Planetary Choices
The podcast 'Planetary Choices' is created and produced by the Research Center for New Critical Politics and Governance, located at Aarhus University, Denmark.
The concept of 'The Planetary' has gained increasing traction in almost all scientific disciplines. From physics, to litterature, to history, law and economics - planetary thinking and policy making is taking more sophisticated shapes, amounting to an emerging new paradigm.
In season 1, called "Mapping the Planetary", we map and assess the concept of the planetary, where we stand today and in which direction planetary thinking and activism may develop in the future.
With this podcast, we also intend to explore scholarly research through an alternative venue of dissemination that allows for aural intimacy, faster publishing and full open access. As each episode contributes to a larger question investigated throughout a season, every episode becomes a data point on its own, consequently making "Planetary Choices" a place of output and on-going research.
Join us and explore the big questions of our planet!
Planetary Choices
The New Order of Planetary Governance - A Conversation with Nils Gilman
In our first episode of Mapping the Planetary, together with our hosts Hagen Schulz-Forberg and James Quilligan, we sit down with Nils Gilman, Vice President of Programs at the Berggruen Institute, and discuss his ideas on a planetary approach to governance.
Gilman distinguishes the concept of the planetary from the global, framing it as a necessary shift in light of the bio-geo-chemical disruption of today.
He reflects on the need for new forms of shared sovereignty and suggests that a move beyond anthropocentric frameworks may open a fundamental rethinking of core categories in both political theory and policy practice.
Academic Reference:
Nils Gilman, Hagen Schulz-Forberg, James Quilligan; The New Order of Planetary Governance—A Conversation with Nils Gilman. Global Perspectives. 10 March 2025; 6 (1): 144161. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/gp.2025.144161
This podcast was created and produced by the Research Center for New Critical Politics and Governance (CPG).
To watch the video version of this episode, please visit the link below:
https://cas.au.dk/en/cpg/podcast/mapping-the-planetary
Today with us is Nils Gilman, who is very active in pushing the planetary agenda for quite some time. He's given us a great new book to read and ponder called ‘Children of A Modest Star’ which is the basis of what we will be talking about today. He is with the Berggruen Institute, where he's a director, and he's also busy debating the planetary. And today he's on the show, but he comes with it, I think, with an historical mind, because Nils, you are a historian by training, which is nice to see, just like me, that some historians just get out of the archives and join the discussion with a specific mindset. Thank you for joining us on the show, Nils. It's great to have you.
Nils Gilman (NG):Thank you so much for having me on.
Hagen Schulz-Forberg (HSF):Could you maybe start by introducing us to the whole idea of how Children of a Modest Star came about that caused so many ruffles now and inspires a lot of readers?
Nils Gilman (NG):Sure. So, the book, John Blake and I, my co-author, we started talking about this book in the summer of 2020, with the possibility of writing this book in the summer of 2020. And as everybody will remember, the thing that was going on that summer, obviously, was the pandemic and the shutdowns that were happening all over the world as a result of the pandemic, the policy of response to the pandemic. And what John and I talked about at some length that summer was that the immediate reaction to the eruption of this, by definition, global or to use language we now use, planetary pandemic, was the retreat to the national. What countries all over the world did to try to stem the tide of the pandemic was to close their borders and attempt to use their national health care systems as a prophylactic and palliative for dealing with the pandemic. This basically didn't work almost anywhere. A couple of places that were essentially islands managed to make this policy work, sort of worked a little bit in Japan, it worked a bit in Australia, in New Zealand. But almost everywhere else, it became very quickly clear that it was impossible to contain the pandemic within the borders of various nation states. Even countries with as much state capacity and as much willingness to oppose draconian rules as China eventually had to give up in the face of the pandemic and allow the pandemic to rip through their populations. And this got us really thinking about how national policy is essentially not suited. National institutions, governance institutions, are essentially not suited, not designed, and in fact, by design, incapable of addressing a challenge like a pandemic. So, then we started to think about what is the characteristic of that. And basically, of course, the issue is that the virus, which causes the pandemic, which causes the disease, which causes the pandemic, I should say, doesn't care about our borders. And this applies not just to a challenge like a pandemic, a pandemic risk, but to a whole variety of other kinds of challenges