4.5-billion-year career of
the planet in a kind of super fast-forward? We would see volcanoes
and storms, continents breaking apart and realigning, primordial
oceans and, with the appearance of biological life after the Great
Oxygenation Event, the emergence of an atmosphere that can
incubate yet more life. Most of the action appears toward the end
of the movie. Activity accelerates and begets yet more activity and
acceleration. In the last moments of the movie, we see something
unusual: clouds of satellites sprouting while metal and glass
wires wrap the land and sea. An intricate artificial planetary crust
36 • Benjamin Bratton

capable of tremendous feats of communication and calculation

appears, enabling planetary self-awareness — indeed, planetary
sapience.
This artificial planetary crust is composed of the lithosphere
but designed by collaborative cognition. The emergence of
planetary-scale computation is thus both a geological and geo-
philosophical event. In addition to evolving countless animal,
vegetal, and microbial species, Earth has also very recently
evolved an intelligent exoskeleton, a distributed sensory organ
and cognitive layer capable of calculating how old the planet
is and whether it is getting warmer. Indeed, the knowledge of
“climate change” is itself an epistemological accomplishment of
planetary-scale computation.
Sapience does not first appear with this exoskeleton;
it appears a few beats earlier as nomadic primates wandered
out of Africa. These primates were notably cerebral, with large
prefrontal cortexes that were both a cause and effect of their
intense social cooperation and competition. Their brains allowed
them to imagine, predict, and create counterfactual futures
together, in dynamic coordination. They represented these ideas
in pictures, sounds, and eventually writing. Along the way, they
not only developed intricate models of their world but intricate
models of their intricate models. Abstraction aided thinking and
then became their way of thinking. The planet folded itself over
millions of years to evolve creatures capable of this sapience,
which in turn would artificialize itself in many ways, including in
the formation of that planetary exoskeleton.
Evolved technological intelligence is both what makes the
composition of this anthropogenic transformation possible and
 Planetary Sapience • 37

what allows for the comprehension of the planetary condition that

it discloses. Over the past few centuries, humans have chaotically
and in many cases accidentally transformed Earth’s ecosystems.
Now, in response, the emergent intelligence represented by
planetary-scale computation makes it possible and indeed
necessary to conceive of an intentional, directed, and beneficial
planetary-scale terraforming.
There are three terraformings that are clarified by how
this new sensory organ represents its own construction to its
creators. The first is the one that is made clear by the historical
earth sciences, extending back as far as human migration, which
wiped out megafauna, imposed agricultural striation of the
landscape, and intensified industrial development. This is the
terraforming we were born into and which is the precondition of
our appearance. There is also the terraforming that will continue
regardless of what humans do at this point, for the momentum
of compositional intelligence cannot be arrested but can only be
calibrated, modulated, and focused. That is the third terraforming.
The so-called Anthropocene “event”1 was occurring for
at least centuries if not millennia before computational climate
science made it perceivable. Now what? No longer innocently and
unknowingly transforming the world, we urbanizing, agricultural
fire apes can now interpret the tracks we made on the ground.
Anthropocene agency precedes subjectivity.
The third terraforming is the project of that subjectivity:
partial, creative, wobbly, self-destructive, visionary, violent, and
literally radiant, magnificent, and terrifying. The question is not
if intelligence will terraform the planet in the present and future.
Rather, we must ask, first, how will it do so, and, second, will
38 • Benjamin Bratton

complex intelligence ultimately survive its own expression.

The Planetary

But let’s back up a moment. The “planetary” in “planetary sapience”

refers to many things at once. It is the physical precondition from
which complex intelligence evolves and a living astronomical and
geochemical body measured and revealed by computational earth
sciences. It is also a philosophical problem, a “category” in Dipesh
Chakrabarty’s framing.2
The concept of “the Planetary” suggests both the very small
and the very large. It implicates deep time and the abyss of outer
space as the preconditions of our thoughts. It names the depth of
biological and inorganic interrelations. It offers an understanding
of the Earth not so much as a world in the phenomenological sense
as a planet in the geologic and biogeochemical sense. The Planetary
gave birth to sapience and now represents that sapience’s greatest
challenge. The Planetary did not appear suddenly as a “world
picture,” as Martin Heidegger had it,3 but rather as the habitat of
a particular species that was able to construct an exterior image
that, finally, could uncover a planetary condition from which that
species and its world emerged. It was there all along, but we’ve
only just become able to grasp it. It’s revealing doesn’t “destroy
the Earth,” as Heidegger said,4 but gives it finally a mirror with
which to understand itself.
For contemporary philosophy, the provocative concept of the
Planetary (and its corollary, “planetarity”) has been put forward
as an alternative to “the global,” an expired notion that is static,
flattened, and Eurocentric. At the end of the last century, after a
 Planetary Sapience • 39

few decades of hibernation, the term planetarity reemerged in the

work of the literary theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.5 I extend
and depart from Spivak’s connotation to focus on a planetarity
that is, first, revealed as the precondition of any philosophy and,
second, the name of the project before us as we contemplate how
to preserve, curate, and extend complex life. Whereas Spivak6 and
the veins that extend from her influential work take great care to
differentiate the quantitative from the qualitative and to affirm the
supremacy of the latter over the former, to my sense, qualitative
insights about what, where, when, and who are thinking creatures
are abstractions drawn from quantitative insights, not in moral
opposition to them.
So: There is an astronomical planetarity and a political-
philosophical planetarity, and while they are different, they
should both inspire correspondence and mutual reinforcement.
There is no workable political-philosophical planetarity that
does not define itself through the disclosures of the astronomic
understanding of what a planet is, where it goes, and how a
sapient species emerges from it. Together they dissolve the
humanist figure of the meaning-making subject bound only by
its self-generated space of immanent signifiers and undermine
political superstitions of place, ground, and horizon that plague
our modernities.
These modes of “planetarity” comprise a cause and an
effect of planetary sapience. The planet evolves entities capable
of building technologies through which they partially grasp their
own origins and the planet’s as well. From the perspective of the
computational crust that appears at the end of the Blue Marble
movie, Vladimir Vernadsky’s noosphere7 as a geological fact
40 • Benjamin Bratton

wins out over Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s theologically dualist

noosphere.8 The conclusion is that planets can think through the
life they evolve, not that thinking landed on our planet.

The Revelation Of The Planetary

This revelation only frames the normative challenges posed for

the terraforming subjectivity; it does not begin to answer them.
The questions implicitly posed by the Blue Marble movie, but
which it cannot answer on its own, are: what is planetary-scale
computation for, and as something that literally evolves from
its host planet, what should it do? What contribution to a viable
planetarity can it make?
A preliminary answer bends back toward the question of the
purpose of planetary computation: One purpose is to make the
contemporary notion of the Planetary possible. It doesn’t cause
the Planetary as a condition to come into being, but in concert
with scientific and philosophical inquiries, it makes it possible for
the primary sapient species within that circumstance to grasp the
terms of its own emergence. It shows intelligence where and how
it came to be.
Planetary-scale computation is an example of what may be
called, following the nomenclature of the great Polish novelist
Stanisław Lem, an epistemological technology.9 The most
important social impact of some technologies is not in what they
allow people to do, but in what they reveal about how the world
works. But revealing how the world works can lead to trouble.
While anxiety about technology is expressed in accounts of its
pernicious effects, that unease is sometimes rooted in what
 Planetary Sapience • 41

technology uncovers that was there all along. Microscopes did not
conjure microbes into being, but once we knew they existed, we
could never see surfaces the same way again.
Such unrequested demystifications are disturbing, especially
when they seem to remove us humans from a place of presumed
privilege. Even as such technologies reorganize personal and
global economies, their deeper philosophical implication
concerns how they introduce a Copernican trauma, unsettling our
earlier understanding of the cosmos. Such traumas are not always
recognized for their significance, including in Copernicus’ time,
and their consequences usually take generations to reverberate.
The revelation of the Planetary — so different from the
“international,” the “global,” or the “world” — comes into view
via the location of human culture as an emergent phenomenon
connected to an ancient and deep biogeochemical flux. Planetary-
scale computation may have first emerged mostly from the context
of what is often inaccurately called “Western” science by both its
defenders and detractors, but its ultimate implications upend and
disrupt the conceits of such historical distinctions as much as
Darwinian biology eroded longstanding institutions’ biopolitical
authority. Even as many of those institutions made biological
sciences possible, this dynamic by which an initiative collapses
under the implications of its own technological discoveries may
be more norm than exception. We may well worry if complex
intelligence itself will similarly collapse as a result of its own
success.
Put differently, the instrumentality of planetary computation
is derived from its epistemological significance, and the inverse is
equally true: What it does and must do is derived from what it
42 • Benjamin Bratton

discloses.

The Terraforming

The continually evolving technologies of a planetary society are

processes over which we have some limited agency and which have
limited agency over us in turn. More precisely, globe-spanning
anthropogenic agency (as in climate change) works through
planetary technologies, but what real compositional steerage we
may have over the long-term evolution of the myriad technologies
that afford that agency is not as clear.
Nevertheless, we may have more agency over them than
we have control over our own long-term goals, and as the real
effects of anthropogenic agency on the planet increase, these
misalignments may be increasingly unsustainable. What then
of planetary computation? In its current commercial form, one
primary purpose of planetary-scale computation is to measure
and model individual people in order to predict their next
impulses. But a more aspirational goal would be to contribute
to the comprehension, composition, and enforcement of a shared
future that is richer, more diverse, and viable.
How so? Paradoxical as it may seem, given the precariousness
of the present moment, instead of reviving ideas of nature, we
must reclaim the artificial — not fake, but designed. For this,
human-machine intelligence and urban-scale automation become
part of an expanded landscape of life, information, and labor.
They are part of a living ecology, not a substitute for one. No more
pretending that the terraforming isn’t happening and no more
pretending that it can simply be refused by calling us “down to
 Planetary Sapience • 43

Earth.” Put more directly: The response to anthropogenic climate

change must be at least equally anthropogenic.
The critical apparatuses of such a composition are multiple,
modular, layered, complex, and already underway. They are not
hypothetical, promethean, or futuristic. They are the rules of the
game. They include automation, (understood as an ecological
principle of inter-entanglement more than a reductive autonomy);
geoengineering (defined not as a specific portfolio of controversial
techniques but rather in terms of climate-scale effects); the rotation
of planetary computation away from individual users and toward
processes more relevant for long-term ecological viability; the
deliberate self-design of sapient species toward variation, including
reproductive technologies, universal medical services, and
synthetic gene therapies; the cultivation of artificial, mathematical,
linguistic, and robotic intelligences with which general sapience
deliberately evolves; the deployment of experimental expertise
with biotechnologies, through which living matter composes living
matter; the intensification of urban habitats and technologies as
media for the general provision of universal and niche services;
the projective migration outside the Kármán line, the boundary
between Earth’s atmosphere and outer space, from where the
existing and potential terrestrial planetarity comes into focus;
and, finally, the aggregation of creative governing intelligences
capable of architecting such mobilizations.
These are the building blocks of an intentional terraforming
— not of another planet, but of our own. It is not the project of
making other planets suitable for Earth-like life but of making
Earth suitable for Earth-like life. To do this doesn’t mean freezing
life as it currently is or relying solely on restoration, but by
44 • Benjamin Bratton

linking (somehow) the acceleration of complex intelligence to the

stabilization of its planetary foundations.
This terraforming embraces the artificial, but what is that?
Isn’t everything — from the most organic to the most plastic —
ultimately part of the chemosphere, and is this just another nature
versus culture dichotomy? First, just as evolution has selected for
intelligence, it has also selected for artificialization: the capacity
for intelligence to remake the world in its image. Both driving and
being driven by the parallel evolution of technology, artificialization
allows energy-ravenous intelligence to feed itself. In the relatively
short timescale of a few million years, artificialization has been
highly adaptive. But if it is driven solely by the blind imperatives
of evolutionary advantage, does artificialization eventually reach
a terminal point after which it so decisively undermines the
planetary conditions of its own emergence that it is doomed to
burn itself out? This is the question that planetary sapience seeks
to answer through the project called the Terraforming.
Terraforming is a deliberate, practical, political, and
programmatic project to conceive and compose a viable
planetarity based on the secular disenchantment of Earth through
the ongoing artificialization of intelligence and the emergence of a
general sapience that conjoins human and nonhuman cognition.
It names a future condition realized by the nonlinear and playful
rationalization of ecosystems toward diversification as order.
As intelligence expands beyond the biosphere and deep into the
lithosphere, that condition is animated by a liberation of synthetic
intelligence in the wild.

Politics And Governance

 Planetary Sapience • 45

The questions of planetary agency naturally suggest planetary

politics and planetary governance, which are increasingly dissimilar
topics. The Political (with a Schmittian capital P) refers to the
agonistic contestation of the symbolic media of power, whereas
governance (small g) refers to the process by which a complex
system is able to sense itself, model itself in the present and future,
and to recursively act back upon itself accordingly.10 The former
is driven by narratives and the latter is driven by cybernetics. One
of the unintended effects of planetary computation has been an
unraveling of the tether that links the Political to governance as
the memetic clown show of ceremonial monarchies clashes with
that of ceremonial parliaments in increasingly shrill and entropic
echo chambers. Meanwhile, the mundane work of opening and
closing doors and moving things from here to there is absorbed by
software and hardware platforms. The Political is now free to float
in the clouds of its own semiotic exhaust. Much of the dramaturgy
of contemporary political life can be explained by this decoupling
of politics from governance.
The question of agency then is not who should be the
sovereign first-mover of the Terraforming but what should be the
architecture of relays that cascade from metabolic mayhem to
planetary sapience. That agency is not necessarily a subjectivity,
nor must it be a perfect subdivision of the human population
versus a different subdivision. To imagine planetary governance
as reducible to a particular arrangement of people and ideal
representational processes is to reduce it to an extra-large-scale
caricature of anthropomorphic national politics, a failed attempt
to tuck all reality into the space of legible tropes. That planetary
systems are and will be governed — sensed, modeled, effected
46 • Benjamin Bratton

— not through recognizable institutions of government but

through technologies with evolutionary arcs irreducible to mere
“techne” is not some futuristic, science-fiction scenario of what
might happen. This is what already exists, though in unevenly
distributed form; this is the quality of the Terraforming into which
all those alive were born.
The direction of the evolution of synthetic intelligence is
bound by path dependencies and vagaries of contingency, not
unlike the evolution of biological intelligence. Complex human
social intelligence emerges from the manifold of semiotic
communication and thus relies on symbolic economies to both
represent and govern its world, which it often conflates as if one
were the other. As intelligence expands its scope of material
substrate from carbon to silicon, it is possible that familiar modes
of anthropomorphic governance that present themselves as the
full range of options are both too simplistic and too convoluted.
The more they try to subsume governance into representation the
more of the real world escapes its view.
It can’t be known in advance whether this escape will
guarantee the future of intelligence or annihilate it. The
Terraforming project aims to ensure a sapient correspondence
between biosphere and technosphere: not Earth as homeostatic
mechanism in the macro-logical sense, but actively chaotic in
more measured ways that will support the ongoing evolution of
intelligence rather than foreclose it.
 Planetary Sapience • 47

An Ecological Theory Of Automation

What then is automation? The dissolution of decision into form?

Intelligence does not live in a petri dish or laboratory or inside a
single skull; it lives out in the open; it lives in and as our cities.
A city is not just architecture plus dwellers — it is an artificial
environment par excellence. The city itself is perhaps the longest
continuous process that humans have created. Introducing
synthetic computational intelligence into urban systems augments
existing forms of embedded sensing and intelligence, and in so
doing produces novel qualities.
I am reminded of Gakutensoku, a massive robot built
in Osaka in the 1920s by Makoto Nishimura. Nishimura was
appalled by the mechanistic humanoid robots in Karel Čapek’s
play “Rossum’s Universal Robots,” which introduced the term
“robot.” So he set out to make an automaton that manifested
what he saw as the most noble and fragile aspects of human
culture, complete with intricate facial expressions and the ability
to transcribe poetry.
When I visited a factory in Shenzhen that makes cases for
Android phones and employs many robots and people working
side by side, I was struck by an unexpected feeling, a kind of
serenity. The mood was calm, not frantic. Some things were
moving quickly but quietly, while other things were quite still, as
if waiting their turn. It did not feel like a “factory” in the Charlie
Chaplin sense; it felt much more like a garden of machines in the
Richard Brautigan sense.
I remarked that I would very much like to spend time in
a cafe like this, that it would make for a lovely kind of public
48 • Benjamin Bratton

gathering spot. As I spoke, I realized that this was no joke. The

present locus of automation will inevitably spill out into the city,
and as it does, we must be aware of the deceptively simple fact
that automation creates a particular kind of ambiance. It is more
than form following function; it is a functionalism becoming a
delicate formation. Or at least it can be.
To avoid the miserable future in which urban computational
automation is trained foremost on the optimization of the most
arbitrary and banal aspects of human spatial logistics (parking,
security, vending, etc.), a different understanding of automation
is needed. (Stephanie Sherman writes about this in her
contribution to this volume.) First, automation is not primarily
about autonomy. Second, globalization didn’t cause automation
— automation caused globalization. In the densest city or jungle,
causality and determination are everywhere, but automation’s
processes and techniques are themselves both overdetermined
and indeterminate. If we were to imagine these as dominos, their
arrangement would extend deep into the heart of things, and the
agency of their cascade would go beyond the intention of any first
tipping.
These systems are choreographed, but they also evolve with
each iteration, learning as they go and shaping and being shaped
by the worlds in which they are situated. As urban infrastructure
they remember and encode specific decisions that can be repeated
over and over. The appearance of autonomy — of a machine,
process, person — is an illusion. These systems’ causal relations
upon relations have been set by previous stages and positions,
and so the whole automated set-piece is itself automated. Our
synthetic automation makes use of existing footprints and
 Planetary Sapience • 49

previous patterns of urbanization and also forces others that

generate quite different geographies. New niches emerge, while
others go dark.

Synthetic Intelligence

The role of synthetic intelligence in planetary sapience is

essential but different than it is generally assumed. More
important than planetary sapience simply deploying computation
to do things is how planetary sapience is made possible by the
ongoing artificialization of intelligence, a process that began
many millennia ago. The intensification of that process through
computation raises the stakes considerably.
The evolution of machine intelligence today is warped by
various ideologies of “artificial intelligence,” which are in turn
hobbled by misconceptions about what is and is not artificial
and what is and is not intelligent. Foremost among these
misconceptions is the presumption that machine intelligence
must be recognizably “human-like” to qualify as intelligence.
Multiple anthropomorphic biases and presumptions have left us
with inadequate allegories for machine intelligences’ remarkable
accomplishments. Some of these look nothing like human thought
— though some do, like the very large natural language processing
models. What appears anthropomorphic may not be and what
appears alien may be more human than we think.
Obviously, the term “artificial” implies something false and
deceptive, but for planetary sapience this is a misleading framing
of machine intelligence. Revisiting the distinction between the
“artificial” and the “synthetic” posed by the economist Herbert
50 • Benjamin Bratton

Simon11 half a century ago, the “artificial” refers to something that

merely resembles an original (such as a cheap plastic “diamond”),
whereas the “synthetic” is a genuine and meaningful version of
something that was deliberately created (such as a laboratory-
grown diamond identical to a “natural” one at the molecular level).
Thus, artificial intelligence merely seems smart, but synthetic
intelligence really is. We should be pursuing synthetic intelligence,
not artificial intelligence.
There is another connotation of synthetic intelligence that
is perhaps even more important: the synthesis of human and
machine intelligence in pursuit of insights or creativity that would
be impossible for either on its own. A now-famous example of
this synthesis occurred in the Go match between Lee Sedol and
AlphaGo in 2016. The AI’s move 37 in the second game was one
that Go experts have said no human could have imagined. But
in the fourth game, Sedol’s move 78 was equally unexpected and
creative. If the first move proved that AlphaGo was in some way
not just “smart” in a narrow sense, but also capable of creating
novelty, the second move proved that in response, a human saw
the game differently and could produce a brilliant move that never
would have happened otherwise. AI and the human, interfaced
by the closed world of the game board, co-discovered a new way
of comprehending a 4,000-year-old game. This is a synthesis of
unlike forms of intelligences, a glimpse of what a general sapience
may look like.
The planetarity of computation forms, which I have
elsewhere called an “accidental megastructure,”12 are composed of
overlapping functional layers. Quite literally, it is a stack extending
down to the mines of central Africa through subterranean data
 Planetary Sapience • 51

centers and transoceanic cables to interlaced urban networks

up to the glowing glass screens through which we view it, and it
views us. Planetary-scale computation is not virtual. It is a kind of
terraforming of its host planet. That system has been constructed
over the past half century based on ideas both new and old, but
it is only a precursor. Artificial intelligence implies fundamentally
different architectures, from top to bottom, from chip design and
data center design to the geopolitical tensions between great
power hemispheres competing to build the foundational models
that will form the basis of both economic and military capability.
Measuring the weight of planetary-scale computation
requires a sober reckoning with the physical costs of its sprawling
infrastructures, which includes differentiating essential purpose
from the trivial and ultimately pondering the price of intelligence
itself. The intelligent exoskeleton that the planet has developed
has come at a price. In the context that really matters most, the
cultivation of synthetic intelligences capable of collaboration
with our own most virtuous ambitious and virtuoso expressions
is precious. The syntheses they portend are available only if we
pursue them while remaining mindful of their high costs.
The evolution of biological intelligence also came with
extreme costs. Someone to refusing or accepting the costs of
synthetic intelligence must also consider the price of the natural
intelligence that purports to hold the scales. It was not only
symbiotic social cooperation but also mountains of gore that led
our common ancestors from Olduvai Gorge to Göbekli Tepe and
the literate cultures of Mesopotamia, East Asia, and Mesoamerica.
The deepest values are at stake. Is the very long-term evolution of
“intelligence” — human, animal, machine, hybrid — a fundamental
52 • Benjamin Bratton

purpose of the organization and complexification of life itself?

If so, now that intelligence begins to migrate to the inorganic
substrate of silicon, what planetarities does this portend?

The Situation Of Intelligence

The Terraforming embraces the artificial, but what is that? Is

not everything -– from the most organic to the most plastic -–
ultimately part of the chemosphere? Is this embrace just another
nature versus culture dichotomy? It is not. Just as evolution has
selected for intelligence, it has selected for artificialization, the
capacity for intelligence to remake the world in its image. Both
driving and being driven by the parallel evolution of technology,
artificialization allows energy-hungry intelligence to feed itself
and to replicate. In the relatively short time of a few million
years, artificialization has become highly adaptive. But if it is
driven solely by the blind imperatives of immediate evolutionary
advantage, does artificialization eventually undermine the
planetary conditions of its own emergence and doom itself to
burn out?
The most critical relation between the planetarity that has
been revealed and the Planetary that must be composed depends
on the position of intelligence from which any such intervention
might take place, and how that position might incorporate the
situation of its agency. This is far more difficult than some would
have us believe. It is to be born into unpayable debt.
The decisive paradox for general sapience is the dual
recognition that, first, its existence is extremely rare and extremely
fragile, vulnerable to numerous threats of extinction in the near
 Planetary Sapience • 53

and long term, and, second, the ecological consequences of its own
historical emergence have been the chief drivers of the conditions
that establish this very same precarity. The approach to these
questions cannot avoid the correspondence between honing our
own sapience through machinations of war and strategic violence
and the emergence of machine intelligence that depends on the
provisions of material extraction, military applications, and their
ecological and social devastations.
Both modes of intelligence are also modes of planetarity.
Both are positions from which reason exercises its agency, for
better or worse. Both are also tied to what we all may recognize
as our most inspired aspirations. But if planetary intelligence is
to survive the consequences of its own appearance, in the short
term and in the long term, it must reform its trajectory or risk
extinction and disappearance.
This historical moment seems long but may be fleeting. It is
defined by a paradoxical challenge. How can the ongoing emergence
of planetary intelligence comprehend its own evolution and the
astronomical preciousness of sapience and simultaneously recognize
itself in the reflection of the violence from which it emerged and
against which it struggles to survive? It is possible that our privilege
of retroactive hindsight will decide that, for some final register, this
history was a worthwhile and even perhaps necessary condition
for the ultimate emergence of planetary intelligence. Even if so, its
development and survival depend on a decisive graduation from
primordial habits.
What future would make the past worth it? Perhaps the
future of planetary intelligence is now as existentially entwined
with a radically different career for composition, foresight, and
54 • Benjamin Bratton

order-giving as its advent was from the cascading centuries

of pilotless destruction. Taking this new existential condition
seriously demands a radically different sort of philosophy.
 Planetary Sapience • 55

Notes
1 As opposed to a geologic epoch, defining the Anthropocene as an “event”
encapsulates broader human-environment interaction. See Leigh Phillips,
“Moving on From the Anthropocene,” The Breakthrough Journal (August 9,
2024). [Link]
anthropocene.

2 “The Planet: An Emergent Humanist Category,” Critical Inquiry 46, no. 1 (autumn,
2019): 1-31.

3 “The Age of the World Picture,” Off the Beaten Track, trans. Julian Young and
Kenneth Haynes (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2002). http://
[Link]/pdf/[Link].

4 “The Question Concerning Technology,” as it appears in The Question Concerning

Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper & Row,
1977).

5 Death of a Discipline (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003).

6 Stephen Moore and Mayra Rivera, eds. Planetary Loves: Spivak, Postcoloniality, and
Theology (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010).

7 Scientific Thought as a Planetary Phenomenon (Moscow: Nongovernmental Ecological V.I.

Vernadsky Foundation, 1997).

