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.

“Can world politics save planet Earth?”

Yes. It can. It must.

However, world politics cannot do so in its current formulation. This is because the type of ‘thinking’ – the dominant approach or logic – to world politics does not think relationally, that is to say, it does not think dialectically through to the actual social relations that could shift practice to balance human/nature that is so urgently required by the severity of ecological crises facing the planet.

Key to its error is how the deep core of the disciplinary mainstream of international relations (IR) accepts the bifurcation of the subject/object: all it sees is nominalism and separation, competition and anarchy, both in the ‘human world’ and the ‘natural world’. Subjects are separate from each other, and separate from nature too. There is only endless division in anarchy, power, and the state. From this premise, comes its grand self-delusion: that by this separation, it objectively knows the ‘real’. Yet it is blind to actual reality specifically because of these assumptions that excludes any ‘real’ engagement with nature or the affinity of human and nature. Blind to this reality, it continues to assume inter alia: that nature is something outside IR ‘proper’, that environmental costs are mere negative externalities, and that ecological crises can be solved through existing cooperative institutional frameworks supportive of the status quo.

Instead, we must change our thinking to view the relation of human/nature as an affinity – as a dialectical unity or correlation.1 That is, we must give proper account to the interstitial situatedeness in which humans relate intersubjectively within nature as a totality (inclusive of all human communities, biological life, and earth systems). The basis of all social life must be seen within, and as part of, the ecological whole in which humans play an active conditioning rather than determinative role.

It is no longer that reflective/critical interpretations of IR must respond to the positivist/rational core of the discipline, that is, “be testable” as Keohane once said.2 It is that both the critical and the positivist must respond to the material contradictions that are so obviously emanating from ecological crises in world politics.

The Planet Politics Manifesto was a huge step in the right direction: a cosmopolitical 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.”

But even here an engagement with the social-relations to actualise this radically normative project remained muted. Moreover, its appeal to ‘post-human’ worldview (is that even possible? I am dubious on anything with the prefix ‘post’! ) seems to continue the same separation of subject or object that characterises the mainstream: this time, from human to nature “first.”

Here, I would like to add to the Manifesto in two ways. The first, is by showing how dialectical naturalism is capable of not only transcending dualistic conceptions of “man/nature” but in expanding our awareness of the potentialities of history toward what Murray Bookchin termed the “liberatory pathways” to a social ecology as a restorative relation between human/nature. The second is through recognition theory as a means to ground the cosmopolitan aspirations of the Manifesto within processes of mutual recognition that respect and foster the diversity of the global community, and, that can actively draw upon the ecological norms that already constitute rational claims in international society (however weak and nascent these may be) and potential for their future development.

1. I have outlined this elsewhere. Shannon Brincat & Damian Gerber (2015), “The Necessity of Dialectical Naturalism: Marcuse, Bookchin, and Dialectics in the Midst of Ecological Crises,” Antipode, 47(4): 871-893.
2. Robert Keohane, 1989: “President Address to ISA, 1988,” in International Institutions and State Power: Essays in International Relations Theory. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 173.

The “Planet Politics” manifesto calls for “a politics that is Earth-worldly, and an Earth-worldliness that is political” (70). ‘Earth-worldly’ means recognizing that humans are (already) entangled with the more-than-human. But that acknowledgment is not enough; what makes a politics ‘Earth-worldly’ is the emotional tenor of that acknowledgment. Humans need to look, smell, hear and feel around them; to sense their multi-species partners; and then – the tricky part! – to embrace the state of entanglement. In this way, humans “reframe [their co-vulnerability] as a source of positive solidarity, rather than simply the fearful, clinging, negative solidarity forged by survival anxiety” (70-71).

The move from co-vulnerability to ‘positive solidarity’ has proven difficult for humans historically. Positive solidarity is not impossible for humans, but it is always an achievement. Sustaining positive solidarity with others is an emotional tightrope that traverses an abyss of fascistic desires for purification, border walls and homogeneity. In the recent rise of populist movements in the global North, we witness a more common emotional reaction to scarcity and uncertainty: xenophobia. These movements should remind us, as does the “Planet Politics” manifesto, that acknowledgment is necessary, but always insufficient. The hope borne by many environmentalists and scientists – that if only enough people knew the facts about climate change and the Anthropocene, they would act cooperatively and constructively – misunderstands human politics and its frailties.

If we are to build an eco-politics of generosity, we need to focus upon those many, micro-moments of recognition as fraught with danger. The political challenge arises in the uncertainty of that final step – in the movement from recognition to embrace. As more severe weather seeps into people’s quotidien existence, as food prices swing wildly, as flows of climate migrants intensify, we need to be prepared with real affective strategies to triage our anxieties. The future contours of world politics will follow the outcome of that single sentence in the manifesto – can we reframe entanglement as solidarity, or will it catalyze the violent politics of ‘survival anxiety’? This is the real threat of ‘climate security’ to world politics: not from the desperation of the most vulnerable people in the global South, but from the anxieties of the most privileged and powerful.

