Seeding Collaboration Toward Planetary Action19 min read

Thinking the planetary calls on us to reframe our relations between ourselves as humans and to the broader ecologies of which we are just one part. To accelerate ambitious interdisciplinary collaborations that apply this perspective to diverse topic areas from Indigenous ways of knowing and biomimicry research to public policy, the Planetary Portal, a project from the Berggruen Institute’s Planetary Program and the University of Giessen’s Panel on Planetary Thinking, weaves together organizations advancing planetary practices around the globe. We spoke to two of the project leads, Jonathan Blake and Jade Clemons, about how the portal’s design instantiates ideals represented by planetary thinking, and what it looks like to think, build, and act in planetary terms. 

Hannah Scott: Why don’t we start by having you both introduce yourselves and the Planetary Portal project?

Jade Clemons: I’m Jade Clemens, Senior Program Manager at the Berggruen Institute, where I support the Planetary Program. Overall, the Planetary Program is tasked with planting the seeds of planetary thinking from the ground up across both the academic sector, the intellectual sector, as well as the general public. The hope is that this term will one day be as ubiquitous as the terms “global” and “international.”

Jonathan Blake: I’m the Associate Director of Programs at the Berggruen Institute in Los Angeles, where I direct the Planetary Program, which, as Jade put so eloquently, is a source of new thinking about the world, in particular about politics and political institutions in the world. It takes seriously the earth-bound nature of our existence, that we live on a planet or even as some say, in a planet, within a biosphere, within the churn of various biogeochemical processes and cycles. One of the things that we’ve launched in the last year is the Planetary Portal, which we co-created along with colleagues at the Panel for Planetary Thinking at the University of Giessen in Germany. We realized that we were both thinking in parallel tracks and wanted to create an online space to start weaving together a broader set of connections among people who share our view. The Portal is a website that starts to stitch together what we’re hoping becomes a worldwide community of people who take this planetary approach to thinking about these worlds, to thinking about politics, and more. By putting everybody on a physical map and showing that they’re all linked together through these shared concepts, through this shared conceptual lens or perspective, we hint that there’s something similar worth exploring further. In one sense it is a resource for people who already think this way to find each other and to see themselves as part of a broader intellectual community, but then also, for people who are maybe not quite familiar with the perspective to encounter it and how they could plug in to the community.

HS: What were the design decisions that went into the development of the Portal? What needs were you and your team trying to meet? Walk me through some real or speculative use cases for the Portal.

JB: To start off, we worked with a developer, Julia Janicki, who made the website and did a beautiful job. From a design perspective, our team all intuitively had this spatial approach and thought about wanting to demonstrate and understand how the research centers that work on this are dispersed around the world. We made two design decisions on the map. The first, which you’ll notice, is that it doesn’t look like your typical map or globe. It’s actually the Peirce quincuncial projection. There are lots of map projections that geographers have proposed over time. They all have their advantages or disadvantages because it is very difficult to accurately represent a three dimensional planet in two dimensional space. So we chose a projection that is not the typical one in an effort to kind of disorient people and the way in which we think about the planet. We also found it aesthetically pleasing and surprising. 

The second design decision we made is to exclude geographic and political boundaries; there are no borders between nation states. This was another choice that gets at the core argument of thinking about the world as a planet, rather than thinking about the world in terms of the international or the global, which are these core concepts through which we typically understand the world where “international” explicitly posits the the understanding of the world as “inter”-dash-”national,” as in between nations, say, relations between the US and Canada or the US and Kenya or, for that matter, Kenya and Chile. That way of thinking about the world obscures as much as it illuminates. We wanted to highlight some of the things that get obscured in that view, and that we also think get obscured in the language of the global. We often use “global” in two ways: one way refers to phenomena like “globalization” and the other to “global climate change,” but the function of the term in these examples is actually quite different. The “global” in globalization really is international — it is about the movement between countries of human intentionality, of human-intentioned things, whether that’s people, goods, capital, knowledge, or ideas moving around. That’s the story of globalization. But the story of global climate change is about the carbon cycle, the cycling of carbon through the atmosphere and the oceans, and about other planetary processes. We argue that it’s worth distinguishing between these two things, so we want to try and project the planet rather than the globe or international space. 

