Welcome to another planet …
Why we created the ‘Another Planet’ blog and what we want it to do — by Bronislaw Szerszynski and Nigel Clark
Some people dream about visiting another planet. A lot of people have nightmares about the strange new planetary conditions we are visiting upon ourselves. So why are planets at the core of so much contemporary thought and practice? What exactly is a ‘planet’? And what manner of planet is this that births a beast such as ourselves — a creature capable of learning about, loving, looting and perhaps even leaving its astronomical home?
There are many blogs and other publications, grounded in various disciplines and modes of thought, that are carrying discussions about the momentous and worrying changes that are happening to the Earth — to its climate, its ecology, its very ‘operating state’ — and the effects that these are having and will have on the lives of humans and non-humans alike. But we feel that there is a need for a distinctive kind of contribution to these debates, one that combines humanities and social scientific reflection about the nature and significance of the transformation that is occurring in the Earth with a detailed and sustained engagement with the specific tendencies and powers of matter under planetary conditions.
A rich, ‘scientific’ understanding of Earth processes is not just the preserve of the accredited scientific instructions of Western, European modernity, but has been generated by diverse individuals and collectives across the planet, from many cultures, often through a deep, practical engagement with such processes — whether chosen or forced. But insights generated by contemporary natural scientific inquiry into the Earth can also play a crucial role in generating an expansive understanding of what our planet is and what it can do.
we want to think not just about the planet that we live on but through it
In this blog we want to think not just about the planet that we live on but through it. For us, this involves accepting and embracing ‘planetarity’ as a foundational and conditioning aspect of human existence — as it is for all the other entities, both organic or nonorganic, with which we share the Earth.
Part of that is attending what planets are: gravitationally collapsed and differentiated bodies, composed of chemically diverse condensed matter, existing typically at a mid-range of temperatures between the cold of interstellar space and the huge temperatures of stars, and held away from thermodynamic equilibrium over vast timescales by flows of energy from their parent star and hot interior. These dynamic features, combined with the specific circumstances of their formation and development, means that planets become unique historical entities, capable of passing through thresholds and generating diverse phenomena on multiple timescales — including ourselves.
We want to explore how this emerging understanding of planets — and a view of human beings and human society as planetary phenomena — can help generate fresh thinking about the planet we live on, and on the human condition.
Why ‘another planet’?
There are a number of reasons for choosing this name for our blog.
Firstly, our planet is changing. Human activity is impacting on the ‘operating state’ of the Earth — altering the climate, reducing biodiversity, changing geochemical cycles and processes of erosion, deposition and mineral formation. The Earth is becoming ‘another planet’.
Secondly, however, we start from the position that the planet was always changeable — always capable of shifting state. To understand how it was that one species could become a force of geological significance, we have to understand how the Earth was always capable of becoming ‘another planet’ — and has done so, time and again, over its 4.5 billion-year history.
Thirdly, we want to make interventions that help to make our planet ‘strange’: to disturb the conventional way of looking at it, to see it through new eyes, and in unfamiliar ways. Crucial here are the insights of non-Western peoples — including those who, colonised by Western powers, have often literally been transported to another world — but there also copious resources in Western thought that will help us see the Earth in fresh ways — as ‘another planet’.
Fourthly, we want the title to invoke the idea of counterfactuals — how could the planet have been different than the one we inhabit? How could it become different, be set on a different trajectory than the current one? How might we use methods that are emboldened by the human imagination but also take advantage of our growing understanding of how planets self-organise over deep time to generate grounded speculations about what the Earth could have done — and might yet do?
Fifthly, our planet is one planet amongst many. Although the focus of the blog will be our own home planet, we will make occasional ventures — emboldened by planetary science, astrobiology, speculative philosophy, science fiction and other cultural forms — to the gravity wells of other planets, both near and distant. Thinking about the Earth as ‘another planet’ in this sense will, we want to argue, help us to see it more clearly, in both its precious uniqueness and also its capacity to be otherwise.
Some posts on this blog will address very broad questions about what it means to think through the planet; others will home in on specific Earthly phenomena, or current events, to see how planetary thinking might shed new light.
We are based at Lancaster University in the United Kingdom, but we will invite others who share our broad vision to contribute posts. We look forward to engaging with a wider community of thinkers, makers and doers who want to be part of an interesting journey of exploration.