Because recognizing entanglement is dangerous, eco-centric politics should be careful with its tone and its narratives. We need to diversify beyond the genres of dystopia and horror to describe our contemporary condition and our possible futures. We need to rethink the almost universal tendency for eco-centric texts to begin with a litany of deaths and horrors (I am guilty of this too). Such a litany focuses on the first step – the need to make people recognize – but too often neglects the most important maneuver that follows – the attempt to inspire humans to feel generous about that entanglement, something that is not suffocation or panic.

This is what makes the “Planet Politics” manifesto so helpful. Not only does it catalogue the ‘reality’ of the planetary and the problems we face, it begins to generate an alternative politics, one in which coal would be a controlled substance, and non-humans would have rights. Eco-centric movements are emerging through many such experiments, at multiple sites.

One possible site, and the subject of my own research, is the politics of work. As it stands, the ideology of work – that having a job in the market economy is related to one’s worth as a citizen and human – blocks our ability to imagine ways of existing beyond the scope of neoliberal capitalism. The vicious circulations of production and consumption demand copious, cheap supplies of energy, and reduce human life to the role of worker/consumer. We are told that we cannot relinquish fossil fuels, or have 100% renewable energy, or enforce a tax on carbon, or limit our consumption, because it would threaten jobs, which, in turn, implies a threat to human life itself. Thanks in part to the ideology of work, the human relationship to energy is framed as one of growth (having unlimited, cheap energy from fossil fuels) versus one of sacrifice (treating energy as limited). Through such a framework, eco-centrism cannot help but appear as a politics that demands self-denial, while fossil capitalism drapes itself in luxury and indulgence.

Eco-centrism can escape this bind by rejecting the ideology of work. Eco-theorists should partner with post-work movements: marginalized voices, and especially feminists, who have critiqued work since the 19th century. Most importantly, post-work politics offers a vision of human life that is fulfilling and pleasurable, even sumptuous, but that does not require intensive commodity and energy consumption. At the fraught moment of recognition, when faced with entanglement, we need just such a generous and creative politics.

Earth, and the multiple, distinct worlds, it sustains, are performing a powerful critique of IR by refusing to conform to the categories, predictions and methods of analysis that it offers. The phenomena mentioned in this section's introduction – global warming, global patterns of extinction, polar melting and more – are embodiments of this critique, and IR scholars (amongst others) need to attend to them. However, this is not the revolt of ‘the Earth’ against ‘human activity’ in general. Instead, these phenomena reflect the responses and conditions of plural, distinct worlds sustained on and by earth to particular, deeply destructive modes of organization and relations. By 'worlds' I mean plural constellations of beings that co-constitute one another and, in so doing, create and sustain the conditions for their collective existence.

The introduction asks how a ‘different kind of world order’ can be imagined and created. From my perspective, the challenge is to become receptive to the existence and expressions of plural worlds. In our original argument, the authors of the ‘Planet Politics Manifesto’ wrote about the irruption of a ‘planetary real’ that is shattering the abstract structures of International Relations, both in theory and practice. I would argue that there is not one ‘real’, and it is not the expression of ‘a’ planet. Instead, what the Manifesto points to is the force-fulness of worlds, which extends far beyond the status of mere background conditions or material substrates for ‘human’ action. In trans-forming, colliding, merging, co-existing and being extinguished, these multiple worlds each express their own ‘reals’. If there is friction between the forces of reality and the abstractions of IR, it is the expression of the plurality of these worlds as they are traversed by the totalizing, homogenizing forms of worlding associated with the formation of ‘the globe’ as a sphere of action.

From this perspective, addressing the crises of today involves not simply formulating a new way of knowing ‘the’ world, but rather becoming sensitive to other worlds. My own research is pluriversal in its grounding and normative commitments. Engaging with Indigenous knowledges and cosmo-visions from across Turtle Island, Australia, Hawai’i, southeast Asia and other distinct places, it seeks to understand the transversal structures that engender global patterns of extinction. As such, it requires attunement to the various worlds that are disrupted or destroyed by Western forms of worlding that seek to elide earth with an enclosed globe.

I am concerned that some of the proposed approaches to narratives of planetary crisis reinforce this impulse. For instance, the ‘Earth system’ framework discussed in the Manifesto offers a vision very different from those embraced by traditional IR; yet it reproduces the idea that there is one, unified planet and that any single worldview can reflect it. Similarly, the concept of the ‘Anthropocene’, in its attempt to gain critical purchase on global crises, ironically encloses earth within the homogenizing envelope of ‘human’ activities, erasing the specificity of the relations and modes of organization that it encompasses. Instead of imagining ‘another’ world, I argue for a politics and ethos of co-existence that honours, expresses, protects and nurtures the plurality of worlds.

