Over the last few centuries we humans have rewired an entire planet. We have, for example, completely changed the balance of Earth’s species. Most of the mammals and birds on the Earth are now ours: i.e. Cows and Chickens. And, of course, we’ve altered the Earth’s atmospheric chemistry with more CO2 capturing more heat and driving global warming. Changing the planet this way is a pretty amazing (though dangerous) achievement for a species that - on an evolutionary level - is basically just a bunch of hairless monkeys. But as Earth slides deeper into these changes, the question facing us as a species is “What now?”
The planet we grew up on will not be the planet our grandchildren experience. So, how are we going to navigate life on this new world?
This week I am in Gissen Germany giving the keynote address for The Panel on Planetary Thinking. Given that assignment, I want to briefly introduce you today to that word “Planetary” in the meeting’s title. That’s becuase “The Planetary” has become important new term for people thinking about the human future on a changing Earth.
We have all grown up in a world of “Globalism”. There’s the Global Economy, Global Trade and Global Culture. From an Earth Science perspective, however, Globalism has been kind of a disaster. That’s because in globalism’s view the planet is just an empty space in which we do our business and then toss our garbage.
Over the past 3 decades, however, it’s become clear that Earth is not so easily ignored. Currently the global economy eats up almost 1/4th of all the energy the biosphere harvests from the Sun every day. That means we human beings are using so much energy you’d be insane to think the planet wouldn’t notice. Of course there’s been a planetary-scale back-reaction. Of course the Earth is changing… duh.
In the face of these changes the philosophy underlying globalism is just not up to the task of facing our future. That’s what “The Planetary” is for.
The idea behind the Planetary is that we must build a new version of human culture, economy and politics that understands that it all depends on a planet. The Earth and its potent biosphere are, literally, the ground on which our planetary-scale civilization have been built. There is no way to separate that 10,000 year old “project of civilization” from Earth from which it emerged.
That’s what I am here in Germany to talk about. How do we shift from a biospherically-blind Globalism to a new kind of Planetary thinking? How do we rethink how we govern ourselves, how we run our economies, how we invent our cultures?
I’ll be writing more on this in the coming months. If you want a deeper dive now you can read this essay on The Planetary I wrote for the Inaugural Berggruen Prize Essay competition (I am happy to say it won).
=====================================================
PS. What would a Planetary driven human future look like? Leave a comment on the website version of the post or email me at [email protected]
PSS. I was not able to have this post proof-read so please excuse any typos.
— Adam Frank 🚀
