https://www.scribd.com/read/498561397/The-Climate-of-History-in-a-Planetary-Age
The Climate of History in a Planetary Age
Dipesh Chakrabarty
OVERVIEW
CONTENTS
Contents
Frontmatter
Publicly Available Download PDF i
Contents
Publicly Available Download PDF vii
Introduction: Intimations of the Planetary
Requires Authentication 1
Part I. The Globe and the Planet
Requires Authentication 21
Part II. The Difficulty of Being Modern
Requires Authentication 93
Part III. Facing the Planetary
Requires Authentication 153
Postscript: The Global Reveals the Planetary
A Conversation with Bruno Latour
Requires Authentication 205
Acknowledgments
Requires Authentication 219
Notes
Requires Authentication 227
Index
Requires Authentication 277
==
CONTENTS
Overview
About this book
For the past decade, historian Dipesh Chakrabarty has been one of the most influential scholars addressing the meaning of climate change. Climate change, he argues, upends long-standing ideas of history, modernity, and globalization. The burden of The Climate of History in a Planetary Age is to grapple with what this means and to confront humanities scholars with ideas they have been reluctant to reconsider—from the changed nature of human agency to a new acceptance of universals.
Chakrabarty argues that we must see ourselves from two perspectives at once: the planetary and the global.
This distinction is central to Chakrabarty’s work—the globe is a human-centric construction, while a planetary perspective intentionally decenters the human.
Featuring wide-ranging excursions into historical and philosophical literatures, The Climate of History in a Planetary Age boldly considers how to frame the human condition in troubled times. As we open ourselves to the implications of the Anthropocene, few writers are as likely as Chakrabarty to shape our understanding of the best way forward.
Author information
Dipesh Chakrabartyis the Lawrence A. Kimpton Distinguished Service Professor of History, South Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago.He is the author ofThe Calling of History: Sir Jadunath Sarkar and His Empire of Truth, also published by the Universityof Chicago Press.He is the recipient of the 2014 Toynbee Prize, which is given to a distinguished practitioner of global history.
Reviews
“With his new masterwork, Chakrabarty confirms that he is one of the most creative and philosophically-minded historians writing today. The oppositions he proposes between theglobalof globalization and theglobalof global warming, between theworldand theplanet, betweensustainabilityandhabitabilityare illuminating and effective for thinking and acting through our highly uncertain and disoriented times.”
— François Hartog, author of 'Chronos'
“One of the first thinkers to reckon with the concept of the Anthropocene and its relation to humanism and its critics, Chakrabarty forges new territory in his account of the planetary.
If globalism was an era of human and market interconnection, the planetary marks the intrusion of geological forces, transforming both the concept of ‘the human’ and its accompanying sense of agency. This is a tour de force of critical thinking that will prove to be a game changer for the humanities.”
— Claire Colebrook, Pennsylvania State University
Topics
Historical Periods
History
Pre-History
====
The Climate of History in a Planetary Age First Edition, Kindle Edition
by Dipesh Chakrabarty (Author) Format: Kindle Edition
4.3 out of 5 stars (4.3) 47 ratings
See all formats and editions
eTextbook
$24.73
For the past decade, historian Dipesh Chakrabarty has been one of the most influential scholars addressing the meaning of climate change. Climate change, he argues, upends long-standing ideas of history, modernity, and globalization. The burden of The Climate of History in a Planetary Age is to grapple with what this means and to confront humanities scholars with ideas they have been reluctant to reconsider—from the changed nature of human agency to a new acceptance of universals.
Chakrabarty argues that we must see ourselves from two perspectives at once: the planetary and the global. This distinction is central to Chakrabarty’s work—the globe is a human-centric construction, while a planetary perspective intentionally decenters the human. Featuring wide-ranging excursions into historical and philosophical literatures, The Climate of History in a Planetary Age boldly considers how to frame the human condition in troubled times. As we open ourselves to the implications of the Anthropocene, few writers are as likely as Chakrabarty to shape our understanding of the best way forward.
Editorial Reviews
Review
“With his new masterwork, Chakrabarty confirms that he is one of the most creative and philosophically-minded historians writing today. The oppositions he proposes between the global of globalization and the global of global warming, between the world and the planet, between sustainability and habitability are illuminating and effective for thinking and acting through our highly uncertain and disoriented times.” ― François Hartog, author of 'Chronos'
“One of the first thinkers to reckon with the concept of the Anthropocene and its relation to humanism and its critics, Chakrabarty forges new territory in his account of the planetary. If globalism was an era of human and market interconnection, the planetary marks the intrusion of geological forces, transforming both the concept of ‘the human’ and its accompanying sense of agency. This is a tour de force of critical thinking that will prove to be a game changer for the humanities.” ― Claire Colebrook, Pennsylvania State University
"Historian Dipesh Chakrabarty confronts the ‘planeticide’ by calling for a humanistic and critical approach to the Anthropocene. . . . Ever alert to the holistic and far reaching vision upheld by ‘deep history,’ the Chicago professor re-raises the old question of the human condition in the new framework of the geobiological history of the planet." ― Arquitectura Viva
"The Climate of History in a Planetary Age, by Dipesh Chakrabarty, is in my judgment the most compelling and encompassing book by a humanist on the complexities and asymmetries of the Anthropocene to date." ― The Contemporary Condition
“For Chakrabarty, ‘global’ does not refer to the entirety of the world, but rather to a particular mode of thought. . . . In critiquing the global, Chakrabarty offers another mode of thinking that can perhaps provide the philosophical grounding for a truly ecological approach. He terms it the ‘planetary.’ Chakrabarty argues the ‘planetary’ is not a unified totality, but rather ‘a dynamic ensemble of relationships.’ While the global mode of thought retains the centrality of the human observer, the planetary mode of thought decentres the human and its apprehension of the world. The human becomes only one node within a much more complex and multivalent system of actors, both human and non-human.” -- Christopher McAteer ― Green European Journal
"In The Climate of History in a Planetary Age, University of Chicago historian and theorist Dipesh Chakrabarty provides an expansive, but hardly exhaustive, overview of the Anthropocene, focusing on how historians, in particular, have grappled with the conditions of a world under physical duress. As humans have become a 'geological force' in this new epoch and the earth has itself become an archive, with human behavior imprinted in the fossil record and ice caps, we are at the cusp of a new understanding of the agency of humankind and other terrestrial beings. This 'planetary' understanding can, in turn, offer a new ethical paradigm for inhabiting this afflicted present, and can apply to remote pasts and possible futures. Such, at least, is the hope expressed in Chakrabarty’s book." ― The Hedgehog Review
"Immensely clarifying and illuminating. . . . while Chakrabarty frequently invokes research produced by natural scientists, his argument carves out an important space for humanists in interpreting and responding to the consequences of anthropogenic geological agency." ― Isis Journal --This text refers to the paperback edition.
About the Author
Dipesh Chakrabarty is the Lawrence A. Kimpton Distinguished Service Professor of History and South Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. He is the recipient of the 2014 Toynbee Prize, which is given to a distinguished practitioner of global history. --This text refers to the paperback edition.