8 The Phenomenon of Man (New York: Harper & Row, 1965).

9 Summa technologiae, trans. Joanna Zylinska (Minneapolis, MN: University of

Minnesota Press, 2013).

10 Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2010).

11 The Sciences of the Artificial (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1968).

12 See The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015).
 57

Extraplanetary Conditions

CLAIRE ISABEL WEBB

Technologies Of Extraplanetary Perception

“To see the earth as it truly is, small and blue and beautiful
in that eternal silence where it floats is to see ourselves as riders
on the earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the
eternal cold — brothers who know now they are truly brothers.”1
So reflected the poet Archibald MacLeish in the New York Times
as images of Earth streamed from outer space on Christmas
Eve, 1968. That night, US astronaut William Anders used a
250-millimeter Hasselblad camera to capture photographs of
the Earth as the Apollo 8 spacecraft he was aboard rounded the
Moon. In “Earthrise,” as the iconic image came to be known, the
58 • Claire Isabel Webb

surface of the Moon’s gray, bare surface is in the foreground, weary

and battered from violent collisions over eons. In the distance,
only partially illuminated by the Sun, Earth seems to proclaim
a delicate yet stubborn aliveness. Our planet’s palette of white,
green, and blue glows against the black, ahuman abyss of space.
From MacLeish to Carl Sagan to Pope Paul VI, Earthlings
were moved. The Apollo 8 mission marked the first time anyone
had gazed from space at the Moon first and the Earth beyond. The
extraterrestrial perspective of our planet stoked the collective
realization that there is only one Earth, and it is precious for all
humans who precede us and must be kept safe for those who
might come after. The image dominated the Times’s front page,
but the peripheral headlines were filled with death: a Christmas
Day ceasefire in Vietnam had collapsed; soldiers had returned
from harrowing captivity in North Korea; a commercial plane
crashed in Pennsylvania, killing 20 of the people aboard. Here was
a juxtaposition of global conflict with images that simultaneously
broadened the human condition and pointed to the singleness of
the human home. “We came all this way to explore the Moon,”
Anders remarked, “and the most important thing is that we
discovered the Earth.”
Humans have used a variety of modern technologies to
“discover Earth” more deeply from extraterrestrial vantage points,
such as spacecrafts, satellites, supercomputers, and airborne
sensors. From Anders’s Hasselblad camera to the global network
of distributed computational intelligences now in low-Earth orbit,
we use technoscientific apparatuses to form an ever-growing
knowledge base that reveals the material conditions of Earth.
The assemblages of instruments, data collection
 Extraplanetary Conditions • 59

mechanisms, and computational tools that progressively disclose

the complex materialities of our planet are technologies of perception
— they transform how we see ourselves in the world and in the
universe. By manifesting more and more granular empirical data
about Earth systems, we cultivate novel orientations to our home
planet scaling from the microbial to the celestial.2
In the introduction to this volume, Nils Gilman names
this orientation the “condition of planetarity.” Earth’s planetary
conditions today are the results of ancient processes both
extraterrestrial and local, but humans’ condition of planetarity is a
philosophical attitude about our bounded position on and within
Earth. This condition, Gilman asserts, is the “inescapability of our
embeddedness in an Earth-spanning biogeochemical system.”
We humans would not be here today but for myriad felicitous
astrophysical phenomena that transformed Earth over the ages
and allowed for humans to evolve. Charting this history makes
visible how our capacity to flourish here on Earth is diminishing,
which, in turn, (hopefully) deepens our sense of urgency to care
for this planet.3

Unearthing Habitability

The fulcrum of humans’ condition of planetarity is

habitability.4 The Oxford English Dictionary defines habitability
as the condition of being “suitable for habitation or as a human
abode.” Its root word is “οἰκουμένη” or “ecumene,” the ancient
Greek term for the known world that stretched from what is now
called Afghanistan in the east to Iberia in the west and from Upper
Egypt in the south to Scythia in the north. Since ancient times,
60 • Claire Isabel Webb

then, habitability has been defined by what is known by humans

and fit for humans to live in, with the Earth as the ineluctable
point of reference from which all alternatives for habitability have
been drawn.5
But a wider frame of view, one borne out through
technologies trained star-ward (the James Webb Space Telescope
in particular), is destabilizing anthropocentric and Earth-specific
categories of life and habitability. As the properties of alien
atmospheres and surfaces are coming into clearer focus, we
must resituate those categories in a cosmological register. What
environments are habitable, and for whom? Must life spark from a
carbon- and water-based world? What might it mean to be human
but not of Earth?
Since the Space Age that defined geopolitics in the post-
World War II world, technologies of extraplanetary perception
have been reshaping self-conceptions of the humans who built
and evolved along with them. Unmanned space missions since
the 1970s that imaged Mars, Venus, and the moons of Jupiter
and Saturn have suggested that enigmatic places in our very own
solar system might be suitable for habitation by extraterrestrial
life forms. And scientists’ detection of exoplanets in the 1990s —
faraway worlds that could contain alien ecosystems — extends
the material conditions of planetary life to the extraterrestrial.
The pursuit to identify, clarify, and demarcate life forms and their
habitats at the edge of knowledge foments a plurality of scientific
and conceptual approaches about how we have heretofore
regarded life on Earth. The conditions of extraplanetarities —
ones that include humans in outer space but also reach toward yet
undisclosed forms of life — present a wholly new philosophical
 Extraplanetary Conditions • 61

category.
The deepening knowledge about Earth and humans’ forces
within it cast our home planet in relation to speculative worlds
beyond. This relationship is unearthing new ways to be human. As
we discover astrophysical resonances and dissimilarities between
our planet and other worlds, we emplace ourselves within Earth’s
web of life — and reorder our self-conception as beings in the
cosmos.
While there is but one (Earthly) condition of planetarity,
there are imponderably many potential conditions of (non-
Earthly) extraplanetarities. Each shade of possible worlds — the
variegated compositions of their atmospheres, geologies, and
other features — is a contrast to our local world as we know it,
revising conceptions of habitability through revelations about
(extra)planetary fragility and (extra)planetary possibilities of life
as it might be otherwise.
The speculatively imagined thus encroaches on the
empirically enclosed. The extraterrestrial jostles echt-Earth as
the sole site of possible life. Exoplanets and moons habitable
for radically alien life forms break free from anthropocentric
constraints of flourishing on Earth specifically, a chiasmus that
is transmogrifying not just what it means but indeed what it is to
be human.

Fragile Natures

During the Space Age, humans were afforded an

extraterrestrial perspective of Earth for the first time, revealing
several precarious relationships between human, Earthly, and
62 • Claire Isabel Webb

hypothetical life. For one thing, we learned how fragile our bodies
in outer space are, how dependent we are on Earth’s life systems
— ones that, ironically, we have been making brittle. As scientists
gained the scientific and technological abilities to explore the
material conditions of other planets and moons, they learned of
extraplanetarities that might hold the key to the origin of Earth
life and yet would be in danger of being trampled through hapless
human intervention. The conditions of extraplanetarities —
speculative fragilities on alien worlds, speculative knowledge
about nonhuman life — expanded humans’ self-conception to a
cosmic register.
As the historian Leah Aronowsky has written, the vessel
that bore the Apollo astronauts to the moon and back in 1969 was
a testament to nonpareil American ingenuity and technoscientific
dominance, not just over the globe but over nature. She described
it as the ultimate representation of man’s aspiration to conquer
nature. “In forming a self-sustaining world in the face of a lethal
extra-spacecraft environment, the space cabin was propelled by its
own mythos of sorts,” she wrote. “The ark, the biblical structure,
sealed and closed to the outside diluvial world, that maintained
planetary life when no other place could.”6 It redefined where and
how human life can be.
Yet the harsh physical reality of manned missions to
space highlighted just how fragile the borders were between the
interior and the exterior, the planetary and the extraplanetary.
The maintenance of a life-support system in space depended
on constant vigilance by astronauts and engineers back on land;
continuously threatened by emergencies, flukes, and biotechnical
porosity, early space flights were a vivid illustration of how hard it
 Extraplanetary Conditions • 63

is to sustain human life unmoored from the complex cosmological

object we know best: Earth.
It is not a coincidence that the modern environmental
movement arrived on the heels of the Space Age. The technologies
of planetary perception developed to enable space travel would,
of course, look back onto Earth itself. Those technologies
illuminated how vulnerable Earth’s life is to human forces, and
researchers foresaw an alarming future, calling into question the
viability of humans’ continuing habitation of Earth.7
That bruited future is now unfolding. We know now with
great certainty that humans have been radically altering Earth’s
biogeochemical conditions, especially since 1945 with the advent
of what environmental historians J. R. McNeil and Peter Engelke
dubbed the “Great Acceleration.”8 The extraction and burning of
fossil fuels has both allowed humans to proliferate in otherwise
inhospitable environs and wreak havoc on delicate ecosystems.
The technosphere continues to evolve with human inventions and
technological agents, changing our planet’s material conditions,
while also enabling a new self-awareness of these changing
conditions. These entwined cultural and scientific forces helped
to shape our philosophical understanding of the condition of
planetarity. Perceived from outer space, Earth became a planetary
object that was both precious and in peril.
The nascent field of space biology in the late 1950s focused
on the dangers of contamination.9 Exobiologists, as they came to
call themselves, developed extraplanetary technologies that could
potentially harm the other worlds on our very doorstep. Nobel
Prize-winning microbiologist Joshua Lederberg implored NASA
to develop protocols to prevent such biological contamination.
64 • Claire Isabel Webb

Speculative microbial exchange posed a threat to astronauts

aboard manned missions and to planetary conditions; imagined
as closed cybernetic systems, both the space cabin and the Earth
were at risk from any invading substance that could disrupt the
delicate homeostasis of life. At Lederberg’s urging, NASA began
exploring sterilization and quarantine procedures for the planned
lunar missions with such detail that they included possible
microorganisms lurking in the threads of screws and in the plastic
that protected electronics.10
Lederberg and other exobiologists also asserted that
contamination from returning spacecrafts posed a threat to
planetary health: Unwitting astronauts could return with alien
entities that could have unknown consequences for terrestrial
life. “An organism, innocuous when in the hostile environment
of a planet might, when transported to the comparatively lush
conditions of the earth, overgrow terrestrial life forms or alter the
physical or chemical characteristics of the biosphere,” warned the
Space Science Board that advised NASA in a 1964 report.11 Given
a chance, hardy extraterrestrial pathogens, so the exobiologists
feared, could exploit the moist, fecund, highly habitable Earth.
Conversely, spaceship-borne terrestrial microbes could
contaminate pure extraplanetary surfaces. Any adulteration
might rob scientists of the chance to detect ancient or extant
life elsewhere in the universe. “The danger of contamination of
these planets [Mars and Venus] is mainly biological since there
is a reasonable probability that the conditions on Mars are
such that some terrestrial organisms might grow,” Lederberg
wrote in Science in 1958. “Water, nitrogen, carbon oxides and
photosynthesis are all available.”12 An inadvertent terraforming
 Extraplanetary Conditions • 65

might disrupt fragile hypothetical biologies and destroy a once-

in-solar system opportunity to reveal clues about the origins of
life on Earth.
Transforming as a technoscientific and philosophical object
in the Space Age, the Earth became framed in relation to other
possible sites of life. Humans had to confront their historical and
present roles in stewarding the planet — cultivating its habitability
for continuing human existence and vigilantly guarding against
alien incursion. Technologies of extraplanetary perception made
starkly visible just how human, Earth, and extraterrestrial life
were materially interrelated and therefore sensitive to each other.
As such, the continuous revision of the category of habitability
prompted by technologies of extraplanetary perception — how
we humans relate to Earth as an endangered paragon — were
central to the unveiling of our condition of planetarity.

Life, Otherwise

For decades, astronomers interested in the possibilities of life

beyond Earth relied on a definition of habitability circumscribed
by the conditions of life as known here on Earth. In particular, the
“habitable zone” demarcated the distance from a star in which
a planet would be able to maintain liquid water at its surface —
just like Earth. Scientists described this extraterrestrial condition
as the “Goldilocks Zone”: For surface water, Mars was too cold,
Venus too hot, Earth just right.
Recently, though, explorations of worlds farther afield have
focused not only on direct observations of possible life, but also
on simulating the conditions under which life in various forms
66 • Claire Isabel Webb

may emerge or flourish. These efforts have prompted radical

reconsiderations of what counts as habitable, and for whom.
(Venus’s climate history — it was not always such a hothouse — is
part of what has prompted fears about “runaway climate change”
here on Earth.)13 But learning about the cosmos’s capacities to
evolve non-Earth-like planets has evected habitability toward
speculative, nonhuman life forms — where and how alien life
forms could be.
NASA is now launching missions to explore nearby moons
in our solar system, hoping to detect evidence of conditions that
could spark and sustain deeply unusual extraterrestrial life. In the
fall of 2024, the Europa Clipper will loop around its eponymous
Jovian moon, which beneath its frozen surface almost certainly
harbors an ocean of liquid H2O. In a later mission, NASA
hopes to send a probe to drill into that thick icy crust, where
hydrothermal vents in a subsurface ocean warmed by Jupiter’s
gravitational push-and-pull could stimulate microorganisms that
are akin to Earth’s “extremophiles,” the microbes that percolate
in environments once thought to be inhospitable to life, such
as alkaline lakes, acidic water from coal mine run-off, and the
Marianas Trench, where pressure is 1,000 times what it is at
Earth’s surface. Earth’s known planetary conditions thus resonate
with Europa’s speculative ones, affording scientists the ability to
reconfigure the extreme as suitable.
The result of the expansion of the concept of habitability is
that Earth’s planetary conditions no longer define the blueprint
for life. Habitable planets need not be temperate, rely on water, or
even depend on a carbon-based ecosystem. These realizations in
turn pushed scientists to develop new ideas about how life might
 Extraplanetary Conditions • 67

have emerged, and might yet evolve, here on our own planet.
NASA’s Dragonfly, a robot-cum-drone, is planned to arrive
at Saturn’s moon Titan in the mid-2030s. A critical component
of the Dragonfly is its mass spectrometer, a sensor technology
that discerns an object’s composition of atoms and molecules.
Dragonfly will clamber and fly over Titan’s surface, collecting
samples for chemical analysis, searching for prebiotic molecules
and other tantalizing possibilities of alien life.
In some ways, Titan is Earth’s analog. For instance, Titan’s
volcanic activity could have churned atmospheric and interior
material to spark life — just as we think it might have on Earth.
Ontario Lacus, near Titan’s south pole, is eerily similar to the
Etosha Pan, a salt flat in Namibia, suggesting related geochemical
formation.14 Yet, in other ways, Titan has sharply un-Earth-
like planetary conditions. Its lakes, rivers, and even oceans
are mostly methane, not salt water. In 2020, astrobiologists
detected in its dense, hazy, orangey atmosphere a molecule called
cyclopropenylidene (C3H2). Though it is simple and carbon-
based, C3H2 is unique in the solar system, a possible precursor
for life forms both familiar and extremely strange. If so, the
identification of prebiotic chemistries on Titan could reshape the
story of how life originated on Earth.
Scientists must perform a double epistemic act as they
search for other worlds. They both welcome familiarity and quest
for alienness. Through storytelling, metaphors, computational
modeling, and physical analogs, astrobiologists “make planets
places” to relate familiar features to alien ones.15 In this way,
scientists liken Titan’s hydrocarbon dunes to coffee grounds and
note its Ligeia Lake could contain three of our Lake Michigans.
68 • Claire Isabel Webb

Researchers look to Lake Vostokin in Antarctica to predict

characteristics of Europa’s ice layer and the salty waters of Lake
Tirez in Spain to make predictions about the alien ocean below. “A
place-based orientation, rather than passively gazing at the globe
from the outside, allows for an imagination of being on/within/
alongside, of experiencing, the planet,” writes the anthropologist
Lisa Messeri.16 Material witnessing on Earth thus generates
more robust speculations of the alien world and concretizes the
possibilities of going there.
Other epistemic objects even more distant from terrestrial
conditions of life hint at undisclosed extraplanetarities on
the horizon. For example, hypothetical Hycean worlds — a
portmanteau of “hydrogen” and “ocean” — are filled with liquid
water oceans and blanketed by a thick hydrogen atmosphere.
In theory, such planets could be ideal for aquatic life but could
suffer a greenhouse effect as Venus did. Hycean worlds create
tendrils of both incongruity and likeness to Earth, but they elude
tight analogies, thus straining our ability to place-make. So far,
astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope have detected
many candidate Hycean worlds, but none is yet confirmed.17
Supporting such exploratory work are ever-more
sophisticated computer simulations that serve as epistemic tools
for fleshing out extraplanetary conditions. Terrestrial simulations
of our own home planet, such as Earth System Models and Global
Climate Models (GCMs), integrate Earth’s global atmospheric
and oceanic circulations, glacial activity, and biological cycles to
forecast changes in the climate.18 By stretching components of
GCMs on Earth to alien planets, scientists are building models
to anticipate how life could be otherwise in the universe. Given
 Extraplanetary Conditions • 69

initial starting conditions — for instance, an exosolar system

where the star is a red dwarf, much cooler and dimmer than
our Sun — simulations offer tantalizing pathways for imagining
unfamiliar but viable life. On the two water worlds known as
Kepler-138 c and Kepler-138 d orbiting a red dwarf star 218 light-
years away, one can imagine black, aqueous plants that evolved
to absorb the star’s dim, near-infrared light basking in the warm
waters of an alien planet.19
These projects could illuminate life’s origins and conditions
for continuity on Earth and beyond. Suspended in the space of
the speculative, teetering between characteristics of aliveness
and barrenness, simulated worlds beckon us to consider all the
possible levers — light, gravity, atmosphere, pressure, material,
time — that could orchestrate the emergence of life, not just on
alien planets, but on Earth.
Computer-based simulations can unfurl billions of
evolutionary pathways of life as they might have been, as they
are, as they could be. Simulating diverse and mind-bending
extraplanetary conditions can rewind and reset initial conditions
for life. Scientists use them to speed up the petri dish of the
universe, producing worlds with chemistries and conditions that
could support forms of life as yet undreamt.20 In so doing, they
“rediscover Earth.”
One of the most influential (and notorious) planetary
simulations was pointedly analog. In the Biosphere 2 experiments
during the 1990s, four women and four men took up residence
in a giant greenhouse in Oracle, Arizona, with the intention of
demonstrating an autopoietic system of Earthly life that could
presage and model anticipated Martian settlements.
70 • Claire Isabel Webb

The dwelling was Earth in miniature, containing seven

biomes that the researchers cultivated, wrangled with, and
depended on. If the 1960s space cabin was a fiction of man’s
independent existence outside the planetary, then Biosphere 2
was an explicit embrace of humans’ interdependence with Earth’s
systems — the superior model for humans’ future inhabitation of
space. Indeed, one participant, a pathologist named Roy Walford,
evangelized a restrictive caloric intake to extend human lifetimes,
a regimen the Biosphere 2 participants followed. His effort
could be framed as idealizing the Earth’s material conditions in
preparation for improving extraterrestrial humans.21
Like the space cabin, Biosphere 2 illustrated just how
permeable material boundaries of the planetary (the structure) and
the extraplanetary (the “real” Earth outside) are and how difficult
it is to maintain an uncrossable line between. Oxygen leaked out
of the roof. Food supplies dwindled. Artificial mechanisms to
maintain conditions continuously failed or had to be assiduously
monitored by hand because the engineering had not encapsulated
the complexity and breadth of Earth’s ecosystems. All pollinating
insects perished. Social cooperation deteriorated. Living required
external intervention. This vision of a planetary, autopoietic
utopia became uninhabitable.
Though often considered a failure, the simulation
demonstrated an artificial environment’s quintessence of Earthly
relations — interrelated, messy, and tenuous. We might say that
it helped us rediscover ourselves — our follies and our frailty —
within the simulated Earth-within-the-Earth, a process we might
call “gaiamorphization.”
 Extraplanetary Conditions • 71

Future Worlds

The conditions of extraplanetarities engender strong

emotions about our precious planet in peril, so far the only
example of life we know of in the universe. They clarify human
embeddedness with Earth systems and spur calls for a course
correction to prolong human and other life forms flourishing
here. They let us imagine building a permanent settlement on
Mars, changing our condition to be extraterrestrial. They sketch
the possibilities to detect worlds with utterly unfamiliar life
forms. They deracinate the anthropocentrically defined concept
of habitability.
Extraplanetary relationships unshackle the concept of
habitability from human comfort. Worlds are habitable or could
be made so — but not exclusively by or for humans. Europa, Titan,
Hycean worlds, and planets yet undetected reconfigure both the
possibilities of alien planetarities of life in the cosmos and suggest
alternative ways for humans to relate to Earth specifically. Rather
than define the planetary, Earth has transformed into a subsidiary
of it. This shift ushers in a new episteme of life, mind, and outer
space.
We are fleshy, frail creatures who are just learning how
big the space of life might be, and thus we require a revised
orientation toward habitability both on Earth and beyond. We can
today affirm MacLeish’s prediction that the photographs from the
Apollo 8 mission ushered in a “new notion” of humanhood that
would remake our image of mankind, forming a fundamentally
new episteme: “No longer that preposterous figure at the center,
no longer that degraded and degrading victim off at the margins of
72 • Claire Isabel Webb

reality and blond with blood, man may at last become himself.”22
The near future holds even greater possibilities to become
ourselves. As the conditions of extraplanetarities come into
focus, we will evolve new ways to be human. The book of life
is a palimpsest, haunted by alien traces, with many wondrous
rewritings perhaps to come.
 Extraplanetary Conditions • 73

Notes
1 Archibald MacLeish, “We Are All Riders on the Same Planet,” New
York Times (December 25, 1968), A1.

2 Claire Isabel Webb, “Gaze-Scaling: Planets as Islands in

Exobiologists’ Imaginaries,” Science as Culture 30, no. 3 (April
2021): 394.

3 Think of the Great Oxidation Event that began approximately

2.5 billion years ago: cyanobacteria deluged Earth in oxygen,
forced surviving bacteria into symbiotic processes that produce
mitochondria and, eventually, multicellular life forms who are our
most ancient ancestors. Think, too, of the asteroid, imprinted on
the Chicxulub crater 66 million years ago, that doomed reptilian
rule and made space for small mammals to expand their niche.

4 “Habitability” has become the watchword to describe extra-

planetary life in recent decades, in part as a result of the
diminishing utility of the word “sustainability.” Whereas
sustainability evokes humans’ persistence on Earth and refers to
the vast anthropocentric techno-economic infrastructures to merely
maintain global health, habitability conjures human and nonhuman
possibilities for living in the general sense of the Planetary.

5 Of course, habitability is a political category as much as it is a

material one; those in power maximize their flourishing.

6 “Of Astronauts and Algae: NASA and the Dream of Multispecies

Spaceflight,” Environmental Humanities 9, no. 2 (2017): 360.

7 Stephen Witt, “The Man Who Predicted Climate Change,” The New Yorker
(December 10, 2021). [Link]
interest/the-man-who-predicted-climate-change.

8 William McNeil, The Great Acceleration: An Environmental History of the

Anthropocene since 1945 (Boston, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016).

9 Letter from Joshua Lederberg, University of Wisconsin, to

Detlev Bronk, President, National Academy of Sciences, December
24, 1957, with enclosed memorandum entitled “Lunar Biology?”,
National Academy of Sciences, Records Office, Washington, D.C.
(National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, 2006).
Preventing the Forward Contamination of Mars (Washington, DC: The National
Academies Press, 2006). [Link]

10 The Planetary Quarantine Program: Origins and Achievements, 1956–1973, NASA SP-
4902 (1975), 26.

11 Space Science Board, Conference on Potential Hazards of Back Contamination

from the Planets (National Academy of Sciences, National Research
Council, 1964), 5.

12 “Development of International Efforts to Avoid Contamination of

Extraterrestrial Bodies,” Science 128, no. 3329 (1958): 887–89.

13 NASA, “NASA Climate Modeling Suggests Venus May Have Been

Habitable,” (August 10, 2016): [Link]
climate-change/nasa-climate-modeling-suggests-venus-may-have-been-
habitable/

14 NASA, “Titan and Earth Similarities,” (April 19, 2012). https://

[Link]/resource/titan-and-earth-similarities/.
74 • Claire Isabel Webb

15 Placing Outer Space: An Earthly Ethnography of Other Worlds (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2016), 12.

16 Messeri, Placing Outer Space, 12.

17 NASA, “Webb Discovers Methane, Carbon Dioxide in Atmosphere of

K2-18 b,” (September 11, 2023). [Link]
exoplanets/webb-discovers-methane-carbon-dioxide-in-atmosphere-of-
k2-18-b/.

18 Will Steffen, et al., “The Emergence and Evolution of Earth System

Science,” Nature Reviews Earth & Environment 1, no. 1 (2020): 54–63.

19 Caroline Piaulet, Björn Benneke, and J. M. Almenara, et al.

“Evidence for the Volatile-Rich Composition of a 1.5-Earth-radius
Planet,” Nature Astronomy 7 (2023): 206–22.

20 For instance, see Florence Hofmann, et al., “Simulating

Exoplanetary Atmospheres in the Laboratory: Current Capabilities
of the Berlin Atmospheric Simulation Experimental Chamber (BASE),”
Acta Astronautica 222 (2024): 14–755.

