Developing Planetary Humanities

Abstract

If modern Western disciplinary structures, laid forth by Dilthey and others in the 19th century, have helped structure the world in ways that bring about climate change and gross economic inequities (along with many “good” things such as vaccines and some modern comforts), how might we re-structure our thinking and learning in ways that address these violent lacunae? What does it mean to educate in a truly globalized world that is facing climate change, extinction, and growing injustice? The answer to that surely cannot be “more of the same”. Following the work of critical theorists and the ideas of Paulo Freire and bell hooks, among others, this essay argues that education should be about imagining and working toward a more just and ecologically sound version of the planetary future in a way that is attentive to as much input as possible from multiple perspectives (human and non). The goals of such an education are connective, grounding, and encountering “others” rather than reductive, productive, and geared toward technology transfer. What would it mean to undiscipline or open our disciplinary categories in ways that reattune us to the changing, entangled planet of which we are a part? What will it take to develop planetary humanities and technologies? If humans are not exceptions to the rest of the natural world, and if the nonhuman world is not just dead matter to be used toward human ends, then how do we go about re-grounding our epistemologies within the planet, rather than continuously thinking “out of this world”? The first part of this essay offers a critique of the reductive and productive model that turns the world into a “standing reserve” for use by some humans. The second part of the essay outlines some principles for knowledge that are more connective, grounding and enable us to counter the multiple others within the planetary community. Such “planetary” knowledge reminds humans of the humus of our humanity, connects us to other life found through compassion (to suffer with), reminds us of the justice of good company (sharing of bread/resources), and focuses on the playfulness of public, political conversations (the ability to be converted to another’s point of view). In the third part, I suggest some grounded metaphors for planetary thinking: wild and slow thinking, elemental and grounded thinking, and creaturely and mycelium thinking.

When I teach classes on environmental ethics, religion and science, or religion and nature, I often begin the class by asking students, “what is the first thing that comes to mind when you think of the word ‘nature’”? More often than not, the answers include things like the oceans, skies, forests, rivers, trees, and other animals, but not themselves or anything having to do with humans, such as cities, technology, culture, and language. There are many reasons why some “modern Western” humans have written themselves outside of the rest of the natural world, and this article aims to address how the modern, Western academic disciplinary structure has helped to create the habit of thinking of humans as exceptions to the rest of nature.

Since the 18th century, European (and eventually US) academics have been obsessed with categorizing areas of knowledge. For example, European scholars mapped out the histories and sciences of economics, geology, biology, grammar/language, and religion. These scholars sought to completely and definitively map out the knowledge that we had of the world, in part as an effort to map out what we still needed to know. Such mappings are a human thing to do: we seek to understand the worlds in which we live and the planet of which we are part. The problem is that no mapping is neutral, and mistaking the “map for the territory” is problematic in many ways (Harrison 2015). First, the map is always informed by where one is from in life: language, culture, history, and one’s embodied identity shape the way in which we look for, analyze, and interpret data. Mistaking one’s own map for the territory then becomes a colonial project: my way is the way or at least the best way, and everyone else must be educated, enlightened, and encultured. This is part of the reason, for instance, that early scholars of religion ranked the religions from the native/primitivistic to the polytheistic, to the monotheistic, and in the end, to Christianity at the apex. This hierarchy of religions with its Christian crown was mapped out by scholars from Christian-steeped cultures. Western enlightenment and, eventually, Modernity simply carried on this progressive understanding of knowledge by replacing God with Nature, revelation with reason, and divine laws with natural laws that could be discovered through empirical evidence available to reason, direct observation, and experimentation. I am not arguing that God and Nature, revelation and reason, or divine laws and natural laws signify the same things; rather, I am arguing that they function to justify knowledge claims in ways that become foundational, universal, and inscrutable. Of course, those telling us what God/Nature, revelation/reason, divine law/natural law actually are (religious leaders or scientists, respectively), have the authority to dictate reality and truth to the rest of the population. This claim to what might be called objective truth belies the assumption that humans, especially some humans, have a special and privelaged place in the hierarchy of life. Human exceptionalism and separation from the rest of the natural world help to support not only a chain of being but also a chain of value, agency, and authority. Even as the sciences seem to confirm that we are through and through evolutionary and ecological creatures, entangled with all other life on this planet, the reductive productive model of Western modern science still assumes that humans are exceptions to the rest of the natural world, and the rest of the world is “standing reserve” for (some) human ends (Heidegger 1977).