Product details
Print length : 292 pages
Customer Reviews: 4.3 out of 5 stars (4.3) 47 ratings
Top reviews from the United States
Ekkehard-Teja Wilke
5.0 out of 5 stars pleased
Reviewed in the United States on January 20, 2022
Verified Purchase
useful for footnotes
2 people found this helpful
Helpful
Report
dr. null set (ABD)
5.0 out of 5 stars Is that the sound of paradigms shifting?
Reviewed in the United States on October 27, 2021
Verified Purchase
Beats me.
Chakrabarty challenges foundational assumptions about historical practice and the meanings of “time” and “experience,” among other abstract nouns. The arguments are lucid, constructive — if not always mellifluous. Entirely worth the effort, however.
Helpful
Report
See all reviews
Top reviews from other countries
Alokmay Datta
5.0 out of 5 stars A paradigm shift in understanding global warming
Reviewed in India on January 9, 2022
Verified Purchase
This is a book that will change the way we look at the impact of human globalization on the ecology of our planet. It brings in the tools of complex systems analysis in the study of our recent history.
2 people found this helpful
Report
Amazon Customer
5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent read on Climate Change
Reviewed in India on August 18, 2021
Verified Purchase
Amazing Sociological work giving the distinction between global and planetary in respect of Climate Change
2 people found this helpful
Report
Amazon Customer
5.0 out of 5 stars A must read for the human world we share
Reviewed in India on September 17, 2021
Verified Purchase
One of the finest book by Deepesh Chakrabaty. Students of environment and ecology will like it most
Customer image
2 people found this helpful
Report
SAHIL BHAGAT
5.0 out of 5 stars Insightful and Informative
Reviewed in India on July 31, 2021
Verified Purchase
A thoroughly researched work that invokes deep questions. A great read. Just finished.
2 people found this helpful
Report
See all reviews
===
Dipesh Chakrabarty
The Climate of History in a Planetary Age
Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2021
ISBN-13: 978-0-226-73286-2 (Paper) $25.00; 978-0-226-10050-0 (HB) $95.00; 978-0-22673305-0 (e-book) $24.99. 284 pp
Dipesh Chakrabarty’s The Climate of History in a Planetary Age is a highly important book addressing the challenge of the climate change for historical studies. According to him, historians can no longer dismiss material realities and non-human world as the climate change has irrefutably demonstrated how human history is conjoined to the history of the planet Earth. Drawing inspiration from many prominent thinkers, including but not limiting to Hannah Arendt, Carl Schmitt, Bruno Latour and Jan Zalasiewicz, Chakrabarty presents a strong and well-founded opinion on the current direction of the discipline of history. The book is divided into three parts consisting of eight essays and a postscript. The essays are concise but, at the same time, informative. The postscript is written in the form of dialogue between Chakrabarty and Bruno Latour summing up the themes discussed in the essays. The structure of the book is practical for its reflective theme and the essays are well bound together.
In part one, The Globe and the Planet, Chakrabarty lays the problem on the table. The major argument Chakrabarty makes is that the word ‘global’ in ‘global warming’ and ‘globalisation’ does not point to the same thing. The globe in globalisation is human centred. It is the history of how humans created the sense of the globe through exploration and technology; how the Earth was shrunk to an inward-looking web of relationships between humans and their institutions. Globe in global warming, instead, marks the wholeness of the planet (pp. 71–78). It does not exclude anything on Earth and human is only one species among countless others.
In the long course of the historical studies however, the history of the Earth and the recent human history, which, according to Chakrabarty many call the capitalism, are addressed separately (pp. 49–51). This leads Chakrabarty to ponder the different temporalities merging in the problem of climate change and how this affects the framing of it. Carbon can cycle in the Earth-system for hundreds of thousands of years having complex consequences to the climate and to life on Earth. For the everyday politics in human scale, these kinds of slow and long processes are irrelevant, even though the climate change is (quite evidently) anthropogenic and affects everybody and everything through the same planetary systems. However, observes Chakrabarty, our political institutions and historical understanding of them is very human centred. Climate change is mostly addressed through the issue of sustainability and the limited resources on the planet, that is, as a problem of human inequality. According to Chakrabarty, it is important to notice how the limited-resources -discourse is deeply human centred perspective towards the world; it puts human concerns first (pp. 81–82).
Understanding the climate change only as a problem of human inequality very effectively reduces everything non-human out of the issue even though human as a species represents only a fraction of the life forms on the planet. In part two, The Difficulty of Being Modern, Chakrabarty proposes that the long history of the planet and multicellular life on it, and the much recent history of humans and capitalism must be brought together to understand the complexity of the whole issue. Even though non-human agency and human’s role as an only possible historical agent have been long debated among environmental historians, not many have delved as deep as Chakrabarty does. Chakrabarty pursues to show how concretely our daily lives and well-being is closely bound to the non-human world and the grand scale processes of the Earth-system. He asserts that while we cannot dismiss the questions of human flourishing and justice between humans in this time of human induced global warming, reducing the connection between human bodies to the non-human elements of the Earth may condemn the whole object of human flourishing into failure (p. 117). We cannot reduce ourselves only to bodies of stardust nor to great minds as we have already tangled our politics to the grand scale geological processes. Thus, argues Chakrabarty, human history comes entangled also to the natural history of the Earth, which is why human centred history of globalisation falls short in understanding climate-change in all its complexity.
In part three, Facing the Planetary, which is a witty reference to a William Connolly’s book of the same name from 2017, Chakrabarty tries to find ways to understand the disproportional timescales of global human history and the long, deep history of the Earth. He observes that the suggested new geological epoch, the Anthropocene, with all its problems, might be suitable concept to make sense of the issue. According to him, there is: “…a constant conceptual traffic between earth history and world history”, when Anthropocene is debated (p. 155). Chakrabarty points that Anthropocene is not only a measurement for geological time, but also, and originally, a measure for the extent of human impact on the Earth. Thus, the concept falls somewhere in between of natural sciences and humanities (pp 155–156). Even though there are several unsettled questions regarding the Anthropocene (when it started? what started it? should not it be called Capitalocene? and so on) it manages to bring earth-scientists and humanists together. In this, claims Chakrabarty, lies the explanatory value of the concept. Anthropocene is somewhat widely used and bears today features of a “buzzword” as if it explains well contours of the present climate crisis. Chakrabarty avoids this kind of hype and skilfully analyses the concept making it easier to grasp.
The book is elegantly argued and plural in its views. Chakrabarty does not try to prove himself right or others wrong, which is much welcomed approach in this time of black-and-white positions and heated debates in media as well as in academia over the climate change, Anthropocene and human inequality. What is more, the clarity of the text helps to underscore the importance of the argument. Chakrabarty has a remarkable ability to write clearly on complex issues such as the above-mentioned Anthropocene or, for instance, non-human agency. This makes the book easily accessible for wide audience from different fields of research and for researchers as well as students on different levels, but also to the larger public interested in the role of climate-change, the Anthropocene and the Earth in history. Reading the book was not only a very instructive experience; it was a pleasure.
