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In this article we make a case for an understanding of human difference that attends to the way that social collectives engage with the Earth’s own capacity for self-differentiation. This draws us into conversation with recent interpretations of Hegel that see at the heart of his philosophy not a self-aggrandizing human agent set against a passive nature but an inherently fractured subject confronting a no-less intrinsically sundered outer reality. We use the example of traditional open-field cultural burning to show how skilled operators can painstakingly develop responses to ecoclimatic variability, putting this into dialogue with Hegel’s reflections on the ‘incendiarism’ of political revolution as a human expression of the wider self-antagonism of nature. We go on to make connections between Hegel’s account of the way that subjects can anticipate their own futurity and Indigenous conceptions of non-linear time, suggesting that the emergence of new earth-oriented practices can be seen as a complex interrelation of past, present and future. We close by suggesting that ‘progress’ for Hegel is not about the collective subject achieving omniscience and omnipotence, but involves the onerous and harrowing coming to terms with both its own divided identity and its exposure to a discordant external reality.

Concerns have been raised that a focus on greenhouse gas removals (GGR) in climate models, scientific literature and other media might deter measures to mitigate climate change through reduction of emissions at source – the phenomenon of ‘mitigation deterrence’. Given the urgent need for climate action, any delay in emissions reduction would be worrying. We convened nine deliberative workshops to expose stakeholders to futures scenarios involving mitigation deterrence. The workshops examined ways in which deterrence might arise, and how it could be minimized. The deliberation exposed social and cultural interactions that might otherwise remain hidden. The paper describes narratives and ideas discussed in the workshops regarding political and economic mechanisms through which mitigation deterrence might occur, the plausibility of such pathways, and measures recommended to reduce the risk of such occurrence. Mitigation deterrence is interpreted as an important example of the ‘attraction of delay’ in a setting in which there are many incentives for procrastination. While our stakeholders accepted the historic persistence of delay in mitigation, some struggled to accept that similar processes, involving GGRs, may be happening now. The paper therefore also reviews the claims made by participants about mitigation deterrence, identifying discursive strategies that advocates of carbon removal might deploy to deflect concerns about mitigation deterrence. We conclude that the problem of mitigation deterrence is significant, needs to be recognized in climate policy, and its mechanisms better understood. Based on stakeholder proposals we suggest ways of governing GGR which would maximize both GGR and carbon reduction through other means.

This paper argues that an exploration of colloids can help us situate human social life within a wider understanding of the sociality and animacy of matter. Colloids are substances such as sols, foams, powders, gels, doughs and pastes that exhibit complex and shifting macroscale physical properties that do not conform to standard conceptions of solids, liquids or gases. Colloids can behave in complex and creative ways because of their topological enfolding of dispersed and continuous matter, in different phases, at a ‘mesoscale’ intermediate between the scale of molecules and that of the macroscale substance. I relate colloids, with their twin phenomena of ‘repetition’ and ‘mediation’, to an understanding of social life as reducible neither to the interaction between separate individuals nor to a transindividual whole. I suggest that human social life participates in a colloidal ‘metapattern’ of repetition and mediation that is manifest across diverse material substrates and spatial scales.

In this short response, we engage with four generous and stimulating commentaries on our Planetary Social Thought (2021). We endorse Cecilia Åsberg's suggestion that the boundary between the environmental humanities and social sciences is dissolving – but also call for more inventive relations between these disciplines and the natural sciences. We discuss László Cseke's account of the rise of factory-farmed ‘broiler’ chickens as a reversal of many of the achievements of the Earth over the last half-billion years. We agree with Franklin Ginn's suggestion that vegetality is a crucial vector of planetary self-exploration and invention – and one that can give us clues as to what life might become on other worlds. We reflect on Simon Dalby's observations about the lack of reference to planetary governance in the book, suggesting that we need a way of thinking about the politics of the Earth that goes beyond conflict and agonism – in Åsberg's words, that we need to learn not just to survive but to thrive.