Furthermore, within this human-centered and hierarchical understanding of epistemological and ethical authority, the assumption is that more and more knowledge—as given to us by experts in the disciplines—will provide us with a better understanding of reality. This progressive understanding of knowledge, based on the reductive and productive models of knowledge, is served well by the disciplinary boundaries we find in Western universities today. Separating knowledge into discreet categories of concern allows for the “backgrounding” (Plumwood 2002) of the complex set of relations that make up any given subject or entity. In this way, a specific entity (say, a single atom or a tree) is extracted from the entangled relations that make it up (say, molecules or the soil and forests) in order to better understand said entity. Often, this extractive model is used to answer very specific human problems rather than merely to explore the wonder and beauty of nature. This “extractive” model of knowledge is met with an extractive form of technology transfer: how can something be made useful to a certain set of human concerns? (Rowe 2023) Finally, this extractive knowledge, along with its technology transfer, is in a symbiotic relationship with the fossil-fueled world in which we live. The extractive model of knowledge matches well with the efficient model of technology transfer, which in the modern world has been accelerated by fossil fuels. Whether we trace what many call “the great acceleration” to the Western Industrial Revolution or to the post-WWII era, technologies of speed have significantly increased the pace at which we can develop new forms of extractive technologies that then feed into the speed at which we live (McNeill and Engelke 2014). This reductive and productive model of knowledge changes the way we think about ourselves and the rest of the natural world: the more we have the capacity for sped-up lives, the more we treat the world as an efficient means to our own isolated individual ends. The problem is that this fossil-fueled speed and the reductive productive model of knowledge that separates and reduces the world for use by some humans is outstripping the carrying capacity of the planet. We are entangled, ecological, and evolutionary planetary creatures that cannot be extracted from these contexts. Progress, under the reductive and productive model, comes at the expense of much life on the planet: human, plant, animal, mineral, and others. The current disciplinary boundaries, the heart of which is the separation of the humanities (the human) from the natural/physical sciences (the rest of the natural world), serve to background this violence in the name of progress for a few people.

Perhaps no better example of the end results of this pace of progress exists than Elon Musk’s version of transhumanism. Occupy Mars! Fuck Earth! We will not need biological bodies where we are going. This is the ultimate extractive end of the fossil-fueled reductive, productive model: certain bodies will be extracted from Earth for a new life on a new planet. As Mary Jane Rubenstein has argued, the fact that billions of dollars are being spent on technologies that try to escape the planet and the biological limits of life should worry us (Rubenstein 2011). Who and what will be allowed to leave the planet? For whom are these technologies being created? If the pace of progress— fossil-fueled, reductive, and productive—is one of the sources of the problems of climate change and the injustice caused by the globalization of neoliberal capitalism, and if this progressive, reductive, productive model of knowledge has led to us literally imagining ourselves out of this world, then perhaps we need to re-think our disciplines in ways that “fail” the progressive understanding of knowledge (Halberstam 2011). This is not a cry for relativism, fake news, alternative facts, and “anything goes” thinking; rather, it is a cry for living and thinking at a planetary pace: one that recognizes that humans (and the humanities) are embedded and entangled with the planet (and the natural sciences). It is a cry for connective forms of knowledge that offer “encounter” of otherness rather than the reduction of other bodies for use by some in the name of progress (Matthews 2003). I think there are several criteria that mark the ways in which we can think, imagine, and live with the planetary community rather than despite it. We may call these trail markers for planetary thinking.