ATTE ARFFMAN
University of Jyväskylä
===
===
* Introduction *
Intimations of the Planetary
For my part, these troubles move me neither to laughter nor again to tears, but rather to philosophizing, and to closer observation
of human nature. For I do not think it right to laugh at nature, and far less to grieve over it, reflecting that men, like all else, are
only a part of nature, and that I do not know how each part of nature harmonises with the whole, and how it coheres with other
parts.
Baruch Spinoza to Henry Oldenburg (1675)¹
If Hegel—a self-declared admirer of Spinoza—were alive to plumb the depths of our sense of the present, he would notice something
imperceptibly but inexorably seeping into the everyday historical consciousness of those who consume their daily diet of news: an
awareness of the planet and of its geobiological history. This is not happening everywhere at the same pace, for the global world re-
mains undeniably uneven. The current pandemic, the rise of authoritarian, racist, and xenophobic regimes across the globe, and dis-
cussions of renewable energy, fossil fuel, climate change, extreme weather events, water shortage, loss of biodiversity, the Anthro-
pocene, and so on, all signal to us, however vaguely, that something is amiss with our planet and that this may have to do with human
actions. Geological events and events constituting the history of life until now have been the preserve of experts and specialists. But
now the planet, however dimly sensed, is emerging as a matter of broad and deep human concern alongside our more familiar appre-
hensions about capitalism, injustice, and inequality. The COVID-19 pandemic is the most recent and tragic illustration of how the ex-
panding and accelerating processes of globalization can trigger changes in the much longer-term history of life on the planet.² This
book is about this emergent object-category of human concern, the planet, and how it affects our familiar stories of globalization. This
conceptual shift has happened in my lifetime, and I hope I will be forgiven if I begin with a few autobiographical remarks.
Coming of age in the inegalitarian, turbulent, and left-leaning city of Calcutta in the 1960s, I grew up—like many other Indians of my
generation—to value and desire an egalitarian and just social order. The enthusiasms of my adolescence later found an academic ex-
pression in my early work on labor history and in my association with the Indian Subaltern Studies project, which aimed to acknowl-
edge the agency of socially subordinate people in the making of their own histories. Our thoughts were also profoundly influenced by
the global rise of postcolonial, gender, cultural, minority, Indigenous, and other studies that the Australian academic Kenneth Ruthven
gathered in the early 1990s under the rubric of “the new humanities.”³
Caught up in the profound historical changes that the swirling currents of globalization had brought into the ordinary lives of mid-
dle-class Indians like me, I was at this time working as a historian and social theorist at the University of Melbourne. Even after my
move to the University of Chicago in 1995, I remained preoccupied with questions that marked popular struggles in my youth, ques-
tions of rights, of modernity and freedom, and of a transition to a world more rational and democratic than the ones I had known. My
book Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (2000) was a product of these years in which I attempted,
through a postcolonial frame, to develop means for understanding what anticolonial and modernizing elites in the formerly colonized
countries did and could do, working sometimes at the limits of the imperial European intellectual legacies they inevitably inherited.
This was what I could bring to the discussion of the story of the globe that European empires, anticolonial modernizers, and global
capital had fashioned together, a theme that dominated history and other interpretive disciplines in the final decades of the last century
and into this one.⁴
Something happened in the early part of this century that forced a shift in my own perspective. In 2003 a devastating bushfire in the
Australian Capital Territory took some human lives as well as the lives of many nonhuman beings, gutted hundreds of houses, and de-
stroyed all forests and parks that surround the famous “bush capital” of the country, Canberra. These were places I had grown to love
while pursuing my doctoral studies there. The sense of bereavement occasioned by these tragic losses made me curious about the his-
tory of these particular fires and soon, as I read up on their causes, brought the news of anthropogenic climate change into the hu-
manocentric thought world I used to inhabit. Scientists claimed that humans, in their billions and through their technology, had be-
come a geophysical force capable of changing, with fearsome consequences, the climate system of the planet as a whole. I also learned
of the burgeoning scientific literature on the Anthropocene hypothesis—the proposition that human impact on the planet was such as
to require a change in the geological chronology of earth history to recognize that the planet had crossed the thresholds of the
Holocene epoch (ca. 11,700 years old) and had entered an epoch deserving of a new name, the Anthropocene.⁵
The figure of the human had doubled, in effect, over the course of my lifetime. There was (and still is) the human of humanist histo-
ries—the human capable of struggling for equality and fairness among other humans while caring for the environment and certain
forms of nonhuman life. And then there was this other human, the human as a geological agent, whose history could not be recounted
from within purely humanocentric views (as most narratives of capitalism and globalization are). The use of the word agency in the ex-
pression “geological agency” was very different from the concept of “agency” that my historian-heroes of the 1960s—E. P. Thompson,
for instance, or our teacher Ranajit Guha—had authored and celebrated. This agency was not autonomous and conscious, as it was in
Thompson’s or Guha’s social histories, but that of an impersonal and unconscious geophysical force, the consequence of collective
human activity.
The idea of anthropogenic and planetary climate change does not face much academic challenge these days, but the idea of the An-
thropocene has been much debated by both scientists and humanist scholars.⁶ The debate has also made the term into a popular
and—as usually happens with such debates—a polysemic category in the humanities today. Yet whether or not geologists agree to for-
malize the label “Anthropocene” one day, the data amassed and analyzed over the last several years by the Working Group on the An-
thropocene set up by the International Commission of Stratigraphy in London makes one thing clear: ours is not just a global age; we
live on the cusp of the global and what may be called “the planetary.”⁷ In thinking of the last few centuries of human pasts and of
human futures yet to come we need to orient ourselves to both what we have come to call the globe and to a new historical-
philosophical entity called the planet. The latter is not the same as the globe, or the earth, or the world, the categories we have used so
far to organize modern history. The intensification of capitalist globalization and the consequent crises of global warming, along with
all the debates that have attended the studies of these phenomena, have ensured that the planet—or more properly, as I use it here,
the Earth system—has swum into our ken even across the intellectual horizons of scholars in the humanities.
The globe, I argue, is a humanocentric construction; the planet, or the Earth system, decenters the human. The doubled figure of the
human now requires us to think about how various forms of life, our own and others’, may be caught up in historical processes that
bring together the globe and the planet both as projected entities and as theoretical categories and thus mix the limited timescale over
which modern humans and humanist historians contemplate history with the inhumanly vast timescales of deep history.
