Planetary Thinking
Interview
From an interview with the Long Now Foundation with Jonathan Blake and Nils Gilman, the authors of Children of a Modest Star.
* Long Now: what (do) you mean when you talk about this concept of planetary thinking.
Jonathan Blake: I can give an overview of the book that takes on that specific question as well, because the first half of the book deals with the questions: What is planetary thinking? How did it come about? What is it in contrast to?
The challenge is that we look around the world and we find ourselves in a situation that's both dangerous and debilitated. We have a series of very powerful political institutions that are established around the nation state and divide up the world into neatly packaged bordered territories with central governments in control of what happens within their borders, but have no authority outside of those borders. At the same time, we have lots of different issues, problems, phenomena that, by their very nature, don't care about those borders that just flow and span and transgress.
Many of these are what we might call natural systems and they all emerge from the fact that we live on a planet that has had its own cycles and processes going on for billions of years: the carbon cycle, the nitrogen cycle, the flows of biodiversity for plants, animals, even viruses moving back and forth. So our diagnosis is that we're stuck in this situation where the institutions nominally designed to handle problems that we humans encounter are structurally unable to tackle the problems that we face: our climate change and pandemics, for example.
Planetary thinking is our way to try to move this problem forward. It's no longer sufficient to think in terms of the national – to think that the nation state can solve these problems.
The framework of the global is that of a collaboration of national governments. Global institutions are institutions that bring together all the different nation states to cooperate, but ultimately are responsive not to the problems themselves, but to the nation states they're making them up. The canonical case here might be the UNFCCC, which is designed to tackle climate change. Every year it gathers in COPs, which are made up of representatives of the nation states, and they are unable to achieve meaningful progress at the speed that we need because ultimately it's the nation states that are making these decisions. This is a problem that others have identified as well. We're not fully original there, but we’re saying: “how might we think about this differently?”
We suggest the concept of the planetary as opposed to the national or the global is the one that might move us forward. The planetary recognizes that we are embedded in these systems, these cycles. We’re only one species among many that share the planet. The second half of the book says, “Okay, well this is all well and good, but what do we do about it?”
We propose a whole new way of thinking about how we might govern the planet from top to bottom, fully revamping institutions, creating new institutions that are more attuned and designed to deal with these what we're calling planetary phenomenon and would break away from the problems that are just endemic in today's system.
Nils Gilman: What makes the planetary distinct from the global is that the global, as described by term globalization, refers to the flows of human-centered things: money, ideas, goods, services, and also bad things:, human trafficking, drugs, armaments and so on. Planetary phenomena are all the other things that flow around the planet that don't care at all about humans and are not based on human conventions or institutions. Human activity may be perturbing these systems, though. We see emergent diseases because humans are encroaching on wildlife, increasing the flow of zoonotic viruses out of natural reservoirs into human populations. Or we see climate change, obviously, being driven by the burning of fossil fuels.
That's accelerating all sorts of systems and we need to figure out a way to live harmoniously with all of them. Human beings have lived through what amounts to an outbreak over the last few centuries as a result of industrial modernity. The human population today is an order of magnitude larger than it was 300 years ago. The impacts we're having on the earth are several orders of magnitude bigger because those 10-times-as-many people are themselves each consuming on average 10 times as much stuff. The amount of consumption and disruption that humans are adding – the anthropogenic forcings, to use the language – is quite remarkable. We’re stuck with a governance system which was conceived several centuries ago and was implemented basically in the middle of the 20th century after World War II to deal with human issues. But we now are disrupting these planetary things and we need a new way to think about it. So the architecture of planetary governance that we propose is one that is adequate to dealing with these challenges."
(https://longnow.org/ideas/children-of-a-modest-star/)
Discussion
Multilevel vs Multiscalar Forms of Governance
- Long Now: The contrast that you draw between multilevel and multiscalar forms of governance is useful for understanding ... planetary issues.
Gilman: We have a whole chapter in the book that deals with this, where we promote the idea that there should be networked trans-local governance systems. Some of these are already being developed – this is not science fiction. To give an example: if you think about climate change, there are two dimensions to the policy challenge. One is mitigation – trying to prevent more carbon from going into the atmosphere that will heat up the planet and acidify the oceans. That's got to be dealt with at a planetary scale because when we emit tailpipe emissions here in Los Angeles, it affects the planetary climate everywhere. It affects it in China, it affects it in Africa.
The other is adaptation, and that's very different. For example, John and I live in Southern California. The big adaptational challenges of climate change for us here in California are heat waves, fires and droughts. But on the other corner of the country that we live in the United States you have Miami. Miami is also facing climate change issues, but it's facing very different issues. For them it's sea level rise, it's hurricanes, it's storms. One of the things we propose is that a city like Los Angeles or the state of California has more in common in terms of its adaptation challenges with places like Perth Australia or Spain and Portugal or Cape Town in South Africa than with Miami. By contrast, Miami has more in common with places that are also in low lying areas that are subject to hurricanes. They might have more in common with say Ho Chi Minh City or Manilla or Dhaka or perhaps in Jakarta. In both cases it makes more sense for cities to network amongst their peers in order to figure out how to use best practices, expertise, and technology that can deal with their challenges. It’s not that the nation state's not important, but that these other layers that have opportunities about how we can govern in a more effective way.
Blake: I liked the way that you summarized our argument, which was: What if the nation state wasn't the main conduit for governance? So this is precisely it: if something were to happen today in either L.A. or Miami, the first phone call the mayor would make is to Washington D.C.. But in a new, planetary system? You can imagine the first phone call you make is to this new trans-local structure; a trans-local institution that brings together all of the cities that are facing drought and fire with a secretariat somewhere that can bring together all the other relevant mayors who've dealt with exactly this thing and know what the protocol is. That's a different way of tackling these issues, a different way of thinking about governance, a way to denaturalize certain ideas and show other possibilities. It's not to say that that phone call to Washington would never happen, but maybe it's not the first one."