1. Trail Markers for Planetary Thinking

If all knowledge is knowledge for, then we must also consider some evaluative guide for what counts as “good” or “better” knowledge within a planetary context (Foucault 1980; Hooks 1994; Freire 2018).1 If current Western, modern disciplines have taken us away from the elements, away from planetary paces, and away from the rest of the natural world in general, and if this obsession with taking flight from our bodily contexts has indeed been at the heart of much violence toward earth bodies (human and nonhuman), then we ought to think about knowledge that is more connective. What does slow knowledge that is not geared mainly toward reduction and production look like? In a recent article, Kocku von Stuckrad argues that such connective thinking is what critical posthumanism and “undisciplining” are about. He writes,

Critical posthumanism aims to transform and ‘undisicpline’ the humanities into a form of scholarly engagement that creates a transversal field of knowledge consisting of human and other-than-human intra-actions. This program is both scholarly and political, geared toward establishing what is today called the ‘posthumanities’.

(von Stuckrad 2023)

What he and others call the posthumanities, I refer to in this article as the “planetary humanities.” This type of knowledge system pays deep attention to the multiple times of the planet and the multiple perspectives (human and nonhuman) that are co-producers of knowledge alongside human beings. Here, I offer a few guidelines for what might count as good planetary knowledge. These are not meant to be exclusive guides but rather to refocus our understanding of knowledge within the emergent, evolving planet rather than take us away from it.

1.1. The Humility of Humus

The etymological connection between humans, humility, and humus (earth) is one that, I think, cannot be highlighted enough. There are, of course, many origin stories that have humans emerging from the dirt: Adam from the Adamah in the Torah, Koran, and Christian Bible; the fashioning of humans from clay in Greek, Egyptian, and Chinese origin stories; the many Indigenous stories that understand humans as being created from the clay or earth and that humans are “kin” with other life on the planet; and, of course, the scientific story of the evolution of life, which suggests that life emerges from the oceans and then evolves out of the earth. The point is that humans are deeply tied to the earth in many religious, cultural, and/or scientific understandings of the origins of humanity. This is an essential recognition needed for reattuning to an evolving planetary community.

Rather than act as if we are not of the humus, humility helps us recognize that we are deeply connected to the dirt, the earth, and all life therein. Furthermore, humility provides the necessary space to allow a multiplicity of stories, histories, and perspectives to coexist. If we are of the earth, then we emerge from the same ground as all other life and do not necessarily have a privileged “view from above” from which to see the whole. The fossil-fueled world gives us little space to listen to the voices of earth-others, but perhaps planetary humanities that acknowledge our earthliness will enable us to slow down and listen. We must acknowledge the limits of our own perspectives (and the human perspective as a whole), lest we cut ourselves off from human and earth “others”. These knowledge systems and actions that promote and deepen connections lead to a “better” planetary future. In other words, what promotes our connection to the Earth also promotes planetary truth, goodness, and beauty.

1.2. The Openness of Compassion

The knowledge of our entanglement with humus, though not always a “good” or “beautiful” thing for the individual, may help open us toward more compassion. I would argue that there is some truth to the Buddhist understanding that life is suffering: everything lives at the expense of other life; our entanglement with the rest of the natural world means that we can be infected by viruses and bacteria and that eventually, our bodies will become food for other bodies. Our entanglement means that our relationships with humans and the rest of the natural world can harm, hurt, or be indifferent to our own needs. The etymology of the word compassion is to “suffer with.” This is an important component needed to reattune to the evolving planetary community around us.