Capital, Technology, and the Planetary
The globe and the planet—as categories standing for the two narratives of globalization and global warming—are connected. What
connects them are the phenomena of modern capitalism (using the term loosely) and technology, both global in their reach. After all,
greenhouse gas emissions have increased almost exclusively through the pursuit of industrial and postindustrial forms of modern-
ization and prosperity. No nation has ever spurned this model of development, whatever their criticisms of one another. As a result of
the spread of industrialization, as historian John McNeill has pointed out, the twentieth century became “a time of extraordinary
change” in human history. “The human population increased from 1.5 to 6 billions, the world’s economy increased fifteen fold, energy
use increased from thirteen to fourteen fold, freshwater use increased nine fold, and the irrigated areas by fivefold.”⁸ Given this global
pursuit of industry and development, it is understandable that the proponents of climate justice should see global warming as a
consequence of uneven capitalist development inflected by class, gender, and race and look suspiciously even on the topic of plan-
etary climate change as an attempt to deny the less developed nations the “carbon space” they might need in order to industrialize.
Yet the history of capitalism alone, as it has been told until now, is not enough for us to make sense of the human situation today.
This has to do with the dawning realization that many of today’s “natural” disasters are consequences of changes that human socioe-
conomic institutions and technologies cause in processes that Earth system scientists regard as planetary. These processes until now
have operated mostly independently of human activities but have nevertheless been central to the flourishing of human and other
forms of life. The more we acknowledge our emerging planetary agency, the clearer it is that we now have to think about aspects of the
planet that humans normally just take for granted as they go about the business of their everyday lives. Take the case of the atmos-
phere and the share of oxygen in it. The atmosphere is as fundamental to our existence as the simple act of breathing. But what is the
history of this atmosphere? Do we need to think about that history today in thinking about human futures? Yes, we do. For the last 375
million years—since the evolution of large forests, that is—the concentration of oxygen has been maintained by certain processes on
the planet at a level that ensured that animals did not suffocate from lack of oxygen and forests did not burn from an overabundance
of it. Diverse dynamic processes maintain the atmosphere in its current equilibrium. Oxygen being a reactive gas, the air needs a con-
stant supply of fresh oxygen. Some of this oxygen comes even from tiny sea creatures like plankton. If human activities affecting the
sea completely destroyed such plankton, we would thereby destroy a major source of oxygen. In short, humans have acquired the
capacity to interfere with planetary processes but not necessarily—at least not as yet—the capacity to fix them.
Our abilities to shape the planet are largely technological, so technology also is an intrinsic part of this unfolding story about hu-
mans. The geologist Peter Haff recently introduced the concept of the “technosphere” to characterize the global system of human
technology:
The proliferation of technology across the globe defines the technosphere—the set of large-scale networked technologies that
underlie and make possible rapid extraction from the Earth of large quantities of free energy and subsequent power generation, long-
distance, nearly instantaneous communication, rapid long-distance energy and mass transport, the existence of modern govern-
mental and other bureaucracies, high-intensity industrial and manufacturing operations including regional, continental and global
distribution of food and other goods, and myriad additional “artificial” or “non-natural” processes without which modern civi-
lization and its present 7 × 10⁹ human constituents could not exist.⁹
According to Haff’s argument, the human population at its current size is “deeply dependent on the existence of the technosphere”
without which it “would quickly decline towards its Stone Age base of no more than ten million . . . individuals.”¹⁰ Technology, one
could then say with Haff, has become a condition for biology, for the existence of humans in such massive numbers on the planet.¹¹
Haff’s thesis about the technosphere enables us to see how “unencumbered,” in Carl Schmitt’s terms, technology has become
today—and how, given the power of technology, humans have already made Earth into a spaceship for themselves and other forms of
life that depend for their own existence on human flourishing. In his 1958 “Dialogue on New Space,” Schmitt articulated through the
voice of a fictional character, Mr. Altman (an old historian), a fundamental distinction between living on land and living on a ship at
sea. At the core of “a terrestrial existence,” he said, there stood “house and property, marriage, family and hereditary right” along with
domestic and other animals. Technology, when present in this kind of life, would be encumbered with all that such a life entailed.
Technology per se would never be in charge of this life. With the conquest of the seas, however, the ship came to embody what
Schmitt called “unencumbered technology.” Unlike the house of “terrestrial existence,” at the core of “maritime existence” was the
ship, a “much more intensely . . . technological means than the house.” On the ship (as on airplanes today), life is crucially depen-
dent on the proper functioning of technology.¹² If technology fails, life faces disaster. If Haff’s argument is right that the technosphere
today has become the primary condition for the survival of seven (soon to be nine) billion humans, we could say that we have already
made Earth into something like Schmitt’s ship in that its capacity to support our many billion lives is now dependent on the existence
of the technosphere itself. In a later article, where Haff distinguishes between a “social Anthropocene”—one “that engages the condi-
tions, motivations and histories of the world’s peoples, including the role of politics”—and a “geological Anthropocene,” he reiterates
that it is important for humans “to recognise that the technosphere has agency, and that agency is not the same as our own.”¹³
The technosphere extends deeply into “subterranean rock mass via mines, boreholes and other underground constructions” and
into the “marine realm” as well—not only through ships and submarines but also through “oil platforms and pipelines, piers, docks,
[and] aquaculture structures.”¹⁴ On dry land, it encompasses our “houses, factories, and farms” along with our “computer systems,
smartphones, and CDs” and “the waste in landfills and spoil heaps.” The technosphere “is staggering in scale, with some thirty trillion
tons representing a mass of more than 50 kilos for every square metre of the Earth’s surface.” “The technosphere,” observes geologist
Mark Williams, “can be said to have budded off the biosphere and arguably is now at least partly parasitic on it.” And compared to the
biosphere, “it is remarkably poor at recycling its own materials, as our burgeoning landfill sites show.”¹⁵
Equally striking are the figures illustrating the role humans have played in reshaping the landscape of the planet not only on its sur-
face but down to the continental shelves. The planet’s land and seafloor have been transformed by humans. “By the end of the 20th
century, sea-bottom trawling was taking place across an area of some 15 million km² each year. This now includes most of the world’s
continental shelves and significant areas of the upper continental slope, along with the upper surfaces of seamounts.”¹⁶ In 1994, ac-
cording to one estimate, “human earth moving caused 30 billion tons to be moved per year on a global basis.” A 2001 estimate gives
the figure of 57 billion tons per year. For comparison, the amount of sedimentation carried into the ocean by the world’s rivers each
year amounts to between 8.3 and 51.1 billion tons a year.¹⁷ Humans, say the geologist Colin Waters and his colleagues, “now move
more sediment around in this fashion [mining and quarrying] than all natural processes combined (26 Gt/yr).”¹⁸ Such a considerable
geomorphological and biological role cannot be separated from the history that connects capitalism with global warming.