JC: I’d also like to point out some of the content choices that ultimately informed the design. First, you’ll see on the map that what’s plotted are organizations, not people. There certainly are really notable planetary thinkers that perhaps aren’t affiliated with an organization whose focus is related to planetary thinking. To compensate for that, there is an additional tab that addresses some of the most notable thinkers in this space that maybe don’t belong to an organization. That was really a content constraint that led to a design choice. You’ll also note, as you look at the informational pop ups for each organization that’s plotted, there isn’t specific contact information. One of the challenges, of course, is concern over data privacy. We’re certainly interested in how other folks overcome the regulatory environment as they try to build community. For us, instead of going through what would have been an extremely lengthy process of contacting every single organization to get consent forms signed, we culled publicly available information that is reasonable to include without necessarily obtaining direct consent. We do, of course, include a “Contact Us” button on the site for any folks who may or may not be comfortable being included in the site. I think there’s also the hope that anyone who might come across this project who doesn’t see themselves represented in this map would reach out to us. Part of the design process was ensuring that the project can evolve over time and be something of a living map.

HS: That was a beautiful overview, and I really appreciate you digging into the mapping choices and how that sort of instantiates the ideals that you’re speaking to. On this last note about the participation of the different institutions and organizations, can you speak to the importance of collaboration, especially between culturally diverse stakeholders, in advancing the planetary as a field of thought and practice? How does the planetary call on us to reframe the concept of collaboration itself as something that occurs not just between humans, but that also includes non-humans and even systems?

JC: Continuing the thought about the organizations we decided to include on the map, the way we introduced the site to the world and made it public was by holding a soft launch and founders gathering. It was an online event and we invited all of the organizations included on the map to attend. That was an effort toward introducing this portal to the world and fomenting those connections and some exchange right off the bat. As we think of the planetary age and how we operate from that perspective, it’s hard to get everyone from every corner of the world to jump onto a Zoom meeting for an hour simply because of time differences. Moving forward in this process of introducing this portal to the world and trying to instantiate that real world exchange, we’re already facing hurdles and there are challenges we’re still trying to solve. 

JB: That’s exactly right. One thing we’re hoping is that this becomes a space to foster collaboration. In some sense, it’s just a map with dots on it. But it’s our hope that implicit in placing things together on a map, we’re saying that these things belong together. You can filter the map by topic and see connections between individual organizations as we’ve grouped group things by their subjects of focus. As Jade said, it was extremely collaborative among us and the folks at the Panel on Planetary Thinking, which was a great experience, but among American academics and German academics there isn’t a super inter-cultural difference in terms of our methods, so that was really a seamless and wonderful partner to work with. So, your question was getting at how the content of the planetary encourages new forms of collaboration. This is a great question. In some sense, that’s at the heart of the concept — it is an argument for new forms of collaboration, saying that the existing system, the existing world that we live in divides itself neatly into these 193 sovereign territorial spaces that can each do whatever they want therein and not really care about the consequences for everyone outside of their little zone. That has not worked well for what we call planetary issues, say climate change, pandemics, biodiversity; these are all things where the main actors are not humans, they can’t care about your boundaries and they don’t hold passports. These are actual problems that former Secretary General of the UN Kofi Annan used to call “problems without passports.” Carbon compounds are going to circle in the atmosphere, birds are going to migrate where they migrate, and viruses are going to pass between humans and zoonotic host species and back and forth across species barriers, all in ways that our systems of governance, our systems of thought are not attuned to and certainly not designed to deal with. The planetary is really a call for action to think and collaborate across these barriers, whether that’s through a new sensibility, a new philosophical stance, or the deployment of new technologies of perception and translation to help break barriers. It’s an understanding that we are all part of the biosphere, that we’re all embedded in and inseparable from the exchange of energy, gasses, and molecules — this is what the planetary brings to our attention. We’re all planetary creatures, creatures that, for better or worse, are stuck on this planet, and we have to find a way to get along or it’s going to lead to the ruin of all of us. 

