What if the planet doesn't want to be governed?
Musings on language as we flirt with the apocalypse
Hello. Tomorrow I’ll be co-hosting a seminar at University College London (UCL) on the challenge of planetary governance. I have written briefly about planetisation here before, and a recent book, Children of a Modest Star by Jonathan S. Blake and Nils Gilman has created significant interest in the subject. To give an example of what’s at stake, 90% of the Amazon forest is in the territory of Brazil, but that part of the planet is also an integral feature of a transnational ecosystem, which begs the question: should Brazil be able to do whatever they like with it? And what follows if the answer is no? That’s the kind of thing we’ll be exploring, but there are also questions of security in a world that is not defined by defending territorial boundaries. And I hear Geopolitical Ecology and Chips is on the menu, so I’m looking forward to it.
I’ve been reading about The Law of Three in Gurdjieff and Bourgeault in preparation for my next post on The Threeness of the World, but for now, since I have just finished drafting some thoughts ahead of tomorrow’s event, I thought I should share them with the wider world.
Yours Aye,
Jonathan.
“Thank you for inviting me to explore The Premise and Promise of Planetary Governance at The Global Governance Institute at UCL. From these words alone I see intimations of an institutional identity crisis and an emerging paradox. In light of where we are geologically (teetering at the far edge of the Holocene), ecologically (transgressing planetary boundaries) and historically (metacrisis), a shift in what Queloz calls our conceptual practice, from globalisation to planetisation, looks timely, necessary and welcome. A globe is a sphere above all, and a mere shape that does not need cosmological, geological or ecological context to be what it is. A planet, on the other hand, is a bio-physical phenomenon that shares a sun and a story with other planets, and that story includes the history of Earth as a precious and generative habitat and a future where the planet’s habitability is in jeopardy.1234
Yet the words global and governance work much better together, not merely because of the alliteration. In its emphasis on human entanglement with non-human life, the decoupling of sovereignty from territory, and - let’s not forget - the way it insists, as if as a spiritual injunction, on foregrounding our breathtaking cosmological context - the planetary perspective ridicules the very notion of governance as a matter of control, regulation and enforcement. So at first blush, yes, it’s time to talk of planetary governance, but also, this might be a constructive category error. Is it too much to hope that ‘planetary governance’ will prove to be a pivotal conceptual practice that enables us to muster together a working agreement, some sense of shared meaning and purpose perhaps, about why we are on this planet other than to govern it?5
In terms of the seminar’s subtitle, Constituting the Political in the Anthropocene, it is not clear to me that we are in the Anthropocene. Do we not care that this time last year some venerable geologists assembled under the auspices of The Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy, no less, and voted against the proposal to formalize the Anthropocene epoch by a resounding 12-4 score? Maybe there’s life in the old Holocene yet? And what of Jason Moore’s Capitalocene that says humanity is not the problem, and we need a term to point instead to the world-ecology of extractive capitalism that organises labour, nature, value (and arguably attention too)? And Donna Haraway’s Chthulucene goes further, in being transgressive of what she calls these ‘exterminating’ notions of Anthropos and Capital, pointing instead towards the need to ‘stay with the trouble’ and ‘make kin’ with the more-than-human-world. Chthulucene is a bloody awkward word, truly! But that’s the point I guess - to discomfort and thereby reorient us with a composite of the Greek khthon referring to the myriad beings of the earth, and kainos as the radically new. Are we truly paying attention to what is happening?6 7
Perhaps Anthropocene is a viable generic placeholder for this contested terrain. Perhaps. But what if our play-nicely conceptual pragmatism and ‘this-will-do’ complacency amount to the same mistake as globalisation in serving to foreclose perception of the deeper and truer context of a world system unravelling? What if compounding real pollution with conceptual pollution is a new frontier of academic negligence? How much do we think words should matter? Does our prevailing political ontology militate against an enacted ecological epistemology or is something more straightforward at stake?8
In The Ethics of Terminology in 1902, Charles Sanders Peirce argues “It is wrong to say that good language is important to good thought, merely; for it is of the essence of it.” Peirce speaks of the need for awareness of “how to develop concepts which are so precise that they can contain and communicate the complexity of ideas and theories”. Of his seven guidelines for developing terminology, the first is “to take pains to avoid following any recommendation of an arbitrary nature as to the use of philosophical terminology”. There is of course a place for pragmatism, but let us not be arbitrary.9
For instance, if the aim is to constitute the political, what does that mean? Are we on an epic quest to locate the appropriate arena for the contest of power, to allow the human struggle to continue? Or is it more like a declaration of despair, an SOS that says we simply do not have an operative collective agency commensurate with the challenges of our times? And if that is the aim, perhaps it is a mistake to begin with institutions and thereby risk reifying a morphology of governance that is failing us.10
What do we want? And where, then, should we begin?”