In this paper I make a case for a philosophy of continuous matter, in dialogue with object-oriented ontology. A continuous-matter philosophy is one that focuses not on the identity, properties, and relations of discrete, countable objects, but on the nature of extended substances, both in relation to human experience and in terms of their own “inner life.” I explore why and under what conditions humans might perceive the world as objects or as continuous substances, and the language that humans use for talking about both. I argue that approaching the world as continua requires the foregrounding of concepts that emphasize the immanent (internal to a region of space), the inclusive (with contrasting properties coexisting in the same substance), the gradual (manifesting differentially at different points), and the generative or virtual (involving the constant production of form and new gradients). I suggest that starting philosophy from continuous matter rather than objects also has wider implications for speculative thought

In a reply to ‘Speculative Listening’ by Kaya Barry, Michele Lobo and Michelle Duffy, I defend representation as a resource for experimental and speculative practice, arguing that the loss of total immersion in the flux and becoming of the world that the representational engenders is a precondition for experimentation and speculation.

In this paper I situate the Situationists' derive within an analysis of drift as a planetary phenomenon. Using the concept of the middle voice', I suggest that drifting can lead us to a deeper understanding of the way that all things move, that move within the extended body of the Earth. I develop the idea of driftwork', in which drift is subsumed within a wider set of purposes or functions, and describe different forms of more-than-human driftwork, with different political implications. I conclude by suggesting that things adrift can help us trace the lineaments of a planetary ethic: an ethic that extends beyond the human, the animal, and the living to the whole extended body of the Earth; that allows us to recontextualize human practices of drifting within a planetary context; that is sensitive to the debt that all moving things owe to the planetary mobility commons that enables their motion; and that helps us to recognize our obligations of care towards all drifting things.

In the Parthenon frieze, the time of mortals and the time of gods seem to merge. Dipesh Chakrabarty has argued that with the advent of the Anthropocene the times of human history and of the Earth are similarly coming together. Are humans entering the ‘monumental time’ of the Earth, to stand alongside the Olympian gods of the other geological forces? This article first looks at the cultural shifts leading to the modern idea of separate human and Earth histories. It examines the changing use of monuments to mediate between human and other temporalities. It explores the use of ‘stratigraphic sections’ as natural monuments to mark transitions between the major time units of Earth history, and the erection of intentional monuments nearby. It suggests that the Anthropocene, as a geological epoch-in-the-making, may challenge the whole system of monumental semiotics used to stabilize our way of thinking about deep time.

• Targets and accounting for negative emissions should be explicitly set and managed separately from existing and future targets for emissions reduction. • Failure to make such a separation has already hampered climate policy, exaggerating the expected future contribution of negative emissions in climate models, while also obscuring the extent and pace of the investment needed to deliver negative emissions. • Separation would help minimise the negative impacts that promises and deployments of negative emissions could have on emissions reduction, arising from effects such as temporal trade-offs, excessive offsetting, and technological lock-in. • Benefits for international, national, local, organisational and sectoral planning would arise from greater clarity over the role and timing of negative emissions alongside accelerated emissions reduction.

Szerzynski argues in his epilogue that there are aspects of our emerging understanding of planets that have a curious affinity with Amerindian thought, articulating a deeper understanding of planetarity struggling to get out of the straitjacket of Western naturalism. Indigenous cosmologies foreground fluidity and transformation, as different entities shift between what might otherwise be seen as wholly separate categories; multiple times seem to operate at once, and originary immanence is just a blink away. Beings exist in and are defined by meshworks of reciprocity and generosity; grasping the deepest truth can involve departing radically from everyday perception and knowledge; everything is alive, aware, a potential interlocutor. In ways that are resonant with contemporary theory the Earth is not a dead mechanism, but sensitive (Latour 2017), ticklish (Stengers 2015), and maybe dangerous (Hamilton 2017). The cosmological accounts in this volume articulate a world that is a set of relations, obligations, and mutual dependencies, warning us of what happens when these relationships are not maintained. That world has to be actively maintained in being, through gift exchanges among humans and non-humans, against the ever present danger of the apocalypse. They are protecting the virtual—defending important, hard-won planetary preconditions that enable the future to arrive, combating a present apocalypse already occurring as a “combined and uneven geo-spiritual formation.”