I am not suggesting that we all become martyrs or suffer as servants. This type of “heroic” suffering has detrimental effects, especially on women and communities of color. This suggests that suffering in the here and now is a virtue that will be rewarded in another life or in the annals of history. Rather, I am saying that knowledge that opens our eyes to the suffering of other lives and our hearts to the pain of this suffering is knowledge that is good, true, and beautiful for the planetary community. This is not just the attention that the joys and pains of our daily lives call for but also attention to the suffering caused by racism, sexism, ableism, heterosexism, anthropocentrism, and many other institutionalized forms of violence in our worlds. To suffer means to try to understand and to stand with those in the planetary community who are suffering in multiple ways, with an eye toward both witnessing that suffering and, when possible, alleviating that suffering by working toward worlds that pay more attention to and provide support for the pluralistic embodiments that make up our planetary community.

1.3. The Playfulness of Conversation

I think the prerequisites for developing something like a planetary polis—a political space that includes humans and the more-than-human worlds and a space that is necessary to co-create the type of connective knowledge I am articulating here—are the types of humility and compassion I have articulated above. Without these connective qualities, it is hard to imagine how one can have a real conversation that enables us to encounter the perspectives of the planetary others. Instead, in a reductive, productive model, we argue for our own truths in an attempt to force others into these truths. This is the most efficient way to accomplish tasks. There is no time for actual conversation when we are moving at fossil-fueled speed, and slowing down would mean missing out, economic loss, and/or an obstacle to progress.

What does it look like to have a real conversation? The etymology of conversation is something like “to turn together”. From my interpretation, this means the ability to enter into dialogues with a willingness to be converted to others’ viewpoints. This type of conversation is at the heart of Hannah Arendt’s understanding of the political sphere (Arendt 1998). However, I would extend that sphere (which she does not) to the rest of the (non-human) planetary community. How might we be converted to ways of becoming that enable us to learn from being in conversation with dolphins, whales, birds, primates, elephants, and other forms of animal and plant life? How might we hear the cries of species extinction, warming oceans, deforestation, and habitat loss in our efforts to “turn together” toward something “better”?

The ability to open oneself up to conversion and in conversation with the entire planetary community are also a markers of what is true, beautiful and good. Conversation stoppers and ideologies that do not entertain the knowledge and ideas of others are most often harmful. These open conversations are hard work, but there is also a sense of playfulness we might cultivate that helps, in the words of Nelle Morton, “hear others into speech”. (Morton 1985). The playfulness of song, poetry, creative non-fiction, and art (both human and non) may help us cultivate spaces that foster productive conversations, and these types of spaces are the spaces required for a planetary polis.

1.4. The Justice of Company

Finally, with humility, compassion, and meaningful conversation, we might begin to develop more just ways of being and becoming together. The etymology of company, “with bread”, is simply the tradition of hospitality known as breaking bread together or eating a meal together. Most religious traditions have rituals that center around food sharing, and the sharing of food and resources is at the heart of justice for all planetary companions. There is perhaps nothing more basic that humans (and nonhuman life) can do together. Of course, in our world of climate change and global neoliberal capitalism, the sharing of resources is rarely done in a just manner: some are impoverished while others indulge; the violence of factory farms and monocultures dependent upon pesticides, fertilizers, and fossil fuel energy in general, cause much animal suffering and environmental destruction; the labor practices of those who enable a meal to be on a given table are unequal and often violent (depending on where one is). Even when such resource sharing becomes more just and equitable, in the best planetary circumstances, everything still ends up being food for something else; this hardly seems just. This is one reason why Jains and some Buddhists pay such close attention to how and what they eat: to cause the least amount of harm possible. The fact that every organism lives at the expense of others is not something that can be escaped. How might we approach this fact every time we eat in a mindful, thankful, and respectful way? If we can approach our companions with humility, compassion, and in a spirit of conversation, we might be able to address issues of justice (for humans, animals, and the rest of the natural world).

The more spaces we create for a just community, the more true, good, and beautiful the planetary community will become. This means creating spaces that address all “isms” and the violence they cause. A company that is not critical of its own terms of existence can serve to perpetuate all the social and ecological violence that critical planetary romanticism hopes to confront and diminish. In the final section of this essay, I turn to some ways of thinking that might help us work better toward these criteria than the disciplinary forms created by reductive, productive models of knowledge.