If all this and much else about human impact on the planet suggest to Earth system scientists that the planet may have passed the
threshold of the Holocene and entered a new geological epoch altogether, we can then say that as humans we presently live in two dif-
ferent kinds of “now-time” (or what they call Jetztzeit in German) simultaneously: in our own awareness of ourselves, the “now” of
human history has become entangled with the long “now” of geological and biological timescales, something that has never happened
before in the history of humanity.¹⁹ True, earth-scale phenomena—earthquakes, for instance—erupted into our humanist narratives,
no doubt, but for the most part geological events such as the uplift or erosion of a mountain occurred so gradually that mountains
were seen as a constant and unchanging background to human stories. In our own lifetime, however, we have become aware that the
background is no longer just a background. We are part of it, acting as a geological force and contributing to the loss of biodiversity
that may, in a few hundred years, become the sixth great extinction. Irrespective of whether the term is ever formalized or not, the An-
thropocene signifies the extent and the duration of our species’ modification of the earth’s geology, chemistry, and biology.²⁰
In thinking historically about humans in an age when intensive capitalist globalization has given rise to the threat of global warming
and mass extinction, we need to bring together conceptual categories that we have usually treated in the past as separate and virtually
unconnected. We need to connect deep and recorded histories and put geological time and the biological time of evolution in conver-
sation with the time of human history and experience. And this means telling the story of human empires—of colonial, racial, and gen-
dered oppressions—in tandem with the larger story of how a particular biological species, Homo sapiens, its technosphere, and other
species that coevolved with or were dependent on Homo sapiens came to dominate the biosphere, lithosphere, and the atmosphere of
this planet. We have to do all this, moreover, without ever taking our eyes off the individual human who continues to negotiate his or
her own phenomenological and everyday experience of life, death, and the world—experience that takes for granted a “world” that
today, ironically, no longer presents itself as simply given.²¹ The crisis at the planetary level percolates into our everyday life in medi-
ated forms and, one could argue, it even issues in part from decisions we make in everyday life (such as flying, eating meat, or using
fossil-fuel energy in other ways). But that does not mean that the human phenomenological experience of the world is over. True, we
are never distant from deep time and deep history. They run through our bodies and lives. Humans in everyday lives may be forgetful
of their evolved characteristics, but the design of all human artifacts, for instance, will always be based on the assumption that hu-
mans have binocular vision and opposable thumbs. Having big and complex brains may very well mean that our big and deep histo-
ries can exist alongside and through our small and shallow pasts, that our internal sense of time—that phenomenologists study, for
instance—will not always align itself with evolutionary or geological chronologies.²²
Being Political at the Limits of the Political
The coming together of human and nonhuman scales produces the political in the form of a paradox that calls into question previous
ways of thinking about and using that category.²³ My use of the word political is indebted to Hannah Arendt’s thoughts modified by
my reading of Carl Schmitt. The innate connection that exists between intergenerational time and Arendt’s conception of the political
allows us see why any action undertaken with the aim of addressing climate change over a time span covering the lives of multiple
generations is political (though no one solution will be to everybody’s satisfaction).²⁴
Readers of The Human Condition will remember that Arendt identified the human capacity for making use of individual
differences—in her terms, plurality—to create the new or the novel in human affairs as the source of “action.” “Action” is foundational
to her definition of the political. Action, Arendt wrote, “corresponds to the human condition of plurality, to the fact that men, not Man,
live on earth and inhabit the world.”²⁵ Action is “the political activity par excellence.” Action was also tied to the condition of natality—
the fact that we are all born as new and unique individuals. “Action in so far as it engages in founding and preserving political bodies,”
writes Arendt, “has the closest connection with the human condition of natality; the new beginning inherent in birth can make itself felt
in the world only because the newcomer possesses the capacity of beginning something anew, that is, of acting.”²⁶ The possibility of
newness, that is, natality—“and not mortality,” adds Arendt—remains “the central category of political, as distinguished from meta-
physical, thought.”²⁷ Arendt returned to the idea of natality in her later publication The Life of the Mind: “Every man, being created in
the singular [unlike animals or species-being, says Arendt], is a new beginning by virtue of his birth.”²⁸ The point is repeated again in
The Promise of Politics: “man is apolitical. Politics arises between men, and so quite outside of man. There is therefore no political sub-
stance. Politics arises in what lies between men and is established as relationships.”²⁹
Arendt’s ideas about the political have sometimes been criticized for their apparent lack of interest in relations of domination, injus-
tice, inequality, and, by extension, democracy.³⁰ But her conception of “the political” can be put in conversation with her ideas about
“action” and “work” to create a conceptual space that allows for an interest in precisely the issues that Arendt’s critics thought she
disdained.³¹ The triple distinction between labor, work, and action with which Arendt opens The Human Condition enables us to see
the point more clearly.³² “The human condition of labor is life itself,” writes Arendt. It is literally about consumption—the metabolism
we need to sustain our biological bodies and their eventual and inevitable decay. What labor sustains—the individual body—does not
live beyond the individual’s lifetime. In contrast, “work” has to do with all kinds of human artifice—from language and institutions to
man-made things—that are necessarily intergenerational.³³ Work produces “the world of things.” Though “each individual life is
housed” in this “world,” the “world itself is meant to outlast and transcend them all.” Work thus produces intergenerational time as
constitutive of itself. This idea of intergenerational time is encapsulated in the argument that work generates matters that endure,
though admittedly, usage “wears out” their durability.³⁴ The world that precedes us in time and yet leaves to us its enduring insti-
tutions, ideas, practices, and things has to be intergenerational in orientation. Arendt connects this with the idea of dwelling: “In order
to be what the world is always meant to be, a home for men during their life on earth, the human artifice must be a place fit for action
and speech.”³⁵ For artifices to act as this site, they need to survive the logics of pure consumption and utility.³⁶
Political action, in this sense, is that which helps humans to be at home on earth beyond the time of the living. A consumption-
driven capitalism in which all artifacts are up for consumption in the present would be an antipolitical machine in that it would even-
tually work against the logic of human dwelling, since dwelling requires artifacts to endure beyond the lifetime of the living. It would be
akin to Arendt’s category “labor”—the activity that all animals have to engage in, which is finding food to keep biological life going.
Intergenerational concerns, made howsoever difficult by the fact that the unborn are not there to press their claims against those of the
living, are thus central to Arendt’s conception of the political.³⁷ Questions of climate justice—not only between the rich and the poor
but also between the living and the unborn—surely fall under the political in this view. How humans might transition to renewable en-
ergy, develop sustainable societies, and other such questions of concern would also be, by the same token, political. Needless to say,
the word political, thus applied, would refer to all activities undertaken to deal with the consequences of—and hence the future posed
by—global warming, from scientific, technological, and geoengineering experiments to policy work and activism across the spectrum
of all available ideologies.
Armed with this conception of the political (I will soon add a Schmittian modification to it), how should we conceive of our own
times as we add to the postcolonial, postimperial, and global concerns of the last century issues such as anthropogenic climate
change and the Anthropocene? The emergence of these latter issues surely does not mean that the issues that seemed important in
the postcolonial world and in the context of globalization have gone away. After all, we still live in times when representation of histo-
ries of “people without history” remains a debated question, when the question of sovereignty of those who lost their lands and civi-
lizations to European occupiers and invaders remains unanswered (and perhaps, disquietingly, unanswerable), when inequalities be-
tween classes grow more acute and wealth concentrates in the hands of the so-called one percent, and when the number of refugees
or stateless people in the world keeps swelling while global capital pursues technology that drastically changes and threatens the fu-
ture of human labor. The same digital technology that makes for intelligent machines also acquires a Janus-faced presence in the lives
of democracies: social media applications like WhatsApp and Facebook can help popular mobilization but are not necessarily con-
ducive to the nuanced debates and discussions that democratic deliberations also require.
