No One Lives on the Globe

Prateek Shankar

In preparation for our first Planetary Studio, we wrote a briefing document that explored how our team was understanding the conceptual landscape of the class of challenges that we are trying to address. In this essay, Prateek offers an overview of critical scholarship that explains why we prefer “planetary” to “global” when we talk about the Earth. In short: “globalism” comes from an imperial attitude, and implies dominance, total knowledge, and control, while “planeterism” recognizes a inter-dependence, rich uncertainty, and exchange.

This is the first essay in the Planetary Perspective series. Read Part 2 at More-Than-Human Intelligence, and Part 3 at What are Planetary Phenomena?

The globe is on our computers. No one lives there.¹

How do we relate to the world—around, within, and beyond us? It is a simple question. Depending on how we answer it, we may end up with radically different ways of understanding and engaging with the planet. As we teeter on the edges of planetary collapse, it has become particularly urgent to recognize the implications of this question on how we frame our politics, our values and goals as a species, and our fundamental understanding of what it means to be human.

The metaphors we use shape the ethics we enact.

Consider Johannes Vermeer’s 1668 oil painting The Astronomer.^{Figure 1} A pensive white male looms over a man-made globe. His gaze lingers as he extends his hand to cup the curvature of the globe, insinuating the beginnings of a profound epiphany. What Vermeer presents here is a Cartesian relational ethic: the conscious astronomer examines a static globe in an attempt to understand the world it represents and ultimately transform it in his own image. In turn, it suggests notions of globalism, a world picture² that frames the human-planet relationship as anthropic, inventing binary logics of natural/man-made, primitive/civilized, national/international, and local/global, among varying rationale for European colonization, ecological exploitation, and technocratic progress.

Now consider the Pale Blue Dot,^{Figure 2} a photograph of planet Earth taken by the Voyager I space probe at the suggestion of (another white astronomer) Carl Sagan. Its subject: a tiny blue pixel, barely visible within the alternating bands of dust and light, and seemingly inconsequential until contextualized by Sagan’s famous words, “That’s here. That’s Home. That’s us.” The Earth, a pale blue dot, “a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.” An iconic reminder of the fragile entanglement of life on Earth, that we’re all—quite literally—in this together. A delicate marble made of matter and energy, entangling the means of survival with its most intriguing product: life. As microbiologist Lynn Margulis put it:

No matter how much our own species preoccupies us, life is a far wider system. Life is an incredibly complex interdependence of matter and energy among millions of species beyond (and within) our own skin. These Earth aliens are our relatives, our ancestors, and part of us. They cycle our matter and bring us water and food. Without “the other” we do not survive.³

Embedded in this web of living and made-alive, the human condition is quite evidentially more-than-human.

Here lies the heart of planetarism, a political imaginary 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, and in consideration of deep time and an expanding cosmic geography. This form of socio-ecological politics, Jeremy Bendik-Keymer⁴ notes, “does not continue the territorially fragmented sovereignty of the long shadow of European imperialism,” instead advocating for a relational ethic centered on epistemic humility and collective flourishing. Here, some key differences:

1. While globalism assumes a quantifiable representation of the world, one that both captures its essence and enables its manipulation, planetarism asserts that the Earth is more than its representation and requires a more responsible engagement with its complexity and diversity.
2. While globalism enables the reproduction of existing power inequalities, favoring certain groups over others (human–Western–white–male), planetarism challenges these structures by foregrounding the fundamental inter/intra/extra-dependence of all life on Earth.
3. While globalism operates within a narrow temporal and spatial horizon, prioritizing short-term gains over long-term consequences, planetarism expands this by considering the past, present, and future of the Earth as well as its place within the larger cosmos.

Sitting With Uncertainty

Even so, both globalism and planetarism are based on certain assumptions that may not adequately capture the reality of the world as it is. Both concepts rely on human-centric perspectives that often fail to account for the agency and autonomy of non-human entities. Tectonic plates shift, birds migrate, mycelial networks carry signals across forests. Ancient fossils slowly decompose into petroleum, pandemic-inducing pathogens lie dormant beneath the ice, even as unknown celestial objects plunge in and out of our solar system. The global and the planetary both imply a degree of coherence and stability that does not reflect the dynamic and unpredictable nature of the world, or the humans in it. In turn, both may obscure (or completely erase) the differences and conflicts that exist within and between various entities on Earth. It would appear that understanding the reality of the Earth requires an acknowledgement of the inherent impossibility of the task.

Gayatri Spivak makes a compelling case for this impossibility in her notion of planetarity, a fluctuating expression she uses to complicate our epistemic representations of the planet as being a unified field. To her, planetarity is a gesture of protest, a skeptical rejection of models that attempt to flatten all people, living beings, and ecosystems within a totalizing organizational logic (such as globe, world, international, or planet). It challenges the very idea of understanding the Earth, suggesting instead that our relationship with the planet be characterized by unknowability. This highlights a critical ingredient in our recipe for a new relationality: the ability to confront and sit with uncertainty.

