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/)