To talk about the planetary and the Anthropocene is not to deny these problems but to render them layered in both figurative and
real terms. The geological time of the Anthropocene and the time of our everyday lives in the shadow of global capital are intertwined.
The geological runs through and exceeds human-historical time. Some consequences of human impact on the planet—cities becom-
ing heat islands, rise in the frequency and intensity of hurricanes, acidification of the seas—remain visible in historical time. Others—
like the impact anthropogenic climate change may have on the glacial-interglacial cycle that has characterized the history of this planet
for more than two million years—are not. Some of the results of our capacity to move earth around are visible and often ugly. In the
state of Rajasthan in India, thirty-one hills that have “gone missing”—that is to say razed to the ground illegally by criminal busi-
nessmen looking for “raw materials” to feed the construction boom in the country—are an ugly demonstration of the earthmoving
capacity of modern humans and their machinery.³⁸ But when I see in a neighborhood park a child unselfconsciously walking around
an earthmoving machine and then see the same child moving sand in a sand pit with the help of miniature versions of the same
machinery—Anthropocene toys!—I see how much our geomorphological agency has been “naturalized” (figs. 1, 2). There is no ques-
tion of artificially separating the time of the Anthropocene from the human time of our lives and history. In many ways, our capacity to
act as a geophysical force is connected to many modern forms of enjoyment.
Figure 1. Theo, age two
If anything, many of the problems we identify as problems of capitalist globalization will only intensify as global warming increases.
Shrinking habitability of the planet, a rise in the number of climate refugees and “illegal immigrants,” water scarcity, frequent extreme
weather events, prospects of geoengineering, and so forth cannot be a recipe for global peace.³⁹ In addition, our global failure to create
a governance mechanism for planetary climate change also suggests that we are not dealing with the kind of “global” problems our
global governance apparatus, the United Nations, was set up to deal with.
Figure 2. Theo and friends
There is an interesting problem of temporality here. Negotiations between nations at the level of the UN usually assume an open
and indefinite calendar. For instance, we don’t know when there will be peace between the state of Israel and the Palestinian popu-
lation or whether the people of Kashmir will ever live in an undivided land. Those are questions that belong to an open and indefinite
calendar. Similarly, we don’t know when humans will be successful in ushering in a fair and equitable world. The struggle against capi-
talism assumes that there is time aplenty for our historical questions of injustice to be settled. The climate problem and all talk of
“dangerous” climate change, on the other hand, confront us with finite calendars of urgent action. Yet powerful nations of the world
have sought to deal with the problem with an apparatus that was meant for actions on indefinite calendars. Following the success of
the Montreal Protocol of 1987, the UN treated anthropogenic climate change as a “global”—and not planetary—problem that was to
be resolved through the UN mechanism. This is why the UN set up the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 1988.
But, interestingly, the action that the IPCC recommends—on global carbon budgets, for instance—assumes a finite and definite cal-
endar that then is subjected to global negotiations. The 2°C figure that is normally seen as the threshold of “dangerous” climate
change, for instance, represents a politically negotiated compromise between the UN tendency toward an indefinite calendar of action
and the finite calendar that scientists come up with. It is entirely possible that planetary climate change is a problem that the UN was
not set up to deal with. But we have no better democratic alternative at present.
Climate change and the Anthropocene are thus prob-
lems that are profoundly political and that challenge our received political institutions and imaginations at the same time.⁴⁰
While being guided by Arendt’s ideas about the political, it is important not to lose sight of the Schmittian insight that even if hu-
mans are capable of being rational and creative, there is no humanity that can act as the bearer of a single, rational consensus. “The
political world,” writes Schmitt, “is a pluriverse, and not a universe.”⁴¹ One does not know where and how human history will proceed.
Our times also require us to address another point that neither Schmitt nor Arendt ever addressed. They are both helpful in giving us a
capacious understanding of the political, but because this understanding remains focused only on humans, it is unfortunately not
capacious enough. Animals and other nonhumans cannot be part of the political in Arendt’s or Schmitt’s schema. Yet the planetary
environmental crisis calls on us to extend ideas of politics and justice to the nonhuman, including both the living and the nonliving.
The more this realization sinks in, the more we realize how irrevocably humanocentric all our political institutions and concepts are.
The important point is that the climate crisis and the Anthropocene hypothesis together represent an intellectual and political
quandary for humans and warrant new interpretations of the significance and meanings of what I once called “political modernity.”⁴²
Hence, the work of pioneering thinkers such as Bruno Latour, Isabelle Stengers, Donna Haraway, Jane Bennett, and others who have
long studied this question of extending the political beyond the human is relevant and important to this project. I will have comments
to make on this problem without in any way claiming to have solved it.
As should be clear by now, it does not matter for my argument whether or not the Anthropocene label is one day accepted formally
by geologists as the name of our current geological epoch. As Zalasiewicz and his colleagues say, the “future status” of the term “as a
concept” can “in general be regarded as secure but is uncertain in formal terms.”⁴³ Jeremy Davies, Eva Horn, Hannes Bergthaller, and
others are right to say that for humanists, the main benefit of the discussion about the Anthropocene is that it has brought the geobio-
logical into view. My particular concern has been to figure out what the implications of the science of climate change and Earth System
Science could be for humanists interested in thinking about the historical time through which we are passing. I should clarify, how-
ever, that I do not approach science from within the traditions developed in certain branches of science studies that often make, in
Bernard Williams’s words, “the remarkable assumption that the sociology of knowledge is in a better position to deliver the truth
about science than science is to deliver the truth about the world.”⁴⁴ I consider it indisputable that the pursuit of science remains en-
meshed in the politics of class, gender, race, economic regimes, and scientific institutions. Therefore, concerns about the actual power
and authority particular scientists may exercise in particular historical contexts are entirely legitimate. I do not believe, however, that
such enmeshment makes the findings of scientific disciplines any more arbitrary or false or merely political than empirical statements
and analyses by a fellow historian or social scientist.⁴⁵ Without the sciences, there still would have been atmospheric warming and er-
ratic weather, but there would not have been an intellectual problem called “planetary climate change” or “global warming” or even the
Anthropocene. This is not to deny the need to produce two-way, practical translations in places between local knowledge, customs,
traditions, practices, and a science that is planetary in scope but to plainly acknowledge that “the local,” by itself, would have never
given us any understanding of the roles that parts of the world sparsely or not at all inhabited by humans—such the regions con-
taining the Siberian permafrost or the oceans themselves—play in processes that determine cooling or warming of the whole planet.⁴⁶
The Evolution and Structure of This Book
Troubled by my own thoughts about planetary climate change but also stimulated by the methodological challenges the problem of
geological agency of humans posed to my usual habits of thought as a humanist historian, I published an essay in 2009—“The Cli-
mate of History: Four Theses.” I wondered about what humanity was in this age of the Anthropocene. We are simultaneously a divided
humanity as well as a dominant partner in a techno-socioeconomic-biological complex that includes other species. It is this complex
that is driving species extinction and is thus itself a part of the history of life on this planet. This makes the complex a geological agent
as well. With the collapsing of multiple chronologies—of species history and geological times within living memory—the human
condition has changed. This changed condition does not mean that the related but different stories of humans as a divided humanity,
as a species, and as a geological agent have all fused into one big geostory and that a single story of the planet and of the history of life
on it can now serve in the place of humanist histories. As humans, I argued, we have no way of experiencing in unmediated forms
these other modes of being human that we know cognitively at an abstract level. Humans in their internally differentiated plurality,
humans as a species, and humans as the makers of the Anthropocene constitute three connected but analytically distinct categories.