I agree with the authors of the "planet politics" manifesto that confronting the ecological crisis calls for a profound rethinking of how we understand ourselves as inhabitants of the earth. We need a new basis for our politics, precisely because our existing arrangements are incapable of sustaining activities that care for the planet as a whole -- our political interests are constituted along provincial or national lines, not global ones. But I do not think that planetary systems science can or should be that new basis, as this mis-states the relationship of science and politics; the attempt to base politics on science converts science into a contestable political position, and thus deprives science of its capacity to serve as a non-partisan input into political life. What we need instead is an eco-theology that can inform both a science and a politics of and for the Anthropocene.

In the manifesto, "the real" of the Anthropocene underpins the call to put planetary systems scientists on an Earth System Council as though such scientists would be empowered to speak for that "real" on the basis of their superior knowledge about it. This in turn presumes that planetary systems science is a privileged discourse for accessing that "real." But incorporating planetary systems science into the political process makes it one political position among others. Scientific claims therefore become politically contestable, and we open up the possibility of bargaining with planetary systems science as one perspective among others, or rejecting or opposing planetary systems science because it serves one's political interests to do so. And this is inconsistent with the very idea of a science of planetary systems, because a scientific claim is simply not a matter of (political) perspective. Facts -- including facts about climate change -- are not partisan positions.

To put this another way, I think there's a real tension between invoking the science of the ecological crisis as a corrective to our currently-dominant scientific ontologies that presume the independence of the human social world from the rest of the natural world, and drawing political positions from that ecological science. To the extent that planetary systems science actually gives us the parameters for any future sustainable politics, then any politics has to be curtailed in accordance with those parameters. It's almost as if in the manifesto the authors simultaneously want and don't want to say that; they want the scientifically-grounded urgency of the crisis, but they don't want the epistemic imperialism over other perspectives that such an appeal entails. I don't think we can have it both ways.

Indeed, at the end of the day what the authors want readers of their manifesto -- a manifesto that is directed, in the first instance, at academic social scientists -- to do is to adopt a different scientific ontology, a different set of presumptions and starting-points for the creation of valid knowledge: a profoundly relational account of life, human beings as embedded in broader systems of ecological transaction, and so on. But the grounds for adopting that scientific ontology can't simply re-state the premises of that ecological way of worlding, or urge us to adopt that "embeddedness-in-the-wider-ecosystem" approach on political grounds. Instead, the grounds for adopting a scientific ontology have to be scientific ones: this way of approaching the explanatory challenge of climate change is a systematic body of theoretical propositions that has been subjected to a public process of contestation. Those epistemic grounds might be good enough for scientists, social or otherwise, but that is precisely because they are not partisan grounds. Their status is quite different from the pronouncements of political parties.

So we are left in a conundrum: planetary systems science, and any successor social science that incorporated it, claims an epistemic status that places it outside of the political realm. But injecting that perspective into the political process undermines that very epistemic status, in effect converting science into one political position among others. How, then, to proceed? I am struck by the fact that even though the authors call for the use of all resources to confront the challenge of the ecological crisis, their account is quite relentlessly secular. The manifesto never mention notions like "creation care," or points out that a relational account of human life as embedded-in-nature is profoundly present in many if not most of the religious traditions that have ever existed in human history. It is as though the authors are implicitly saying that science, the science of planetary systems, is sufficient to save us. In my view this simply cannot work, precisely because science of any kind (to invoke Max Weber for a moment) doesn't answer the question "how should we then live?" Instead, science tells us the consequences of our most basic commitments, and the likely outcomes of our possible courses of action. Science is not a value-system that tells us which outcome to choose, which is precisely why it has to remain constitutively separate from the political process through which we collectively determine our courses of action.

So I would argue that "planet politics" based on planetary systems science isn't what we need. What we need instead is a new set of value-commitments, and those don't and can't come from science. What we need is something like "eco-theology," a recognition of the commonalities and what Ludwig Wittgenstein would have called "tissues of resemblance" that emerge between and among various ways of knowing including planetary systems science, but also including a wide variety of religious and spiritual traditions that make ethical claims on us. Those commonalities and that broad theology -- and I call it a theology deliberately, because I can see no way that doing this doesn't involve notions of our obligations in the face of something sacred -- can then inform the (social) science that we produce and offer to the political process as a non-partisan, non-political way. At the same time, a robust eco-theology can inform the political process through avenues other than that of non-partisan scientific advice, precisely because theology works directly on value-commitments and makes imperative claims involving how we ought to live. Planetary systems science can clarify how we might go about dealing with the massive environmental changes we human beings have set in motion, but it can't tell us why we ought to do so. Only a changed theological vision can do that.