2. Wild and Slow Thinking

How do we begin to think with the planet instead of thinking and living as if the rest of the planet simply does not matter? I have argued that the answer to this question begins with a critique of the fossil-fueled pace at which we live and the reductive, productive model of knowledge that is in a symbiotic relationship with that pace. I then began to explore the “trail markers” for how we might begin to live at a more planetary pace rather than by fossil-fueled, chronological narratives of progress through models of knowledge that are more about encounters and connections. If we think back to the most recent COVID pandemic, it provided many of us “moderns” with the time to slow down a bit, and a lot of people began noticing things in the world that had been “backgrounded” (Plumwood 2002). Some people noticed more birds and wildlife in urban areas or heard the sounds of more animals and insects. There was also time for many to reflect on the injustices: Black Lives Matter, MeToo, and other movements were highlighted, as were the differences in race, gender, and sex regarding access to healthcare, oxygen, and vaccines. Finally, there were others for whom Covid meant more work and less time. Usually, these were essential workers, women (and some men) who had to take care of children and also be their educators, and poor people who did not have the luxury of working remotely while still getting paid. My argument here is not that everyone was able to slow down, but that because many were not under the daily pressures of rushing to and fro for a 9-5 job, and because many others were overworked and exhausted, it shed light on the social inequities in our world based on race, class, sex, gender, and ability. This knowledge, which arose from a slower pace for some and an accelerated pace for others, was more connective and based on encountering and understanding the experience of others (for example, noticing the nonhuman life around us or better understanding the injustices certain people face due to racism). These encounters and experiences that open us to the experiences of humans and earth-others are where something like planetary humanities might begin.

In order to “think with” our bodies and the planet, we need to rekindle our connections to other “earth bodies”. As David Abrams notes:

We mistakenly think of our flesh as fixed and finite form, a neatly bounded package of muscle and bone and bottled electricity, with blood surging its looping boulevards and byways. But even the most cursory pondering of the body’s manifold entanglements—its erotic draw toward other bodies; its incessant negotiation with that grander eros we call ‘gravity’…suffices to make evident that the body is less a self-enclosed sack than a realm wherein the diverse textures and colors of the world meet up with one another.

(Abram 2011)

One way of reattuning to our planetary contexts and to the other bodies around us is to think about wild and planetary time. The times of the planet and the times of the many different bodies therein simply do not conform to chronological time. One way to open onto the times of the planet may be to reattune to the wild. Not wild as in the opposite of all things human, but wild as in the process of emerging nature or naturing. As Jack Halberstam notes,

And so, the category of wildness … will stand for the order of things that we have left behind, the anticipatory mood that accompanies all claims of coming after something, and the unknown future that, for now at least, still beckons from the horizon. Wildness is all at once what we were, what we have become, and what we will be or, even, what we will cease to be in the event of postnatural climate collapse.

(Halberstam 2020a)

He continues, “wildness is the absence of order, the entropic force of chaos that constantly spins away from biopolitical attempts to manage life and bodies and desires” (Halberstam 2020b). Getting connected to the wild means reattuning to becoming bodies on one’s own terms. Chronological time is undone. Of course, there is an order to the movement of things and bodies, but it is much more like the emergent order of a starling murmuration. Time is a product of entangled bodies becoming, not a container into which things fit. Many religions involve rituals that take us out of chronological time: meditation, prayer, trance, liturgical time, dreaming, and various shamanic experiences all depend upon time that is much more relational and of its own emergence rather than chronological.