HS: How does the concept of the planetary differ from or go beyond earlier aims at reorienting subjectivities to encompass ecological concerns, from the Whole Earth Catalog and 60s environmentalism to sustainability and the circular economy, for example?

JC: To my mind as a budding economist, planetary thinking does feel, particularly in the realm of economics, like it is an outgrowth of prior philosophies and prior thinking. But particularly now, I think of Kate Raworth, who has suggested that there is an outer boundary to planetary production that we have to respect. It seems pretty fresh and new, this explicit statement, that the goal of growing GDP forever, for all time is not a goal that is reasonable to work towards, in part because of environmental concerns. I think this is a frame of thinking that requires one to examine all assumptions around traditional understanding of the view on the planet, it requires expansive thinking about the interconnectedness between one’s actions and their impacts on other people, creatures, and matter. The planetary necessitates a complete rethinking of existing systems and an explicit acknowledgement that our existing systems are failing and that we are both harming the planet at a rate that will lead to our destruction, but that there’s also hope. If we can shift our thinking toward this new frame, and design systems accordingly, perhaps we can get back on track.

JB: I’ll start concretely with what you posed as predecessors for the planetary, the genealogy of the idea of the planetary. Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth thinking is something that we ourselves are descendants of, and we trace that quite explicitly. The late 1960s, early 1970s, was a moment marked by the Space Age as well as the rise of systems thinking, as well as budding environmental consciousness due to the increasing awareness of ongoing environmental damage. This is the period that sees both the rise of the environmental movement as a social force, marked by the first Earth Day in 1970 but also the birth of environmental ministries — things like the Environmental Protection Agency in the United States and similar agencies all developed in the late 1960s and early 70s. People really started to become aware that the degradation of the environment is an issue and that we can’t constantly spew toxins into the air and water. But there was also this awareness that we’re on one planet, promulgated by the Whole Earth Catalog, and particularly the campaign that Brand had in the late 60s with these buttons that say, “Why haven’t we seen a photograph of the whole earth yet?” We were actually just joking about this yesterday, that the planetary could be summed up in a pin that says, “Well, we’ve seen it now. Now what do we do?” 

One way that we draw on that image of thinking in whole systems or, as the Whole Earth Catalog said, thinking of the whole earth, is thinking of the planet as a whole. And we now know much more about our planet. One of our core concepts that we use is the idea of “planetary sapience.” It’s this idea that we are aware of ourselves as a planetary force and what we have done to the planet. In the 1960s, you had this budding emergence of a true planetary sapience — it was only in the mid-century that we came to understand that there was such a thing as the global atmosphere. Before that, the climate and atmosphere were really thought to be a geographically specific thing. Starting in the 19th century, people talked about the Austrian climate, or the Californian or even the Bay Area climate, but the idea that there was a global climate really emerged in the 20th century. Then the idea that we could do something to that climate really emerged in the 60s and 70s, for the most part, as a mainstream scientific idea. In some ways, the planetary’s connection is quite direct from those earlier, particularly early 70s ideas of planetary holism. We could also mention the 1972 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm, which brought environmental issues to the forefront of the international agenda, bringing the planet into the global governance agenda for the first time. To link to what Jade was talking about, the 1972 Club of Rome Limits to Growth report used new kinds of computer modeling to model the earth as a whole system and came up with the result that Earth is going to overshoot its carrying capacities if we don’t radically change our economies and our politics. So we have all those ideas starting to simmer and crystallize then, building on scientific and political thought that had been advancing for about half a century. Now we just know so much more — we have satellites orbiting the earth, constantly measuring atmospheric chemistry, ocean temperatures, population density; we have real-time monitoring of forest health, of species health, of human health and well being. We have a much greater understanding at a planetary level. We as individuals can’t go to a forest and see how that forest is thriving or not. With human communities, there’s a visual, lived experience, but to understand that at a planetary level, it’s simply too vast for any one individual to understand. There needs to be some sort of scientific and technological capacity to understand that the Earth has warmed by 1.1 or 1.2 degrees Celsius. That’s just something that we can’t comprehend as an individual, or even as a whole bunch of individuals. The planetary perspective is now really emerging, in the first decade or two of 21st century because we now have this technological apparatus at a global scale that allows us to collect data and then feed it through supercomputers that are able to model and compute to a level of precision that we simply didn’t have in the 1970s, to say nothing of before that.