Prefixing the World: Why the polycrisis is a permacrisis, which is actually a metacrisis, which is not really a crisis at all by Jonathan Rowson. Perspectiva, September 06, 2023.
For an overview of Planetary Boundaries see Rockström, J., Donges, J.F., Fetzer, I. et al. Planetary Boundaries guide humanity’s future on Earth. Nat Rev Earth Environ 5, 773–788 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43017-024-00597-z or Katherine Richardson et al., Earth beyond six of nine planetary boundaries. Sci. Adv.9,eadh2458(2023).DOI:10.1126/sciadv.adh2458
Queloz, Matthieu, The Practical Origins of Ideas: Genealogy as Conceptual Reverse-Engineering (Oxford, 2021; online edn, Oxford Academic, 22 Apr. 2021), https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198868705.001.0001, accessed 19 Mar. 2025.
This idea of shifting emphasis from sustainability to habitability can be found in Blake, J. S., & Gilman, N. (2024). Children of a modest star: Planetary thinking for an age of crises. Stanford University Press. A recent paper deepens and refines the idea: Vinke, A. (2024). Habitability for a connected, unequal and changing world. Global Environmental Change, 84, 103552. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2024.103552
I explore this feeling in more depth in Rowson, J. (2021, April 26). Tasting the pickle: Ten flavours of meta-crisis and the appetite for a new civilisation. Perspectiva. https://systems-souls-society.com/tasting-the-pickle-ten-flavours-of-meta-crisis-and-the-appetite-for-a-new-civilisation/ and Rowson, J. (2020, December 2). Metamodernism and the perception of context: The cultural between, the political after and the mystic beyond. Perspectiva. https://systems-souls-society.com/metamodernism-and-the-perception-of-context-the-cultural-between-the-political-after-and-the-mystic-beyond/
Moore, J. W. (2019, April 1). World accumulation and planetary life, or, why capitalism will not survive until the last tree is cut. Political Economy Research Centre (PERC). https://www.perc.org.uk/project_posts/world-accumulation-planetary-life-capitalism-will-not-survive-last-tree-cut/
Haraway, D. J. (2016). Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press.
For ecology as a form of perception and understanding, see Ophuls, W. (2011). Plato’s revenge: Politics in the age of ecology. MIT Press. See also: Guattari, F. (2000). The three ecologies (I. Pindar & P. Sutton, Trans.). The Athlone Press. (Original work published 1989)
Peirce, C. S. (1902). The ethics of terminology. In C. Hartshorne & P. Weiss (Eds.), Collected papers of Charles Sanders Peirce (Vol. 2, pp. 319–322). Harvard University Press.
For musings on the challenge of operative collective agency, see Rowson, J. (2024, March 3). We are the world. Perspecteeva.
I agree humanity per se is not the problem - it's corporations, the market-driven systems, and their resulting egregores. Interesting to see this syntax in your title. No, the planet does not want to be governed. What? the planet has a will? has preferences? Well, yes - why not? Why not assume that the planet 'calls the shots' for the whole biosphere - and we don't. What humans are doing is ruinous, but I feel the existential threat is to ourselves, not the planet. I expect Gaia will do what it must to survive in reaction to our egregious deviation from the program.
James Lovelock's Gaia Hypothesis never got its due. As a scientist he took pains not to go beyond the evidence and suggest the earth was a sentient, purposeful being. But reading between the lines, I think there was a unifying principle around which humanity might have rallied. David Abram, a deep ecologist and author of "Becoming Animal" said with intuitive confidence: "We live immersed in intelligence, enveloped and informed by a creativity we cannot fathom." Mystery abounds - yet perhaps we could have fathomed Gaia, and even learned to cooperate with it, if fifty years ago our institutions had taken the idea seriously, and poured research into the full extent of the self-regulating systems of our planet. Lovelock probably only scratched the surface. Only the maverick Lynn Margulis dared push the envelope a bit further, against the current of "acceptable" science.
Anyhow, thank you Jonathan for all you do to articulate these issues and promote responsibility in the sense-making space.
Nicely put, sir. Perhaps Brits see the globe more clearly than we Americans. Might that be based in memory of actually staffing a global empire in the field, rather than just sending in the occasional army and touring musicians? Or perhaps a British fondness for gardening?