Perhaps we need to think in terms of there being multiple planetary times. Geological time, seasonal time, and cosmic time all exist. There is also the time of a river, the time of a forest, the time of a mountain, the time of a nightingale, the time of a salmon, and the time of a ladybug. Indeed, as ornithologists, zoologists, and entomologists note, the experiences of birds, insects, and different animals differ depending on their embodiment and the way in which those different embodiments experience the world. What may sound like a “chirp” from a bird to the human ear, when slowed down in the way that other birds hear it, is a full stanza of music. What may be inaudible or invisible to us is what some other animals, insects, and birds experience as a daily reality. The spectrum of experiences, and thus the spectrum of time, differs according to the planetary body. Therefore, one way of breaking out of the fossil-fueled time of progress is to open up to these wild times. Indeed, slow movements and re-wilding projects already exist; what might we learn from these communities that could help us with slow and wild thinking?

3. Elemental and Grounded Thinking

Another way of slowing down and thinking about the planet is through what we might call elemental thinking. Here, I am thinking of the traditional elements of earth, air, fire, and water (Hobgood and Bauman 2018). We can find these four basic elements used in the rituals of most religious and Indigenous traditions, along with the recognition that these basic elements make up all of life. In a sense, these elements are sacred to life in many traditions: whether the breath of life that is spirit, the fire of life that is the source of life energy, the water of life that is blood, or the soil of life that makes up all bodies. In contrast, the modern Western world, with its reductive and productive knowledge system, has led to the commodification of each of these elements. Land was the first element to be commodified through the enclosure of commons and private property. The idea of “owning” land still seemed foreign to most Indigenous communities during the era of European colonization. However, today, the modern Western world takes it as the norm. Fire was the second element to be commodified in terms of the privatization of the ways in which we use energy. Gathering enough energy for the day was replaced by the ownership of coal, oil, and natural gas, which people must buy. It seems normal for most modern Western people to pay a company for the use of “fire” that has been privatized, collected, and sold. Water has been commodified in recent history. As someone born in 1976, I remember well in the 80s and 90s when bottled water became a “thing”. My grandmother thought this was so odd that she often threatened to fill old milk jugs with water, sit at the end of her driveway, and sell it. Now, the idea that water is sold in bottles is just “normal”. Furthermore, municipalities that were responsible for water have been replaced in many instances by private corporations. The final element, “air”, has not been completely commodified, but it is becoming increasingly so. We saw glimpses of this during the Covid pandemic when there were not enough oxygen tanks to go around in hospitals. There are also oxygen bars and cans of oxygen “boosters” sold in the market. About a decade ago, there was the case of some Australian companies who were “bottling” clean air to sell to China (Butt 2016). Even though oxygen has not been completely commodified, there are still plenty of people in the world, not to mention other animals, who do not have enough clean air to breathe. Inner city folks, the BLM cry of “I can’t breathe”, sexism in the workplace that does not allow women the space to breathe, and the 6th mass extinction event all give testimony to the fact that air is a commodity that is not shared equally by all. Although we may think that air could never be commodified, historically, people thought it equally absurd that earth, water, and fire might be commodified. From a fossil-fueled reductive and productive model of life, the commodification of air is a logical outcome. What if we thought of earth, air, fire, and water as commons for all planetary life rather than something that could be privatized and sold on the market? What happens if we begin to think elementally, not in terms of how these elements can be used for (some) humans, but in terms of how these elements can be shared by the planetary community?

Here, I suggest an elemental way of thinking that leads us to connect more with the wider planetary community rather than asking how we (modern) humans might use the elements for human or individual human benefits. What happens if we think of technologies for the planetary community rather than just for (some) humans? (Bauman 2020). What if we thought of knowledge transfer as a means to enhance the lives of the entire planetary community rather than merely accumulating benefits for a privileged few (humans)? How might we develop technology transfers for the thriving and resiliency of rivers, mountains, salmon, polar bears, nightingales, and orangutans? Thinking elementally also means thinking about our entanglement with the entire planetary community. We see some of this elemental thinking in the manifesto of the EcoSexual movement, which recognizes the eros and attraction of gravity and the ways in which our porous bodies are elementally entangled with the rest of the planetary community (Sprinkle and Stephens 2015). We are, first and foremost, earthlings, and as Bruno Latour suggests, we are humans only in the context of the wider planetary community (Latour 2024). If knowledge leads us “away” from that context, then that knowledge should be rejected (see, e.g., Harraway 2016). Transhumanist projects that deny the body and earth are merely a continuation of anthropocentrism and elitism writ large. In other words, the transhumanist vision is the next step in the reductive, productive model of fossil-fueled reality.