We construct their archives differently and employ different kinds of training, research skills, tools, and analytical strategies to con-
ceive of them as historical agents, and they are agents of very different kinds.⁴⁷
This conscious conjoining of differently scaled chronologies produced in me a feeling that I have often likened to that of falling. It
was as though as a humanist historian interested in political issues of rights, justice, and democracy, I had fallen into “deep” history,
into the abyss of deep geological time. This falling into “deep” history carries with it a certain shock of recognition of the otherness of
the planet and its very large-scale spatial and temporal processes of which humans have, unintentionally, become a part. Being from
the Indian subcontinent, where diabetes has acquired epidemic proportions, I sometime explain this experience by drawing an analogy
with how an Indian person’s sense of his or her own pasts suddenly undergoes an instantaneous expansion when he or she is diag-
nosed as diabetic. You go to the doctor with a (potentially) historian’s view of your own pasts, a biography that you could place in cer-
tain social and historical contexts and that spans two or three generations. The diagnosis, however, opens up completely new, imper-
sonal, and long-term pasts that could not be owned by one in the possessive-individualist sense that the political theorist C. B.
Macpherson once wrote about brilliantly.⁴⁸ A subcontinental person will most likely be told that they have a genetic propensity toward
diabetes because they have been rice eaters (for at least a few thousand years now). If they were academic and from a Brahmin or
upper-caste family in addition, then they had practiced a sedentary lifestyle for at least a few hundred years, and it would perhaps also
be explained to them that human muscles’ capacity for retaining and releasing sugar was related to the fact of humans having been
hunters and gatherers for the overwhelming majority of their history—suddenly, evolution and deep history!⁴⁹ You don’t have experi-
ential access to any of these longer histories, but you fall into a sudden awareness of them.
While my 2009 essay received many appreciative responses, it also confronted a maelstrom of criticism. My critics claimed that my
reference to humans as a “dominant species” and my use of the moniker Anthropocene (and not something like Capitalocene) ran the
risk of “depoliticizing” climate change by detracting attention from questions of responsibility, the role of capitalism, empires, uneven
development, and the drive for capitalist accumulation. The rich, they rightly pointed out, were far more responsible for the climate cri-
sis and would always be lesser victims of the crisis than the poor. I have replied to some of the specific criticisms elsewhere.⁵⁰ With-
out going over that ground in detail, let me simply say that I agree with the literary scholar Gillen D’Arcy Wood’s recent assessment
that some of the criticism may have been at cross purposes.⁵¹
However, it may be productive to reflect on the burden of the criticisms I received for what it tells us about the recent history of the
interpretive disciplines in the human sciences. Scholars in the field of postcolonial history and theory were relatively slow to respond
to the crisis of global warming even though the science was hitting the newsstands by the late 1980s. Take the year 1988. That was
when James Hansen, then the head of the Goddard Space Center of NASA, spoke to the United States Senate and presented them with
three main conclusions: “Number one, the earth is warmer in 1988 than at any time in the history of instrumental measurements.
Number two, the global warming is now large enough that we can ascribe with a high degree of confidence a cause and effect rela-
tionship to the greenhouse effect. And number three, our computer climate simulations indicate that the greenhouse effect is already
large enough to begin to [affect] the probability of extreme events such as summer heat waves.”⁵² The United Nations’ Intergov-
ernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was set up the same year.
Postcolonial thinking and criticism—a branch of the humanities that deeply influenced critical theory in the late twentieth century—
may be said to have begun its journey ten years before these events with the publication in 1978 of Edward Said’s polemical classic
Orientalism.⁵³ Many currents of thought—critical race theory, feminist criticism, anticolonial and postcolonial criticism, cultural stud-
ies, minority studies—came together in the 1980s and after to move the humanities away from the aristocratic temperament in which
the study of texts, rhetoric, philology, grammar, prosody, and so forth had been anchored for ages.⁵⁴ Humanities, a branch of knowl-
edge that once was about the cultivation of personhood and establishing cultural claims to rule by imperial and other elites, trans-
formed in these decades into a branch of knowledge that both studied and produced what James Scott once memorably called
“weapons of the weak.”⁵⁵ Subaltern Studies, first published in 1983, was conceived very much within this new orientation of the
humanities.⁵⁶ The year 1988 was when Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak published her famous essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?”⁵⁷ And with-
in a few years from of the publication of that essay, Homi Bhabha, Stuart Hall, Kobena Mercer, and others collaborated in 1995 to cu-
rate the first postcolonial exhibition and conference on Franz Fanon that resulted in the publication of The Fact of Blackness.⁵⁸ Bhab-
ha’s own classic collection of essays on questions of postcolonial criticism and thinking, The Location of Culture, came out in 1994.⁵⁹
These new intellectual directions in the humanities produced revelatory insights but remained, if I may say so without putting too
fine a point on it, environmentally blind. This might sound like an extreme statement, so let me briefly explain what I mean. The late
1960s and the 1970s had, of course, seen an upsurge of environmentalist movements in different parts of the world. Europe saw the
rise of green parties and politics. In many cases environmentalist movements and thoughts led to certain criticisms of capitalist
growth models (as may be seen in the writings of the well-known Indian environmentalist Vandana Shiva). The tocsin that Rachel Car-
son sounded with her 1962 Silent Spring led, thanks in no small measure to the “blue marble” picture of earth popularized by Amer-
ican astronauts in 1972, to the idea that humans had this “one world”—one atmosphere, one large mass of oceanic water, one spher-
ical home—that was both fragile and finite, vulnerable to the ravages of extractive capitalism and the postindustrial way of life. One of
the most prominent expressions of this “finite earth” view was the 1972 report called The Limits to Growth, also known as the Club of
Rome Report authored by Donella and Dennis Meadows and their colleagues.⁶⁰
But this “one-worldism” did not quite gel with the humanities traditions from which postcolonial criticism issued. Scholars in the
humanities (in which I include the interpretive branches of history and anthropology) were fundamentally not “lumpers” but “splitters”
of human history, scholars who believed that all claims about the “oneness” of the world had to be radically interrogated by testing
them against the reality of all that actually divided humans and formed the basis of different regimes of oppression: colony, race, class,
gender, sexuality, ideologies, interests, and so on. They were skeptical of arguments that tended to fold the diversities of human
worlds into the oneness of a finite Earth. This unifying move seemed ideologically suspect and always appeared to have been made in
the interests of power. These scholars believed that the path for the emancipation of all humans one day could not be found without
first addressing and working through the conflicts and injustices these divisions entailed. Indeed, one may see this opposition between
the lumpers/one-worlders and the splitters/postcolonials as running through many of the legitimate demands that are made in the
name of environmental or climate justice today.⁶¹ The splitting reflex is now deeply set and thoroughly understandable: scholars in the
humanities, after all, have been raised—and with good reason—for over five decades to be extremely suspicious of all claims of total-
ity and universalism. I was myself a child of this tradition.