One of the central aims of the “Planet Politics” Manifesto is to push international relations (IR) scholars into uncomfortable positions. This it accomplishes in spades. Readers are forced to confront the exceptional conditions of planetary change and the abject failure of international relations to see, acknowledge, and respond to the new Anthropocene world. We are tasked with no less than a “profound restructuring of international politics and order that can assure the planet’s survival…” (522). Clearly, we’ve got a lot of work to do.

The Holocene age - the 12,000-year present – in which international relations was formed, is now over. That period defined by relative climatic stability and the gradual expansion of Homo Sapiens, both in numbers and impacts, has now given way to an age of exception – where humans are geological agents, capable of fundamentally transforming the Earth system. This new reality presents a host of downright weird conundrums for a discipline that traditionally viewed the Earth as an inert staging ground for the human drama - or as a distinct object that offered humans either protection or danger. We are now left with a creeping realization that the ideas, concepts and institutions that have shaped global politics have all been bred for life on a planet that no longer exists. We have no true sensibility of what is happening, let alone for what comes next.

How might we, as IR scholars, go about fulfilling the call to action found in the Manifesto? If IR is so profoundly out of touch with the planetary real, then are we better off staying out of the way? Perhaps we should stick to what we know best and leave it to others to deal with environmental change. As Green and Hale (2017) have recently shown, IR has done just that. Less than 4% of surveyed scholars identify the environment as their primary research focus, despite climate change consistently labelled as one of the three most important policy issues of our time.

Yet, somehow, this is deeply unsatisfying. It reflects ignorance and indifference to increasing harms across human and nonhuman worlds rather than enlightened restraint. Given its role in preserving a violent status quo, IR has a responsibility to reflect deeply upon its ontological, epistemological, and ethical foundations. It needs to figure out ways to co-exist with, learn from, and respond to an entangled, social nature that is fundamentally different than what it has supposed. The Manifesto is a welcome addition to this ongoing process.

My own work examines one direction that, ironically, harkens back to the roots of IR and security studies: the notion of care. Often neglected, care is in fact fundamental to the concept of security. As the literary scholar John T. Hamilton (2013) has explained, the Latin root of security - Securitas - invokes the Roman figure Cura to describe an ideal state where there is no risk and care is no longer needed in our actions; a place where we can exist without worry and with the knowledge that no harm is coming. To be secure is to be care-free.

Yet, given what we know about the Anthropocene – ongoing extinctions, rapid climate change, cascading ecological transformations and tipping points – it is clear that the promise of security needs reconfiguration. We need more, not less, care.

What can care offer us as IR scholars in the Anthropocene? First, by activating multiple traditions of care, already found often in feminist and other subaltern traditions, we can recode and reclaim security away from its fatalistic determinism that relegates the future to apocalyptic conflicts over dwindling resources. Second, care allows us to cross the massive scalar and temporal zones that are impenetrable to conventional security studies. We can care for future unborn generations, or past ancestors, in ways that transcend conventional security ethics. Third, it transcends the human-nature binaries that restrict who or what is worthy of ethical consideration. Finally, it makes visible the immanent forms of relationality that bind us with distant others, including non-humans.

All of these reasons, and others, help create new forms of planet politics. Care is appropriate because it demands nothing in return - no search for justice and reciprocity in a world that is often indifferent or openly hostile to us. In fact, care helps us respond to inevitable loss and failure. Given some of the environmental realities outlined in this forum, perhaps planet politics is fundamentally a hospice politics. This subverts the security problematique – the search for stasis, control, predictability, and survivability. A caring response obliges us to act in a spirit of empathy; to extend hospitality and kinship to human and non-human strangers; and to feel gratitude in the midst of ongoing, seemingly perpetual, social and ecological crises.

To answer the organizing question of this forum, no, world politics cannot save planet Earth. The world we once knew has already ended. Once we learn to acknowledge that it will be possible to think and act creatively and, hopefully, carefully.

References:
Green, Jessica F., and Thomas Hale. 2017. “Reversing the Marginalization of Global Environmental Politics in International Relations: An Opportunity for the Discipline.” PS: Political Science. 50.2: 473-479.

Hamilton, John T. 2013. Security: Politics, Humanity, and the Philology of Care. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

We have lived by the assumption that our political system will naturally evolve for the better. We were wrong. World politics can only save planet Earth if it reforms, and IR scholars must reform ahead of the change.