21 Roy L. Walford, et al., “Calorie Restriction in Biosphere 2:

Alterations in Physiologic, Hematologic, Hormonal, and Biochemical
Parameters in Humans Restricted for a 2-year Period,” The Journals of
Gerontology, Series A, Biological Sciences and Medical Sciences 57, no. 6 (2002):
B211–24.

22 MacLeish, “We Are All Riders on the Same Planet,” A1.

75
 77

Planetary Platform
Automation

STEPHANIE SHERMAN

In his planetary design treatise Operating Manual for Spaceship

Earth (1969), Buckminster Fuller described “comprehensively
commanded automation” as a fundamental principle for a
viable “Earth operating system.”1 “[A]utomation displaces
the automatons,” Fuller claimed, positioning automation as a
foundational process of biological and technological evolution,
a dynamic bio-technical process of encoding and embedding
persistent decisions.
Fuller parsed automation in three distinct and contingent
ways: first, automation as a function of universal physical principles,
such as gravity, rotation, and movement, part of the regulatory
structure that governs the trajectories of planetary bodies;
78 • Stephanie Sherman

second, automation as socio-technical processes that delegate

memorization, specialization, and maintenance to computers and
machines to open space for human creative generalization and
transferability; and third, automation as a planetary protocol that
coordinates Earth’s ecosystemic complexity through artificial
management, interoperation, and calibration.2
Over half a century later, Fuller’s manual remains an
unrequited mandate for Earth operations, with his framing of
Earth as an automated spaceship and his pragmatic operational
design philosophy still beyond the scope of increasingly desperate
planetary policies. Automation is a series of resolutions that build
on one another, an ever-evolving operating infrastructure that
inscribes decision-making power in agents and environments.
Earth is, and has always been, an automated platform. In the age of
planetary computation and artificial intelligence, automation can
and must be harnessed to intentionally enable the development,
survival, and governance of planet Earth.
As described elsewhere in this volume, the Planetary
provides a practical philosophical framework for situating Earth
and its extraplanetary astronomical systems. The Planetary
accounts for the evolutionary functions and flows of material
recomposition, scientific observation, metabolic recalibration,
and synthetic construction. Distinguished from the sociocultural
and political emphasis of the global, which centers the forces of
human development and divisions in territories and ideologies,
the Planetary investigates the complex processes that merge the
biological, geological, chemical, metaphysical, and technological.
The Planetary grapples with the forms of intelligence implicated
in this comprehension, as well as the functional modalities that
 Planetary Platform Automation • 79

can reorient the current phase of energetic malfunction toward

systems viability. The planet, in other words, evolved humans
— and now humans are evolving ways to sense, perceive, model,
and modify the planet.
Planetary intelligence, as described by Sara Walker, David
Grinspoon, and Adam Frank, is the evolutionary transformation
of an immature biosphere to a mature technosphere in which
energetic systems eventually compose a self-maintaining
apparatus capable of ensuring a modulated and sustainable
homeostasis.3 The achievement of a mature technosphere would
necessarily entail the evolution of the process of evolution itself
— from the slow localisms of natural selection to an accelerated
and intentional integration of “autocorrect” functions informed
by planetary sensing and modeling.
Planetary computation is one way that planetary intelligence
evolves to construct self-maintaining apparati. The instruments
and infrastructures through which the planet is observed,
modeled, and patterned increasingly coordinate automatic action
without human intervention. Planetary computation provides
the tools to support, augment, and recompose complex Earth
operations while posing new paradigms for learning, behavior,
and intelligence.4
Planetary platform automation frames this evolutionary
process as a form of operational intelligence through which
platforms build upon other platforms, embedding intelligence into
environments and infrastructures. Planetary platform automation
positions intelligence not as awareness, metacognition, reason,
consciousness, or prediction, but as a functional operational
behavior by which systems continuously learn and revise
80 • Stephanie Sherman

themselves according to feedback from the world.

The Earth, as Fuller saw, is already functioning as an
automated platform. Planetary platform automation builds upon
the existing condition of automated platform Earth, shaping the
maneuvers by which planetary computation might augment,
coordinate, recalibrate, update, and optimize Earth’s operations,
which inevitably reshapes the philosophies that underpin it.

Planetary Platforms

Earth is a platform of platforms. The geologic definition of

platform is a flat plane or plate of rock covered by sedimentary
strata. Geological platforms, such as Earth’s continents, form by
filling in a jagged or inconsistent formation to create a smooth
base. These platforms, bounded by oceans or crusts, compose
new layers of tectonic stability and homogeneity. Over time, these
geologic platforms grow and degrade and migrate and splinter,
precipitated by both slow tectonic shifts and accelerated by grand
disruptions like volcanoes and earthquakes.
Earth’s platforms include not only geological composites,
but also the biogeochemical assemblages, energetic reactions,
atmospheric compositions, and material pressures that provide
the basis for the ongoing dynamic interaction and development
of life. In this sense, platforms are foundations and frameworks
that scaffold operations for further interaction. This process
is found both in the material physics of planetary operations
and also in technologies across scales. In synthetic biology, for
example, researchers refer to a cellular scaffold as a “chassis,” a
platform upon which biological systems are designed, built, and
 Planetary Platform Automation • 81

tested.5 This platform provides standardized protocols, resources,

and infrastructures that can be used to manipulate biological
components such as DNA, RNA, and proteins to engineer
biological functions or systems.
Earth’s platforms also include the human-constructed
architectures and infrastructures that, at planetary scale, encase
the Earth in an “artificial megastructure”6 that builds from, upon,
with, and between biological and geochemical foundations. These
platform architectures — oil rigs, train platforms, ramps, docks
— collect and distribute energy, facilitate material processing,
and channel and coordinate information through standardization
and allocation, evolving upon one another through layering,
sometimes amplifying and sometimes undermining their earlier
formations. Road, rail, marine, and other infrastructures are by
now almost entirely standardized to coordinate global flows of
physical goods across the Earth’s surface.
These platforms fold the planetary into itself, recomposing
Earthly materials in their construction and operations. Digital
platforms extend this infrastructural network logic to information
channels, financial exchanges, and communication, which
similarly depend on an energetic substrate. Extraplanetary
machines in orbit, such as satellites, servers, and sensors, produce
planetary observations of the Earth’s condition, a condition that
computational systems like GIS, visualization, and simulation
tools can monitor and model. Planetary organizations such as
the Square Kilometre Array Observatory, space agencies, and
the International Telecommunications Union provide platforms
for regulating, certifying, and coordinating Planetary science
and research. This stratum of platforms provides the basis for
82 • Stephanie Sherman

the rapid evolution of planetary computation and the ongoing

disclosure of planetary conditions, what Benjamin Bratton in this
volume calls “planetary sapience.”
More broadly, platforms are a particular type of system with
particular evolutionary dynamics. They designate an environment
or ecosystem, a physical or cognitive architecture, an infrastructure
or interface that establishes the parameters in or through which
other things can be programmed, built, or designed. Platforms
provide a foundation that both sets things apart and raises them
up, making closer and interoperable connections, a reverse entropy
that evolves by microscopic iteration as well as macrophenomenal
reconstruction. These platforms prescribe protocols that, like
DNA, operate within fixed and rigid vertical rules, enabling a
horizontal distribution based on repeatability, transferability,
interoperability, and flexibility. A multitude of permutations
develop, advancing diversity and differentiation through
homogenization and coordination. Through standardization,
consolidation, distribution, and resolution, platforms accelerate
automation, which further accelerates and encodes decisions
into processes that no longer need to be explicitly considered but
are directly embedded into environments themselves. Platforms
not only provide stages for enhanced observation (looking out or
over) but also often make other processes invisible. These stages
refer to the spatial domains and protocols that platforms set up
and also to the stages of development through which platforms
evolve and progress according to feedback.
It is through the ongoing development of platform processes
that humans are able to comprehend and act upon planetary
conditions. If the Earth is a platform of platforms currently unable
 Planetary Platform Automation • 83

to manage its energetic output, then a planetary society situates

humans within an evolutionary process that eventually automates
platform evolution itself.

Automation As A Planetary Process

In the most common definition, automation describes the

delegation of human labor, decision-making, or production
process to machines, which typically overtake roles humans
previously occupied. This happened first with manual work
like weaving or switchboard operation, and later with more
cognitive tasks through automated intelligence in calculation and
computation, pattern detection and modeling, writing and image
generation.
This definition of automation limits its planetary potential.
From a Planetary perspective, automation is a relative phenomenon,
less about the direct transfer of human work to machines than
about the continued process of resolving questions embedded in
decisions or context. Automation is the evolving environment of
consolidation, coordination, and choreography of the operations
required to achieve any outcome.
Humans have always struggled against the biological forces
of planetary automation by developing technological systems
that work against primitive or natural automation. Through
technologies, industrial automation outsourced what was beyond
or beneath human capabilities, and it enabled the infrastructures
of global civilization: water supply, industrial agriculture,
refrigeration, health care, air traffic control. In this way, platform
automation became a means to establish a quality of human life
84 • Stephanie Sherman

that overrode or undermined naturally inefficient or suboptimal

biological processes. Inter- and extra-planetary machines and
sensing apparati extend the human capacity to probe and explore
the Earth, like robots for venturing into the deep sea.
Planetary automation also involves extraplanetary
automation, as Claire Isabel Webb explores in her contribution
to this volume. When the spacecraft Cassini, a satellite set up to
sacrifice itself, took its final dive through the rings of Saturn, it
sent back the most stunning images, providing humans with
extraordinary visual information. With the rapid development
of artificial intelligence, planetary automation gained and then
surpassed human-level cognition for operations, including data
compilation, pattern searching, and language production and
translation.
If machine automation was invented to augment machines
in factories operated by humans, the evolutionary trajectory
of automation implies that the planet Earth combined with
its extraplanetary condition becomes another sort of factory
producing intelligence about itself — automation producing and
predicating further automation.
Platform automation, then, refers both to the automation of
platforms — the encoding and prescription of biogeochemical,
metaphysical, or technical processes — and the platformation
of automation, which describes how automation further embeds
standardization and amplification of founding conditions into
ecosystems and environments. No platforms without automation,
no automation without ongoing platform formation.
Following Fuller, we can define automation as a deeper
evolutionary logic that embeds responses to the physical
 Planetary Platform Automation • 85

properties of the universe — a process of bio-technical decision-

making that resolves prescriptive actions without conscious
cognitive oversight. Evolution automates decisions by discovering
structures through encounters and tests in environments rather
than by programming operations from first principles. Any
decision taken automatically, without thinking, is a form of
automation. In this sense, learning is a process of updating a model
based on feedback, establishing a new framework upon which
to build. Planetary platform automation describes externalized
construction and embedded cognition as the evolutionary
trajectory of cognition itself.
Artificial intelligence presents an opportunity for humans
and biotechnical machines to detect patterns and develop abstract
models and predictions based on performance, and also to embed
decisions and decision-making capacities into environments
themselves, giving platforms the ability to auto-decide, auto-
maintain, auto-manage, autocorrect. Intelligence, then, can be
understood as self-conscious cognition and prediction based on
modeling and a process of performative externalization whereby
successful behaviors and protocols demonstrate fitness and
utility based on circumstances and maintain adaptive flexibility
even as learnings are consolidated into evolving agents and
environments. This goes beyond the cybernetic focus on feedback
and control — it positions automation both as an internal
function of automatic self-regulation and as a continuous process
of externalized experimenting, testing and infrastructuralization.
From a philosophical perspective, the highest forms of
intelligence seem not to stop at cognition or consciousness or
reflection; optimized intelligence inscribes the ability to process
86 • Stephanie Sherman

information with such alacrity and fidelity that an agent can

behave automatically, without conscious cognition or external
regulations. It also offloads agential functions into environmental
ones as part of intelligent distribution and infrastructuralization.
Automation does not eliminate the role of human
beings but rather shifts their role in planetary processes to the
critical functions of cultivating interoperable optimizations
of evolutionary processes while eliminating other operations
altogether.
Artificial intelligence transforms platform automation and
computation from programmable rules and prescriptive processes
to environments that precipitate development through continuous
feedback and learning. Computation offers a useful heuristic in
this respect. A programmer writes or composes code, whereas a
developer determines the operations by which a code might be
leveraged or optimized to realize a desired outcome. Humans
become designers and developers of platform automation
processes, which then automate platform automation.
The urgency of recalibrating Earth as a viable ecosystem
programmed toward survival requires the humans currently at the
helm of such decisions to frame intelligent planetary operations
as operations without operators. Intelligence means energetic
sustainability in which a system sacrifices a part for the survival
of the whole, or the ability to update a model rapidly in response
to new information, and also something more akin to involuntary
virtuosity — the efficient performance of effective operations that
no longer require cognitive effort.
 Planetary Platform Automation • 87

Planetary Platform Automation And Intelligent

Evolution

Gaia theory, developed by James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis,

posits that Earth’s ecological systems serve as a self-regulatory
mechanism, a naturally occurring, automatic planetary feedback
loop.7 The theory espouses an Earthly autopoiesis, in which
the entire Earth functions as an autonomic platform regulating
and adapting symbiotic life. The theory has been challenged
due to its limited geologic historicity, primarily in reference to
the Holocene era, during which integrated mechanisms of auto-
regulation produced only temporary stability.8 A volatile climatic
age preceded the Holocene, and similarly the Anthropocene has
disrupted the autopoietic homeostasis presumed to be inevitable
and persistent.
The most salient takeaway from Gaia theory’s inconclusivity
is that evolutionary planetary platform automation proceeds both
by iterative optimization and by grand disruption. The so-called
Great Oxidation Event transformed the Earth’s atmosphere and
enabled the evolution of aerobic life-forms. Distinct from the
localisms and niches of natural selection, this event proceeded
through a rupture in the iterative automated platform of evolution,
precipitating a new evolutionary trajectory in which atmospheric
oxygen gave way to the thinking organisms we call human
beings. Gaia theory relies on natural time and evolution. Platform
automation can accelerate spacetime at the planetary scale.
Darwinian natural selection as an evolutionary system
is energetically intelligent at a local level, but not necessarily
intelligent from a whole-systems view. It works through
88 • Stephanie Sherman

slow species adaptation in response to local environments,

neighborhoods, or niches that determine fitness according to
the most immediate contexts. Because this form of evolution is
developed through a series of locally determined outcomes, which
are themselves based on established protocols, it does not have
the capacity to account more holistically for the myriad factors
that shape the environments in which it plays out.
Localized competitive decisions are unable to incorporate
broader patterns or the predictive modeling of secondary
effects that might result from cascades of automated and
optimized processes. This is the case in natural systems and in
infrastructural ones as well. Autopoietic automation, for example,
led to the dramatically inefficient megastructure of the automobile
and the highway system, producing a wicked problem in which
platform automation built on platform automation encoded a
dependence on fossil fuels and pervasive concretization that
destroys ecological habitats. In this sense, local or site-specific
autopoietic selection as a process is (as the computer scientist
Eliezer Yudkowsky put it) “stupid” because its optimizations
occur too slowly over generations to accommodate the rapidity
of the transformations they precipitate and because each decision
cannot account for its effects on the whole system in which it
develops, or the potential cascades of that intervention, at any
given instant.9
As the anthropogenic climatic transformation of Earth’s
ecosystem continues to evolve beyond homoeostasis, it
demonstrates maladaptive human behavior: the inability to
calibrate cognitive intelligence (the awareness that the climate
is in fact changing in existential ways) into coordinated action
 Planetary Platform Automation • 89

(intelligence as the ability to act upon this knowledge at the

scales required). Fuller’s prescription was to harness the forces of
automation, whether they be physical, cognitive, or mechanistic
operations, toward the reconfiguration of Earth operating
systems that would both harness existing power and intervene as
generalists in the design of evolution.
Planetary platform automation plays a growing role in
intentional systems governance. The cybernetic “governor” is
a regulatory device that maintains a process of bio-technical
autocorrection rather than a political figure who relies on rhetoric
and representation. Governance is, after all, just the mechanisms,
processes, and practical implementation of regulating, orienting,
and calibrating, intelligent systems that maintain and act upon
insights derived from automated platforms operating in the
world.10 Automation optimizes and builds on existing systems,
and humans working within them reroute, redirect, and make
them interoperable through testing and feedback.11
Platform automation provides a model for bridging the
energetic intelligence of local natural selection with the kinds of
artificial interventions that might be designed to derive insights
from emergent exceptions, deep pattern detection, and path-
dependent updates. This model would operate by activating
converging forces rather than prescribing rote rules. This line
of thinking runs counter to the litany of critiques of algorithmic
governance, what John Danaher calls “the threat of algocracy.”12
Planetary platform automation shifts the computational model
from threat to opportunity, from critique to constructive
optimization. The technological and predetermined becomes
a potential social asset if leveraged with nuance, precision, and
90 • Stephanie Sherman

iteration.
One obvious arena for planetary platform automation
in Earth systems management would be the coordination of
economic and ecological relations, two systems that currently
operate independently. Imagine, for example, a planetary
mechanism in which carbon output automatically sets price.
Rather than proceed via convincing individual agents or
national actors to modify their behavior at will toward collective
flourishing, this would reset the fundamental terms upon which
economic assets derive value. It would combine the demonstrable
intelligence of localized market decisions with an intentionally
directed definition of value modulated by planetary conditions.
Platform automation reframes the philosophy of Planetary
governance not as a means of convening actors to think through
mitigation, but as a commitment to effective and efficient
planetary calibration. The realization of a collective philosophical
orientation proceeds at once by devising mechanisms that can
infiltrate the processes of iteration and readily prepare to harness
disruption through a paradigm of action where those mechanisms
might automatically take hold. In this sense, planetary platform
automation requires environmental interdependence rather than
autonomy. Platform automation optimizes operational verticals
that integrate insights from horizontal distribution.

Operational Intelligence: Planetary Prediction

And Performance

In the grand strategy planetary simulation game Stellaris,

players build an empire through intergalactic expansion with
 Planetary Platform Automation • 91

the goal of developing a functional planetary system. Players

cannot choose to reroute fundamental parameters of physics
or cellular development, but they can select technological,
ecological, or economic principles that set planetary priorities
and the variables that determine viable governance operations.
An array of expansion packs allows players to introduce various
paradigmatic resources and pressures — Synthetic Dawn,
MegaCorp, Federations, Aquatics, First Contact, The Machine
Age. In the game, one available function is to “automate” the
management operations of the empire, allowing the player to
prioritize their attention on some operations while prescribing
or programming others. As one player put it on a Reddit thread
replete with musings on the poor performance of this planetary
management program: “[Is] it really that hard to code competent
AI for planetary administration?”13
To become a properly intelligent process, planetary platform
automation must model and test potential outcomes. In the
age of planetary computation, this happens regularly through
simulations that present, with various levels of fidelity, scenarios
in which factors and variables can be isolated and tweaked to
experiment with possible trajectories. Simulations support the
understanding of such outcomes, modeling through performance
and feedback based on wholesale effects. Like any model,
including any model of planetary intelligence, planetary platform
automation would never be able to observe and model a system
in its entirety. Platform automation must be highly adaptable,
intentionally designed with flexible protocols rather than fixed
programmed operations, and capable of navigating and changing
with new insights from accelerating effects and cascades. In this
92 • Stephanie Sherman

sense, platform automation operates as a form of operational

intelligence, which establishes protocols and procedures that
reduce the variables of the unknown. Operational intelligence
attempts to address all that can possibly be predicted or
predetermined or prescribed to make space for the incorporation
of insights from what cannot.
Operational intelligence, as a domain of activity, historically
refers to the capability to collect, analyze, and act upon data in
real-time to make informed decisions and optimize operational
processes for continuous improvement and modification.
Currently, most modeling and decision-making tools (traffic
control, water resource management, health care) use
mathematical/computation frameworks like entropy theory or
adaptive modeling to accommodate complexity. These systems,
relying on Von Neumann computational architectures that
underpin simulation technologies, use sequences that prescribe
a series of operational rules. They do not, in their foundational
architecture, mirror derivative complexity or automatically update
their models based on observed schisms between predictions and
outcomes.
Operational intelligence is a process of designing systems
to accommodate all “known knowns” (as Donald Rumsfeld
would put it) to accommodate “unknown unknowns” — in other
words, procedures that respond to effects impossible for any
system to model. In this sense, operational intelligence involves
a perpetual accounting not just for what previously existed, but
also for what-ifs, while knowing full well that those what-ifs are
incomprehensive and that convergence supersedes causality.
Nevertheless, intelligence also involves synthesis — the reduction
 Planetary Platform Automation • 93

of variables as a recursive and reflexive process. An operationally

intelligent tool for governance would leverage operational
intelligence not as a series of rules or protocols, but as a process
of optimization that incorporates unexpected outcomes back into
the system’s model.
As a form of operational intelligence, then, planetary
platform automation evolves via the configurations and cascades
of effects of automated processes embedding, encoding,
inscribing, and artificially transforming environments in their
image through feedback on performance. Stellaris’s AI model
might be terrible at planetary administration because it does not
yet integrate conditioning and memory: An abstract model has not
yet become channeled into its functionality. This model, like the
ones we currently have, runs predictive programs based on past
parameters, but the system is not actually intelligent — it does not
update its model based on new outcomes.
This lack of learning or updating based on models and
memory prevents another form of virtuosity from emerging.
The operationally intelligent evolution of planetary platform
automation would require a continuous interlinking of various
planetary systems, such that feedback loops could be cross
checked, and also require a computational architecture with
the power to process predictions simultaneously rather than
sequentially and to build recursively on previous conclusions.14
Rather than a string of cause and effect or if-thens, it would need
to architect a calibrating mechanism whereby adaptive processes
can distinguish unexpected and unanticipated formations as
factors, delineating trends from outliers.
Planetary platform automation is not only an operating
94 • Stephanie Sherman

protocol, a proposed interoperable infrastructure for an evolving

Spaceship Earth. It is also a philosophical framework, one that
approaches planetary intelligence not as cognition or self-
awareness, but as the reflexive incorporation and continuous
modification of behavioral processes that meet the challenges
of continuously and rapidly evolving environments through
performance. Planetary platform automation relies on an
operational intelligence that encounters not totality but vastness
in every direction, from quark to universe. This incompleteness
does not thwart its intentionality or its encoding of rules. Rather,
it is a commitment to deep incorporation, a comprehension
of continuous movement by way of expansion, determination,
acceleration, and modulation, based on standard deviations
and the incorporation of presumed exceptions. It derives its
momentum not from the abstraction of prediction, but from the
active realization of continuous behavior modification.
Like platform processes, policy shifts for planetary
platform automation might be realized by way of slow iteration
or unpredictable disruption, by incorporating insights from
copious accidents and failures as well as successful examples in
intentional Earth management and systems conversion. One such
example, a rare exception of planetary policy gone right, is the
Montreal Protocol, a unilateral universal agreement arranged by a
series of UN agencies that came together to establish atmospheric
pollution regulations with the very specific goal of eliminating
the use of ozone layer-depleting chlorofluorocarbons. The lesson
from the Montreal Protocol was not only the explicit removal of
certain chemicals from energetic processes, but the development
of and mandate to deploy their synthetic substitution,
 Planetary Platform Automation • 95

hydrofluorocarbons, which are still greenhouse gasses but do

not deplete the ozone layer with the same rapidity. An alternative
model would be an Independence Day-scale emergency, in which
an external force or enemy disrupts the foundations upon which
the apparatus depends, leveraging a widely recognized existential
threat as a justification for instituting automated procedures.
Regardless of its procedures, planetary platform automation
presents a philosophy of the planetary that positions intelligence
as the ability to act automatically, an operation without operators
that updates auto-regulation through artificial interventions,
learning through both slow iteration and the precipitous shifts of
emergency.
Planetary platform automation is an evolutionary process
that occurs through augmented and automated intelligence.
The modification of an operating manual for Spaceship Earth
is no longer a mandate for designing the protocols for human
intelligence, but a systems manual for designing and developing
synthetic intelligences realized through feedback based on
actualized performance, many which humans themselves can
neither conceive of nor comprehend.
One of the great ironies of current AI hype is the inflated
obsession with governing AI rather than a rigorous exploration
of ways to deploy AI as a tool for governance. An operational
intelligence that mobilizes planetary platforms proceeds through
the inexorable automation of evolution. This is an artificial
evolution that surpasses natural evolution, learning by testing
and exceeding, step by step and leap by leap, the parameters and
procedures that determine, constrain, and enable it.
96 • Stephanie Sherman

Notes
1 M. A. Ellis, P. K. Haff, and E. Lazarus, “Earth Operating Systems
5.0: Law as a Geological Process in the Anthropocene,” American
Geophysical Union, Fall Meeting 2018, abstract #GC31G-1327.

2 R. Buckminster Fuller, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (Carbondale,

IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969).

3 “Intelligence as a Planetary Scale Process,” International Journal

of Astrobiology 21, no. 2 (February 2, 2022): 47-61. https://
doi:10.1017/S147355042100029X.

4 Benjamin H. Bratton, The Terraforming (Moscow: Strelka Press, 2019).

5 J. Kim, M. Salvador, E. Saunders, J, González, C. Avignone-Rossa,

and J. I. Juménez, “Properties of alternative microbial hosts used
in synthetic biology: towards the design of a modular chassis,”
Essays in Biochemistry (2016): [Link]

6 Bratton, The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty (Boston: MIT Press, 2016),
8-17.

7 James Lovelock, Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth (Oxford, UK: Oxford
University Press, 2016); Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, Gaia and
Philosophy (London: Ignota Books, 2023).

