Planetization

An introduction to something that has yet to be written

Vishnu(7): Are there any dead dinosaurs in Space?

Me: Yes, there is a large fossil record of dinosaurs on planet Earth. And our planet, the place we live on, is also in Space.

This question is a great example of a seven-year-old’s relentless curiosity. My son Vishnu is now eight and the questions keep coming, but I share this one here to remind ourselves that we live on a planet.

If you take a moment to think about it, it’s pretty shocking. We live on a street, perhaps, but we also live on a planet.

When it all gets too much, I find it helps though, to remember that we live in outer space. I value it partly as a kind of cosmic insignificance therapy but mostly just as an amusing shift in perspective.

Our planet is now home to over eight billion human beings apparently, though I did not count that number myself. Most of us live in cities with tarmac and concrete and cars, though our planet’s original surface is water, ice, earth, and all that grows therein. We humans speak seven thousand languages across about two hundred nation-states and thirty-eight time zones, but many of us increasingly experience the whole thing as our arena, something we feel obliged to have a view on, take personal responsibility for, and act within. Due to travel and migration, economic interdependence, shared institutions, the news cycle, the internet, smartphone-enabled social media, perhaps now also AI, and certainly our ecological plight, there’s a kind of planetization going on.

From ‘Outer Space for Kids’ by SvetaDraws. For a hot planet, the sun looks pretty cool.

We may not speak Mandarin, Hindi, Ukrainian, or Portuguese, and we can’t possibly know how the world looks and feels to everyone. The majority of humans on the planet are focused on survival needs, and rarely have the luxury to think about bigger-than-self issues, but millions of us do have the privilege, which is also a kind of obligation, to think and talk about the state of the world as a whole.

To wonder what’s going on, who we are, and what we should do is the perennial human condition, but there used to be intuitive contextual boundaries to those inquiries – the religion, the home, the club, the community, the academic discipline, the language, the nation, even ‘The West’ (which you’ll find, for instance, in Japan).

In 2023, millions of people perceive context in a way that is at once intimate and expansive because the planetary perspective is waiting for us in the so-called phone in our pockets or handbags, next to our wallet, keys, and fluff du jour. With access to a miasma of facts and opinions on everything, many now talk of the state of the world with a disconcerting familiarity, as if they were describing the state of their bedroom.

Marshall McLuhan was on to this kind of perspective shift when he said: “When the rockets went into space, earth art and ecology were born”. Today, the climate crisis especially makes us talk of ‘the planet’ as if we were talking about our neighbour.

In his wonderful chapter for the Perspectiva compilation, Dispatches from a Time Between Worlds, Jeremy Johnson puts it like this:

“Our modernist social imaginary is breaking down, and a planetary imaginary, though still incipient at best, is nevertheless cohering. We can begin to say a few words about what this restructuring is like: in the Anthropocene human beings have begun to enfold the non-human world into their social imaginary, because that world can no longer be kept at a perceived and abstracted distance….the social imaginary is becoming the planetary imaginary.”

Well said, and it is indeed the time of ‘the more than human world’, though it’s a term, I note in passing, that comes from the human mind and warms the human heart.

We now know that trees appear to talk with each other through fungal networks, and bees not only help plants to have sex, but also do a waggle dance to convey to their hives where their next home should be. And I recently watched an Instagram video of a herd of elephants cross a road in Thailand and the last elephant to cross apparently gives thanks to the driver who waited with a nod of the head and a flick of the trunk. And on Twitter (oh how I miss you) I learned that dolphins that likes to get high on the toxins of a puffer fish. All the while, and every day, I know that thousands of chickens are slaughtered in factory farms around the world, and insecticide has a whole new meaning. Meanwhile, in my own family, it’s entirely possible that a pet dog called Tina wants to go for a walk in Troon.

We carry the dead and the unborn with us too, not to mention any notion we might have of Spirit within, between, and beyond it all. There is a good chance that there is intelligent life on other planets too, some chance that they are here watching us already, and I’m curious to know what their equivalent of popcorn would be. Yet I find it more helpful to suppose that our sentience and consciousness and language and culture might be a unique intergalactic achievement. Rather than imagine this world as one of many, I prefer to see it as unique, one of a kind, because as far as we know that’s what it is. We now risk destroying something unfathomably precious, and many rightly feel moved to protect it. I know I do.

But is this not absurd? Me and the planet, as if we were mates?

We experience the world of many parts as a discombobulating whole because we, too, are discombobulating wholes of many parts. This curious 21st-century sense of the big world being the arena for the attention and agency of a relatively small self is increasingly common, and it is a source of both dissonance and inspiration - beguiling might be the word. Some call this internet-infused feeling metamodern, but you don’t have to.

We are now several years into noticing that issue-based thinking within bounded contexts, even on matters as huge as climate collapse, is just not working. The impact of planetization is that whatever else our personal, social, and political context may be, there is now always a planetary context too.    

This is all an introduction to something I haven’t written yet. I’m curious to know what readers think should follow…