Given this tension between "splitters" and "lumpers" that my own thinking was also once subject to, I spent the last ten years trying
to work my way through the implications of—and the controversies surrounding—the four theses I set out in the essay of that name.
This is why, much discussed and critiqued though it has been, that essay, “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” now revised and re-
named “Four Theses,” remains the inescapable starting point of this project and serves as the first chapter of this book. I have added a
brief appendix to this chapter to clarify my use of words and expressions such as species and “negative universal history” that troubled
some readers of the original essay on which this chapter is based.
Methodologically, this book presents an argument by taking the reader through the path I myself took to develop and arrive at it. A
key moment along that path of discovery came for me when I stumbled on the realization that the concept of globe in the word global-
ization was not the same as the concept of globe in the expression global warming. Same word but their referents were different. This is
the idea that I would eventually come to develop as the globe/planet distinction. Not a binary, I wish to stress, but two related terms
distinguished analytically. The more I read into Earth System Science and the more I thought about the accusation that my four theses
let capitalism off the hook, the more this distinction seemed important to me. This is what the first section of the book is all about. My
second chapter, on “Conjoined Histories,” where I put out some initial thoughts about why the few-centuries-old story of capitalism
did not give us enough of an intellectual grip on the problems of human history that anthropogenic climate change revealed, builds up
to the globe/planet distinction. It is in chapter 3, “The Planet: A Humanist Category” that the distinction is fully developed. This chap-
ter provides the intellectual fulcrum on which the argument of this book turns. The category “planet” allowed to me see, and ultimately
to say, that contemplating our own times required us to behold ourselves from two perspectives at once: the planetary and the global.
The global is a humanocentric construction; the planet decenters the human.
The second section of the book, titled “The Difficulty of Being Modern,” consists of three chapters that variously explore the ques-
tion of why modern ideas of freedom—whether projected for individuals, the nation, or for humanity in general—retain their attraction
even after many of the assumptions underlying them have been justifiably challenged by various critics of modernity and modern-
ization. In the first of these (chap. 4), “The Difficulty of Being Modern,” I analyze the intimate connection between postcolonial na-
tions’ conceptions of freedom and the increased need for energy that has been historically serviced mainly by fossil fuel and by a vari-
ety of projects of “mastery of nature” (such as damming rivers). The second (chap. 5), “Planetary Aspirations: Reading a Suicide in
India,” is a reading of the ideas of humanity and freedom that a Dalit-identified young man who took his life in 2016 left in his suicide
note. The chapter reads the history of stigma and upper-caste disgust surrounding “the dalit body” as pointing to certain limits to how
the human body is imagined in the reigning conceptions of the political. The last chapter (chap. 6) in this section, a reading of Kant’s
1786 essay “Speculative Beginning of Human History,” is in effect an anthropocenic critique trying to show how the distinction, funda-
mental to modernity, made by the great philosopher between the moral and animal lives of humans has come undone in the present
crisis of the biosphere.
I have called the final section of the book “Facing the Planetary,” partly as a homage to the political theorist William Connolly’s book
by the same name. It begins with a chapter called “Anthropocene Time”—chapter 7—where I try to explicate what the geologist Jan Za-
lasiewicz calls a planet-centered mode of thinking in order to distinguish it from thoughts that put human concerns exclusively at their
center. I then go on to develop—in a chapter titled “Towards an Anthropological Clearing” (chap. 8)—some of the implications that
our recent opening up to the planetary and the geological has for our understanding of the human condition today. I look on the
present crisis as providing an opportunity for working toward Karl Jaspers’s idea of an “epochal consciousness,” a form of argumen-
tation that seeks to make a conceptual place for thinking the human condition before committing to any particular version of practical
or activist politics. The fact of the planet—the category explained in the first section—coming into view in the everyday lives of hu-
mans leads us to question whether the relationship of mutuality between humans and the earth/world that many twentieth-century
thinkers inherited, assumed, and celebrated has become untenable today. How do we move, in the face of the current ecological crisis,
toward composing a new “commons,” a new anthropology, as it were, in search of a redefinition of human relationships to the non-
human, including the planet? That is where this book ends, with the beginnings, I hope, of a conclusion not yet reached in history.
A postscript of a conversation with Bruno Latour is added in which many of the points made in this book are canvassed.
As the foregoing description of the book makes obvious, my account of human worlds and their relationship to the planet humans
inhabit does not aim to contribute in any immediate and practical sense to possible solutions to climate-related conflicts in the world.
These conflicts, as I have said, may even be sharpened by the planetary environmental crisis and by the different tensions—having to
do with borders, water, food, housing—that the crisis provokes. My hope is that stories that bring our deep and recorded histories to-
gether may help generate new perspectives from which to view these conflicts and thus contribute indirectly toward their mitigation.
The more we see that in spite of all our divisions and inequalities, what is at stake is the survival of civilization as we have known it, the
more, I hope, we will see the insufficiency of our necessarily partisan views in addressing what one may, with a nod toward Arendt, call
the human condition today.
In his book on the Anthropocene, philosopher Sverre Raffnsøe reminds us that Kant’s Introduction to Logic saw four fundamental
questions as critical to distinguishing four domains of knowledge: the basic question of “knowledge, science, theory and metaphysics”
was “What can I know?”; the basic question of moral and practical thought, “What should I do?” and the question in religious and aes-
thetic contexts was “What can I hope for?” Raffnsøe goes on to point out that Kant saw these three basic questions as “folding in on
each other, and mutually contributing to and being clarified through . . . a fourth and seminal question: ‘What is Man? [Was ist der
Mensch?].’”⁶² The last question, wrote Kant, was to be answered by “anthropology.”⁶³ The phenomenon of the Anthropocene and the
crisis of climate change raise all of these questions. Scientists—and social scientists—are best placed to discover what we can know;
politicians, activists, and policy thinkers and engineers are best equipped to find what we can do. It falls to religion, aesthetic, and cog-
nate domains of thought to suggest what we can expect. Humanity’s current predicament renews for the humanist the question of the
human condition. This humble book, then, joins the efforts of other humanists in collectively thinking our way toward a new philo-
sophical anthropology.
===