The near future now holds unprecedented environmental and political chaos. The need to arrest climate change is urgent. But, our frayed political system is incapable of taking action. Big business has been empowered to monetize the natural world—a convergence that condemns thousands of species to disappear from the tapestry of the earth. Trees have become carbon sequestration, gorillas are an ecotourism destination and species without market value are invisible.

People across the world intrinsically know that once wildlife is gone the place they once lived will be hollow. These are the threads we must protect.

Before we collected into giant cities, we managed our relationship with our wild community—the nonhuman species that share the landscape and seascape of Earth with us. We made local decisions, and we reflected on the nature of the wild relationship that surrounded us.

Now cloistered in our monetized societies, we are disconnected from the venerable bond between animal and human that still exists in communities close to the wilds of the world.

We rake against the natural fibres of local conservation, destroying their form and texture until they are smooth and uniform. In our determination to replicate solutions for diverse and complex local problems, we have been seduced into weaving with neutrality—with sameness.

Whole villages have been forced from their ancestral forest homes—wilderness they have harmoniously inhabited for generations. In their place armed border guards stride, paved roads snake and exclusive hotels stand. Where children once learned from their elders of the leaves and fruits and animals around them, tourists now stare from open top cars at the last surviving tiger. Hunters once stood on the ice edge at sunrise, offering thanks to the spirit world before hunting meat for their community. Now they meet wealthy sport-shooters, from half a world way, who lust for blood and a polar bear trophy.

A transnational elite control funding and policy directions, through globally centralised decisions. They discipline populations into neoliberal market acceptance and a limited, toothless version of environmentalism that ignores the debt of historical resources harvest of colonial and imperialist actors. They reinforce their own construction of nature, silencing different interpretations and viewpoints, in a quest for a homogenised world.

The fabric we are weaving is dystopic.

There is another option; a rooted cosmopolitan option. It is time for ancient, wise, stories to be the core of a wild tapestry of future decisions.

International environmental governance form should be born of the community—their home, their solution, their management. Political institutions must be reformed in a rooted cosmopolitan direction that serves as a constructive supplement to the laws of the state. We can break from the neoliberal agenda by tuning conservation to the community landscape level—respecting cultural identity and expression and the connectedness of human and non-human members of the community—and channelling this broader, messier, more inclusive community directly into international discussions.

In turn, civil society must claim a formal seat at the international decision-making table, as communities advocating for the wildlife they live with.[1] Communities should have the power to speak for the wildlife that surrounds them.

This reform is more than hiring local people as park rangers or ecotour guides, or systematically enabling them to monitor and blow the whistle on illegal hunting. Truly acknowledging community connections to place and wildlife—recognising that forests, grassy plains, arctic tundra or wetlands are homes—can build powerful local conservation initiatives, that don't need the market to determine they have a value.

The weft of a rooted cosmopolitan potential exist where activists fight to protect waterbirds and wetlands from mining; herders make peace with snow leopards in the Himalaya, and people stand in the footprints of elephants that walk the plains and forests of Africa. We can let go of our vice-like grip on the current international political order, embrace these local voices, and choose the warp thread that empowers them.

The ‘Planet Politics Manifesto’ leads the way. Like a weaver sitting at an empty loom, there are many possibilities ahead. The tapestry of our future is our collective choice. We can sit, indifferent, and weave plain fabric, allowing others to dye and shape it into projects of their own making—projects that will impoverish communities and subjugate nature until we lose the last of what is precious. Or, we can design a beautifully woven tapestry that reflects the depth, texture and colour of what we want to save.

This is our choice.

[1] I have outlined this elsewhere, see: Margi Prideaux, 2017, Global Environmental Governance, Civil Society and Wildlife, Routledge, London

The crucial point about the Anthropocene discussion isn’t whether the science is right or whether it is an alternative to IR, but that it requires social scientists to rethink the implicit contextualisations that inform their analyses. The earth system is being transformed at a rapid rate; the key determinant of the future climate conditions of the planet is now humanity and the decisions the rich and powerful make in coming decades about what carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere will be. Climate on this planet is no longer a matter of orbital dynamics and Milankovich cycles.

The transformation underway is also causing the sixth extinction event in planetary history, and the movement of species by humans in the last few centuries has rearranged biological geographies in a way probably not seen since Pangaea split up hundreds of millions of years ago. Thinking about human affairs in that context is key; the implicit geopolitical assumptions of most of IR is that there is a given context for human rivalries. The Anthropocene discussion makes that an impossible formulation as the premise from which to begin investigations or think politically.

It also raises great difficulties with the formulation of ‘saving the planet’. Humanity has already dramatically altered the planetary system, and has done so by making all sorts of new things, and moving and reassembling others, not least animal and plant species. In the last couple of centuries, but most noticeably in the last couple of generations, we have been making carbon dioxide in prodigious quantities. And cities, roads, the ecological deserts that are agricultural mono-cropping systems, as well as plastics and all sorts of ‘novel entities’ in the earth system term, that are making the future context for humanity very different from the past.