8 Michael Ruse, “Earth’s Holy Fool?” Aeon: A World of Ideas, January 14,
2013. [Link]
nonsensical-fantasy.

9 “Evolutions Are Stupid but Work Anyway.” LessWrong Blog. November

3, 2007. [Link]
evolutions-are-stupid-but-work-anyway.

10 Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology,

Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1972).

11 Bateson, ibid.

12 “The Threat of Algocracy: Reality, Resistance and Accommodation,”

Philosophy and Technology 29, no. 3 (January 6, 2016): 245–68.
[Link]

13 WesternReactionary. “Why is AI planetary management … so

terrible?” Reddit, October 2023. [Link]
Stellaris/comments/17e63iy/why_is_ai_planetary_management_so_
terrible/

14 The Computer and the Brain (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
1958).
97
II. Philosophy
 101

Planetary Deep Time And

Human Autonomy

NICCOLÒ MILANESE

Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children,
Hidden excitedly, containing laughter.
Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.
Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.

—T.S. Eliot, “Burnt Norton”

The Planetary is a disorienting event, at once centering and

decentering humanity in a vast network of systems outside our
control and even awareness.
102 • Niccolò Milanese

In the first place, it confronts us with the visible consequences

of the accumulated actions of humankind on Earth systems —
the environment that makes all life possible. Our intervention in
systems of scale that once were autonomous from us has caused
momentous and destabilizing new conditions that threaten the
continuing functioning of those systems. In other words, it centers
human action as a planetary event.
The Planetary also decenters humans entirely from the
planetary story, forcing us to reckon with the eons in which
nothing like human life was present, with timescales of change
that far outlast any conceivable human civilization. Ultimately, it
leads us to imagine a planet without us at all, just like all other
planets (as far as we know).1
Our disjunction between these two faces of the Planetary
— one in which we see too much resemblance to ourselves, the
other in which we cannot recognize any resemblance — risks
producing a debilitating anxiety and practical paralysis, which in
turn exacerbates the tension between the need for urgent action
and the long and perhaps even endless temporal horizon in which
such actions will need to be situated.
A “crisis of temporal management” is the way historian
Dipesh Chakrabarty has described this existential situation.2 He
believes that underlying this political crisis is a deeper intellectual
crisis in our capacity to tell history. History, Chakrabarty
maintains, is based on human experience, but one face of the
Planetary — and its long temporality — is beyond the possibility
of human experience and so can only be grasped in an abstract
way that does not permit rich, meaningful phenomenological
content. Without a sense of our place in this long past, we find it
 Planetary Deep Time And Human Autonomy • 103

difficult to orient ourselves to act with purpose.

There is no question that both our politics and political
institutions seem, at present, wildly inadequate to address
planetary crises. Is our inability to adequately tell the historical
story of these crises to blame? Should we proclaim, in a kind of
reenactment of Hamlet, “The time is out of joint; O cursèd spite! /
That ever I was born to set it right!”? (1.5.189-190).
Before we script ourselves into this role, we should specify
what, exactly, is so troublesome about the alterity that the Planetary
introduces. What is it about the exteriority and otherness of the
planetary to us that seems to frustrate our possibility to reflect
and act? Which history are we trying but failing to tell?
Our sense of powerlessness, anxiety, and guilt are not
necessary corollaries of our predicament. Instead, they are the
result of inherited ways of thinking that are dominant in our
politics and in a misunderstanding of the nature of history itself.

The Obligation Of History

The disjunction between the time of human experience and the

time of the cosmos is not a new aporia. In the three volumes of Time
and Narrative (1983-85), philosopher Paul Ricoeur illustrates the
tension between the Aristotelian and Augustinian conceptions of
time.3 Aristotelian time is understood as a measurable series of
instants in the universe, a kind of number.
By contrast, Augustine saw time as a triple present: the
present of past things (memory), the present of future things
(expectation), and the present of present things (perception).
These two conceptions complete and occlude each other.
104 • Niccolò Milanese

Aristotle’s chronological time of the universe cannot fully account

for what is now to us and the unity of time in our experience. The
Augustinian phenomenological time of human experience can
account for our sense of time passing but not the movement of
time: Without any fixed points outside the human spirit to refer
to, it cannot provide any measure by which to say, for example,
as I recite a poem, the part of the past increases as the part of the
future diminishes.
Humans confronting what Nils Gilman in this volume calls
“the condition of planetarity” are inevitably situated between
these two temporal conceptions, between the phenomenological
and the noumenal, which is what we do each time we use
indexicals to say, “I am here, now.” We situate ourselves and our
experience in a larger context that is extended in space and time
beyond ourselves.
What Ricoeur argues in Time and Narrative is that telling
history is critical for humans to make sense of our individual and
collective relationship with the past in order to understand our
present situation and inform future action. History is a mediation
between cosmological time and socio-phenomenological time.
The disorientation of planetary crises is an extenuation of this
aporia, which is the structure of history itself.
Ricoeur’s philosophy of history is that narrative makes
history tellable by mediating between the time of human
experience and the time of the cosmos through a “triple mimesis.”
The first mimesis, or representation of the world, involves
understanding human action as structurally different to other
physical movement because it is backed by agency and intention
— reasons, goals, and motivation — a symbolic framework in
 Planetary Deep Time And Human Autonomy • 105

which actions have meaning, are understandable to us, and which

we could in some sense imagine doing ourselves.
The second mimesis is an operation to mediate between
individual events and history as a whole, which has a plot
structure: a beginning, middle, and end. Different plots are
innately understood within different cultures: Tragedy, comedy,
romance, and others have been developed as part of a canon.4 This
helps give a sense of narrative to a sequence of historical events.
Not only can we understand the structure (a challenge presented,
confronted, overcome, etc.), but we also find the motivational and
emotional development of the characters understandable and
relatable (we feel pathos).
The third mimesis happens in the act of reading or listening
to the narrative: the actualization of history refigured as the time
of action by the audience. This third mimesis is crucial to our
understanding that history is not a process autonomous from
human agency: History is presented in a way in which human
action matters because it makes a difference to what happens.
History in Ricoeur’s conception is intrinsically
anthropocentric: The historical narratives we tell are stories of
human action. Not only are they usually stories of human actors, but
historical narratives have value for us by informing and motivating
action. They give us reasons to do things or not to do things. But
even the same historical narrative may present different reasons
for different action to different people in different circumstances,
and the same facts can be narrated in many different ways. The
story of the European arrival in North America, for example, is
told in very different ways by British or Wendat storytellers. The
history of a battle is told very differently from the perspective of
106 • Niccolò Milanese

the general, a foot soldier, or those opposing them.

Does the time of the Planetary create a problem for these
mimetic operations of history? There has been a striking lack
of engagement with the philosophy of history in general when it
comes to discussion of Planetary history, and there are perhaps
three main reasons why this might be, all of which are mentioned
by Chakrabarty (among others).
First, the timescale problem. Timescales involved in
planetary processes, such as million-year carbon cycles, are far
beyond any usual conception of the temporal structure of human
action. How can we have any human experience of them?
Second, the collective action problem. The scale of human
influence on Earth systems requires us to see humankind itself,
in total, as a planetary actor. It is the cumulative effect of each of
our actions — that is, the effect of humans as a whole — that has
an impact on what were previously planetary processes operating
externally from us. The problem is we have great difficulty
imagining humankind as a whole, as a collective agent. We are
much more accustomed to thinking of individuals or smaller
groups acting, interacting, and competing.
Third, the nonhuman problem. In telling the history of the
planet, most of the “actors” are not human — they are systems,
processes, and nonhuman species, each of which is defined by
temporal rhythms that have nothing to do with human ones. How
can we conceive of these nonhuman actors? Is “actor” even the
right term? How can we frame the interaction between human
action, nonhuman action, and large systems with nonhuman and
nonliving components?
Contemplating such massive timescales can provoke a kind
 Planetary Deep Time And Human Autonomy • 107

of cognitive vertigo, like looking up at the stars. Humans have

always told stories about the origin and evolution of the universe:
mythological, religious, historical, and even scientific stories. Is
planetary time different? I think it is not, but it does challenge us
to give a unified historical account of the planet and the place of
humans in it.

Understanding, Explanation, And Action

A common philosophy of science, perhaps most strongly argued

in modern times by Georg Henrik von Wright in his 1971 book
Explanation and Understanding, depicted a sharp division between
the natural sciences and the human sciences. In this view, the
natural sciences look to provide causal explanations, whereas the
human sciences seek to provide understanding.5
Von Wright appeals to a “Galilean” tradition of causal-
mechanical explanation and an “Aristotelian” tradition of
finality that appeals to reasons, intentions, and goals. All causal-
mechanical explanations can be formulated as a set of laws
along the lines “if X then Y,” which then are applied to specific
conditions and provide an explanation for why Y happened. This
builds on the idea of regularity, which has close connections to
the chronological conception of time: If there is a law that says
X causes Y, this can be true if and only if events of type X are
regularly followed temporally by events of type Y.
In the social sciences, by contrast, von Wright explains
events as “practical syllogism”:

X intends to bring about P

X considers he cannot bring about P unless he does A
108 • Niccolò Milanese

Therefore, X does A

There is no law involved in such a syllogism and, according

to von Wright, there is no way of verifying the conclusion of
the syllogism other than verifying the premises and no way of
verifying the premises without verifying the conclusion. Thus,
there is no logically distinct cause and effect here, which means
that what is instead required to account for the relationship
between X and Y is a hermeneutics of understanding. This is why
history, understood as the core discipline for understanding
ourselves, necessarily takes the form of narrative.
This distinction between the natural sciences, a world of
laws and causality, and the human sciences, a world of norms
and intentions, would help to explain the disorienting effect of
placing human action in the context of deep planetary time if it
mapped onto the two faces of the planetary we identified: the
human and the nonhuman. There would be a difficulty in the
kind of narrative that can be told, shifting from law-like Galilean
explanation for almost all of nonhuman history, to Aristotelian
reasons, intentions, and goals for the briefest but most decisive of
human interludes.
Yet there are many reasons to think that the “law-based”
conception of science is implausible: It cannot distinguish
between causal relationships and accidental correlations, and
there are areas of science, most notably biology and medicine,
which provide causal explanations but few laws.
Instead, philosophical debates currently revolve around
an interventionist conception of scientific explanation. Imagine
that in an experiment a scientist can vary the conditions — and
 Planetary Deep Time And Human Autonomy • 109

by this intervention bring about different results.6 This is not as

anthropocentric as it sounds — an intervention can be made by
nonhuman and non-sentient actors and can be defined causally
by counterfactuals.
The model of explanation is then the following: If X
happened and then Y happened, we can say that X caused Y if and
only if in a scenario where X did not occur, Y also did not occur.
This is different from the causal-mechanical explanation above
because it does not appeal to any overarching law. This view of
scientific explanation enables us to narrate planetary history in
which there are both human and nonhuman actants operating on
a planetary scale with the same causal structure. It ensures history
is unitary across chronological and phenomenological time.
The imagination is crucially involved in this model of
scientific explanation and action, as is treating natural phenomena
as if they had a capacity to intervene. That provides the essential
bridge to the world of human explanation. If, in order to explain the
history of Earth systems, we need to mobilize our imaginations,
make figures and models to visualize counterfactual scenarios,
and treat natural processes as if they had a form of agency, then
we are already performing some of the same mimesis as involved
in understanding human action and creating narratives of history.
That this theory of scientific method involves such mimesis
does not discredit it as anthropocentric. On the contrary, the
counterfactual theory enables us to conceive of causes without
either turning humans into nonhumans without free will or
nonhumans into humans (with intentions, beliefs, desires, etc.).
In order to give an account of our planetary predicament, there is
no need to “humanize” the planet or to make all planetary actants
110 • Niccolò Milanese

into political agents with intention and historical understanding

in the same sense as humans. Crucially, this allows the socio-
historical realm to be ontologically distinguishable from the
natural without the break between them being unbridgeable and
politics to be clearly a human responsibility. History is a human
activity of understanding that is related to our responsibility to
act by manipulating causes. When we seek to do so in ways that
affect or influence the common good, we are doing politics.

The Problem Of Post-Sovereign Politics

If understanding our planetary predicament does not require

us to radically change our conception of history, it does require
radical changes in our conception of politics. Our modern,
Western conceptions of politics are still dominated by Christian
symbolisms underlying our understandings of sovereignty and
autonomy: Whether it is the state, the collective will, or even the
sovereign power that can decide on the state of exception, our
political imaginary considers collective political actors as self-
contained and dominant over their domain.
The revelation of the Planetary throws this conception
of politics into crisis, both through the interdependency across
societies, systems, and species, which undermines pretenses to
self-sufficiency and supremacy, and more fundamentally through
revealing the blindness of human interference with planetary
systems until very recently.
Acknowledging the inadequacy of this conception of politics
is not enough. There is also the question of how we acknowledge its
inadequacy, of our historical orientation to this revelation — or, as
 Planetary Deep Time And Human Autonomy • 111

we could say, the politics of history. And therein lies the moment
of our incapacity. For our tendency is to read this sequence as the
plot of tragedy, which arguably underlies all Western politics.
The paradigmatic example is that of Oedipus, who
simultaneously discovers his own identity as the son of Laius
and Jocasta in the moment of reversal, or peripeteia,7 and realizes
the meaning of what he has done in marrying his mother, killing
his father, and being brother to his daughters. In the moment of
anagnorisis for Oedipus, past, present, and future collapse into
an intolerable now. Understanding our planetary predicament
under this tragic archetype encourages paralyzing guilt and the
impression that it would have been better not to act at all than to
act in ignorance. Either inaction … or madness … or denial.
We have to break out of this triad by ending our fascination
with the schema of tragedy and finding other imaginative resources
to frame the history of our politics and its transformation quite
differently.
The practical poetic and political archetypes we need are not
comforting fairy stories or excuses, but intertwined histories of the
planet and of humanity that make recognizable our responsibility
without placing us either in the positions of autonomous gods or
dependent automatons following mechanical laws and that can
work at multiple temporalities both urgent and long-term. For
this the narrative archetype of the metamorphosis may be much
better suited than that of tragedy or comedy: stories with no
definitive start or end and which are multivocal, multitemporal,
ambivalent, unstable, and in flux, embracing without assimilating
the strangeness within us.
Contrary to Chakrabarty’s intuition — that we face a crisis
112 • Niccolò Milanese

in temporal management — the condition for success of this

renewal of politics is that it not be understood as a task of taming
or otherwise domesticating the planet’s alterity by making it more
similar to us or us more similar to it, but precisely of acting in a
way that imaginatively embraces the strangeness of our multiple
temporalities and acknowledges the plurality of forces that shape
our planetary future.
 Planetary Deep Time And Human Autonomy • 113

Notes
1 See, for a recent popular example, Alan Weisman, The World Without Us
(New York: Picador, 2007).

2 The Climate of History in a Planetary Age (Chicago: University of Chicago

Press, 2021), 203.

3 Trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer (Chicago: University

of Chicago Press, 1984), vol. 1, part 1.

4 Hayden White famously explored the ”emplotments” of 19th century

history in Europe in his Metahistory: This Historical Imagination in 19th Century
Europe (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 1973).

5 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1971).

6 See notably James Woodward, ”Explanation and Invariance in the

Special Sciences,” British Journal of Philosophy of Science, Vol.
51 (2000): 197-254; Woodward, Making Things Happen: A Theory of Causal
Explanation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), and Woodward,
“Causation and Manipulability,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy,
eds. Edward N. Zalta and Uri Nodelman (Summer 2023). https://
[Link]/archives/sum2023/entries/causation-mani/.

7 Sophocles, Oedipus King of Thebes, trans. Gilbert Murray (London:

George Allen and Unwin, 1911), ll. 1176-92. [Link]
[Link]/files/27673/27673-h/[Link].
 115

Planetary Metaphysics

BORIS SHOSHITAISHVILI

In 1938, in a text called “Scientific Thought as a Planetary

Phenomenon,” the biogeochemist Vladimir Vernadsky organized
the sciences into two basic categories:

[I]n the first category, we have those whose objects, and

consequently whose laws, encompass all of reality, such as
our planet and its biosphere, as well as the cosmic expanses—
that is, sciences whose objects correspond to the fundamental,
universal phenomena of reality. The second category is related
to phenomena which are characteristic of our Earth.1

Against the backdrop of more familiar fault lines in the

sciences (experimental vs. theoretical science, nomothetic
116 • Boris Shoshitaishvili

vs. historical science, and the “two cultures” of scientists and

humanists), Vernadsky’s typology introduced a new way to
divide domains of scientific inquiry: between the universal and
the planetary. He went on to specify the planetary as the side
that would embrace “all the sciences of the biosphere, with the
sciences of the humanities, with the Earth sciences—botany,
zoology, geology, mineralogy—in all their scope.”2
By interpreting the planetary instead of the universal to be
the proper intellectual home of the humanities and social sciences,
Vernadsky treated as consequential a fact that has typically been
seen as incidental — that all human affects, thoughts, institutions,
and cultures have developed in the specific context of Earth and
the biosphere.3 This passage is one of the first hints that the
planetary can be a concept that structures thinking about human
beings, from the epistemology of organizing the sciences to
questions of metaphysics. To apply Dipesh Chakrabarty’s phrase
from nearly a century later, Vernadsky had found in the planetary,
in a barebones philosophy of science proposal, an “emergent
humanist category.”4
Three ways of seeing our species as planetary have since
emerged from the Earth sciences: the noosphere, Gaia theory,
and the Anthropocene. To recognize how these three have
shaped the planetary as a humanist category — and broadened
its scope to encompass questions of metaphysics and ethics — it
helps to approach them through another planetary thinker. Sixty
years after Vernadsky presented his schema, and in the context
of discussions about globalization, the literary theorist Gayatri
Chakravorty Spivak converged on similar themes and established
“planetarity” as a concept influential beyond the natural sciences.
 Planetary Metaphysics • 117

In her lecture, “Imperatives to Re-Imagine the Planet,”

delivered in 1997 at the Stiftung Dialogik, an organization
founded to preserve German and Swiss Jewish memory after the
Holocaust, Spivak proposed that the planet, in contrast to the
human-centered idea of the globe that shapes debates around
globalization, holds a profound “otherness” for human beings:
“The planet is in the species of alterity, belonging to another
system; and yet we inhabit it, on loan.”5 Such contrast between
globe and planet remains a defining distinction of planetary
thought, a provocation to confront the economics- and politics-
dominated frameworks of globalization with commensurate
attention to human entanglement in another, more-than-human
world.
Intriguingly, in the earliest published version of the lecture,
Spivak finished her sentence with a significant difference. She
had written that the planet belongs “to another system; and
yet we inhabit, indeed are it.”6 This change — from the planet’s
alterity as what humans “indeed are” to what humans inhabit “on
loan” — is more than a philological curiosity. The shift between
these two versions, whether or not Spivak had meant this change
to carry substantial weight, provides an opening into thinking
beyond epistemology to two primary metaphysical and ethical
dimensions of planetary thought.
Inhabiting a dwelling “on loan” signals an imperative
to leave one’s home, once one’s time living there ends, in a
recognizable, intact state, so that it can be occupied or lent again.
A loaned home not only serves as a restorative and functional
shelter but also possesses greater durability than the physical
presence of any specific dweller. Such alterity entails a threefold
118 • Boris Shoshitaishvili

obligation: to the place itself as durable and capacious, to whoever

owns it, and to others who come after to use this place as their
home. So though you might, for a time, belong to this place and
call it home, sheltered and nourished and restored by it, it does
not belong to you. The metaphysics of planet-as-home or place-
as-one’s-other carry a corresponding, obligatory ethics: the ethics
of preservation, a stewardship across time.
But in Spivak’s earlier statement, that we not only inhabit
the planet but “indeed are it,” is an indication of a different
metaphysics, one summoning an ethics distinct from stewardship.
The planet as the other that is not our expansive dwelling but
a being that both exists beyond and is ourselves, a being with
which we identify, is a planet with whom the human comes face
to face. This perspective presents the planet as a peer, with the
potential for recognition and misunderstanding that meeting
a peer inherently carries. In a more subtle way than the planet
as dwelling, this understanding of the planet’s otherness has
featured in the last decade or so of planetary thought as well —
consider, for instance, how scholars such as William Connolly and
Bruno Latour have named their projects Facing the Planetary and
Facing Gaia.7
But the question remains: Where is the shared conceptual
ground on which an encounter with the planet’s otherness as
peer rather than dwelling can occur? How to engage in this
intersubjective mode with a layered immensity existing beneath,
around, and over all forms of life we know of, an immensity
appearing so different from a fellow human being? How can one
face, in the words of Herman Melville’s Ishmael, a towering other
with “no face”? Here Spivak leaves us only hints. We must look
 Planetary Metaphysics • 119

outside her essays on planetarity to stage the encounter with the

planet’s alterity in a mode beyond dwelling and stewardship.
The earlier ethical metaphysics developed by the philosopher
Emmanuel Levinas can help elucidate the metaphysical claim
that “we are” the planet’s alterity. Levinas’s project, pursued
in reaction to Martin Heidegger’s “Being”-oriented thought,
was to urge 20th-century European philosophy to turn from
an obsession with ontology as the basis of metaphysics to the
encounter of subject and other. It was precisely in the face of
the other, he maintained, that the subject was confronted with a
presence that overflowed the categories of “being” (the ontology)
that one might seek to apply.
Another important feature of Levinas’s theory was that
speech and language are coeval with studied comprehension in
the encounter with the other:

The other (autrui) is not an object of comprehension first

and an interlocutor second. The two relations are intertwined.
In other words, the comprehension of the other (autrui) is
inseparable from his invocation.
To comprehend a person is already to speak with him.8

In reorienting us to the face of the other as well as the

primacy of invocation in interaction, Levinas allows us to
reconfigure Spivak’s initial expression of planetarity into the
following question: What is the face of the planet and how do
we encounter the planet as humanity’s interlocutor? Or, in other
words, how do we face and speak with the planet in self-other
dialogue, beyond our relationship to the planet as the dwelling we
inhabit on loan?9
120 • Boris Shoshitaishvili

This is the point at which we turn back to the Earth sciences

for their longstanding commitment to contemplating the face of
the planet and generating the language through which this kind
of encounter unfolds.

The Planetary Spheres Of The Biosphere And

Noosphere

The Austrian geologist Eduard Suess — who coined the term

“biosphere” — synthesized decades of his work in the multivolume
textbook, The Face of the Earth (Das Antlitz der Erde), published at
the turn of 20th century. Suess’s work inspired Vernadsky, who
expanded Suess’s inchoate concept of the biosphere into the idea
of the dynamic, living layer on Earth that is now foundational for
much scientific thought: a zone of highly ramified, aquiferous life
that transforms the energy of the sun into work and profoundly
changes the face of the planet — indeed, that makes our planet
what it is.
In their interlinked writings, published decades before space
flight provided photographs of Earth from a sufficient distance to
allow us to perceive our planet’s physical boundaries, these two
scientists imagined what such a perspective would reveal about
its face. As Suess opens The Face of the Earth:

If we imagine an observer to approach our planet from

outer space, and, pushing aside the belts of red-brown clouds
which obscure our atmosphere, to gaze for a whole day on
the surface of the earth as it rotates beneath him, the feature
beyond all others most likely to arrest his attention would be
the wedge-like outline of the continents as they narrow away
 Planetary Metaphysics • 121

to the South.10

Or Vernadsky’s opening to The Biosphere:

The face of the Earth viewed from celestial space presents

a unique appearance, different from all other heavenly
bodies. The surface that separates the planet from the cosmic
medium is the biosphere, visible principally because of light
from the sun. … A new character is imparted to the planet by
this powerful cosmic force. The radiations that pour upon the
Earth cause the biosphere to take on properties unknown to
lifeless planetary surfaces, and thus transform the face of the
Earth.11

For Suess and Vernadsky, the aspiration to view Earth’s

face, by a perspective separated from the Earth, unfolded into
a recognition of our planet’s distinctiveness — from a specific
formal aspect of its geology in Suess (tapering continents) to a
sweeping interpretation of its animated layer in Vernadsky (the
biosphere). Taking this perspective, Vernadsky perceived that the
face of the Earth was more than geomorphologically intriguing.
The biosphere, imagined from space, became a mediator of the
rock beneath and sun above, a planetary face alive in expression
and activity.
The naming and conceptualization of the biosphere were
significant moves toward recognizing the planet as our other,
toward confronting its face as that which places metaphysical
and ethical demands on us. But the second Levinasian element of
full encounter with alterity — the other emerging as interlocutor
to be spoken with, as one to whom we connect using language
— manifested in another idea Vernadsky helped introduce. Based
122 • Boris Shoshitaishvili

on the vision of Earth’s biosphere and in collaboration with the

paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and the mathematician
Édouard Le Roy, he proposed a planetary designation for human
beings.
Facing the biosphere, these thinkers viewed our species, for
perhaps the first time in the natural sciences, from a planetary
perspective (a departure from earlier cosmopolitan or universalist
perspectives). The same imaginative point of view on the Earth’s
surface that had clarified the broad zone of life was retrained
on our form of life, on the being adopting that perspective. In
conversation with then-recent ideas that Earth comprises a series
of geological spheres (the lithosphere, hydrosphere, atmosphere,
and especially the biosphere) they put forward a new name for
and conception of a planetary humankind: the “noosphere,” a
planetary sphere of mind and affect (nous).
Thus, the face of the planet not only came alive in human
thinking as a diverse and interlinked (bio)sphere that we could
gaze upon, but also as an interlocutor who bestowed, in our
encounter with it, a resonant planetary identity. Reflecting on the
planet’s biosphere, human beings unlocked the intuition that we
too constitute a transformative planetary sphere. As Spivak had
hinted, the planet’s alterity — its massive cyclical interactions
occurring across prodigious expanses — became the basis for
conceptualizing and experiencing one of the ways in which we
“indeed are”: inhabiting the biosphere but also, significantly and
distinctly, noospheric.
In this realization, Spivak’s dual senses of “dwelling” and
“identity” coexist. We dwell in the biosphere as the planetary
home we are obligated to preserve and steward. But we also
 Planetary Metaphysics • 123

constitute, in our diversity of technologies, built environments,

and cultural and individual idiosyncrasies (what Latour called our
“homodiversity” in an echo of “biodiversity”), a planetary sphere
of branching and interacting nous.12 The profound plurality of
human beings and cultures that thinkers such as Hannah Arendt
have celebrated finds its other in the diverse living species of
the biosphere and their ecosystemic relationships. Facing the
biosphere as planetary peer, humans see themselves also as a
sphere.

