The Anthropocene has emerged as perhaps the scientific concept of the new millennium. Going further than earlier conceptions of the human–environment relationship, Anthropocene science proposes that human activity is tipping the whole Earth system into a new state, with unpredictable consequences. Social life has become a central ingredient in the dynamics of the planet itself. How should the social sciences respond to the opportunities and challenges posed by this development? In this innovative book, Clark and Szerszynski argue that social thinkers need to revise their own presuppositions about the social: to understand it as the product of a dynamic planet, self-organizing over deep time. They outline ‘planetary social thought’: a transdisciplinary way of thinking social life with and through the Earth. Using a range of case studies, they show how familiar social processes can be radically recast when looked at through a planetary lens, revealing how the world-transforming powers of human social life have always depended on the forging of relations with the inhuman potentialities of our home planet. Presenting a social theory of the planetary, this book will be essential reading for students and scholars interested in humanity’s relation to the changing Earth.

The Anthropocene has emerged as perhaps the scientific concept of the new millennium. Going further than earlier conceptions of the human–environment relationship, Anthropocene science proposes that human activity is tipping the whole Earth system into a new state, with unpredictable consequences. Social life has become a central ingredient in the dynamics of the planet itself. How should the social sciences respond to the opportunities and challenges posed by this development? In this innovative book, Clark and Szerszynski argue that social thinkers need to revise their own presuppositions about the social: to understand it as the product of a dynamic planet, self-organizing over deep time. They outline ‘planetary social thought’: a transdisciplinary way of thinking social life with and through the Earth. Using a range of case studies, they show how familiar social processes can be radically recast when looked at through a planetary lens, revealing how the world-transforming powers of human social life have always depended on the forging of relations with the inhuman potentialities of our home planet. Presenting a social theory of the planetary, this book will be essential reading for students and scholars interested in humanity’s relation to the changing Earth.

In Planetary Longings eminent cultural theorist Mary Louise Pratt posits that the last decade of the twentieth century and the first decades of the twenty-first mark a turning point in the human and planetary condition. Examining the forces of modernity, neoliberalism, coloniality, and indigeneity in their pre- and postmillennial forms, Pratt reflects on the crisis of futurity that accompanies the millennial turn in relation to environmental disaster and to the new forms of thinking it has catalyzed. She turns to 1990s Latin American vernacular culture, literary fiction, and social movements, which simultaneously registered neoliberalism’s devastating effects and pursued alternate ways of knowing and living. Tracing the workings of colonialism alongside the history of anticolonial struggles and Indigenous mobilizations in the Americas, Pratt analyzes indigeneity both as a key index of coloniality, neoliberal extraction, and ecological destruction, and as a source for alternative modes of thought and being. Ultimately, Pratt demonstrates that the changes on either side of the millennium have catalyzed new forms of world-making and knowledge-making in the face of an unknowable and catastrophic future.

The relationship between social thought and earth processes is in its infancy. This book offers to make good the defect by exploring how human induced changes impact upon planetary processes.

The present ecological mutation has organized the whole political landscape for the last thirty years. This could explain the deadly cocktail of exploding inequalities, massive deregulation, and conversion of the dream of globalization into a nightmare for most people. What holds these three phenomena together is the conviction, shared by some powerful people, that the ecological threat is real and that the only way for them to survive is to abandon any pretense at sharing a common future with the rest of the world. Hence their flight offshore and their massive investment in climate change denial. The Left has been slow to turn its attention to this new situation. It is still organized along an axis that goes from investment in local values to the hope of globalization and just at the time when, everywhere, people dissatisfied with the ideal of modernity are turning back to the protection of national or even ethnic borders. This is why it is urgent to shift sideways and to define politics as what leads toward the Earth and not toward the global or the national. Belonging to a territory is the phenomenon most in need of rethinking and careful redescription; learning new ways to inhabit the Earth is our biggest challenge. Bringing us down to earth is the task of politics today.

In this pathbreaking book, Pierre Charbonnier opens up a new intellectual terrain: an environmental history of political ideas. His aim is not to locate the seeds of ecological thought in the history of political ideas as others have done, but rather to show that all political ideas, whether or not they endorse ecological ideals, are informed by a certain conception of our relationship to the Earth and to our environment. The fundamental political categories of modernity were founded on the idea that we could improve on nature, that we could exert a decisive victory over its excesses and claim unlimited access to earthly resources. In this way, modern thinkers imagined a political society of free individuals, equal and prosperous, alongside the development of industry geared towards progress and liberated from the Earth’s shackles. Yet this pact between democracy and growth has now been called into question by climate change and the environmental crisis. It is therefore our duty today to rethink political emancipation, bearing in mind that this can no longer draw on the prospect of infinite growth promised by industrial capitalism. Ecology must draw on the power harnessed by nineteenth-century socialism to respond to the massive impact of industrialization, but it must also rethink the imperative to offer protection to society by taking account of the solidarity of social groups and their conditions in a world transformed by climate change. This timely and original work of social and political theory will be of interest to a wide readership in politics, sociology, environmental studies and the social sciences and humanities generally.