Comment:
As one of the authors of “Planet Politics,” I have had the opportunity to present the ideas in it to various audiences since its publication. We hoped to begin a wide-ranging dialogue about possible ways to address the weaknesses in international institutions around responses to climate change, species extinction, and ecosystem damage. These weaknesses are often not so different from other complex problems that IR has grappled with—the legal gray areas and theoretical aporias inherent in sovereignty and the international system of sovereign states. In an anarchical, self-help system with no overarching power to enforce punishment for breaches by states and state actors, things get sticky quickly and suffering often ensues for those least deserving.
Add to these weaknesses a (minimum) 4 degree C rise in global temperature leading to loss of arable and livable land, acidification of the world’s oceans and a marked decrease in sea life (to name but two issues facing us) and we can see tragedy of epic proportions for human and non-human communities faced with issues that transcend state borders.
This leads to our second important provocation in “Planet Politics”: disciplinary myopia. In addition to institutional and legal weaknesses, IR, and its disciplinary understandings of the planet are insufficient at best, and deficient at worst. As Tony Burke writes in the introduction to this forum, IR is both too state-centric and too anthropocentric to see what is right there in front of it.
Put differently, the inability to respond to the above—either because of political will, disciplinary myopia, or purposefully weak institutions—occurs because IR only factors in human systems, actors, and communities. Human induced changes in Earth’s climate and ecosystems will affect us, yes, but where is the discussion about the 8 million species that will also be in dire need of aid and care?
This leads to my third and final provocation. What we asked in “Planet Politics” was for IR to think about the overlapping and entangled non-human systems that exist within, among, and around our own. This lays bare the fact that we humans find ourselves having to acknowledge that we need the biosphere much more than it needs us. The Earth is indifferent to our need to save it. It will continue with or without our presence. And for most of the other species on this planet, our extinction would come as a relief.
This leads me to the most concerning response when I try to outline a non-anthropocentric course of action: emotional resistance, and even defiance, when I ask how humans might love and care for the worlds with which we are entangled on Earth. How do we stop separating ourselves from “nature” and to see other species as kinfolk (to use Donna Haraway’s term) with intrinsic value of their own and not just as resources for our use? Dominion is not ours and never should have been. This, as my grandmother would have said, is how we got into this pickle in the first place.
I have been told again and again that my project is utopic, hopeful and completely naïve and this has led me to the conclusion that our most crucial challenge is that we need to learn how to love.
Most can just look on and watch the suffering and immiseration of other species with few qualms. Sometimes this blasé dismissal is couched in the two ways I organized my response above. One, it would be much too difficult to add in nonhuman animal and ecological systems because the international can’t even handle human problems. Two, from a disciplinary viewpoint well situated in the quantitative social sciences, we can only be attentive to what we can measure. Broadly, it is perhaps because nature, as most understand it, has no value until it is destroyed. Trees are only the lumber they become. Cows, pigs, and chickens are only livestock to be slaughtered for food. Oceans only supply raw materials for humans to consume. I am always asked, “Where is your data?” “Why waste time on thought experiments?”
This could be a communication problem: a very important mentor and supervisor of my dissertation research, in an early conversation about how to approach IR with my research project in mind, told me that I might want to find a new language to speak to my discipline: “You can’t talk about love in International Relations. Think about another way into your project.” This was said not as a gatekeeper (she is not in IR), but rather as a provocateur. I needed to think about what my field of study could, or in this case could not, say about the world it endeavored to explain. What we’ve got here is failure to communicate. Therefore, in my book The Microbial State: Global Thriving and the Body Politic, I begin with the line “International Relations needs a bigger vocabulary.” I created some metaphorical conceits to expand our vocabulary.
Now I believe we need bigger hearts. It is essential to love in such a way that our hearts could encompass the world and all its creatures. And there is an impossibility in this love, a deep and painful tragedy. We will have to see the suffering we up until now refused to see and know that there may few ways to ameliorate it, but we nonetheless must try. And we must mourn.
Of course, being able to count and quantify will be important—vital even, to acknowledge the scope of the changes that will happen—but what about feeling, care, and love for that which lives alongside us?
To use the framing given to me by this forum—one of salvation—earth may not need saving, but our souls do. Not responding to human induced climate change for all of those affected is first and foremost a moral failing, not a systemic or political one. Let us not be weighed in the balance and found wanting.
Opening Comments From Chairs
The history of international relations over the last century is replete with egregious examples of strategic shock and failure that have done grave damage to global security.