In so far as what needs to be ‘saved’ can be clearly articulated, it’s the key elements of biodiversity and the habitats that these species live in, as well as a fairly stable climate, something akin to the Holocene conditions that humanity has known through history. The last 12,000 years have had a very unusually stable climate. The prospect of rapid climate change introducing a fluctuating, rather than fairly predictable, climate isn’t something that an urban humanity of 9 or 10 billion people can reasonably expect to cope with given its needs for food which requires reliable production and an economy to move it around.

This isn’t about saving a given context but a matter of thinking intelligently about how we make multiple socio-ecological systems that allow humanity to, in various diverse ways, live well in new contexts without burning large quantities of material (biomass or fossil fuels) to do so. Its also about thinking about ecologies that can absorb the huge amounts of carbon dioxide that already are in the atmosphere, not least to slow, and hopefully eventually reduce the problems of ocean acidification, that so threaten numerous aspects of Oceanic life. This point is often overlooked; being a land based species we are, and IR is, usually guilty of a profound terrestrocentrism that ignores the fact that life is an aqueous phenomenon first and foremost.

Planet politics is thus about production, about who decides what gets made, where, and how. The rich and powerful have disproportionate influence on these matters through their investment strategies and economic decisions. It matters greatly if fossil fuels power our cities or if instead windmills and solar panels do. If we use fossil fuels we make yet more carbon dioxide. No economic system is innocent; mining raw materials will continue to be a dirty business, but how we do these things, and which ores we use, dug from where, and processed how, has consequences that need to be worked into production decisions. These are now far too important to be left to the vagaries of so called ‘markets’.

Planet politics has to be about trying to think about systems that deal with the worst human suffering caused by economic inequities, and doing so while ensuring that what we make doesn’t preclude living well for future generations. It’s obviously about technical change, but it’s also about social changes that operate on the clear understanding that we are earth, are a part of earth, not apart from earth, and our societies are dramatically altering both human and non-human habitats.

This ontological premise requires abandoning the distinctions between Nature and Society, and understanding that we are moving species around, literally making new ones by selective breeding and building artificial habitats in a series of new ecological arrangements that are just that, new! IR has been mostly concerned about how to dominate a divided world or how to deal with the consequences of efforts to do so. Planet politics now has to be about figuring out how to share a crowded world, one constituted of many new ‘worlds’, in the sense of interconnected assemblages, that operate in ways that allow others to flourish too in a biosphere that humanity is rapidly remaking.

I want to thank Tony, Stefanie, Simon, and Audra for inviting me to take part in writing this essay, and for our host for lending us some ‘real estate’ on his weblog.

I shared some of Patrick Jackson’s concerns in my initial contributions to this essay. Specifically, I shared the concern that writing of this genre often verges into the radically a-political in the guise of being radically plural – that the non-human world goes from being an ontology one 'thinks through' to a radical claim of being as such; or that science and technology are used to trump politics, or to turn what are properly questions of value and meaning (Jackson’s ‘theology’) into a value-free science of administration. This is ever the concern with social science, and it has been thus at least since Wolin’s Politics and Vision, Marcuse’s Reason and Revolution, and perhaps going as far as Comte and Saint-Simon.

Further, my sense is often that this concern is ‘weaponized’ in contemporary International theory. Some years back I wrote a book that spoke to the question of how values are ‘baked in’ to the academic study of world politics, in which I proposed that a particular kind of critical skepticism – drawing on the work of first-generation Frankfurt school scholars like Adorno and Horkheimer – that was meant to help us remain aware of, and reflexively engaged with those values, and their work in structuring scientific and social-scientific inquiry.

My sense is that such critiques are listened to selectively: such skepticism is fine when put to Joe Nye's liberalism or Barry Posen's realpolitik, but not when one moves to the corners of international theory that self-identify as ‘normative’ or ‘critical’. I understand why this happens – to speak of oneself as a ‘critical’ theorist is often to describe not one’s intellectual tools, but one’s position within the discipline – but there is a depressing quality to it nevertheless. It risks reviving a kind of emancipatory naïveté which post-war critical theory specifically sought to disavow. It is the regulative ideal of emancipation that is to guide us in our scientific work, not the practical instantiation of one or another account of it.

To fail to appreciate this adequately is to set the stage for ever more cycles of reification and closure. More repetition and less difference; more seeking at the margins for some magic combination of subaltern discourses which will somehow prove resistant to reification and tendentious appropriation and exempt us from burden of thinking deeply, reflectively, and circumspectly. The "tricky part," as Cara notes in her contribution (above), lies in learning to "embrace the state of entanglement" that such reflection generates; to dwell and abide in it. This strikes me as precisely correct.

