Year: 2026
Type: book-chapter
Abstract: The planet enters politics.Not only world politics, but the very idea of politics.We are just beginning to grasp what that entails.Over the past decades, the natu ral sciences have increasingly approached the Earth not as a fragmented collection of systems but as a planet to be "made whole" (Dry 2019).From the metabolic analogies of ecological research and Gaia theory (Commoner 1971; Lovelock and Margulis 1974; Odum 1971), to the integrative logics of Earth system science (Schellnhuber 1999; Steffen et al. 2005), from planetary health (Whitmee et al. 2015) to planetary emergency (Lenton et al. 2019), scientific inquiry has sought to render the planet as a coherent object.More recently, this planetary turn has extended into the humanities and social sciences.From planetary justice (Lobo et al. 2024; Pedersen et al. 2024) to planetary law (French and Kotzé 2021; Lawrence 2018) and planetary histories (Bashford et al. 2023; Chakrabarty 2021), scholars are increasingly exploring the "planetary" as a horizon for their respective disciplines (cf.Gilman 2024).Across these fields, the "planetary" names both an epistemic prob lem and a political challenge: How should we reckon with the conditions of a world that exceeds humans while shaping them at every turn?Focusing on this active shaping, what happens if we view the Earth not primarily as a metabolic system but as an agential complex, a planet not merely to be known or managed, but acted or even governed with?Fi nally, what does a truly planetary politics look like?This book demonstrates that the concept of the planet-and our planetary condition in particular-offers a lens that changes how we grasp the human condition and how we conceive, analyze, and do politics.We therefore identify the agencies that co-constitute this condition and spell out 1 Introduction: Emerging Awareness of Our Planetary
Source: The MIT Press eBooks
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W7225160200