In this paper I argue that discussion about the ‘technosphere’ as an emergent new Earth system needs to be situated within wider reflection about how technospheres might arise on other worlds. Engaging with astrobiological speculation about ‘exo-technospheres’ can help us to understand whether technospheres are likely, what their preconditions might be, and whether they endure. Engaging with science fiction can help us to avoid observer biases that encourage linear assumptions about the preconditions and emergence of technospheres. Exploring earlier major transitions in Earth’s evolution can shed light on the shifting distribution of metabolic and reproductive powers between the human and technological parts of the contemporary technosphere. The long-term evolution of technical objects also suggests that they have shown a tendency to pass through their own major transitions in their relation to animality. Such reflection can shed new light on the nature and likely future development of the Earth’s technosphere.

In this paper, I present a unified framework for understanding abiotic, biotic and technological mobilities as achievements of a far-from-equilibrium planet self-organising over geological time, and generating informationally rich forms of matter and motion. I discuss how flows of energy through the Earth support the emergence of different kinds of movement in spatially distinct ‘mobility regions’ and scale-related ‘mobility situations’. I also discuss how technological mobilities exhibit forms of ‘gratuity’, a relative uncoupling of different aspects of motion, which have arisen repeatedly in the Earth’s past, and may presage the emergence of radically new forms of planetary mobility.

The authors of An Ecomodernist Manifesto offer us a new twist on an old argument: to avert ecological collapse we need not less modernity, but more. According to the ecomodernists, our global predicament is like that of a truck driver in the midst of an emerging multiplevehicle pile-up; if we lose our nerve, and jam on the brakes, the disaster will overwhelm us. We must instead keep faith in the technological, progressive project, and press the accelerator down even further; only then can we get through the moment of danger and leave the pile-up of history behind us. Let us decompose this vehiculum novum into its two halves, and look at the torsion involved in this particular coupling of ideas—the ecological cargo and the modernist tractor unit, as it were. The ‘eco-’ prefix refers to their recognition that “humanity must shrink its impacts on the environment to make more room for nature.” Here, they seem to align with the direction of travel of the wider environmental movement. Yet the ‘-modernist’ half of their name firmly asserts their belief that if this is to happen, it will not come about through any slowing or reversal of the modernisation process but only through greater energy use, urbanisation, technological innovation and agricultural intensification. In this they seem to set their trajectory at an angle nearing 180 degrees to the usual orientation of the environmental movement, which would more usually call for degrowth, ecological agriculture, contraction of energy and resource use and more ‘natural’ lifestyles. The ecomodernists believe that there is no contradiction here: anti-technological sentiments and romantic ideas of pristine nature were always stowaways, illicit passengers that did not really belong in the environmentalist package. If they fall off the back of the accelerating wagon, all the better. However, from the point of view of the wider ecology movement, the ecomodernist pantechnicon is overloaded with contradictions and its attitude wilfully obtuse; it is already

In this chapter I argue that we can start to extend political ideas to other entities within the Earth through deploying an intermediary concept such as ‘memory’. In the domain of human politics, there has been much attention to the role of collective memory in the politics of recognition and justice—but also the role that active forgetting can play in creating the conditions for progressive social change. What about the politics of the Earth? Natural scientists sometimes us the word ‘memory’ to describe biological or even geophysical process: they talk of ‘climate memory’, or ‘ecological memory’, or materials as having ‘shape memory’. But what would happen if we took such usages seriously, and applied the idea of memory to a complex entity like a planet? How could the Earth be said to remember and to forget? What memory systems has the Earth evolved in its 4.5 billion-year ‘geostory’? And if the Earth is indeed entering ‘the Anthropocene’, a new geological epoch in which humans are the determining geological force, how might the Anthropocene be inserting itself into the memory systems of the Earth? Might thinking of the Earth as something that remembers and forgets change the way that we think about this thing we call the Anthropocene, what it is and what it means?