4. Creaturely and Mycelium Thinking

Rather than materializing fossil-fueled chronos time into an anthropocentric transhumanist vision that would literally take (some of) us away from our bodies and other planetary bodies (and leave all other bodies behind), what if we began paying more attention to the earth’s bodies that make up what it means, at heart, to be a human being? First and foremost, we are planetary creatures of this Earth. As Ana Tsing notes,

Other species, as well as nonliving things, make it possible to be human. That this statement is not obvious to many humans at this moment in time is only because of habits of thought that have become powerful over the last few hundred years. In this modernist mode of thinking, humans presume to transcend and master nature, rather than forming worlds together with nonhumans. One significance of recent discussion of the Anthropocene as a time of human-sponsored environmental crisis is that it urges us away from those powerful habits of thought. The imagined mastery of humans no longer looks so successful; we are asked to reconsider the ways in which human and nonhuman histories are inextricably intertwined. The Anthropocene, like every other trajectory in which humans have been involved, is more-than-human.

(See, e.g., Tsing 2021a)

If we are indeed creatures among creatures, then perhaps we need to start taking our cues from other organisms about what it means to be and become human. Instead of living “as if” we are a unique species and “as if” we are isolated individuals, what if we started to align our thinking with others, like in a startling murmuration? A starling murmuration is composed of unique and individual birds, but they move together to create patterns that emerge during their movements. There is no linear direction or ultimate point toward which they fly to and fro, but there are patterns and orders that emerge among the individual birds flying together. Perhaps this is what it is like to be a creature among creatures in the planetary community. The goal is not fossil-fueled progress but paying deep attention to the other bodies that make up the community and looking for unique patterns to emerge.

Another example would be to think like a rhizome, mycelium, or Pando Populus (Tsing 2021b). In each case, what connects us “underground” is often more important than the individual plants, mushrooms, or trees that emerge from the community. To be sure, the emergent phenomenon seen above ground has its own aesthetic importance, and it is functionally important to what is below ground and to other organisms around it. However, what is seen cannot be possible or emergent without all the hidden connections that make it possible (Harney and Moten 2013). From this perspective, we ought to think of what we see as individuals as emergent, unique nodes of a community that springs forth from the background of the ecological and evolutionary relationships that make up each given node. There is no individual without the community, and each unique individual adds something new to the community. This is an insight that Whitehead had in terms of thinking about each moment as many being increased by one (Whitehead 1978). As such, we must pay attention to the ways in which life emerges in multiple forms over and over again, rather than trying to fit life into some sort of teleological or foundational mode. Though we may conceptually understand this, how we might begin to do this practically and politically is a harder problem to solve. Joanna Macy’s “Council of All Beings” provides glimpses of one way we might begin to encounter earth-others as fellow planetary citizens. In this exercise, humans take on the persona of a specific species and tell the rest of the human community how human actions are impacting the species. This exercise provides a hint of what a planetary polis might look like.

These types of connective ways of thinking about the planetary community—wild, elemental, and creaturely—help to slow us down a bit, break us out of fossil-fueled progressive time, and think with and open onto the times of the planetary. In this sense, they are “better” ways of thinking than the planetary- denying forms of thought that rely on transforming the world into commodities for some people. They help us to face the planet, to face Gaia, instead of turning away from it and, in the process, denying our own embodied planetary contexts (Latour 2017).