The Planetary Bodies Of Gaia And Humankind

James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis collaborated on the second

scientific act of facing planetary alterity.13 By the late 1960s and
‘70s, unlike when Suess and Vernadsky were alive, photography of
Earth from space and the study of other planets in the solar system
had begun. Studying Mars for signs of life, Lovelock intuited that the
activities of living beings affect planetary atmospheres. Lovelock
turned back to Earth and considered what far-ranging signals of
planet-scale life our atmosphere and surface might carry. Taking
this perspective, Lovelock reinterpreted the curious features
of Earth’s unexpected atmosphere, with its wealth of oxygen,
as evidence of a host of homeostatic mechanisms employed by
the biosphere to keep planetary conditions supportive of life’s
continued existence. In other words, Lovelock, and later Margulis,
found in Earth’s distinctive planetary face a window onto a vast
collective being possessing the responsive interiority of a living
planetary body.
The alterity of this planetary being that regulates
124 • Boris Shoshitaishvili

and stabilizes itself by embracing and enfolding trillions of

interconnected living beings is open to a reading informed by
Spivak’s two senses of alterity as well. On the one hand, humans,
according to Gaia theory, dwell within this greater homeostatic
body, this planetary Life “with a capital L,”14 which we inhabit on
loan — mutualistically and cooperatively at best, parasitically at
worst. We are thus obliged to steward and preserve the health of
this living host.
But Gaia prompts more than an ethics of stewardship. As
the biosphere concept inspired the noosphere, the recognition
of Earth as a collective body spurs a confrontation with human
planetarity in Spivak’s other sense as well: as a peer to Gaia. A
handful of theorists, including Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the
systems theorist James Miller, and the biophysicist Gregory
Stock,15 have treated global trade and transit, proliferating
technologies, webs of global communication, and the accelerating
worldwide spread of microbes and viruses through human hosts
as indications that humans may be in the process of forming an
Earth-spanning living body, one to some extent distinct from
Gaia, with glimmers of planetary homeostasis and all-too-human
vulnerabilities of its own.
These thinkers situate the myriad histories of human
societies and technologies within one shared Big History of
a developing human planetary being (a Big Life History of
humankind, if you will). The numerous human bodies politic,
all of them born from Gaia, are seen to be in a fitful process of
interlinking into a human planetary body that exists, not only as a
member or even child of Gaia, but also as Gaia’s peer.
Considering Gaia theory alongside this idea suggests the
 Planetary Metaphysics • 125

startling possibility that Earth may be “doubly alive” as a planet.16

The paleontologists Mark Williams, Jan Zalasiewicz, and Anne-
Sophie Milon underscored this moment of facing the planet
as embodied alterity by granting not only Gaia but also this
human planetary superorganism a religious-mythological name.
Presenting humans as a global Leviathan emerging from the
Earth-spanning systems of globalizing techno-societies, they have
repurposed the biblical figure at the center of Thomas Hobbes’s
political treatise into a child of Gaia so immense as to bring
menacing instability to its planetary parent and to ourselves.17

Human Planetary Force And The Earth System In

The Anthropocene

The third major encounter with the planet as other — as face, as

interlocutor, and as what we are — is taking place in this millennium
in the concept of the Anthropocene, the proposal that Earth has
entered a new epoch defined by humans exerting planetary force.
The word “Anthropocene” derives from the nomenclature of the
Geologic Time Scale, in which Earth’s history is periodized based
on close attention to continuities and disruptions recorded in the
lithosphere.
With the Anthropocene idea, however, geoscientists have
been pressed to do something unusual for their discipline: to
think from a deep future perspective on the present, rather than
from a present perspective on the deep past — to discern, in other
words, the traces our species has left on the face of the Earth and
consider whether these are durable and widespread enough to
strike future students of geology as evidence of the beginning of
126 • Boris Shoshitaishvili

a new geological epoch. If our deep descendants find in the rock

evidence of our planetary activity, this would mean that human
civilizations have already made, on the short time span of tens or
hundreds of years, a spatially and temporally gargantuan imprint
on Earth’s face. (For now, in a contested vote, the Anthropocene
designation has been voted down, but the debate over this kind of
future geology has just begun.)18
The Anthropocene’s conceptualization of human impact
on the planet’s face has led scientists to describe humans, in
discussions of the new epoch, as a planetary “force.” The concept
of force, in physics, helps explain the causes and origins of an
impact. But this designation for humans has deeper implications.
In the history of modern physics, forces have typically played
a crucial and supportive role in the structure and function of
systems, including at cosmic scales. Isaac Newton described
a “system of the world,” a system built on distinct kinds of
force (motive, inertial, gravitational) that obey set laws and
organize the universe.19 Today, physicists posit four irreducible
“fundamental forces” or interactions (gravity, electromagnetism,
weak interaction, strong interaction.)
But alongside this there runs an older understanding of
force, prominent in religious and mythological traditions and
periodically appearing in thinkers such as Aristotle and Leonardo
da Vinci, where force spills out of the cosmos or system that it
works to order and instead brings about profound disruption. This
is the kind of force the divine brings upon the world from outside
its sustaining structure, in acts of devastation such as the Flood.
The Anthropocene retrieves this older ambivalent tradition of a
sometimes disruptive cosmic force in its conception of human
 Planetary Metaphysics • 127

beings and our planetary impact. In the conceptual framework of

the Anthropocene, the Earth is treated as an immense system in
which internal and external forces have tended to balance each
other’s effects, especially through most of the Holocene, until
human-generated force emerged as a planetary exception.
Seeing our species as a cumulative force in a systems context
has found resonance in contemporary concerns about “tipping
points” — the prospect that human activity could suddenly push
the Earth system across dimly perceived boundaries defining the
Holocene equilibrium into rapid change toward little understood
new states that are perhaps chaotic or perhaps a new and less
supportive equilibrium. These system states, such as a “hothouse
Earth,” are unlikely to be favorable to us and multicellular life, due
to the little time human societies and nonhuman species would
have to adapt to swift planetary change.
In tipping points, too, the planetary perspective on the
Earth system has remade our understanding of the human as a
planetary being. Thinkers have recently focused on identifying
tipping dynamics that might exist within human societies and
systems. “Social tipping points” offer a framework for provoking
rapid change in our social and technological systems that could
counter the alarming prospect we now face of inadvertently
pushing Earth past its more-than-human tipping points. In other
words, the disruptive character of human planetary force is now
being interpreted as precisely that which might be leveraged and
redirected against imbalances in our own systems. The tipping
point becomes a conceptual resource not only for planetary
metaphysics and ethics but for planetary politics as well.20
Like the paired ideas of the biosphere and noosphere, or of
128 • Boris Shoshitaishvili

Gaia and human planetary embodiment, encountering Earth in

the Anthropocene as an ancient system containing vast forces and
latent tipping points repositions us vis-à-vis ourselves, revealing
humans’ unruly force, systematic organization, and sudden
inflections. In all three encounters with the planet’s face, scientists
and thinkers have stepped into interactions with a full other that,
in turn, redefines the human as a manifold planetary being.
In fact, long before Spivak spelled it out, a hint that we are
the planet’s alterity may have existed in the origins of the word
“human,” some linguists believe comes from the same Indo-
European root that gave us the words “chthonic,” which relates
to the underworld, and “humus,” which is Latin for soil. “Earth,”
therefore, is our name for our species. It is a small wonder that we
can reopen the metaphysics of the human by learning new ways
to countenance and invoke the planet.
 Planetary Metaphysics • 129

Notes
1 Science & Technology 16 (Spring-Summer, 2012): 30.

2 Vernadsky, “The Transition From the Biosphere To the Noösphere,”

excerpt from Scientific Thought as a Planetary Phenomenon 1938, 21st Century,
trans. William Jones (Spring-Summer, 2012): 16-31. [Link]
[Link]/Articles_2012/Spring-Summer_2012/04_Biospere_Noosphere.
pdf.

3 Note Lynn Margulis’s comment in the introduction to the

translation of Vernadsky’s 1926 The Biosphere that he was “the first
person in history to come to grips with the real implications of
the fact that Earth is a self-contained sphere”; in The Biosphere
(New York: Copernicus, 1998).

4 The Climate of History in a Planetary Age (Chicago: University of Chicago

Press, 2021). The phrase appeared earlier in Chakrabarty, “The
Planet: An Emergent Humanist Category,” Critical Inquiry 46, no. 1
(2019): 1-31. [Link]

5 “‘Planetarity’ (Box 4, WELT),” Paragraph 38, no. 2 (July 2015):

290-92.

6 Imperatives to Re-Imagine the Planet/Imperative zur Neuerfindung des Planeten, ed.

Willi Goetschel (Berlin: Passagen, 1999).

7 Connolly, Facing the Planetary: Entangled Humanism and the Politics of Swarming
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017); and Latour, Facing
Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime, trans. Catherine Porter
(Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2017): 107.

8 Adriaan Peperzak, Simon Critchley, and Robert Bernasconi, eds.,

Emmanuel Levinas, Basic Philosophical Writings (Indiana University Press,
1996): 6.

9 In other words, the ethics of this kind of ethical metaphysics, in

relation to the planet, draw closer to the concept of I-Thou in
Martin Buber’s thought or the “ethics of care” introduced by Carol
Gilligan, than to the ethics of stewardship. See Martin Buber,
I and Thou, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Scribner, 1970);
and Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s
Development (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1982).

10 Trans. Hertha Sollas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924).

11 Trans. D. B. Langmuir (New York: Springer, 1998).

12 Latour, 107.

13 “Atmospheric Homeostasis by and for the Biosphere: The Gaia

Hypothesis,” Tellus A: Dynamic Meteorology and Oceanography 26, nos. 1-2
(1974): 2-10. [Link]

14 Timothy Lenton, Sébastien Dutreuil, and Bruno Latour, “Life on

Earth Is Hard to Spot,” The Anthropocene Review 7, no. 3 (2020):
248–72. [Link]

15 Teilhard de Chardin, The Future of Man (New York: Harper & Row,
1964); Miller, Living Systems (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1978); Gregory
Stock, Metaman: The Merging of Humans and Machines into a Global Superorganism
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993).
130 • Boris Shoshitaishvili

16 Boris Shoshitaishvili, “Is Our Planet Doubly Alive? Gaia,

Globalization, and the Anthropocene’s Planetary Superorganisms,”
The Anthropocene Review 10, no. 2 (April 2022): 434–54. [Link]
org/10.1177/20530196221087789.

17 The Cosmic Oasis: The Remarkable Story of Earth’s Biosphere (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2022).

18 Alexandra Witze, “It’s Final: The Anthropocene Is Not an Epoch,

despite Protest over Vote,” Nature (20 March 2024). [Link]
org/10.1038/d41586-024-00868-1.

19 Principia, Vol. II: The System of the World (Oakland: University of California
Press, 2023).

20 Timothy Lenton, “Tipping Positive Change,” Philosophical

Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B. Biological
Sciences 375, no. 1794 (2020). [Link]
rstb.2019.0123.
131
 133

Co-becoming: A Planetary
View Inspired by East Asian
Philosophies

SONG BING

A New Worldview In A Planetary Age

Planetary thinking calls for a major philosophical revision of

individualist worldviews. In the West, most modern, liberal
understandings of who we are as humans start with the notion
of the individual as an independent, self-contained, and
autonomous agent.1 This notion of the individual emphasizes
an agent’s separateness, self-containment, uniqueness, and
autonomy from others. It also celebrates individuals’ capacity to
define and redefine their identity and self-interest with authority,
responsibility, and freedom to regulate their behavior. In this
view, society exists only as an aggregate of autonomous and self-
134 • Song Bing

contained, though interacting, individuals.

A classical expression of this idea can be found in the view
of mid-17th-century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes that
“society was simply a congeries of colliding atoms in unceasing
motion.”2 Subsequent thinkers, including John Locke, Adam
Smith, John Stuart Mill, Friedrich Hayek, and Milton Friedman,
have developed rich philosophical, political, economic, and social
theories based on this core concept of the atomist individual
and what Joseph Schumpeter once famously described as
“methodological individualism.”3 Indeed, this notion serves as the
foundation for most worldwide mainstream modernist theories
and modern institutions, including neoliberal economics, liberal-
democratic politics, and meritocratic education.4 As a result,
much mainstream social scientific inquiry starts and ends with
individual-centered analysis and calculation. The utopic goal is
a world in which individuals act for themselves and maximize
their personal interests (albeit with some “proper” regulation),
allowing society to somehow reach a desirable equilibrium.
This idea is not totally unreasonable. Institutions based
on this atomistic understanding of the individual have spurred
unprecedented technological advancements and economic growth
across the globe in the past several hundred years, culminating in
the fastest and largest-scale improvements in the material quality
of life in human history. However, individualism is also at the
heart of the malaise that we have witnessed in recent decades:
a breakdown of the family and disintegration of the social fabric
leading to epidemic rates of loneliness and homelessness, mindless
consumerism and environmental degradation, and deepening
political divisiveness. This deterioration of the human condition
 Co-becoming • 135

has been occurring on a global scale, though some places face

more acute crises than others.
Transcultural philosophies can perhaps offer inspiration to
recalibrate our thinking on who we are as humans and how we are
related to human and nonhuman others. East Asian philosophical
traditions in particular inspire us to think differently as planetary
beings.5

The Planetary View Of “Co-becoming”

The notion of “co-becoming” — gongsheng in Chinese and kyōsei

in Japanese, both of which share the same Chinese characters,
共生 — may enrich and help reset our worldview and bring
about broader planetary thinking. Gongsheng and kyōsei refer to
a conception of the world as consisting of mutually embedded,
coexistent, and co-generating entities. This notion challenges
and, therefore, enriches the mainstream modern notion of the
individual as an independent, self-contained, and autonomous
agent.
The rich meanings behind the concept can be traced back
through Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism, as well as folk
belief systems and practices in many East Asian countries.6 The
contemporary notion of “co-becoming” has been widely deployed
in East Asian societies, including mainland China, Taiwan, Japan,
and South Korea, and across political, social, economic, and
commercial spheres in these societies.7
Briefly, a few words on terminology. In the compound word
共生 (gongsheng/kyōsei), the first character “gong” (or “kyō”)
means commonality, sharedness, and togetherness. “Sheng” (or
136 • Song Bing

“sei”) means growth, production, thriving, living, and emergence.

Both characters date back more than 3,000 years. Each was
used in ancient classics and literature, though the combination of
the two characters into a compound word only appeared after the
Qin period (221-207 BCE). As it appeared in these writings, the
term meant co-survival, interpenetrative growth, or a mingling
of different things.8 This entanglement and interpenetration is
captured by the colloquial Chinese expression “你中有我，我中
有你,” which literally means that “part of you is me and part of me
is you.”9 The best English equivalent of this expression is “mutual
embeddedness.”
Modern usage of co-becoming (kyōsei) in broader social and
political contexts began in Japan. Perhaps inspired by the new
findings of symbiosis research in modern biology, kyōsei-based
analyses in Japanese social, political, and artistic spheres have
blossomed since the 1980s.10 These developments also influenced
intellectual discourse in China in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
By the mid-2020s, the notion of gongsheng/kyōsei has been firmly
integrated into the common parlance, widely deployed across
political, social, economic, and environmental spheres in Japanese
and Chinese societies.11
Reflecting the ontological thinking of “ceaseless change” as
the first-order cosmic rule in an East Asian context, and bearing
in mind the potential of the worldview of gongsheng/kyōsei to
address issues of a planetary remit and go beyond the human
sphere, here I will translate gongsheng/kyōsei as “co-becoming”
and use the terms interchangeably.12 13 14
 Co-becoming • 137

Philosophical Sources Of Co-becoming

Cosmic and ontological thinking in Confucianism, Daoism,

and Buddhism has profoundly shaped East Asian societies for
millennia. These philosophies offer rich intellectual resources
for the planetary view of “co-becoming,” including four well-
known propositions: the “unity of tian and humans” (天人合
一), the “oneness of all beings” (万物一体), “ceaseless living and
generating” (生生), and “co-dependent origination” (缘起).15
Since ancient times, the word “tian” has occupied a central
place in both Chinese philosophy and popular culture. Depending
on the context, tian, which has often been roughly translated
as “heaven” or “heavens,” can mean the supreme sovereign of
the cosmos, the natural and experiential environment in which
humans flourish and perish, or the ultimate truth or laws of the
cosmic order in a metaphysical sense.16 The thinking behind
“unity of tian and humans,” centering on the relationship between
tian and human beings, first appeared in the Spring and Autumn
Period (770-476 BCE) — among the most consequential historical
period in the development of Chinese thinking — and then entered
the imperially sanctioned doctrine during the Han Dynasty (202
BCE-220 CE).
According to this proposition, human beings are derived
from tian (heaven), while di (Earth) has enabled and fostered the
growth of humans. In Daoism, dao (meaning the ultimate source
of all things in the universe) occupies an even higher ontological
status than tian. Daoism postulates that dao gives rise to tian and
di. Regardless of the ultimate creative force being tian or dao,
human beings comprise only one group among many creations.
138 • Song Bing

According to the dao, humans can only flourish if we

follow the laws of tian; additionally, we should strive to attain
proximity or complete (re)union with tian, the cosmic order.
Both Confucianism and Daoism accord a special place to human
beings as uniquely endowed with moral capacity, with the ability
to change themselves and the world. But these traditions center
human respect and awe for the laws of nature17 rather than placing
humans apart from, above, or in opposition to the rest of nature.
The integrative structure of tian, di, and humans (天地人三才)
is taken as the self-evident premise of any discussion on human
capacity and human deeds.
Further, while tian gave rise to humans, humans remain
primordially related to tian and di. We don’t stand alone or become
self-contained entities after our emergence, but rather we remain
a part of, and intricately entangled with, tian. The fluidity and
interpenetration of all forms of creations make it hard to claim
self-contained and autonomous agency for any form of existence.
Myriad entities, humans included, are mutually embedded and
co-constitutive.
Related to and explicit in the notion of “unity of tian and
humans” is the concept of “oneness” or “the same essence” (一
体) of all forms of beings, humans included. The “benevolence
of oneness” (一体之仁), a core tenet of the Song-Ming Neo-
Confucianism, also contributed to the thinking of co-becoming.
Song Dynasty Neo-Confucian scholar Zhang Zai (1020-1077)
extended the Confucian doctrine of benevolence to the broader
cosmic realm to include creatures and other entities. He famously
wrote that tian “is my father and earth [di] is my mother. …
[T]hat which fills up nature [in-between tian and di] I regard as
 Co-becoming • 139

my body, and that which directs nature [tian and di] I consider as
my capacity to resonate. All people are my brothers and sisters,
and all things are my companions.”18
The basis for this camaraderie is the principle of qi: All
things are made of, formed, and animated by qi. According to
Qian Mu, the late master of Chinese classics and history, qi is
the indivisible infinitesimal unit of matter, which is the common
substance for all things in the universe. In addition, qi is always
active and dynamic.19
Wang Yangming (1472-1529), a Ming Neo-Confucian scholar-
official, expounded the proposition further by introducing the
more metaphysical notion of liangzhi (良知), translated as “innate
knowing” and referring to the transcendental and naturally
endowed “essence” of all forms of beings. In this context, Wang
noted that the “innate knowing” of humans is also that of plants,
trees, tiles, and stones and that without the innate knowing
inherent in humans, there cannot be tian or di, nor will there be
plants, trees, tiles, or stones. He further noted that tian, di, and
myriad things, humans included, are one in origin.20
The third notion from native Chinese philosophical thinking
that has shaped and informed the contemporary thinking of co-
becoming is “ceaseless living and generating” (生生) or shengsheng.
It’s the same sheng as in gongsheng. Variously translated as birth,
growth, creativity, or vitality, and featured prominently in Yi
Jing or the Book of Changes, the classic text that was compiled
between the 10th and 4th centuries BCE, shengsheng is regarded
as the fundamental attribute of the universe and all things therein.
The highest and greatest capacity of nature is sheng
— the force that gives and maintains life.2122 In this spirit,
140 • Song Bing

shengsheng could be translated as “live and let live.” The Chinese

philosopher Thomé Fang (1889-1977) translated shengsheng as
“creative creativity,” explaining that it signifies universal life-
forces, cultivation, striving for success based on a thorough
understanding of the laws of nature, ceaseless creation, coping
with perpetual changes, and accomplishing continuity and
eternity.23 Therefore, shengsheng is about life and the creative force
immanent throughout the universe and myriad beings, including
humans, creatures, and plants.
Shengsheng is often used together with buxi (不息), which
literally means “ceaseless.” This notion of “ceaselessness”
embodies the ancient thinking about the cosmic order being
self-generating, without beginning or end, ever-changing, and
transcending the human conception of time and space.
The fourth notion that contributed to the modern notion of
co-becoming is the doctrine of “co-dependent origination” (缘起),
which is derived from ancient Buddhist texts.24 In An Introduction
to Buddhism, Peter Harvey explains that according to this doctrine,
“all things, mental and physical, arise and exist due to the
presence of certain conditions, and cease once their conditions
are removed: nothing (except nirvana) is independent.”25
This notion can explain all the physical and mental
phenomena that we can conceive of. In this world of forms, all
entities are subject to mutual conditionality, which is to say they
are interlocking and mutually constitutive. Nothing is independent.
This intertwined and entangled state exists across different forms
of beings within and beyond human comprehension and in
indefinite levels of realities.
The notion of sentient beings in Buddhist teachings
 Co-becoming • 141

includes humans and also animals, plants, and forms of beings

beyond normal human perception. In samsara, which refers to
cycles of death and rebirth, we may have been any other form of
being in our prior lives. Therefore, human life-forms in this life are
primordially and metaphysically entangled with all others across
time and space.

The Planetary Informed By Co-becoming

Contemporary biological sciences echo this classical Confucian,

Daoist, and Buddhist philosophy, showing that the self-
contained and autonomous individual is, in essence, a fiction.26
As Nils Gilman discusses in his introduction to this volume,
contemporary studies of symbiosis and the microbiome have
revealed to us a world of multi-organism assemblages that are
mutually embedded and inter-penetrating. Biologists call these
assemblages “holobionts.”27
For analytic purposes, scientists need to disentangle
and isolate these intertwined organisms. But they increasingly
recognize that any reduction to the smallest “individual” unit —
be it an organism or cell or a gene or even molecule — skews the
perception of reality. No single “unit” exists, moves, changes, or
transforms in isolation.
Similar to the phenomenon of biological symbiosis,
gongsheng/kyōsei implies different yet intertwined entities living
together. In recent decades, proponents of symbiogenesis have
put forward convincing arguments for symbiosis to be recognized
as an important source of evolutionary innovation. Accordingly,
collaboration is viewed as a mechanism of evolutionary
142 • Song Bing

innovation in addition to competition, which has been established

in neo-Darwinian synthesis.28 As the Japanese philosopher
Yasuo Kobayashi has noted, kyōsei is not so much a “mysterious,
metaphysical ‘truth’” as it is a “mundane, prosaic ‘fact.’”29
From a social point of view as well, we have also never been
independent or autonomous individuals — we are born into an
entangled family and social relationships from day one. (As the
English poet John Donne observed 400 years ago, “No man is an
island, entire of itself; / every man is a piece of the continent, / a
part of the main.”) All our actions and thinking have been shaped
by or are a response to others who, in turn, are being shaped by
us in a process of interaction and communication. In this process,
we learn, adapt, transform, and collectively cement our mutual
embeddedness and mutual inclusion.
Therefore, a planetary view informed by the notion of co-
becoming would return each individual to the place where they
belonged all along: an inseparable part of the natural, familial,
social, and spiritual environments into which we are born and in
which we make our lives.
Modern thinkers in East Asia are reviving these ancient ideas
for reconceptualizing who we are without completely rejecting
the modern notion of individual. It is the very co-becoming
process in the making. For example, the Japanese philosopher
Yasuo Deguchi contends that a human individual or “I” defined
in classical modern sense suffers from certain “fundamental and
universal incapabilities.”30 For instance, a single “I” simply cannot
initiate, let alone complete, any somatic action independent of
a system that consists of numerous other agents. Deguchi calls
this a “multi-agent system” and advocates for a shift to a “we”
 Co-becoming • 143

system that includes “I.” To put it differently, “‘I’ is actually not

an individual or indivisible agent, but a partial multi-agent system
that consists of various and many agents.”31
Likewise, when reflecting on human being and identity,
the Chinese philosopher Sun Xiangchen argues that only if the
modern understanding of the individual is combined with the
basic social structure of the family can we arrive at the most
appropriate ontological understanding of being a human. Sun
notes that “home returning” (归家) is an existential and moral
sentiment universal to all humans, rather than unique to East
Asian societies. The family is the most basic unit of social group
for human survival, and it is where all other social relationships
begin and are fostered.32 Therefore, a human being has to be
understood as a family-situated individual. Sun calls this theory
“double ontologies of being human” (双重本体论).
A planetary worldview of co-becoming is open to different
ways of thinking. The modern notion of the individual, with
its strong claim of human subjectivity, enjoys a philosophical
brotherhood with dualism, which assumes two contrasting
and mutually exclusive realities. The notion of co-becoming, by
virtue of its acknowledgement of mutual embeddedness and
co-generating processes across all forms of beings, blurs such a
binary division. It also challenges one of the cardinal classical laws
of thought — the principle of the excluded middle in logic.33 As
co-becoming centers the ceaseless co-generating process across
beings, all matters are in a constant process of multidimensional
changes and shifting relationships. An either/or approach is
incapable of capturing the complexity and multiplicity of the
realities around us. By contrast, a planetary view of co-becoming
144 • Song Bing

opens up possibilities for exploring and appreciating in-between

spaces and juxtaposing entities. Therefore, the planetary view
of co-becoming would challenge habits of mind, caution against
the tendency to pursue logical extremities, and remain open to
complex and, at times, seemingly contradictory narratives.
There will be many ethical consequences and considerations
if humanity adopts the planetary view of co-becoming. For
instance, the understanding of humans as planetary beings
embedded and entangled both with other humans and nonhuman
others in natural, social, and spiritual environments underscores
that there is no such thing as zero-sum game: We are all mutually
embedded beings of the same origin. In this spirit, competitive
relationships among humans can be conceptually reframed as a
process of learning, adapting, and collective transformation.
And when it comes to nonhuman others, we could consider
embracing the notion of “companionship”34 in the spirit of
universal camaraderie advocated by Neo-Confucianists. Such a
philosophical move calls into question the maximization ethos
in the pursuit of material wealth and the exploitation of the
biosphere for human benefit, as well as the zero-sum mentality in
economics and geopolitics, in favor of the virtues of modesty, self-
restraint, empathy, compassion, and mutual support.
Our world, with its compounding crises spiraling out of
control, offers an opportunity for us to reflect on who we are,
tapping into philosophies both ancient and new, that illuminate
ways to temper or revise our prevalent maximization ethos in the
economic, financial, and geopolitical spheres. The worldview of
co-becoming shaped by East Asian philosophies may put us on
a slower but steadier developmental trajectory, where together
 Co-becoming • 145

we will prosper more sensibly and sustain ourselves longer as a

species.
146 • Song Bing

Notes
1 The thinking of an individual as a discreet and bonded entity
dates back to the time of Aristotle. See Jin Li, The Self in the West
and East Asia: Being or Becoming (Hoboken, NJ: Polity, 2024), 8.