The new ‘mobilities turn’ has become a powerful perspective in social theory. John Urry’s oeuvre has been very influential in the emergence of this new field and has had lasting impacts on many scholars. This collection presents originally commissioned essays from leading scholars in the field who reflect on how Urry’s writing influenced the course of their research and theorizing. The volume gathers contributions in relation to John Urry’s path-breaking work. The new ‘mobilities turn’ made a strong imprint in European social theory and is beginning to make an impact in the Americas and Asia as well. It challenges mainstream theoretical and empirical approaches that were grounded in a sedentary and bounded view of states. It propels innovative thinking about social and media ecologies, complex systems and social change. It bridges many disciplines and methodologies, leading to new approaches to existing problems while also resonating with questions about both history and the future. Mobilities research marks the rise of academic and intellectual cooperation and collaboration ‘beyond societies’, as nations around the world face the ecological limits of contemporary mobility and energy systems. The contributors represent several national contexts, including England, Germany, Denmark, Finland, Taiwan, Brazil, Canada, Australia and the USA. The book collects personal essays and gives insight into a vivid network of scientists who have connections of various degrees to the late John Urry as an academic figure, an author and a person.

In this short article, I try to spell out what I think are the key steps involved in what is still unfinished business for the social sciences, following the global turn of the 1990s – a planetary turn. In so doing I tease out some of the origins of my own planetary thinking in the work of the late John Urry.

High modernism, the dominant sociotechnical imagination in postwar Taiwan, manifested in tacit answers to the questions of what a better society would look like and the most pragmatic and viable approach to make the particular dreamed-of future become reality. This article explores the exclusion of alternative energy futures brought about by a high modernist imaginary. This imaginary underlies a strategy of emphasizing shortage at present and prosperity in the future—as long as the current shortage is solved in a reliable way. Focusing on the contention over energy supply between 2011 and 2015, this article provides an analysis of how power shortages are presented in discursive ambiguity, how the claimed crisis over the electricity shortage moves to the center of public debate via the institutional practices of power rationing, and how its public authority is established through collective witness. Renewable energy is continually represented as an “immature” and “unviable” technology when it comes to satisfying the nation’s need, through particular routinized practices in the calculation of “reserve margins” in electricity planning and the collective witnessing of (limited) operating reserves. We argue that both of these come with their own assumptions and political implications and therefore invite scrutiny.

In this paper I argue that we need not only to ‘decolonise’ the Anthropocene but also to ‘desecularise’ it – to be aware that in the new age of the Earth we may be coeval with gods and spirits. Drawing particularly on the work of Giles Deleuze, Felix Guattari and Georges Bataille, and using concepts from both thermodynamics and fluid dynamics, I start to develop an interdisciplinary theory of planetary spirit, and use this to speak of both the ‘laminar’ high gods of time that are being invoked to summon the story of Earth’s ongoing transformation into a canonical mythos, and the turbulent lower spirits of place which manifest particular, situated dynamics on an Earth crossed by interlocking gradients and flows of energy, value, power and entropy. I suggest that what might once have been distinct territorialised ‘cultures’ or ‘natures’ in which humans engaged in particular situated patterns of interaction with animals, spirits and other beings are increasingly being convened into a global multinatural system, what we might call a ‘combined and uneven geo-spiritual formation’.

The term “geoengineering” is used to refer to a range of techniques for deliberatively intervening in the global climate to counteract global warming. Solar radiation management techniques are a class of geoengineering methods designed to reflect some of the inbound sunlight back into space with the intended effect of arresting further warming of the planet and thus counteracting global warming. Carbon dioxide removal techniques, by contrast, aim to remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere through practices which attempt to address the root cause of climate change. The challenges that geoengineering poses for geographical scholarship are discussed, including analysis of the various contributions the latter can play. This includes, inter alia, analysis of geoengineering's distinctive relationship with nature, its challenges for debates on risk governance, its potential implications for contemporary political systems, its conditioning by wider economic relations, and the role for public engagement in deliberating a geoengineered future.