The Allies were warned in 1919 that imposing a harsh settlement on Germany could have dangerous political consequences; in the 1940s, atomic scientists warned that serious efforts to cooperate with the Soviet Union would be needed to forestall a nuclear arms race; and in the early 1960s, US leaders were warned that a war in Vietnam could not be won. More recently, in the late 1990s, neoliberal economic dogma blinded policymakers to warnings about the potential for economic collapse in Southeast Asia. The Bush administration ignored the warnings of its most senior US counterterrorism officials that an attack on the scale of 9/11 was likely; then it ignored warnings about the chaos that could ensue in Iraq after an invasion.
Now, in 2017, many of us worry that a similar ideological, conceptual and institutional myopia is laying the ground for a disaster as profound - and in many ways worse - than those of the 20th Century: unchecked climate change, and the devastation of planet’s Earth’s biodiversity and fundamental ecological systems. The evidence emerging from climate and earth system science is increasingly disturbing: the highest levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere for 1 million years; accelerating rates of polar icecap, permafrost and glacial melting; widespread coral bleaching events like that in Australia’s Great Barrier Reef; unprecedented species extinctions and declines in wild animal populations; unsustainable rates of deforestation and habitat destruction; and ocean acidification and overfishing that will devastate marine biodiversity. And even after the signing of the Paris agreement, the world is still on track for 3°C of global warming which would see massive sea level rise and the loss of the Amazon as a tropical ecosystem.
We were motivated to write the Planet Politics manifesto by our alarm at this crisis and the manifest failure of our political institutions and leadership to see and act on it. While we have all been involved with environmental politics and thought in various ways, the Manifesto’s authors have all made significant critical contributions to thinking about international and environmental security. If we expand our concern beyond human and national security to ecological security on a planetary scale, it is clear that the looming ecological crisis is the greatest threat to global security in this coming century.
The manifesto is thus a demand for International Relations - understood both as a field of study and structure of institutions that includes states, the UN, corporations, and more - to reorganise their efforts around a global political project: to end human-caused extinctions, prevent dangerous climate change, repair the oceans, and support vulnerable multi-species populations, enfolded within a dual commitment to social and economic justice. We argue that this should be pursued as a multilevel “cosmopolitics” that combines governance and resistance, law and subversion, in a common project of human and ecological survival.
The current world order, we charge, is both too state-centric and too anthropocentric: the nonhuman world is seen merely as a strategic and economic resource for human purposes and corporate profit, and political attempts to address climate change and biodiversity protection have been hampered by a world order that enables states to weaken international agreements with power politics and lowest common denominator outcomes.
Instead, we demand an eco-centric politics that places the interests of the global ecology and nonhuman life first - this is the true meaning of sustainability, which can no longer be an anthropocentric process of bargaining human interests against ecosystem protection. The nature and dynamics of industrial capitalism - whether in fishing, agribusiness, mining, biotechnology or energy - are a major part of the problem; but so is the structure and commitments of the existing global order and international law.
Policymakers and international relations theorists often congratulate themselves on their “realism”; we charge that they are failing to understand the reality of the way in which industrialised humanity is affecting the course of planet Earth, and the manifold threats to human and nonhuman life that it will produce. We are thus in a very dangerous kind of “social nature” - nowhere can we say that the natural world is unaffected by human activity, and nowhere can we pretend that social and political life can carry on in ignorance of the dramatic responses and changes in the natural world.
This situation is often called the Anthropocene, a geological epoch that deserves the name of the “age of Man”. However, against some versions of the Anthropocene narrative, we caution that in this situation humanity is both remarkably powerful and dangerously weak, having set ecological changes in train that will turn back on human societies in dramatic and unpredictable ways. We are aware of the insights of post-structural and social constructivist thought, and also of the implicit biases of ecology and Earth system science, but we believe it important to argue that ecological change is occurring in ways that are both affected by and independent of human will; in ways that resist and trouble all of our constructs. Science will remain extraordinarily valuable, but it must abandon its modern project of making and domination for a project of ecological listening, response and repair.
The political, philosophical and institutional forms that the planet politics project could take have been left somewhat open, focused however by our fundamentally eco-centric (or “post-human”) worldview that makes the needs of ecosystems and nonhuman life a fundamental priority. This is a profound challenge to the political, economic and ontological systems of modern humanism. We suggest multiple lines of departure: an Earth-focused ethos of worldliness and entanglement; new kinds of animal and ecosystem rights and representation in international law and global governance; and more rapid and intensely-directed efforts to arrest ecologically damaging processes such as deforestation and the mining and burning of coal.
We are eager for further dialogue and research on how such a project of Planet Politics can and should be pursued: the ways that it is already being pursued; can challenge the ways in which environmental politics is currently pursued; or might itself be revised and challenged. We thank Professor Joseph Camilleri for the opportunity to pursue this dialogue here, and welcome all readers to pursue it in every place and community in which you are engaged: to take it as widely as you dare.