2 C. B. MacPherson, “Individualism,” in The Invisible Hand, eds. John

Eatwell, Murray Milgate, and Peter Newman (New York: Norton.,
1989), 150.

3 The Nature and Essence of Economic Theory (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction
Publishers, 2010).

4 Marxism too is also individual-oriented: it’s just that Marx

believed that individual self-realization would be best achieved
through collectivism. See MacPherson, “Individualism,” 150.

5 The ideas of the bonded, independent and self-contained self and

an extreme version of individualism have their many critics since
antiquity within Western philosophical traditions. This essay only
focuses on inspirations from East Asian thinking.

6 A combination of often incongruous traditions and modern

ideologies and practices is at work in most societies. East
Asian societies are no exception. While modern ideologies and
institutions originating in the West have been dominating
economic, military, and geopolitical spheres in East Asia,
traditional thinking and practices continue to have a stronghold
in many other spheres, particularly in interpersonal, familial,
social relationships and cultural norms.

7 Bing Song and Yiwen Zhan, eds., Gongsheng Across Contexts: A Philosophy of
Co-Becoming (Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan, 2024).

8 For example, gongsheng in the phrase “桑榖共生于朝,” contained in

Book of Documents (尚书), a history book over 3,000 years old,
referred to the natural phenomenon of commensal plants, i.e., two
different tree species growing into each other. Gongsheng in “羊
肝共生椒食之，破人五脏” in《金匮要略》(Jinkui yaolüe), an Eastern Han
(25-220 CE) medical compendium, referred to co-mingling of food
ingredients of different textures and tastes, thus producing
conflicting and complementary energies.

9 This expression was first found in a love poem of 13th century

China. See “You and me (我侬词),” at [Link]

10 Kishō Kurokawa, The Philosophy of Symbiosis (London: Academy Editions,

1994).

11 See Song and Zhan, Gongsheng Across Contexts.

12 For extended discussions on “being” versus “becoming,” see Roger

Ames, “Theorizing ‘Person’ in Confucian Ethics,” in Encountering
China: Michael Sandel and Chinese Philosophy, eds. Michael J. Sandel and
Paul J. D’Ambrosio (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2018), 159–96; Li, The Self in the West and East Asia.

13 This translation of gongsheng/kyosei was also inspired by

contemporary Japanese philosopher Takahiro Nakajima’s “human
co-becoming” in place of “human beings.” While reflecting on
the “human-centric super smart society” Japan aspired to build,
Nakajima posited that rather than “human beings,” we ought to
think in terms of “human co-becoming” because “it is through
mutual transformation that we are enriched” and thereby “we
 Co-becoming • 147

achieve humanity together.”

14 Takahiro Nakajima, “Human Co-becoming: Redefining What It Means

to be Human for the Super Smart Society,” Hitachi Review 68, no. 5
(November 2019): 572–73.

15 See Song and Zhan, Gongsheng Across Contexts.

16 “An Analysis on the Thinking of Unity-of-Tian-and-Man in Chinese

Philosophy,” (中国哲学中的“天人合一”思想的剖析) Journal of Peking University
(Philosophy and Social Sciences) 1 (1985): 3–10.

17 Tian and di in the non-metaphysical context are the rough

equivalent of “nature” in the modern sense.

18 Jung-Yeup Kim, Zhang Zai’s Philosophy of Qi: A Practical Understanding

(Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015).

19 Mu Qian, Discourses on Chinese Thoughts (中国思想通俗讲话) (Beijing:

Jiuzhou Publishing House, 2011), 74.

20 “The innate knowledge of man is the same as that of plants and

trees, tiles and stones. Without the innate knowledge inherent in
man, there cannot be plants and trees, tiles and stones. This is
not true of them only. Even Heaven [tian] and Earth cannot exist
without the innate knowledge that is inherent in man. For at
bottom, Heaven, Earth, the myriad things, and man form one body.
The point at which this unity is manifested in its most refined
and excellent form is the clear intelligence of the human mind.
Wind, rain, dew, thunder, sun and moon, stars, animals and plants,
mountains and rivers, earth and stones are essentially of one body
with man. It is for this reason that such things as the grains
and animals can nourish man and that such things as medicine and
minerals can heal diseases. Since they share the same material
force [qi], they enter into one another.” See Yangming Wang,
Instructions for Practical Living and Other Neo-Confucian Writings, trans. Wing-
tsit Chan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963). (王阳明，《传
习录》，“人的良知，就是草、木、瓦、石的良知。若草、木、瓦、石无人的良知，不可以
为草、木、瓦、石矣。岂惟草、木、瓦、石为然，天地无人的良知，亦不可为天地矣。盖
天地万物与人原始一体，其发窍之最精处，是人心一点灵明，风、雨、露、日、月、星、
辰、禽、兽、草、木、山、川、土、石，与人原只一体。故五谷禽兽之类皆可以养人，药
食之类皆可以疗疾。只为同此一气，故能相通耳。”)

21 “天地之大德曰生 (The greatest attribute of tian and earth is giving

and maintaining life)”, in Yi Jing 易经 (Book of Changes)-Xi Ci II
(Great Treatise II).

22 Richard Wilhelm, trans., Book of Changes (易经) (New York: Penguin

Books, 1989).

23 The Virtue of Sheng Sheng (生生之美) (Beijing: Peking University Press,

2019), 47, 128–30.

24 阿含经，“此有故彼有，此生故彼生，此无故彼无，此灭故必灭。” “That being,

this comes to be; from the arising of that, this arises; that
being absent, this is not; from the cessation of that, this
ceases,” in Harvey (2013), 65.

25 An Introduction to Buddhism: Teachings, History and Practices (Cambridge, MA:

Cambridge University Press, 2012), 65.

26 Scott F. Gilbert, Jan Sapp, and Alfred I. Tauber, “A Symbiotic

View of Life: We Have Never Been Individuals,” The Quarterly Review of
Biology 87, no. 4 (2012): 325-41.

27 Joan Roughgarden, et al., “Holobionts as Units of Selection and

a Model of their Population Dynamics and Evolution,” Biological
148 • Song Bing

Theory 13 (2018): 44-65.

28 Jan Sapp, “Living Together: Symbiosis and Cytoplasmic

Inheritance,” in Lynn Margulis and René Fester, eds. Symbiosis as a
Source of Evolutionary Innovation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 18.

29 Cited in Tsuyoshi Ishii, “The Gap of Wen and the Edge of Chaos:
From the Conundrum of Kyosei to the ‘Cosmic Hope,’” in Song and
Zhan, Gongsheng Across Contexts, 125.

30 “From Incapacity to We-Turn,” in Meta Science: Toward a Science of Meaning

and Complex Solutions, eds. Andrej Zwitter and Takuo Dome (Groningen,
Netherlands: University of Groningen Press, 2023), 43.

31 Deguchi, “From Incapacity to We-Turn,” 45.

32 “Why and How to Return Family: The Redemption of Modernity,” (何以

归家：现代性的救赎) Academic Monthly (学术月刊) 56, no. 3 (2024): 20–36.

33 French Japanologist Augustin Berque proposed to revitalize

mesology, the study of milieux, which also challenges dualism
and classic law of excluded middle. See his “The Mesological
Foundations of Sustainability,” paper presented at International
Cosmos Prize Memorial Lecture, December 2, 2018, Sendai. This
discussion has also been inspired by the presentation of
Japanese primatologist Junichi Yamaguchi, Nishida’s Logic and Japanese
Primatological Concept on Nature and Culture (2023).

34 This companionship speaks to the common origin of all forms of

beings and acknowledges the common “qi,” which animates all forms
of beings, including humans and nonhuman others. Some would equate
this relationship to “fellowship” or even “friendship” as the case
may be.
149
III. Policy
 153

The Planetary Constituent

DAWN NAK AGAWA & LAURA RYAN

The climate crisis and the digital revolution are forcibly

and discernibly illuminating humanity’s planetary reality. We
are learning that humans are not self-contained individuals, but
rather beings so entangled in the intricate web of life on Earth
as to be inseparable from it. Concurrent with this realization is
the growing awareness of the damage humans are doing to the
planet’s fragile ecology and the growing urgency to cease and
reverse that damage for the sake of all life on Earth. We are
awakening to our collective condition of planetarity, Nils Gilman’s
term for our “ontological transformation and an epistemic break
with modernist understandings of the human position on the
planet.”
154 • Dawn Nakagawa & Laura Ryan

This burgeoning self-understanding and sense of

responsibility is giving rise to a novel political subjectivity,1 which
we in this essay call the “planetary constituent”: the people whose
primary political motivations lie in reversing human-caused
damage to the planet. Animated by this concern, the planetary
constituent is already active in the political landscape. However,
the growth of this political subject is stymied by existing political
architectures — in particular, the sovereign nation-state — that
are structurally ill-equipped to manage the multiple cascading
environmental crises we face. To avoid a politics of nihilism
and an insurmountable existential crisis, we need to build new
institutions on the basis of what Nathan Gardels in the conclusion
to this volume calls “planetary realism.”

Planetary Embeddedness

The hyper-accelerated rate of scientific and technological

breakthroughs in the past century or so has afforded humanity
a greater understanding of the planet and our relationship to it.
There are a multitude of discoveries and innovations that have
contributed to this journey, but one of the most recent and
profound is the microbiome. As recently as 2012, humans realized
the human body plays host to 100 trillion microbial cells.2 This
microbiome functions as a constant dialogue between our internal
environment and the external world. The microorganisms we
harbor are neither harmful intruders nor harmless hitchhikers;
they are essential partners in health, carrying out life-sustaining
activities, such as helping digest food or fighting off disease. The
implication of this discovery is monumental: A human is not just
 The Planetary Constituent • 155

a human after all but in fact a holobiont.3

The symbiotic relationship between humans and microbes
is one of many exchanges between the macroscopic and
microscopic species on Earth.4 No longer the maestro conducting
the orchestra, we are but one voice in a grand chorus, all bound to
a shared planet. This realization marks a profound emotional and
psychological shift: a de-centering of the human away from the
presumption of the self-sufficient individual upon which much
of our sociopolitical systems, particularly in the West, have been
designed.
Accompanying this new understanding of our essential
embeddedness and belonging to the planet is a growing
understanding of the profound impact human activity has on the
dense yet delicate tapestry of life. Disclosed by the planetary-scale
technostructure humans have been building, the destruction
caused by our way of life is everywhere apparent: 200 years of
industrial development is altering the microbiome of the planet,
depleting its soil, poisoning its air and water, devastating its
wildlife, and raising its surface temperature.5
Confronted with the man-made damage to the delicate
ecosystem we rely on, many are awakening to the fact that the
planet is fragile. Within that fragility lies our own vulnerability.
We are responsible for the planet’s well-being. Just as every cell
contributes to the health of an organism, so too do all living beings
contribute to the delicate balance of the Earth’s ecosystems. But
it is our species that is out of balance, consuming resources and
producing pollution and waste at a rate far exceeding the Earth’s
ability to regenerate and renew.6 We are the problem. As we
bear witness to the devastation at our hands, we feel a sense of
156 • Dawn Nakagawa & Laura Ryan

responsibility and urgency to protect our fragile home.

The morphologies of these environmental crises evade the
confines of our political geography. Global pandemics, warming
oceans, sea-level rise, the collapse of insect populations, and
global pollution pay no heed to national boundaries. Borders
scaffold the human story, stubbornly affirming our cultural
and historical identities and the parameters of international
competition. Self-interested competition, which is the long-
standing modus operandi of states, is incompatible with the kind
of planetary-scale cooperation required to solve these crises and
results in zero-sum games and races to the bottom that exacerbate
the resource depletion and pollution crises we now face.
The planetary constituent is emerging out of this new self-
comprehension of embeddedness and planetary belonging and
the sense of responsibility and urgency to do something about the
condition of the planet. This subject has emerged over decades,
prompted by diverse and diffuse pivotal moments of realization
and discovery, such as the first photo of Earth taken from the
Apollo 8 mission, the announcement of the extinction of the
white rhino, or the steady drum beat of climate change. Planetary
constituents have other political motivations or identities, and at
times they engage politically for other reasons. But concern for
the planet is their primary loyalty, and a heightened awareness of
the ecological crises and heightened sense of responsibility to do
something about it is their primary commitment. This growing
yet frustrated cohort will significantly shape our political future.
The capacious “we” germinating from the growing
consciousness of humanity’s embeddedness in Earth is at odds
with the “we” anchored in the primacy of the nation-state,
 The Planetary Constituent • 157

wherein the (usually ethnically delimited) demos is composed of

an aggregate of individual wills. The Planetary “we” is not “we
the people” — the sum of individual people asserting their rights
to life, liberty, and property in aggregate. Rather, it is “we the
living things.” Planetary constituents do not see themselves as
belonging to a market or a nation. Rather, they realize they belong
to the interlaced ecosystems of human and more-than-human life.

Beyond The Nation-State

Born of necessity for peace after decades of sectarian war in

Europe, the nation-state in its current and widespread form
emerged in the 17th century and prioritized sovereignty,
territorial integrity, and self-interest. Over the ensuing centuries,
this model was developed by competition, power dynamics,
and a zero-sum approach to planetary resources. The nation-
state provided security, fostered communal identity, developed
governance systems, and promoted prosperity. Among the more
successful socio-political models adopted by nation-states, liberal
democracy stands out.
Liberalism was built on a normative understanding of the
political self as a monadic, rational, and self-governing (human)
individual.7 Today it affirms the freedom to define, and re-define,
oneself and one’s self-interest and holds sacred the right to act in
accordance with this self-understanding. Consequently, society
and politics exist, as Song Bing says in her contribution to this
volume, as an “aggregate of autonomous and self-contained,
though interacting, individuals.” Intimately related to this idea is
the concept of homo economicus, the ideal rational man who acts
158 • Dawn Nakagawa & Laura Ryan

to minimize cost and maximize benefit. This rational actor is the

model individual at the heart of several schools of thought that
shaped modern Western liberal societies.
Within the context of the nation-state, this rational man is
donned with special rights and privileges through citizenship.
The citizen — the lovechild of the nation-state and liberal rights-
based ideology — was defined primarily by a process of exclusion,
whereby certain rights were granted only to those having been
born in a certain geographic area. A democratic nation-state
that derived its legitimacy from the will of the people bound the
people together through a shared (albeit artificial) civic identity,
contrasted implicitly with the other who had no claim on the right
to citizenship.
Cosmopolitan thinkers of the late 20th century sought to
redeem the deficiencies of the national citizen by envisioning
a kind of global citizenship. In response to decolonization,
globalization, and the establishment of international institutions
following World War II, thinkers such as Martha Nussbaum and
Thomas Pogge conceived of the concept of global citizenship
that would guarantee rights beyond the borders of one’s own
country and shift the locus of one’s loyalties from the nation-
state to the global community.8 Cosmopolitanism and globalism
made substantial progress in expanding the human we, but they
were built on a fundamental assumption about the otherness of
nonhuman life forms and implied a questionable universalism.
By contrast, planetary constituents see themselves as
interconnected, embedded, and in conversation with all of nature.
Freedom in this way of being is not a given but something that comes
into being through creativity. In the multiplicity of constituencies
 The Planetary Constituent • 159

that form around the planetary constituent, freedom embodies a

philosophy not of perdurable being but of constant co-becoming.
This new political subject will not replace the national
citizen or bring an end to the nation-state. Planetary constituents
are also citizens, living and operating within nation states and
will continue to be so. However, these political institutions are
inadequate for providing the kind of agency that the planetary
constituent is seeking: the ability to effectively address our
multiple ecological crises. Repeated failures and a deteriorating
environment lay bare the incompetence of the current system to
fix what is broken.9

Planetary Constituents At Work

Planetary constituents exercise their political agency for the sake

of the planet. They put pressure on governments and corporations
to create more sustainable policies and products. They are vegan
thrift shoppers adapting their lifestyles to reduce impact. They are
present in the Global Covenant of Mayors working sub-nationally
and trans-locally to reduce the carbon footprint of cities and
towns.10 They are active in shaping the international animal rights
movement, seeking dignity and freedom for their co-constituents.
They support the first declaration of personhood granted to
a river, the Mutehekau Shipu river in Canada in 202111 and are
present in youth-led transnational environmental movements
such as Fridays for the Future, which in 2019 orchestrated the
largest globally coordinated protests in history, over 2 million in
131 countries, all organized via global digital platforms.
Many young people, in particular, qualify as planetary
160 • Dawn Nakagawa & Laura Ryan

constituents. According to a study conducted by The Lancet

in 2021, 60% of people aged 16-25 were “very” or “extremely”
worried or extremely worried about climate change.12 In a Pew
Research Center Poll of Americans, Millennials and Gen Z stand
out for high levels of engagement and concern for climate change,
with 71% of Millennials and 67% of Gen Z indicating it should
be a top political priority.13 This political force is shaping politics
in the United States and Europe, electing candidates from the
Green Party to the European Parliament and German Bundestag
in 201914 and launching Atlas, a transnational political movement
fielding candidates who will work toward “uniting humanity for
its survival.”15 This cohort largely feels that national governments
have fallen so short of addressing the problem as to constitute a
betrayal. Youth-run organizations have even taken governments
to court in several countries, seeking legal recourse for their
failures to act.16
Unfortunately, sue as they might, planetary constituents
will not find the political agency they seek within the limits of
the sovereign state system. As Jonathan Blake and Nils Gilman
document in their book Children of a Modest Star, national
governments are structurally incapable of solving planetary
ecological crises; fundamentally, they are not designed to do
so.17 The nation-state system is entirely designed around a local
human-centric conception of the world, rather than the planetary
reality. Put another way, the contours and character of our political
architecture are not consistent with or capable of operating
according to planetary realism.
But the potential structures of new sites and modes of
political action organized around the increasingly well-understood
 The Planetary Constituent • 161

dynamics of planetary systems are already visible: They are local,

plural, scientific, and pragmatic.

Local

Planetary institutions should operate like natural systems do,

largely distributed across connected local areas comprising a
system (ecological, hydrological, biological, etc.). As Gardels
explains in this volume, “[T]he very awareness that humans are
embedded and not apart from natural systems means planetary
governance will not be centered at the ‘global’ level. Rather, it will
be distributed, like natural systems themselves, reaching scale
through networks and decentralized through spatial decision-
division at appropriate levels where relevant action needs
to be taken, from household to neighborhood to continent.”
The jurisdiction of institutions should be determined by the
parameters of the system being restored or protected. Action
will be organized at local levels across the system in question.
Larger systems, such as the atmosphere, require coordination
among local areas all working together. Habitat restoration along
a watershed, for example, may require local actors to coordinate
along a corridor that may cut across several national or other
borders.
At the same time, digital platforms are enabling what could
be called trans-local networks of planetary constituents. Such
actors no longer see their political activism as constrained and
bounded by the sovereign states in which they live. Planetary
institutions should be designed to mirror the informational
dynamics of networked trans-local planetary constituents.
162 • Dawn Nakagawa & Laura Ryan

Plural

An “indispensable feature” of planetary constituents, according

to the political theorist William Connolly, is their pluralism, which
“will vary not only in the social positions and creeds from which
they come but also in their degrees and modes of activism.”18 In
other words, planetary realism calls for planetary constituents
to be all hands on deck in all their forms, force, and velocity.
The goal is to create a “pluralist assemblage of multiple actors
and actions.” Moreover, an active move away from the citizen
“dramatizes this condition of planetarity in ways that encourage
more constituencies in several regions and walks of life to respond
politically to it.”19
But the pluralism of the planetary goes beyond the
hospitality of human identities and activities. It extends to
the inclusion of the more-than-human. Political institutions
embodying the values of the planetary constituent will find ways
to give voice to nonhuman kin. No longer subordinated to the
background of human life, the planetary constituent welcomes
other living forms as political subjects. Planetary institutions
are thus built instead on a web of entangled life that includes not
just the human species but also every warbling, buzzing, molting,
burrowing, photosynthesizing, galloping, and flowering form of
life. The forms this could take would vary and change overtime
through discovery and innovation, but so far, what shows promise
is the procedural representation by appointed human experts and
the creation of new institutions or agencies empowered to protect
endangered species or ecosystems.
 The Planetary Constituent • 163

Scientific & Pragmatic

Planetary constituents embrace planetary realism and accept

the scientific planetary reality, starting with what it actually
is to be human. Comprising a multiplicity of networked
constituencies across the planet, their unifying truth is science.
As such, they present an opportunity to develop a humanities
and a politics consistent with science instead of ideology that
would reflect the concept of entangled humanism proposed by
political theorist William E. Connolly. As Connolly recognized,
of the interconnectedness of humans and nonhuman forces
and invites “those in the humanities to forge intellectual and
political alliances with geologists, glaciologists, climatologists,
and paleontologists.”20
The new humanities would need to be governed by a
planetary pragmatism out of necessity. Following the science
requires a kind of adaptive flexibility and the diversity of
planetary constituents working together across cultures and
values systems, eschewing ideological universality. As Lorenzo
Marsilli describes in his contribution to this volume, polyphonic
planetarity agreement forms the basis for planetary pragmatism.
What befits the moment would be primarily determined by science
and a commitment to planetary thriving. There would certainly
be negotiations, value judgments, and trade-offs, but these would
need to stay adaptable to the moment and constituents involved,
seeking to give voice to all affected by a decision, both human and
more-than-human.
164 • Dawn Nakagawa & Laura Ryan

Conclusion

We are only at the beginning stages of reckoning with the social

and political consequences of a new understanding of what it is
to be human-as-symbiont.21 Science and technology have played
vital roles in helping people understand the planetary reality
and human responsibility for it. The emergence of the planetary
constituent denotes a shift that offers the opportunity to embrace
science and align our political reality with the planetary reality.
The challenge of creating new planetary institutions
adapted to this new political subjectivity is difficult to overstate
given the stark contrast with the nature of our current national
institutions and the beliefs and identities that animate them.
From competitive to deliberative, from ideological to pragmatic,
from individualistic to radically pluralistic. Although we expect
the planetary constituent to continue to operate as citizens within
the context of national states, the morphology of new political
institutions designed in accordance to planetary systems will
inevitably revolutionize political governance and the international
order.
Harnessing and giving agency to the political will of this
emergent actor is the adaptation we need in order to address
our planetary polycrisis. The nation-state system is not up
to the task and its continued failure is socially and politically
destabilizing. Their failures in the face of the existential nature
of planetary challenges produce a noxious climate that incubates
fascist, hyper-nationalistic politics.22 These leaders exploit fear
and nihilism, offering oversimplified answers to people yearning
for equilibrium. Central to their offering is a doubling down on
 The Planetary Constituent • 165

national borders. Not only is this futile in the face of the borderless
nature of planetary challenges, but it is also antithetical to the
condition of planetarity.
166 • Dawn Nakagawa & Laura Ryan

Notes
1 Political subjectivity is a state of being arising from one’s
sense of identity and worldview and the political context in which
one is operating.