In this paper we highlight the need to attend to the structuring power of knowledge production in geoengineering research, because of the way that problem definitions are shaped by disciplinary ways of thinking and describing the world. We also draw attention to a number of problematic assumptions about how interdisciplinary research should be approached and organised in this area. We first look at the logic of ‘subordination’, in which certain disciplines are given the task of problem definition and others—typically the social sciences—are allocated the task of filling in gaps within that given frame. We then examine the more fundamental ‘integrative imaginary’ which, we argue, mistakenly assumes that disciplines can be combined in a straightforward way to reveal different aspects of the same underlying world. We conclude by proposing a more reflexive imaginary for interdisciplinarity, one that challenges the idea of integration and subordination, that promotes and benefits from the multiplicity and heterogeneity of ways of seeing that different disciplines offer, and that can thereby contribute to greater ‘epistemological responsibility’ in geoengineering research. Keywords: geoengineering, climate, integrated assessment, transparency, interdisciplinarity, knowledge, science, reflexivity

There have been a number of calls for public engagement in geoengineering in recent years. However, there has been limited discussion of why the public should have a say or what the public can be expected to contribute to geoengineering discussions. We explore how public engagement can contribute to the research, development, and governance of one branch of geoengineering, solar radiation management (SRM), in three key ways: 1. by fulfilling ethical requirements for the inclusion of affected parties in democratic decision making processes; 2. by contributing to improved dialogue and trust between scientists and the public; and 3. by ensuring that decisions about SRM research and possible deployment are informed by a broad set of societal interests, values, and framings. Finally, we argue that, despite the nascent state of many SRM technologies, the time is right for the public to participate in engagement processes.

In this paper I explore the metaphor of the strata of the earth as ‘great stone book of nature’, and the Anthropocene epoch as its latest chapter. I suggest that the task of marking the base of the Anthropocene's geological layer is entangled with questions about the human — about who would be the ‘onomatophore’ of the Anthropocene, would carry the name of ‘Anthropos’. I consider divergent ways of characterising the geological force of the Anthropocene — as Homo faber, Homo consumens and Homo gubernans — and situate this dispersal of the Anthropos within a more general dispersal of ‘man’ that occurs when human meets geology. I suggest that the becoming geological of the human in the Anthropocene is both the end of the great stone book of nature and the Aufhebung of ‘man’ — both his apotheosis and his eclipse.

This essay appeared in the journal Environmental Humanities in a special commentary section on the papal encyclical Laudato Si’.

The capacity of human beings to invent, construct and use technical artifacts is a hugely consequential factor in the evolution of society, and in the entangled relations between humans, other creatures and their natural environments. Moving from a critical consideration of theories, to narratives about technology, and then to particular and specific practices, Technofutures, Nature and the Sacred seeks to arrive at a genuinely transdisciplinary perspective focusing attention on the intersection between technology, religion and society and using insights from the environmental humanities. It works from both theoretical and practical contexts by using newly emerging case studies, including geo-engineering and soil carbon technologies, and breaks open new ground by engaging theological, scientific, philosophical and cultural aspects of the technology/religion/nature nexus. Encouraging us to reflect on the significance and place of religious beliefs in dealing with new technologies, and engaging critical theory common in sociological, political and literary discourses, the authors explore the implicit religious claims embedded in technology.

In Nature, Technology and the Sacred (2005) I argued that the modern project of the technological mastery of nature remains profoundly shaped by its religious roots. In this paper I explore connections and tensions between this analysis and the neo-Calvinist critiques of modernity and modern technology advanced by Herman Dooyeweerd and Hendrik van Riessen. I explore the relationship between Dooyeweerd’s analysis of Western culture as a sequence of religious ‘ground motives’ and my own in terms of the series of ‘orderings of the sacred’ which together constitute the ‘long arc of monotheism’. I relate van Riessen’s analysis of the internal structure of technology to my argument that this structure has been shaped by transformations in the sacred since the Protestant reformation. I conclude with some observations, prompted by the divergences between the two accounts, concerning the relationship between technology, monotheism, history and politics.

OCIAL THEORY is faced by a new spectre haunting the ‘globe’ – thechanging of the world’s climate. Such changes are now thought to bebeyond doubt and, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on ClimateChange (IPCC), very likely the product of human practices (IPCC, 2007).These practices have generated raised levels of ‘greenhouse gases’ in theatmosphere, which seem to be leading to increased temperatures, which willin turn transform future forms of human life around the world. Even attemptstomonitorand‘mitigate’climatechangearelikelytoinvolvedramaticchangesin social organization: the creation of a global assemblage of internationalagreements, carbon atoms, markets, technologies, weather events and socialpractices.Thereseemsnodoubt:the21stcenturyissettobeonewhereissuesofclimate,resourcesandenergyareparamount.Theworldofcultureandvirtu-ality has met its match; the material world apparently does matter and can‘bite back’. The economies and societies of whole continents may well havetransformedconditionsoflife.Andthehigh-carbonworld initiatedinthe20thcentury could turn out to be a mere passing moment in the long-term pattern-ing of human history. It is not so much post-modernism that we should bedebating but the conditions of possibility of ‘post-carbonism’.There are three broad positions or discourses within the climatechange literature.