HS: Planetary “experiences,” if you will, often take place on scales that are utterly imperceptible to us. To think and take action from a perspective that exceeds our own biologically-endowed sensory apparati therefore requires the aid of technological sensing mechanisms. I’m curious to know how you think the cyborgian phenomenological experience that planetary thought demands will alter our subjectivities, and thus, how the artforms that have historically captured and communicated those subjectivities (the novel, the expressionist painting, etc.) will shift in turn?

JC: Jon and I were at a workshop last week thinking about planetary institutions. One of the challenges that kept coming up is the fact that we live in a sort of post-truth society in many ways — the social media landscape, the way in which people get information now is so different than it once was. The information ecosystem is also at a much larger scale, where people feel they can hop on the internet and become an expert on just about anything and get information in any way they choose. So how do you break through? One thing that kept coming up was including some way to make the story personal, to make planetary phenomena personal. We all just survived COVID. Many of us are experiencing changes in weather patterns. Those are two very obvious examples. The more we can get people to relate to how planetary phenomena impact them personally, the more it will start to resonate.

JB: It’s hard, right? I’m a writer — I write these things and hope people will read them and understand. It is a truism, but that doesn’t make it any less true, that a picture’s worth a thousand words. Blue Marble (and actually I prefer Earthrise) changed the world, right? There’s a reason people put Blue Marble on flags and not some lengthy scientific text. We are storytelling creatures, we’re visual creatures, and one of the big opportunities is that it’s going to take all of us and particularly those with the skills, the knowledge, and the wherewithal to produce visual art or immersive experiences or whatever it is to kind of communicate this perspective in a way that I fully recognize not everyone can get by reading my 300-page book (though they should once it’s available!). 

The planetary is really a call for action to think and collaborate across barriers, whether that’s through a new sensibility, a new philosophical stance, or the deployment of new technologies of perception and translation to help break barriers.

I’ve been talking a lot about the vastness of this concept, which tries to capture the vastness of the planet and our place in the broader cosmos. There’s work for all of us to get that across because these changes do happen and things like Blue Marble made it happen. Blue Marble helped us understand that there is this global society; another concept of the late 60s and early 70s, that of Spaceship Earth, told us that we’re all here on one planet. Going to speculative fiction, Kim Stanley Robinson’s work has been heralded recently for making much more visceral what thousands of scientific reports did not. There’s certainly an amazing, huge opportunity now for the intersection of hard scientists who are seeking to understand not just the changes, but the state of our planetary condition and what it means, and then how that can be mediated through the work of philosophers, humanists, social scientists, novelists, and artists to think through, as colleague of ours who’s working on a project on he calls “planetary metaphysics” puts it, to learn what it means to live as planetary creatures. 

HS: What’s next for you both and the Planetary Portal?

JB: We’ve just put the Portal out into the world about a month ago, and we’re just starting to get the word out about it and slowly seeping out to interested networks and partners. My upcoming book, which is co-authored with Nils Gilman, is called Children of a Modest Star: Planetary Thinking for an Age of Crises and is coming out in April 2024 with Stanford University Press. 

JC: This little portal has already connected the three of us here, so I think it’s already doing its job!