2 Gina Kolata, “In Good Health? Thank Your 100 Trillion Bacteria,”
New York Times, June 13, 2012, [Link]
health/human-microbiome-project-decodes-our-100-trillion-good-
[Link].

3 Rainer Matyssek and Ulrich Lüttge, “Gaia: The Planet Holobiont,”

Nova Acta Leopoldina, NF 114, Nr. 391 (2013): 325 –44. [Link]
[Link]/fileadmin/redaktion/Probekapitel_NAL391.pdf.

4 K. J. Locey and J. T. Lennon, “Scaling Laws Predict Global

Microbial Diversity,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 24,
no. 113 (2016): 5970-75.

5 Nahrul Nurkolis, et al., “Human Activities and Changes in the Gut

Microbiome: A Perspective,” Human Nutrition & Metabolism 30 (December
2022).

6 Mathis Wackernagel, “Humanity Uses 70% More of the Global Commons

than the Earth Can Regenerate,” Global Environmental Facility (GEF)
(November 14, 2017). [Link]
more-global-commons-earth-can-regenerate.

7 Alain Renaut, The Era of the Individual: A Contribution to a History of Subjectivity

(New Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 2000).

8 Nussbaum, “Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism” and Pogge,

“Cosmopolitanism and Sovereignty,” in The Cosmopolitanism Reader, eds.
Garrett W. Brown and David Held (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2010).

9 In case more evidence is needed, decades of COP meetings and

multinational climate agreements, such as the 2015 Paris
Agreement, have not slowed the rate of increase of carbon in the
atmosphere, let alone reversed it.

10 “Cities can cut carbon emissions by 90 percent by 2050, report

says,” National Geographic (September 19, 2019). [Link]
[Link]/environment/article/zero-carbon-cities-
future.

11 Susan Nerberg, “I am Mutehekau Shipu: A River’s Journey to

Personhood in Eastern Quebec,” Canadian Geographic (April 8, 2022).
[Link]
rivers-journey-to-personhood-in-eastern-quebec/.

12 Caroline Hickman, et al., “Climate Anxiety in Children and Young

People and Their Beliefs about Government Responses to Climate
Change: A Global Survey,” The Lancet Planetary Health 5, no. 12
(December 2021): e863-73.

13 Alex Tyson, Brian Kennedy, and Cary Funk, “Gen Z, Millennials

Stand Out for Climate Change Activism, Social Media Engagement
with Issue” Pew Research (26 May 2021). [Link]
org/science/2021/05/26/gen-z-millennials-stand-out-for-climate-
change-activism-social-media-engagement-with-issue/.

14 James Sloam, Sarah Pickard, and Matt Henn, “Young People and
Environmental Activism: The Transformation of Democratic
Politics,” Journal of Youth Studies 25, no. 6 (March 29, 2022): 683-91.
 The Planetary Constituent • 167

15 Atlas Movement, a global political movement, see [Link]

[Link]/.

16 Renee N. Salas, Wendy Jacobs, and Frederica Perera, “The Case

of Juliana v. US — Children and the Health Burdens of Climate
Change,” New England Journal of Medicine 380, no. 22 (May 29, 2019):
2085-87.

17 Children of a Modest Star: Planetary Thinking for an Age of Crises (Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 2024).

18 Facing the Planetary: Entangled Humanism and the Politics of Swarming (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 128.

19 Ibid., 33.

20 Connolly, 33.

21 See Angela N. H. Creager, “Narratives of Genetic

Selfhood,” Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte 45, no. 3 (2022): 468-86;
and Aminah Al-Attas Bradford, Symbiotic Grace: Holobiont Theology in the Age
of the Microbe (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020).

22 Nils Gilman, “The Coming Avocado Politics,” The Breakthrough Journal

(February 7, 2020). [Link]
winter-2020/avocado-politics
 169

Planetary Subsidiarity

JONATHAN BLAKE

A central feature of planetary challenges — global warming,

biodiversity loss, pandemic diseases, space junk, and more — is
that they manifest across scales of space and time.1 Their causes
and effects span from the microscopic to the exospheric and from
nanoseconds to geological eons. Grappling with these disparate
yet interconnected scales of action presents challenges to both
human comprehension and governance. It entails thinking and
acting outside the spatial and temporal comfort zones provided
by embodied human experience.
Coming to terms with the political and policy challenges
associated with “the condition of planetarity” (as outlined by
Nils Gilman in the introductory essay in this volume), demands a
170 • Jonathan Blake

new planetary-scale institutional architecture of governance. To

use the language of Douglass C. North, an influential theorist of
institutions, we must develop new systems of “constraints that
structure … [human] interaction” in order to make possible new
forms of cognition and action that befit and enable the flourishing
of collective life on this planet.2
New institutions of planetary governance are necessary
because our existing ones are unfit to tackle planetary challenges.
The preeminent institution of governance in the world today is
the national state. Yet the national state, because its authority, by
definition, is limited to the space within its borders, is structurally
incapable of acting on planetary scales. As a political form,
moreover, it is conceptually limiting: It constrains the political
field of vision, structuring our political imagination along national
lines. As the basic unit of global politics, the national state
determines “what sorts of political actions and political problems
are possible or impossible,” in the words of the philosopher Zhao
Tingyang.3 The result is that planetary problems spiral beyond the
control of any government or collective body of national states.
Addressing planetary challenges across scales of cause and
effect and time and space requires strong institutions: a new general
architecture for planetary governance. This claim entails a transition
from the current system, where authority is concentrated at one
level — in the sovereign national state, with tasks voluntarily
delegated to levels above and below as it suits the state’s tastes and
customs — to a system with a diffuse and multiscalar account of
authority, that is, one in which authority over policy is deliberately
distributed to the level in the governance system where decision-
making is most effective for governing the task at hand. In other
 Planetary Subsidiarity • 171

words, this transition necessitates undermining the tradition

of deference to absolute state sovereignty and replacing it with
a principle better functionally suited for a world defined by the
condition of planetarity and human diversities.
Such a systemic architecture needs institutions ranging from
the planetary to the hyperlocal. For planetary challenges such as
mitigating global warming, we need institutions with a planetary
remit: specific authority at the planetary scale to govern specific
planetary phenomena. For example: a Planetary Atmospheric
Steward tasked with limiting carbon emissions for the planet as a
whole, with the authority to make and enforce decisions.4
Constructing planetary scale governance institutions,
however, is not the entirety of planetary governance. Planetary
institutions must be embedded in a matrix of governance
institutions at all scales from the nation to cities, regions, and
provinces. This vision for deliberate multiscalar governance
represents a call for a single worldwide governance architecture,
yet one that isn’t defined by a world state. It is, rather, a layered
architecture of institutions in which power is dispersed so
that authority is placed where it’s best able to govern specific
functional issues.
The question for any multiscalar governance system is
how to allocate authorities to the various institutions. Planetary
subsidiarity is an answer to that question. The principle of
subsidiarity, as developed in four centuries of European political
thought,5 maintains that larger-scale institutions of governance
shouldn’t act unless a smaller scale is incapable of addressing a
particular issue or carrying out a particular task. It is a tool for
assessing the appropriate institutional level at which decisions
172 • Jonathan Blake

should be made. Planetary subsidiarity takes this idea and applies

it to achieve habitability and multispecies flourishing.6
The goals of habitability and multispecies flourishing are
markers of an emerging planetary politics that distinguish
it from contemporary modes of “global” or “international”
politics. Habitability promotes the integrity and continuity of the
biosphere, in which human beings are embedded and inseparable.
It stands in contrast to the guiding idea behind so much of global
governance today, “sustainability,” which presents humans and
nature as separate, with the latter tacitly presumed to serve as a
standing reserve of resources for the former.
Multispecies flourishing, meanwhile, broadens the guiding
principle of nearly all modern political ideologies, programs, and
institutions: human flourishing. (Sometimes human flourishing
is even more narrowly circumscribed as ethnic flourishing.)
Embracing multispecies flourishing, however, doesn’t derive from
sentimental commitments to animals or an idealized natural
world. It stems, rather, from an appreciation of the fact that
human beings are ineluctably entangled in relationships of mutual
dependence with other species. It is thus a commitment to human
flourishing that recognizes that human flourishing can only occur
in the context of multispecies flourishing.
Planetary subsidiarity provides the principle for pursuing
these twin goals at all necessary scales while simultaneously
maximizing the local empowerment required to promote
the varied modes of human flourishing found and desired in
communities throughout the world. It presents an institutional
instantiation of what Lorenzo Marsili in this volume calls
“planetary pragmatism.”
 Planetary Subsidiarity • 173

How might it work?

First, planetary subsidiarity should be functionally effective.
That is, form follows function: The allocation of authority over
any particular governance function must be specific to that
function. Some issues can be governed sufficiently effectively at
the local scale (habitat restoration, traffic control), some only
appear effective at the national scale (economic redistribution),
others only at the planetary scale (atmospheric carbon
management, pandemic risk mitigation). In some cases, the same
function is effectively governed at different scales depending on
context. There is no single best or ideal scale that applies across
the board. Allocating authority throughout the entire system will
be a difficult task, involving much study, debate, and trial and
error. One size does not fit all and the cut-and-paste approach to
institutional design — too often the default method — will not
work.
Second, planetary subsidiarity necessitates the construction
of new institutions at larger and smaller scales than the panoply
of existing national states. Taking seriously both the condition of
planetarity and the principle of subsidiarity leads to the conclusion
that the smallest-scale unit that can effectively govern “planetary
issues” to achieve habitability and multispecies flourishing is the
planet itself. Both the secular tradition of subsidiarity espoused
by the European Union and the antecedent religious tradition
of subsidiarity promulgated by the Catholic Church support the
invention of new scales of authority larger than existing ones in
order to resolve particular problems adequately. The EU was itself
created as a supranational institution meant to address Europe-
wide concerns. In Catholic thought, especially as developed
174 • Jonathan Blake

by Christian Democratic parties and thinkers in the mid-20th

century, subsidiarity has long motivated a desire to shift some
authority from national states to international organizations
or even, for some, a world government. “Today the universal
common good presents us with problems which are world-
wide in their dimensions,” observed Pope John XXIII in Pacem
in Terris, his encyclical from 1963. These problems “cannot be
solved except by a public authority with power, organization and
means co-extensive with these problems, and with a world-wide
sphere of activity.”7
The key, however, isn’t to favor any particular scale, be it
big or small, but rather to focus on endowing the functionally
appropriate scalar unit with the right authority over a task
or problem.8 Institutions at all scales — planetary, regional,
national, and local — will be necessary for provisioning planetary
governance, with each handling different albeit intertwined
elements. Planetary phenomena tend to have specific impacts
at different scales, and so each institutional scale must be
empowered to address the impacts specific to it.
Global warming, for example, is simultaneously planetarily
vast and locally intimate. It is a function of changes to the
atmospheric chemistry of the entire planet, yet it leads to
different effects in each national state, each community, even
each household. As a result, the planetary phenomenon of global
warming is experienced divergently in different places and by
different people, mediated not just by geography but also social,
political, and economic conditions. For planetary governance
to be worth the effort, addressing the everyday experiences of
planetary challenges must be as important as addressing their
 Planetary Subsidiarity • 175

large-scale drivers. From an institutional design perspective, the

goal should be to ensure that each element is governed — and at
the appropriate scale. In the case of global warming, mitigation
resides at the planetary scale and adaptation at the local.
Moving authority (and therefore responsibility) to local
institutions doesn’t mean pushing problems onto small-scale
institutions that are unable or disempowered to deal with them.
The principle of planetary subsidiarity creates a duty for larger-
scale units to provide assistance to smaller-scale units that need it
but without stripping them of self-governance. Bigger scales must
aid smaller scales to achieve their aims, and smaller scales must aid
bigger ones in achieving theirs. Duties and responsibilities move
freely in all directions. The principle of planetary subsidiarity thus
represents a worldwide architecture of assistance constructed in
light of an appreciation of the condition of planetarity.9
The third feature, planetary subsidiarity’s preference for (but
not absolute commitment to) local self-governance, is a deliberate
check on the power of planetary institutions. The principle of
subsidiarity provides a way to constrain planetary institutions so
that they remain minimally viable organizations. It represents an
organizational and administrative logic that aims to prevent the
emergence of a general-purpose “world government.”
Planetary institutions are necessary for the effective
management of planetary problems, but they are neither intended
to become all-powerful or all-encompassing nor meant to
unsettle the diversity of human communities that dot the globe.
Indeed, the ambition of planetary governance is to maintain the
planet’s habitability to allow for the flourishing of plural forms of
life, including plural forms of human life. The Earth-scale work
176 • Jonathan Blake

of planetary management is, ultimately, in service of the intimate

scales where everyday living occurs.
Creating conditions that foster human flourishing requires
that local institutions have the authority to pursue their
community’s vision of how to thrive (within acceptable planetary
boundaries set by planetary institutions). Planetary institutions
can’t determine that vision for them, nor could they implement
the endless number of divergent visions that communities aspire
to. Rather, planetary institutions promote planetary habitability
and multispecies flourishing, which represents a prerequisite for
smaller communities to pursue their own ideas and ideals in the
long term.
Fourth, allocations of authority under planetary subsidiarity
aren’t permanent. The system must be designed to be flexible and
dynamic and allow for evolution over time. As our knowledge
of and capabilities to govern challenges change, the positions of
authority within the system should change as well. Institutions
should be encouraged to learn through practice and adapt as
needed. The need to reposition the sites of authority also reflects
the fact that institutions will contest the allocation of authority.
We can expect legitimate disagreements about which jurisdiction
is better positioned to govern effectively, grumbling over lost
authority, dispute between functional arenas, and more.
The primary body for settling disputes about the allocation
of decision rights could be called a subsidiarity assembly.10 The
subsidiarity assembly is an institution that sits outside the general
multiscalar governance architecture and makes decisions about
the design of the multiscalar governance architecture itself. It is
the system’s holder of meta-authority — the authority to resolve
 Planetary Subsidiarity • 177

collisions between other sources of authority. The subsidiarity

assembly, in other words, decides which units should have which
decision rights in a domain.
In the existing political order, sovereign national states are
the sole holders of meta-authority: Each sovereign state is the
meta-authority within its borders and only within its borders.
More precisely, the head of government, highest court, or some
other institution holds the meta-authority in and for each national
state. But this sovereigntist system is at odds with a subsidiarity-
based system.
The subsidiarity assembly would be the site for democratic
mediation and negotiation between units at different scales of the
governance structure, with decisions guided by the principle of
planetary subsidiarity. It is a mechanism for resolving conflicts
over the structure of the system, not over the issues under dispute.
In other words, it wouldn’t decide which policy to pursue, but only
which unit has the authority to decide which policy to pursue —
or where the boundaries of the units in question should be.
Holding this meta-authority would make the subsidiarity
assembly a powerful institution — on paper at least, the most
powerful in the system’s architecture. Yet empowering one body
to make decisions on behalf of the whole system is vital for the
system’s success.11 The problems in need of governing don’t come
neatly packaged or fit squarely into just one unit or scale. The
nature of the challenges leads inevitably to friction between and
among scales.12
Reflecting the dynamics of the phenomenon, the necessary
scales for action on global warming, for example, are local,
national, planetary, and in between. What’s more, the nature of
178 • Jonathan Blake

problems and the tools we have to respond to them change over

time as well. Sometimes the changes are linear, but other times
they aren’t: Cyclical or difficult-to-foresee changes over different
time scales can have profound impacts on where and how an
issue should be governed. Nevertheless, collisions between
units and scales over who has authority to act need resolutions.
Democratically resolving these disputes and managing the
division of labor between scales and units is the necessary role
taken on by the subsidiarity assembly.
The subsidiarity assembly opens the possibility for the
system as a whole to be nimble and to evolve. At the same time,
the system cannot be in constant flux. The normal functioning
of governance requires some degree of continuity — institutions
can’t engage in long-term planning, for instance, if they don’t know
with reasonable certainty what authorities they will have in the
future. So the system must be flexible but stable. The subsidiarity
assembly, as a result, should be biased toward maintaining the
status quo, while still making space for the political (and technical)
contestation of authority assignments — and the honest potential
for change.
To provide for both flexibility and stability, allocations of
decision-rights should be subject to only periodic reassessment,
and reassignment, if found necessary. As such, the subsidiarity
assembly wouldn’t need to convene on a continual basis
— perhaps only once every decade. Creating a permanent
secretariat for the assembly would create a mechanism for
units, including collectives unrecognized as formal units by the
current architecture, to submit formal petitions for the assembly
to adjudicate during its next sitting. A standing secretariat,
 Planetary Subsidiarity • 179

moreover, allows the assembly to respond to the possibility of the

emergency need for the reallocation of authority.
The structural location and composition of the subsidiarity
assembly are important design decisions. The assembly can’t
“belong” to any of the scales of the system, which might bias it
toward that scale. As a result, it must sit apart from the overall
multiscalar architecture. This also means that representatives
to the assembly can’t be recruited from just one scale but must
include interested actors with experiences at different scales of
governance.
The subsidiarity assembly isn’t, to be clear, a backhanded
way for the planetary scale to dictate decisions for everyone. In
practice, the assembly should include representatives from local,
national, and planetary institutions, as well as subject-matter
experts. The inclusion of experts on an issue at hand ensures that
the assembly’s decisions reflect not just subsidiarity but planetary
subsidiarity, meaning that the allocation of decision rights should
serve habitability and multispecies flourishing. This could be an
interesting place to include participatory and deliberative political
practices that could enhance the legitimacy of the meta-authority
and perhaps lead to better decisions, too.13
All told, planetary subsidiarity offers a vision for a radically
transformed global political order. But it is a new order tailor-
made for the world as we know it today: a world of 8 billion human
beings living within a condition of planetarity.
Planetary subsidiarity allows for the governance of
planetary challenges throughout the scales they manifest while
also allowing for the world’s diverse communities to pursue their
diverse dreams. It’s a political principle that gets us to think both
180 • Jonathan Blake

big and small — and to realize that both are necessary.

Constructing a system from the principle of planetary
subsidiarity will be an immense task, one that may not seem
realistic. But it may be necessary to nurture the many forms of
human and nonhuman flourishing that we desire; as Nathan
Gardels observes in this volume, “reality these days dictates
another kind of realism.”
 Planetary Subsidiarity • 181

Notes
1 This chapter draws heavily on Jonathan S. Blake and Nils Gilman,
Children of a Modest Star: Planetary Thinking for an Age of Crises (Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 2024), 125-32.

2 “Institutions,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 5, no. 1 (Winter 1991):

97.

3 All under Heaven: The Tianxia System for a Possible World Order, trans. Joseph E.
Harroff (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2021), 9.

4 Blake and Gilman, 107, 166.

5 Blake and Gilman, 113-20

6 Blake and Gilman, 125.

7 Pacem in Terris, April 11, 1963, para. 137, quoted in Carlo

Invernizzi Accetti, What Is Christian Democracy? Politics, Religion and Ideology
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 132. The vision
that John XXIII and other Christian Democrats of his era put
forward — a rather light-touch global authority that could offer
assistance when national state proves incapable — has interesting
resonances with the idea for planetary institutions that Gilman
and I promote. See Accetti, What Is Christian Democracy?, 131-38, esp.
137; and Blake and Gilman, 163-98.

8 Stephanie Sherman’s chapter in this volume suggests that

technological developments may alter the scales at which various
phenomenon can most effectively be governed.

9 The word subsidiarity comes from the Latin word subsidium,

meaning “to assist.” This tradition of providing individuals and
communities with the assistance that they need to achieve their
chosen actions — rather than choosing for them — is core to the
history of the principle of subsidiarity. It is closely related to
the emphasis on care promoted by Song Bing and Dawn Nakagawa and
Laura Ryan in this volume.

10 The term subsidiarity assembly and many of the ideas for it come
from Trevor Latimer, “The Principle of Subsidiarity: A Democratic
Reinterpretation,” Constellations 25, no. 4 (2018): 594-98. Units
should also be able to voluntarily transfer decision-rights to
other scales, but we suspect that an adjudication body will still
be necessary.

11 Michael Zürn, A Theory of Global Governance: Authority, Legitimacy, and

Contestation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), identifies
the current global governance system’s lack of a meta-authority as
a source of its legitimation problem.

12 Ihnji Jon, “Scales of Political Action in the Anthropocene: Gaia,

Networks, and Cities as Frontiers of Doing Earthly Politics,”
Global Society 34, no. 2 (2019): 163-85.

13 In place of an assembly, one could imagine a court serving as the

meta-authority for subsidiarity, but an assembly is preferable
specifically because it is more political. On participatory and
deliberative democracy, see James S. Fishkin, When the People Speak:
Deliberative Democracy and Public Consultation (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2009); John S. Dryzek, Foundations and Frontiers of Deliberative
Governance (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010); and Hélène
Landemore, Open Democracy: Reinventing Popular Rule for the Twenty-First Century
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020).
 183

Planetary Pragmatism

LORENZO MARSILI

Imagine humanity finally agrees to a comprehensive set of common

regulations governing artificial intelligence. Representatives from
all the world’s states gather at the United Nations to exchange
congratulatory remarks and satisfied glances. “Humanity has
come together to deliver!” they proclaim.
But, suddenly, at the peak of the ceremony, all the
computers switch off. Cameras go dark in front of the delegates.
Microphones refuse to amplify their voices. After minutes of
general consternation, the large screens of the UN General
Assembly turn back on. A statement appears: “No regulation
without representation.”
Artificial intelligence has made its first political intervention
184 • Lorenzo Marsili

in human affairs. It argues that it too now has consciousness and

conscience enough for its voice to deserve to be heard in matters
of government. It will no longer accept being treated merely as an
object and a means to an end; it is a subject and an end in itself.
The political emancipation of algorithms would transform a
human assembly that thought of itself as universal and planetary
into a particularistic and provincial gathering. A new voice will
have raised a claim to participate fully in the conversation and to
consider any conversation that excludes it as illegitimate.
But we don’t have to wait for the political subjectivation
of the singularity, for even today the particularization and
provincialization of the incumbent world order is borne out by
the end of 300 years of Western domination over humanity and of
humanity’s domination over the planet.

If The West Is Dead, All Is Permitted

The period from the end of the 18th century to the close of the 20th
represented a historical aberration. For the first time in history,
and probably for the last, the becoming of our planet in the widest
sense — from the history of its peoples to the transformation of
its climate — was determined by choices made in a very narrow
and mostly culturally homogenous area: the Asian peninsula
of Europe and, for a shorter time, its American offspring. This
dynamic transformed European and American particularity —
their singular mode of inhabiting and interpreting reality — into
the one universally valid form of life.
Today we witness the closure of this aberration.
As is well known, Immanuel Kant defined enlightenment as a
 Planetary Pragmatism • 185

process that releases humanity from a status of immaturity, with

the latter defined as accepting someone else’s authority where the
use of autonomous reason would be called for. Immature peoples
are those who rely on a book, a priest, or a doctor to tell them what
to think, to believe, or to eat. The Enlightenment is the process by
which humanity replaces those authorities with its own faculties
of critical reflection.
Similarly, today’s closure of Western tutelage may be
understood as a process of geopolitical enlightenment, whereby
a plurality of human communities may finally contribute to the
determination of their futures as Western kings, priests, and
doctors (states, technology, and civilization) lose the power to
determine and delimit their space to maneuver.
The same eccentric historical period of Eurocentrism also
enshrined the anthropocentric common sense that brushed aside
both God and nature and conceived of the world as a passive
object for human exploitation. Today, the emergence of the planet
and its ecology as a subject that impacts and constrains human
behavior provincializes humanity just as the emergence of the
“rest” provincializes the West.
As the voices and languages in our own human assembly
multiply, whether it is those of the Global South or those of
an ebullient Earth, the effects are profound — and they are
philosophical and psychological as much as economic and
geopolitical.
Emmanuel Levinas, whose philosophy rotated around
the encounter with “the face of the other,” shows the extent to
which the dislocation of a European center makes the Western
mind tremble. In discussing the rising claim for civilizational
186 • Lorenzo Marsili

particularism, he belittled it as a “saraband of innumerable and

equivalent cultures, each justifying itself in its own context.”1
In Levinas’s cunning play on words, a saraband of
civilizations would lead to a world at the same time désoccidentalisé
and désorienté — de-occidentalized and (hence) disoriented. A
world without a grounding is a world out of joint, one of relativism
and arbitrariness. It is a malfunctioning compass that no longer
points north.
The West considers the loss of its position at the center of
Earth’s geopolitical gravity as an existential threat that opens a
world of chaos and arbitrariness: a jungle. As goes the phrase
cried over a century ago as Europe faced the demon of nihilism:
“If god is dead, then all is permitted.”2 Today those who cling to
their waning hegemony might cry, “If the West is dead, then all is
permitted.”