Resources for an authentic response to the ‘post-ecologist condition’ as described by Ingolfur Bluhdorn can be found in a cultural modernism which emphasises the contradictory nature of the human condition and whose master trope is irony. The concept of irony can help us both diagnose and respond to the crisis in public meaning which helps sustain unsustainable behaviour. Forms of dispositional irony, in which private and public meaning are disconnected from each other, are symptomatic of the post-ecologist condition; in response, forms of communicative irony are used by environmental movements to expose such dispositions and strategies. However, such tactics can only serve as partial and limited responses to the problem of unsustainability, unless they are embedded within and shaped by a generalised ironic stance towards the world and oneself. The contribution concludes by sketching elements of an environmentalism informed by this ironic ‘world relation’.

In this paper I reflect on the nature of our relationship with the atmosphere that surrounds us, by exploring the constituent parts of my title and the complex relations between them. I first look at ‘life’. How might the meaning of ‘what is life?’ depend on the context in which it is uttered? What does it mean to choose the boundary between the living and the non-living to interrogate? Are we asking after the current state of life or the very essence of ‘life itself’? I then look at the notion of being ‘in’. Drawing on Martin Heidegger, Hans Jonas, Cornelius Castoriadis and Jesper Hoffmeyer, I suggest that to say that life is ‘in’ something is to invoke the constitutive relations between organism and environment. Then I turn to ‘air’, exploring the variegated meanings that make up the modern concept of ‘air’ and looking at a number of different ways we might say that ‘life is in the air’. The atmosphere can be seen as having its own kind of abiotic life, or life can be seen as carrying the signal of life – but life can also be said to be ‘in the air’ in a strong sense because of the metabolic relation between the inside and outside of the living body. Finally, I turn to ‘the open’, exploring the differing uses of this term by Heidegger, Giorgio Agamben and Tim Ingold. I conclude by arguing that the air contains not just the vital signs of life but also the signs of our technological disruption of the atmosphere, and that the reading of these signs can be a moment of responsibility for us.

In this paper I argue that an important strand of ecotheology should be an articulated techno-demonology - an understanding of the ways that technologies increasingly confront us as indifferent or malign agencies. Drawing particularly on the New Testament language of spiritual agencies, I consider in turn three necessary components of techno-demonology. First, techno-demonology needs a taxonomic nomenclature, one which names techno-demonological phenomena in a manner that reveals the specific ways in which the technologies can stand before us as autonomous powers. As a contribution to this task I distinguish between elementals (stoicheia) and powers (dynameis) - between technical systems which have become treated as ends in themselves, and have thus started to control human action, and technologies whose unanticipated side-effects overwhelm their intended purposes. Second, I suggest that techno-demonology should include an understanding of how such techno-demons arise; I thus give historical explanations for the proliferation of technological elementals and powers in the contemporary world. Finally, I argue that techno-demonology should include the redemptive task of restoring technology to its rightful place in creation.

Contemporary tensions between science and religion cannot simply be seen as a manifestation of an eternal tension between reason and revelation. Instead, the modern secular, including science and technology, needs to be seen as a distinctive historical phenomenon, produced and still radically conditioned by the religious history of the West. Clashes between religion and science thus ought to be seen fundamentally as part of a dialogue that is internal to Western religious history. While largely agreeing with Caiazza's account of the “magical” understanding of technology, I suggest that this needs to be seen as part of a more fundamental drift in religion and culture away from canonical meanings to more “indexical,” pragmatic ones—but also that technology is still inflected by soteriological meanings that were coded into modern technology at its very inception in the early modern period. I conclude by arguing that a recognition of science and technology's grounding in Western religious history can make possible a more fundamental encounter with religion.