In that vein, the claim that climate change is too urgent for us to get caught up in the problems of thinking that attend 19th/20th century catastrophes sounds eerily familiar. Is such a claim not essentially similar to those made in the 19th/20th centuries who said that the dangers of industrial scale military mobilization – or later, nuclear ‘sneak attack’ – were too urgent to allow us the luxury of woolly-headed navel-gazing? Are not periodizations of the ‘holocene’ and the ‘anthropocene’ just as historicist – and therefore, just as available to tendentious appropriation – as were the historical writings of Ranke and Meinecke?

In that vein, what was unique and special about this group (and this is reflected in many of the fine interventions offered above), is that they tried – really tried – to accommodate those views in the writing of the manifesto. The vast majority of the paper is Stef, Tony, and the other authors. The key contribution I wanted to make – that I felt I needed to make – came at the end of the essay:

"We [pursue the call made here] aware of the limitations of thinking, of the necessity for chastened, sustainable critique and self-reflection alongside engagement with other disciplines working towards similar ends. In claiming the notion of a new planetary real, and in borrowing from the natural sciences, we do not claim the naïve position that the findings of those sciences are incontestable. Even less would we argue that descriptive claims drawn from such science have only one possible normative or political reading. Planet politics, in other words, does not claim to have transcended the limits of conceptual representation, solved the age-old epistemological problems of mediation and reification, or somehow leapt over the normative problems of identitarian thinking with its associated dangers for politics.

Certainly, Planet Politics needs to enter the constellation of ontologies, epistemologies, and methods that define our discipline if that discipline is not to fail; if, that is, this discipline is to continue to speak meaningfully to the world that presents itself to politics as a demand. We are thus challenging IR to reorganise its very foundations around the complex system of processes and interactions that bind society and nature so terribly together and are producing such world-shaking results, rather than around the anthropocentric drama of human cooperation and conflict. Chastened as it is, that claim is bold enough without also taking on the claim of privileged irrefutability. We also acknowledge that the ‘cognitive, industrial, economic, affective, technological, epistemological and meteorological’ environments that make our life and studies possible are also destructive of the climate, and possibly ourselves."

That is, as I understand us, IR has failed because it simply doesn't know how to value this kind of thinking; that it remains a scientific/political discourse in the bourdieusian sense, rather than a properly scientific field. The social networks of science and prestige have served to exclude a view that's terribly important because, well, no-one knows how to get a job in the US writing in the idiom we have chosen. The failure of IR is thus a failure not of thinking, but of the academy; and the 'end of IR' is about a scientific community that prefers to keep talking in its preferred idioms than to confront the growing gap between our phenomenological encounters with 'the real' (not reality as such, but reality as we perceive it – the naive experience of watching Florida or Louisiana coastlines disappear into the sea, or watching the Great Barrier Reef die).

In that sense, we have failed; we've preferred the 'job' of being IR professors over the ‘vocation’ of thinking which that job means to sustain. In this vein, really original work like Audra's or Stef's or Tony's – or the work Simon has been doing for two decades – has this absurd disciplinary mountain it has to climb, while other folks do not. Bentley Allen has a nice piece on this that fills in some of that gap – the social construction of 'the environment' as an object of thinking – that I think fills in the gap between our piece and this claim, as does Inanna Hamati-Ataya’s 'field theory' work more generally.

Bruno Latour recently said that “climate change and its denial have been organizing all of contemporary politics at least for the last three decades” and, Cassandra like, he has been ignored by political scientists for whom the dialectical language of class struggle is the only language in which politics can really be understood as politics. But consider Trumpism and its effective denialism. The campaign rhetoric solved the problem, as far as the Trump voters were concerned, because Trumpism makes it clear there is no problem. They were ‘saved’, in a canny mobilisation of deeply ingrained American theology. Faith suffers idiots. All this, coming from the man about to take over the political reins of the world’s most important nation, hence most capable of helping save the planet politically. His opposition in Hillary Clinton missed a great opportunity, that of mobilising fear, like Trump had with his fascistic religious outsider threat. Clinton could have calmly talked of the greatest challenge facing the planet, including the economic challenges for environmental damage that insurance companies are calculating the cost of. She could have talked about how she would have dealt with this great challenge. And the fear that Trump had washed from the hearts of his voters would have remained with her more rational, secular ones, and they might have voted to mitigate risk. As it was, she said nothing about it, and they felt unmoved. Business as usual was her myopic political strategy. Paradoxically, the crisis that Trump has initiated could even generate more passion, counter-reaction and hope in the near future.