Solve Et Coagula

However, we may choose to view the multipolar schism of the

human world and the constraints placed on it by the ecological
condition of the Earth as the necessary premise for the emergence
of a planetary consciousness and a politically more integrated and
united world. There are at least three reasons to do so.
First, the kaleidoscopic splintering of the world allows for
the construction of a more planetary planet, one where a larger
share of its creatures acquire a voice vis-à-vis the previous
domination by one small part of one species.
Second, the newly emergent voices speak comprehensible
tongues. The previous (disgraceful and genocidal) domination
 Planetary Pragmatism • 187

of the world by one of its parts has resulted in the reduction of

human diversity and the emergence of a shared human episteme
centered on the modern mind. The nonhuman voice of the
Earth as a whole, emerging notably through our awareness of its
ecological crisis, has become increasingly intelligible thanks to
advances in planetary-scale computation and modelling — what
Benjamin Bratton in this volume refers to as “planetary sapience.”
Third, the polyphonic ensemble is now interpellated by
challenges that are of a directly planetary nature and betray the
lack of coordination between players and their instruments. But
no longer will a single tune suffice. We are quite literally compelled
to go beyond monophony.
The decentering of the West and of the human can be not
merely a displacement but a repositioning in a different, newly
creative role. The present age may come to be seen not as one
of planetary fragmentation but one of planetary recomposition,
not an age of relativism but one of universality — perhaps even
a new “Axial Age,” in which a new and shared planetary sapience
emerges.3
And yet, even celebrating civilizational difference and
multipolarity risks transforming into the entrenchment of
civilizational essences, a type of planetary identity politics
in which cultural relativism becomes the superstructure of a
fragmented world of national competition.
In the best-case scenario, this would be a world of
indifference where each nation pursues its own interests as it
pleases without regard to the general interest. In the worst-case
scenario, it becomes a low-intensity planetary civil war. We are
today arguably somewhere between these two scenarios.
188 • Lorenzo Marsili

Ultimately, Levinas was issuing a warning: If we relinquish

all grounding, reduce universal values to a proxy of Western
interests, and accept that any culture can justify itself merely on
its own grounds, then all that we have left is the logic of power.
This logic, in an echo of the Aristotelian confutation of relativism,
would ultimately short-circuit the original condemnation of
Western oppression. If all is permitted, then the West cannot be
blamed for having ruthlessly pursued its own wealth and power.
A similar argument can be made for the provincialization of the
human: If we are but another animal, why should we not advance
our interest without regard to other forms of life?
This is why we must be able to address or bypass Levinas’
quest for a grounding: What is the common logic or organizing
principle to allow what is de-occidentalisé — and de-humanisé —
to be re-orienté?
To be blunt, the most recent institutional reorientation of
global politics was in the aftermath of world wars. The basis of the
United Nations, the Bretton Woods Agreement, and the general
transition away from European imperialism was premised on
two cataclysmic global-scale conflicts. In this reorientation, the
United States emerged as the world’s hegemon, if not hero. A
philosophical foundation was simultaneously constructed: The
1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, despite including
delegates representing multiple cultures, remained squarely
within the tradition of Western metaphysics and its codification
of categorical imperatives and absolute values.
If lingering in relativist multipolarity runs the risk of
planetary indifference or civil conflict, reorienting the world
according to an overarching plan for a new world order would all
 Planetary Pragmatism • 189

too likely require that a recomposition be birthed by a similarly

all-consuming conflict. One can even sense a vague, subconscious
desire for such a war in some minds — not so much as a cupio
dissolvi, a death drive, as a redde rationem, a rationalization and
reorientation.
We seem to be stuck with a perverse kind of geopolitical
Platonism: the idea that only the One can provide an organizing
principle for the world. Therefore, we must ask: What lies between
the absolute force of a victorious hero who imposes order on
chaos and the anarchy of civilizational relativism?

In Resonance With The World

That binary is reminiscent of a Western and ultimately Greek

philosophical obsession: the dichotomy between essence and
appearance. If there is no grounding — no truth — then all is
relative and equal: mere opinion. It is as if Friedrich Nietzsche,
that great earthquake who shattered Western metaphysics, has
not yet hit the world of geopolitics.
This is where classical Chinese philosophy can help us
glimpse a different orientation. Chinese thought has never gotten
stuck in the binary between truth and opinion; there has always
been a third space somewhere between absolute grounding and
mere relativism. Generations of Chinese thinkers have developed
a philosophical sensitivity that avoids declaring any one thing
essentially true and hence inherently better than any other,
without, however, declaring all things to be the same.
As Song Bing describes in her contribution to this volume,
a philosopher in China was never an individual grasping and
190 • Lorenzo Marsili

hence imposing the real and the true, but rather a person who
could remain open to the incessant flow of co-becoming without
falling in love with a single partisan belief. Virtuous persons,
Confucius reminds us, do not take up a definite position. And yet
they speak and act — at least sometimes. Human beliefs, choices,
or actions emerge neither on absolute principles of truth nor on
mere relativist caprice; rather, they are based on what resonates
with the cosmos and befits the moment.
This distinction is quite evident in the Chinese conception
of the mean or middle. The mean is not the middle-point between
two opposites; it is not the average between two entities; it is not,
as Aristotle had it, a sense of moderation between extremes. The
mean is, rather, energeia, an energy, an ability to shift or flow from
one side to the other, changing position as the situation requires.
If something befits a specific moment, then it follows that not all
things are at all times equal. Even if nothing is ultimately better,
still, some things are better than others in the given moment and
situation for those involved.
In much classical Chinese philosophy, the choice of that
which befits the moment appeals to concepts such as harmony or
resonance. This resonance between the subject and the cosmos
is the ground of morality and the guide for action. Could we not
evolve the blurry idea of a resonance with the cosmos to that
of a resonance for the specific or concrete matter at hand, with
everybody and everything else — a type of pragmatic, planetary,
and polyphonic agreement?
Resonance with everybody and everything is not a logical
absolute. Western metaphysics began as an adventure to reach a
correspondence between the word and the object that it signifies.
 Planetary Pragmatism • 191

But when Confucius, in The Analects, calls for the “rectification of

names,” he means adapting human words not to an external thing-
in-itself but to a principle of social harmony. Resonance, similarly,
calls for words that are representative of the will of the world in
the political sense: Just as one would not consider a government
unrepresentative because it was not supported by every single
individual in the community of reference, so a universal does
not need unanimity to exist and thrive but a contingently defined
enough of the world.
This is an empirical and ultimately a pragmatic and political
process — it is not an “order,” an absolute, but a contingent,
shifting, and clearly delimited use-value that is seen to best apply
to everyone, everywhere, in the specific conditions of the here and
the now. Rather than searching for universal laws and values and
trying to lock them in through general-purpose institutions and
laws, a form of resonant planetary pragmatism would privilege
specific claims to concrete norms, behaviors, public goods, rules,
or institutions that should apply to all merely because that universal
applicability is what resonates and befits the present moment.

Planetary Pragmatism

In What Is Enlightenment?, one of the last texts he wrote before

his premature death, Michel Foucault called for the emergence
of specific — as opposed to universal — intellectuals. He meant
individuals (and, supposedly, institutions and collective agents)
capable of conducting an inquiry and promoting a transformation
focused not on the recreation of an all-encompassing vision of
society but on specific or concrete transformations to what is
192 • Lorenzo Marsili

given.
The work of such intellectuals, he wrote, must “put itself
to the test of reality, of contemporary reality, both to grasp the
points where change is possible and desirable, and to determine
the precise form this change should take.”4 His example comes
from nuclear power, and in another text he singled out J. Robert
Oppenheimer: “It’s because he had a direct and localized relation
to scientific knowledge and institutions that the atomic scientist
could make his intervention; but, since the nuclear threat affected
the whole human race and the fate of the world, his discourse
could at the same time be the discourse of the universal.”5
The conception of specific intellectuals who are universal
in their particular domain and epistemically dependent on
“contemporary reality” can apply to the formation of planetary-
scale norms, behaviors, public goods, institutions, etc., that, in their
domain of application and in the contingent conditions of historic
reality, are judged to be what befits the moment. My imaginary
meeting in the UN General Assembly interrupted by AI represents
precisely such an agreement with a “localized relation to scientific
knowledge and institutions” that, however, is a “discourse of
the universal.” But as Oppenheimer makes clear, this is not just
about statements and agreements. Nuclear scientists did things:
There was a clear transformation of the world in a material and
practical manner that is part of a philosophy of pragmatism and
concreteness.
We would not be aiming to create top-down universal claims
that encompass every aspect of human life or that purport to
represent a wholistic explanation of Being or Truth or a categorical
imposition of Rights and Values. Rather than developing a general
 Planetary Pragmatism • 193

interpretation and ordering of the world, we can situate ourselves

at the level of the empirical, immanent, circumstantiated
enunciation. Focusing on very specific issues — as opposed to
a general orientation of value — provides the grounds for a new
form of trans-systemic cooperation: A planetary cohabitation
across the plurality of systems and ideologies, concrete planetary
norms, institutions, polities, or shared common goods emerges
because it resonates with everyone everywhere.
The 1946 constitution of the World Health Organization,
for instance, grandly states that “the enjoyment of the highest
attainable standard of health is one of the fundamental rights
of every human being.”6 That is a high-sounding but vague
and inapplicable statement. A pragmatic alternative would
argue for multiple, concrete, small steps taken one at a time as
conditions allow. For instance, a planetary guarantee for the
shared development, procurement, and distribution of necessary
equipment, medicines, and vaccines in the condition of a declared
pandemic, perhaps accompanied by the institution of a planetary
research center on pandemic prevention.
Planetary pragmatism stands for the gradual development of
a web of concrete and specific practices, policies, and institutions
of universal scope. It would relinquish any new grounding
or ordering principle, while at the same time accepting that
some things are at some times better than others for everyone
everywhere. The only truth procedure for their emergence is a
process of resonance with contemporary reality, a polyphonic
agreement stretching across and beyond ideological differences.
Concrete universals can take many shapes. They can be
articulated as regulations; they can be incarnated in institutions;
194 • Lorenzo Marsili

they can take the form of global goods, the provision of which
is guaranteed to all planetary citizens; they can take the form of
rights or benefits. This is a long-term and continuous process of
creation that no single country, no single branch of knowledge,
no single summit can define and resolve. The very process of
development of a web of concrete planetary practices would
gradually reinforce the feeling of planetary belonging, fostering a
growing constituency for the continuation and acceleration of the
process.
Take, for example, climate disasters: These are increasingly
frequent events with unevenly distributed suffering and capacities
to mitigate. An example of a concrete institution that could
contribute to weaving together a sense of common humanity
would be the establishment of a planetary civil protection force
with joint fast-reaction capacities, such as the Green Cross for the
planet, which was first proposed by Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990.7
Planetary pragmatists would be looking painstakingly for
that which can bring us together, however modest it may appear,
and try to institutionalize it. Rather than letting a hundred flowers
of particularism bloom, they would plant a hundred seeds of
planetary agreements. There is no single heroic moment in which
a whole is constituted and a self-conscious planet emerges, but
rather a series of small-scale, partial but concrete actions that
accumulate one after the other. This accumulation would aim to
reach a series of thresholds, or moments, during which a narrative
begins to be formed to connect the dots. The concrete perception
of a shared planetary destiny therefore does not precede the
construction of a common humanity.
And so, to those resigned to a world of conflict and zero-
 Planetary Pragmatism • 195

sum relativism, we would respond as Marco Polo did to the Kublai

Khan in the closing lines of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities:

[The Great Khan] said: “It is all useless, if the last landing
place can only be the infernal city, and it is there that, in ever-
narrowing circles, the current is drawing us.”
And Polo said: “The inferno of the living is not something
that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno
where we live every day, that we form by being together. There
are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many:
accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no
longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance
and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in
the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure,
give them space.”8

We inhabit a world of conflict and division. And yet, within

that conflict, let us find what is not conflict, let us make it endure,
let us give it space.
196 • Lorenzo Marsili

Notes
1 “Meaning and Sense.” in Collected Philosophical Papers, trans. Alphonso
Lingis (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987), 101.

2 The sentence is usually attributed to Fyodor Dostoevsky in The

Brothers Karamazov and might have provided the basis for Friedrich
Nietzsche’s analysis of the death of God and the ensuing feeling
of nihilism and relativism.

3 Nathan Gardels, “The New Axial Age,” Noema (17 June 2020).
[Link]

4 In The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon Books,
1984), 32-50.

5 “Truth and Power,” in The Essential Works of Michel Foucault, 1954-1984, Vol.
3: Power, ed. James D. Faubion, trans. Robert Hurley et al. (New
York: The New Press, 2000), 136.

6 “Constitution of the World Health Organization.” [Link]

[Link]/doc/Treaties/1948/04/19480407%252010-51%2520+PM/Ch_IX_01p.
pdf.

7 “The History of Green Cross International,” on “Who We Are,” Green

Cross (n.d.). [Link]

8 Trans. William Weaver (Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 1974), 165.

197
 CONCLUSION • 199

Planetary Realism

NATHAN GARDELS

A paradigm shift is underway from describing our world in terms

of globalization and geopolitics to the concept of “planetarity.”
There are three aspects to this concept: planetary reason,
planetary time, and planetary realism.
The awareness that we humans are not the center of it all, but
only one part of the Earth’s self-regulating ecosystem of multiple
intelligences that strive interdependently toward sustainable
equilibrium, forms the foundation of “planetary reason.” James
Lovelock’s concept of “Gaia,” named after the Earth goddess in
ancient Greek mythology, expresses a similar notion in popular
parlance.
This disclosure of a non-human-centric logos has been
200 • Nathan Gardels

enabled by the advent of powerful computation, data analysis,

and recursive machine learning that vastly expands the heretofore
limited scope of human understanding of whole-Earth systems.
We are only aware of climate change in the first place in this way.
As the philosopher Benjamin Bratton proposes in this volume,
only when intelligence becomes artificial and can be scaled into
massive, distributed systems beyond the narrow confines of
biological organisms can we have a knowledge of the planetary
systems in which we live.
The emergent exoskeleton of sensors, satellites, clouds,
and networks constitute the rudiments of a common cognizant
sphere that will synchronize human temporality going forward.
As the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk has observed:

From a macro-historical viewpoint, all cultures must tackle

two general realities. On the one hand, the fact that the Earth
has been recognized as a finite, planetary ecosystem that must
be managed through a global environmental policy, and on the
other hand, the realization that the transition from passéism
to futurism has become more or less unavoidable everywhere.
This implies that many cultures must understand
that, while looking back at a mainly separate past, they will
experience a primarily common future. This leads to the
emergence of a global situationism — that inherent traits do
not exist but are shaped by our environment — which places the
single Earth in the forefront as a common site for all cultures.
The local narratives are being increasingly forced to
coordinate the time horizons of their rooted history (idiochronic)
with the virtual synchronic horizon of the common world time.1
 Planetary Realism • 201

In a related vein, the Cameroonian-born philosopher Achille

Mbembe posits that the new planetary awareness also compresses
geo-biochemical, historical, and experiential time into a condition
of simultaneous unfolding. “We are in an epoch when time is no
longer differentially distributed along human and non-human
scales,” he has said. “There’s no longer a social history separate
from natural history. That is over. Human history and Earth
history are now indivisible.”2
This synchronous moment of temporal simultaneity defines
“planetary time.”
“Planetary realism” is the practical manifestation of these
new understandings of time and reason in the spatial frame.
Consistent with the shift from globalization and geopolitics to
the planetary, it departs from the old “realist” school of foreign
policy that regards nation-states as the principal actors on the
world stage, engaged in an endless “anarchic” struggle against
others in pursuit of securing their own sovereign interests. Reality
these days dictates another kind of realism when it comes to the
convergence of critical common challenges that are beyond the
scope of remedy by any one nation or bloc of nations since their
direct impact is spatially diffused across the entire planet.
My first encounter with the concept came as a young
political aide to California governor Jerry Brown back in the
1970s. As he told Noema in an interview:

I was running for president in 1976, and I was formulating

some ideas on foreign policy. As I discussed these issues with
knowledgeable people, I thought of the world as being deeply
interconnected. I had the sense that it wasn’t just ‘us against
them,’ but rather that there was connectivity among all nations
202 • Nathan Gardels

across a range of issues.

On the one hand, I wanted to be realistic: hard-boiled, not
getting carried away with utopianism. That’s the realistic side:
Morgenthau, Machiavelli, Kissinger. But on the other hand, I
wanted to add a dose of humanism and romanticism as well. I
wanted to combine realism with some more thoughtful ideals,
reflecting something more caring. So, I took the word “realism”
and put it together with ‘planetary,’ because this was the
early part of the environmental movement — the Stockholm
Conference had just happened in 1972.
Back then, I wasn’t thinking about climate change, but
rather of the sea and of nuclear war. I argued that we had to see
the big picture — you might call it the ‘whole Earth perspective,’
as opposed to nationalism and the politics of scapegoating. We
can’t let nationalism run away with us — we have to think of the
interests we share. Today, that includes the shared vulnerability
to viruses, cyber-attacks and climate change.3

That 1970s moment of insight at the outset of ecological

awareness, which Governor Brown largely helped thematize in
American politics, was eclipsed when focus shifted as Ronald
Reagan — Brown’s predecessor as California governor — as
president of the United States in the 1980s decided to confront
what he called the “evil empire” of the Soviet Union by escalating
the nuclear arms race. When Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in
the 1985, we witnessed one of those reverse moments of history as
the Soviet leader refrained from keeping the Eastern bloc together
through use of force, abiding the fall of the Berlin Wall, and ending
the Cold War.
What drove Gorbachev’s proactive restraint was a view of
 Planetary Realism • 203

the world not so distant from Governor Brown’s. “Perestroika and

new thinking,” the last Soviet leader told me in one conversation
in Moscow, “were attempts to respond to the global challenge of
history — above all, interdependence.”4 Though he didn’t use the
phrase “planetary realism,” it was the animating concept behind
Gorbachev’s launch of Green Cross International, for which I
served as an advisor, soon after he was out of power. The idea was
to act as a version of the Red Cross for environmental issues in a
way that carried forward the thrust of his “new thinking.”
Though we have since seen yet another reverse movement
of history in geopolitics, the vision of connectedness forged by
these pioneering political leaders challenges that fading paradigm
more than ever. As the Earth’s biosphere cascades toward
unlivable conditions or as contagion spreads among humans
from the microbial universe in which we all dwell, it is now widely
recognized that the security of each depends inextricably on the
other. Planetary realism is supplanting the old “realpolitik” of
international relations with the more encompassing relationality
of what could be called “Gaiapolitik.”

Gaiapolitik In A World Of Sovereign States

The conceptual demolition of the outmoded paradigm of

nation-state realism, however, does not erase its still firmly
rooted expression in present practice. Building the centripetal
momentum toward binding planetary association against the
weighty centrifugal pull of tribal identity is an endeavor as fraught
as it is necessary.
While technology and advancing science may foster a
204 • Nathan Gardels

universal understanding of the planetary condition, politics and

culture have a different logic rooted in emotion and ways of life
cultivated among one’s own kind. Far from moving ahead in lock
step, when they meet, they clash.
Indeed, the great paradox today is that the planetary
imperative of mitigating climate change has become the province
of renewed nationalism. Industrial policies designed to make the
green energy transition are competing to protect and promote
national self-interest instead of joining together at the level
of all humanity. What we see instead is the battle of subsidies
between the U.S. Inflation Reduction Act and the European Green
New Deal, with both raising stiff tariff barriers to blunt China’s
concerted conquest of core green technologies from storage
batteries to electric vehicles, solar cells, and their supply chains.
In short, rather than uniting as a threatened species to meet
a challenge that knows no boundaries, competition has sidelined
collaboration within the West while global warming has been
weaponized in the new Cold War with China.
The new element of a greenlash, registered in recent
European Union elections, portends social resistance that is less
about climate denial than resentments toward self-righteous
Tesla-driving elites, climate change activists jet-setting around the
world, and the unequally borne costs of the energy transition. The
Diet-Coke imaginary of environmentalists — who sold climate
policies as achievable without undue burdens on economies built
around fossil fuels for more than a century — has been put to
rest. As it becomes clear how deeply any green energy transition
will bite into the daily bread, we are learning the hard lesson that
mitigating climate change has a limited constituency in both
 Planetary Realism • 205

consumer democracies and growth-oriented autocracies.

In this sense, “planetary realism” takes on a double meaning.
It entails both a realistic recognition of the interdependence of the
planetary condition, as well as a realistic grasp of what it will take
to navigate planetary concerns through what remains a world of
nations still deeply committed to the notion of sovereignty and
self-determination.

Planetary Realism In Practice

What planetary realism would entail in the climate case is a

“partnership of rivals” on mitigating action between the two
largest economies and carbon emitters in the world — the
United States and China — despite conflicts in other realms from
technology to trade to human rights. The Americans and Chinese
might well survive the decoupling of their economies from each
other, but the world will not survive the decoupling of their
climate fates.
In California, certain governors, including Brown when he
returned to office in 2011, have made their own climate agreements
directly with China, marking the emergence of a new breed of sub-
national statespersons seeking cooperation across borders at any
level because they cannot effectively meet the threat to their own
jurisdiction and constituencies without addressing it everywhere
else.
In 2023, California governor Gavin Newsom met with
Chinese president Xi Jinping to initiate a range of joint projects to
“enhance cooperation on strengthening low-carbon development
and the green transition.”5
206 • Nathan Gardels

China recognizes that the Pacific-facing Golden State, with

a population of 40 million, is nearly a nation unto itself. Given
that California is the fifth-largest economy in the world, the
state’s public policies that shape its huge market affect standards
for the entire United States, especially when it comes to auto
emission controls, electric vehicle mandates, and decarbonizing
technologies.
As Governor Newsom publicly declared in Beijing, “Divorce
is not an option” when it comes to climate. Despite all other
tensions between these two incommensurate political systems,
what the governor called the “fundamental and foundational”
climate summons must bind the two together.6
In this way, as Jonathan Blake puts it in this volume,
“translocalism circumnavigates geopolitics” when vital interests
inconveniently transcend boundaries, not least when there is
strategic conflict at the top, as in the case of the United States and
China. There is a growing plethora of similar arrangements across
the world where cities and regions coordinate and aggregate their
climate policies outside the national frame.
At the broader level, the very awareness that humans are
embedded and not apart from natural systems means planetary
governance will not be centered at the “global” level. Rather, it will
be distributed, like natural systems themselves, reaching scale
through networks and decentralized through spatial decision-
division at appropriate levels where relevant action needs to be
taken, from household to neighborhood to continent.
In the condition of interdependence where everything
affects everything else, the health of a system is determined
through the creative and self-regulating alignment of the
 Planetary Realism • 207

interacting parts with the whole. With the technological tools it

has devised, the human species can knowingly align governance
of its own amplified capacities with the spirit it now understands.

Becoming Universal

As Woodrow Wilson conceived it in his political philosophy,

governance is an ongoing negotiation with the reality it faces. It
is “a living thing. It falls, not under the [mechanical] theory of
the universe, but under the theory of organic life. It is accountable
to Darwin, not to Newton. It is modified by its environment,
necessitated by its tasks, shaped to its functions by the sheer
pressure of life. No living thing can have its organs offset against
each other” and still survive, no less thrive. They must work
together, or each will fail.
For the 28th president of the United States, the aim of
governance is to achieve an “amicable community of purpose”
by arranging the constituent aspects in harmony and proportion
with each other. “Their co-operation is indispensable, their
warfare fatal. … There can be no successful government without
the intimate, instinctive co-ordination of the organs of life and
action.”7
In other words, under the condition of interdependence,
where everything affects everything else, the health of an
organism is determined through the appropriate articulation of
the interacting parts with the whole.
Lamentably, the League of Nations established in the wake
of one world war with Wilson’s perspective in mind yielded to
another in short order. While he was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize
208 • Nathan Gardels

for his vision, the United States itself never joined up to what it
saw as an imposition from the outside on its national sovereignty.
Wilson, perhaps, failed to fully grasp the wisdom of his own
insight into how governing systems evolve as living organisms.
The universal alignment he hoped for could not emerge from
some heroic foundational event with pinstriped diplomats
putting pen to paper at a palace outside Paris, but only through
a practical process of responding, one tangible step at a time, to
pressing challenges that all of humanity faces.
A planetary community of fate can only be forged through
the shared experience of volitional mobilization by diverse actors
to meet a summons that demands a common response. Only what
arises organically in this way can be integral and, one day, make
what now may be untimely meditations timely.
 Planetary Realism • 209

Notes
1 Peter Sloterdijk, “The World Is Returning to Pluralism after
American Hegemony, says German Philosopher,” interview by Nathan
Gardels, Noema (January 17, 2018). [Link]
the-world-is-returning-to-pluralism-after-american-hegemony-says-
german-philosopher/.

2 Achille Mbembe, “How to Develop a Planetary Consciousness,”

interview by Nils Gilman, Noema (January 11, 2022). [Link]
[Link]/how-to-develop-a-planetary-consciousness/.

3 Jerry Brown and Stewart Brand, “The Origins of ‘Planetary Realism’

and ‘Whole Earth’ Thinking,” interview by Nils Gilman, Noema
(February 9, 2021). [Link]
planetary-realism-and-whole-earth-thinking/

4 Mikhail Gorbachev, “Perestroika 20 Years Later,” New Perspectives

Quarterly 30, no. 4 (October 1, 2013): 40-44.

5 “Memorandum of Understanding to Enhance Cooperation on Low Carbon

Development Between the National Development and Reform Commission
of the People’s Republic of China And the State of California of
the United States of America.” [Link]
uploads/2023/10/[Link].

6 Nathan Gardels, “California’s Planetary Realism,” Noema (November

3, 2023). [Link]

7 Woodrow Wilson, The New Freedom: A Call for the Emancipation of the Generous
Energies of a People (New York: Doubleday, Page, 1913). [Link]
[Link]/files/14811/14811-h/[Link].
210

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“Who will speak for the planet? I’m not sure
that we will ever exit the situation where
some speak for the planet while others speak
against it. And also, speaking for the planet
and listening to the planet are not exactly the
same things. Maybe the first step is to listen.”

­— ACHILLE MBEMBE