"The planet is a political orphan": Dipesh Chakrabarty says to keep Earth habitable, we must reimagine a politics beyond the nation-state
The always interesting Noema Magazine is exploring a theme that’s very relevant to our Planet A reframe-refresh of the site this week - the planetary. They see it as the evident successor to globalisation - not so much an economic system homogenising the planet, but a techno-ecological system now trying to prevent tipping points and degradations.
We’ve run pieces from Achille Mbembe and Nathan Gardels in this track, and we’re delighted to show you some excerpts from Noema’s interview with Dipesh Chakrabarty, author of The Climate of History in a Planetary Age (2021). Some extracts below:
The global and the planetary
The distinction between “the global” and “the planetary” is important because we must understand the category “planet” not only as an entity without which we wouldn’t exist, but also as an entity with a much longer history than human history. It is a history to which humans belong, but it is not their history. This is something we moderns all too easily forget.
Human forgetting of the nature of this planet has been ratcheted up through economic development. For example, the tendency for humans to live in huge cities. Fundamental to city living is that humans tend to take the supply of food, water and energy for granted.
When I think of peasant societies and the India I grew up in [during the 1950s and ‘60s], there was still a closeness to knowing nature, because people were coming into the cities from the countryside, and the cities themselves were expanding into rural areas. Many of the domestic workers, for instance, were actually peasants-in-residence in urban middle-class households. In my childhood, they would share their experience of the village.
Before I learned from books, I learned peasant sayings about seasons: auspicious times to sow or harvest according to the calendar of seasonal production. Even in the Kolkata that I grew up in, parts were rural.
I used to play soccer on a ground that was still called “the paddy fields” in Bengali. It was next to a kind of swamp; sometimes the ball would fall into the swamp, and we’d have to go in to get it, and we’d come out covered in leeches. We grew up with snakes, foxes and frogs. Sometimes we were cruel to them, sometimes we got hurt by them. But we were always aware of the natural world.
Someone living in Kolkata now just doesn’t have the same kind of experience. For a child growing up in the city today, these experiences would be completely impossible.
The more urban you get, the more the tendency to take the Earth for granted gets reinforced. That happens even more when we get all-weather food. We can’t see the relationships between seasons and food. We get mangoes here in Chicago and you get them in LA throughout the winter, whereas in India, I grew up knowing that mangoes are a summer fruit. But then we got the industrialization of food production and processing and cold storage technology.
The effect is that we forget what we’ve done to the Earth. Our reactions to stories about forests getting destroyed, what mining might be doing, these become more academic relationships. The experience of people who get displaced by a dam or by a forest fire is so far from many middle-class people’s lived experiences.
This decentering of the lived experience of the Earth has practical implications. The other day, for example, I was in a discussion with my younger colleagues in the University of Chicago’s School of Molecular Engineering. They’re investing heavily in developing technologies for lithium batteries to store energy derived from solar or wind power.
But their research does not require them to have any interest in where lithium comes from. Where do you mine for lithium? What environmental problems does its mining cause? They have no interest in these questions, so long as they get the product. This kind of forgetting is built into our civilization and its technological capabilities.
Whether we like it or not, humans have become a planetary force, a geophysical force. We can cause extinction of species. We can even cause earthquakes. But, also, we can intervene in the nitrogen cycle of the world, the hydrological cycle of the world, the carbon cycle of the world. We might have to do climate engineering, that is, planetary-scale management. Whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing is a different question.
The Planet Is a Political Orphan
The planet is a political orphan. Theoretically, people have been designing global governance, but they still do so, naturally, in terms of nations.
Think of the Himalayas. There are eight or nine rivers issuing from the Himalayas that service about eight or nine countries, from Pakistan to Vietnam, so the glaciers are important to these countries. But the glaciers are all nationalized. India owns India’s glaciers, Pakistan owns Pakistan’s glaciers, etc.
The result is that the Himalayas have become the most militarized mountain range in the world. India and China have fought wars there. If you look at the number of tanks, the number of military bridges built, the blasting of the mountain, you can see that nation-states remain totally invested in geopolitics.
How do we move from here to a planetary-level governance? Can we move on the basis of a planetary calendar? The IPCC’s report last year and the year before was described by the UN as “code red” for climate, and they used the expression “climate emergency.” Now clearly “emergency” connotes a sense of time because it signals urgency.
It’s urgency on a planetary calendar; it’s asking for some kind of synchronization of national and subnational actions. It is saying to nations, “Can you come together on this by this time? Because that’s what the planet needs.” But nations remain mired in the temporality and politics of development.
The planet has its own calendar
The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) speaks of a singular planetary calendar. It is telling nation-states: “This is how much time you’ve got. You can only emit so much carbon if you want to stay below raising the average temperature by 1.5 degrees.”
This treats the planet as one, because it assumes that the carbon emitted in America contributes to the warming just as much as a carbon molecule emitted from Russia. In other words, the IPCC’s calendar is based on the oneness of the planet. Earth Systems Science is based on a oneness of the planet.
But what do nations do? Nations bargain with that singular, planetary calendar to extract differentiated timetables for their own national action.
To give you an example: in 2016, there was a conference in Rwanda on air conditioners. India bargained very, very hard to be in the group of countries that could be slowest to scale down the use of air conditioners. That had to do with the fact that India’s cities are becoming hotter — indeed, dangerously hot.
As India gets richer and hotter, therefore, people are buying air conditioners, including even poor families. The air conditioning companies (who are all using old, more pollutive technology) are experiencing booming business.
The politics of this in India are defined by a combination of families’ desire to buy air conditioners, and maybe — I am only guessing here — the commercial interests of air conditioning companies that benefit from the sale of old and less clean technology.
When developing nations like India talk about historical responsibility for climate change, what they’re actually saying is, “Look, Americans, you work faster to deal with the planetary. The planetary is your problem. Development is our problem.” India and others are saying, “You guys have polluted it, you guys have screwed it up, now you fix it. And then give us the technology to meet our developmental goals.” This is like splitting the planet, converting the one into many.
Or one could say that such thinking is a politics of giving up on the oneness of the planet that Earth System Science posits, which goes to the heart of the problem of why the planet as such doesn’t lend itself to politics.
Elon Musk Can’t Exit The Planet
Elon Musk [has] an escape strategy. But imagining that humans can survive by fleeing Earth misunderstands our embodied relationship to other Earth system processes. It fails to recognize that we’re Earthlings in a particular way.
Given current technology, colonists to Mars probably will not survive. For us to survive on another planet, we will need to export not just human-created technologies but the whole microbiome system on which we rely. Planetary escape therefore seems to me a very unpracticable solution to the problem of a planet in peril.
So, I come back to my position that we humans will have to remain political to solve the climate crisis on Earth, to maintain the habitability of Earth for ourselves and for future humans and nonhumans. But being political is a distinctly human vocation and it seems to be ours alone.
The full interview is here.