Perhaps our relationship to the planet—in its complex entirety—must itself be made alive; our grounding ethic, then, be one of dynamic situatedness: rooted in a sense of wonder in the face of planetary unknowability but equally agile and responsive to the complexity of its evolving challenges. As we find ourselves at this crucial juncture in our shared history, where every day is an ALL CAPS headline announcing yet another lethal calamity somewhere in the world, this negotiation of how we choose to relate to the world becomes crucial, especially if we are to ever build pathways towards mutual flourishing. So, we ask you: how might we frame a relational ethic with the planet that responds respectfully and effectively to its ever-changing conditions and challenges? How do we—in practice—confront complexity? What does that look like?

These Bodies of Knowledge

We might start by drawing on the insights of feminist, indigenous, and postcolonial scholarship, which have long questioned the dominant modes of knowledge production that have shaped our understanding of the world. These theories have illustrated the importance of situated knowledges⁵, relational ontologies⁶, and embodied practices⁷ as ways of engaging with the world in more nuanced and ethical ways. They emphasize the deep entanglement of how we see the world with where we see it from (and through), urging us to locate our production of knowledge in the physical bodies, social contexts, and ecological surroundings that inform them. In situating ourselves in the broad commonwealth of the more-than-human world, they challenge the edifice of human exceptionalism and the separation of our minds from our bodies, transforming Descartes’ proclamation of “I think therefore I am” into a grounded realization: “Here I am; therefore I think.”

To illustrate, we shift attention to our primate cousins, specifically to recurrent scientific efforts to locate evidence of their “intelligence.” Writing in Ways of Being. Animals, Plants, Machines: A Search for a Planetary Intelligence, James Bridle describes a common intelligence test that involves placing some tempting food just out of reach of an animal, and leaving them with a tool (like a stick or string) to obtain it. Most primates—apes, chimpanzees, gorillas, and others—will always make use of the instrument to snare the treat (either pulling the string or using the stick to drag it towards them). However, when the same test was conducted with a gibbon in 1932, it failed to pull the string on the floor, leaving scientists to conclude—by their very narrow definition—that it was “less intelligent” than other primates.

However, it wasn’t until a 1967 experiment with four other gibbons that this was formally disproved. The difference? Instead of leaving the string on the ground, researchers decided to hang it from the roof of the enclosure. The response was immediate: in one swift motion, the gibbon grasped at the hanging string, tugged it towards itself, and won not only the snack but also human approval of its intelligence. This new experiment was designed to account for the fact that gibbons are brachiators, meaning they use their arms to swing between the trees. As a result, their fingers are simply too elongated to pick up objects lying on flat surfaces, which means that their “intelligence” is built off of their relationship to their immediate environment: they reach for what’s above them. It wasn’t their intelligence that needed questioning but the cookie-cutter human model for assessing it.

As Bridle points out, the gibbons’ sense-perception functions in response to their specific biophysical relationship to their immediate world. Yet, too often, humans process the world in their own image. It’s no wonder that the Turing test—a popular method to test machine intelligence—was originally known as “the imitation game.” Quite literally, our measure for assessing a machine’s presence of mind was its ability to exhibit human-like behavior. In framing the non-human world—machine, primate, or otherwise—against a rigid anthropic model, we struggle to see what’s actually going on. As Bridle puts it, “Embodied as we are, with a different body pattern and pattern of awareness [of the gibbon], we expect the solution to problems to match our own patterns.” These varied non-human body patterns may lie outside our perception, and yet, what we count (or don’t count) as intelligence is defined by the extent of human awareness. See where I’m going with this?

A New Technology of Relating

The gibbon example foregrounds two key insights: first, that relationality is a psychosomatic experience, in that an organism “does intelligence” through the interaction of its body with the world around it,⁸ and second, that perhaps the reality of the Earth, in its profound complexity, lies somewhere within a broader gestalt of intersecting relational models.

Not only does humankind share the planet with an infinite number of matter-energy configurations (animals, plants, oceans, machines, and more), but also that each of these configurations has their own relational model with their world. Within this broader web of relationships, globalism’s human-centricity renders it deeply inadequate as a relational model. Similarly, while planetarism may account for some degree of these inter-relationships, it too fails in its inability to comprehensively confront the unknowable. In choosing how we relate to the world, how might we account for the limits of our sense-perceptions, especially given its intrinsic effect on what we count as intelligence, as knowledge, and as reality?

What we need, perhaps, is a new technology of relating. By this, we don’t mean handing over the reins to an AI chatbot (RelationGPT, anyone?). Arguably, even language is a technology, in that it is—in the words of Ursula K. Le Guin—“an active interface with the material world.” The question is if its enough in its current formulation, or if we require something dramatically new. Further, as we shift our focus towards relational ethics, we inevitably confront the continuing influence of coloniality, conquest, and control on how we choose to belong to this planet and to each other. The central provocation here is to realign this relationship with the planet, if we are to ever let go of the blinkered violence we have inherited from the legacy of globalism. We need to embrace the complexity, diversity, and unknowability of the planet as a source of strength and creativity rather than a problem to be solved or controlled. We must recognize that the planet is not a globe, but a living entity that deserves our care and respect. Fundamentally, an evolved relational ethic may be key to our unfurling of an effective response-epoch, to navigate the uncertainties of our times and ensure the integrity of this pale blue dot that we call home.