Meanwhile climate change and its denial continue to organise politics. Young conservatives join the Liberal party (where I live in Australia) and do internships with the Minerals Council of Australia as front-line ideologues promoting the coal industry. If it weren’t for climate change, there would be no need for them to be mobilised, though they won’t admit it (because it either ‘doesn’t exist’, or it ‘doesn’t matter’). But there it is, organising politics by way of denial, something that can easily be reversed, one hopes. Climate change, as what Tim Morton calls a ‘hyperobject’, is infiltrating all our lives from all points of the material and political compass. Our more progressive friends, in industry as well as in social institutions, are forging ahead with green technologies, economies and strategies, and presumably these are incrementally ‘saving the planet’.

I fear the Cassandra syndrome; gentle, cooperative speakers will not be believed because the bullies have all the money and power. The latter put their faith in transcendence and even fund research into space exploration to find another planetary colony. This has been a long-held political fantasy, coupled with science fiction and religion, for longer than the messing up of our Earth began to really be felt. How many will read us, in the humanities or the sciences, who rationally calculate that ‘there is no planet B’? The essential public infrastructures of institutions of knowledge and law are being dismantled by neo-liberal regimes, partly by demonstrating that all ‘experts’ are partisan because they are contracted to funding bodies or political positions. We have to vigorously resist the economisation and privatisation of our research that makes this possible. But this doesn’t mean retreating to ‘neutrality’; it means acknowledging the politics of knowledge and how what matters for scientists and philosophers also matters for the informed public who are allies in struggles to make careful decisions for the broadest number of stakeholders, including other living things.

Joseph Camilleri poses a number of important questions in his brief intervention. The one I wish to focus on is this one:

“…if far-reaching change is envisaged in the way we think, feel and act, what are viable strategies for change? Who – not just individuals but collectivities and institutions – are in a position to exercise leadership, or at least to contemplate ground-breaking initiatives? Simply put, what would it take to actualise something of the ecologically centred revolution called for by the Manifesto?”

While we are trying to enter into, and further build, a community of intellectuals, activists and governors around the Planet Politics agenda, it is certainly beyond a small number of writers to solve such a profound set of political problems, which, as Stephen Muecke acknowledges, is shadowed by the power of the global political right, NewsCorp, the fossil fuel industries, and systemic climate change science denialism (lets call it by its true name: denihilism).

In the Manifesto, and in more recent essay by Stefanie and myself on the nature of political power after the Anthropocene, we argue that change will need to be distributed, working across every possible jurisdiction and level of government, across borders and ecosystems, in ways that take in diplomacy and governance as well as resistance and subversion. Such a distributed politics, one that acknowledges a sharing of power with nonhuman life and processes, breaks with both the traditionally leftist model of power which looks to some kind of vanguard agent or class, and the traditionally elitist liberal model of power focused around the state and other acknowledged political actors, such as civil society and NGOs.

Yet dealing with climate change means dealing with every actor and activity that contributes to greenhouse emissions and global warming, while being bold enough to identify and target the institutions and actors who can make the swiftest and most beneficial change. Our argument for a coal convention is not merely about morality or security, but is an argument that climate change mitigation should involve directly targeting major emissions sectors and sources, rather than rely on tax and market-based approaches or vague and non-binding political agreements such as that concluded in Paris. Similarly direct and distributed efforts can be applied to phasing out our reliance on oil - with emissions standards and policies that force the rapid uptake of electric vehicles, support them with zero emissions electricity and new investments in public transport and zero emissions freight corridors.

Dealing with biodiversity loss, deforestation, and habitat destruction, requires confronting systemic processes, market structures, and corrupt and irresponsible actors: fishing fleets, palm oil companies, politicians, consumers, manufacturers and supermarket chains. These are complex systems, but they can be attacked at every possible node and institution that enables them to function. At the same time, we must be creative and bold enough to move outside permitted political channels and processes, and change their logic.

I would suggest that the state should be thought of as an increasingly important focus of effort and a potential ally in a sustainability politics. Having worked at the edges of national environmental policy-making in the past, and seen it being both effective and subverted by vested interests, we can see that the state can promote structural economic and societal change for sustainability, can protect ecosystems, and regulate corporate power. Unfortunately, the international system also provides it with enormous leeway and control over its territorial waters and marine ecosystems, and its terrestrial ecosystems. These have been viewed as granting unlicensed levels of ecologically destructive freedom; we need to change that into a solemn responsibility for ecological repair and sustainability.

Many progressives have an understandable if overstated suspicion of the state and the project of governance, or possibly also lack of awareness and understanding of how it functions. Yet the state is an important site around which we need to build understanding and intervention. The right-wing attack on environmental science, governance and regulatory capacity - from CSIRO to the EPA - is blatant evidence that state efforts to protect the environment are effective and resented. The answer is to make them stronger still.