that exist in the world. The most obvious one, obviously, in addition to climate change, which is the other major sort of model animal within our book, is climate change mitigation. When we drive, when I drive through the streets of Los Angeles here, the tailpipe emissions that come out of the back of my car, go into the atmosphere and transform the climate all over the world. No single country with its governance institutions can possibly manage the challenge of climate change mitigation on its own. So, this really got us thinking about why the structures of governance that we've inherited from essentially the 20th century are simply ill-suited for dealing with the kinds of biogeochemical disruptions which we use following the historian Dipesh Chakrabarti, which we described using the term planetary. And let me just say one other thing about that. So, this the central concept that we're trying to introduce and promote in this book is this concept that we call the planetary. And the planetary is probably most easily understood in contradistinction to the idea of the global, the global as in globalization. The global of globalization, and here we follow again, historian Dipesh Chakrabarti, described the things that flow around the earth, which humans are moving around intentionally, usually for economic reasons. So, goods, services, money, ideas, and all of these kinds of global issues are basically anthropocentric things, things that humans create and intentionally move around the world. And we have a series of governance institutions that have been set up to kind of manage those, the commerce of ideas and money and goods and services around the world. The World Trade Organization, the WTO, the Bank of International Settlements, various kinds of intellectual property regimes, and so, on and so, forth. These are all things that have been developed over the last 75 years to manage the flows of global things, anthropocentric global things. Planetary things, by contrast, are things that are also, flowing around the earth, but they're deeply tied up with the biogeochemistry of the earth. Biogeochemistry, of course, is a term that comes out of Earth system science and systems biology and refers to the fact that the entire planet is one giant ecosystem of ecosystems that are all interacting with each other in complicated ways. And those things too are in the process of being disrupted by human activity. So, we're talking about climate change, obviously the carbon cycle is being disrupted by industrial activity, but also, things like the nitrogen cycle, acidification of the oceans, oceanic plastics, even beyond the earth itself, beyond the stratosphere, we have the proliferation of space junk and things like that. And all of these things, which flow around the earth, irrespective of our geographic borders and therefore outside of the system of global governance that we've developed, are basically ungoverned and are running out of control. And trying to think about how we would build a governance system to manage those things was the central normative project of the book.
James Quilligan (JQ):Thank you, Nils. Planetary thinking about new forms of governance and institutions and rules is going to involve the development of a new epistemology and a new story, really. What do you say are the key factors that are leading humanity to re-conceptualize the world as planetary rather than global?
Nils Gilman (NG):Yeah, that's a really important question. I mean, obviously humans have always been deeply tied up with the ecosystems that we live in. This is not a new fact. What I think is new is two things. One is that for some time, and there's a debate about exactly how you should date the start of this process, humans have been not just dwelling within our ecosystems but increasingly disrupting them. And particularly since the end of the Second World War, when a process begins, it's been labeled a great acceleration, we've increasingly started to disrupt all sorts of ecosystems all over the world that we rely on and dwell within. So, on the one hand, we have an awareness, a growing awareness of the way in which humans and human activity is disrupting all of these biogeochemical systems. On the other hand, the other thing that's really important that's happened, and this goes directly to your question of epistemology, how do we know that we know this, is over the last few decades, we have built a giant smart exoskeleton, you might say, of sensor networks and information systems and supercomputer programs that are allowing us to understand this phenomena of human disruption of the planetary systems in much, much, much greater detail and specificity than was ever known before. I mean, obviously, human beings have been aware that we're disrupting ecosystems for some time. You know, over a century ago in the United States, there was kind of a national crisis over the fact that we eliminated the carrier pigeon, carrier pigeon went extinct. This is the kind of bird that existed literally in the billions upon billions in the 19th century, and we're hunted to death over the course of the 19th and into the early 20th century. So, humans have been aware that we can cause massive ecosystem disruptions. But the level of specification of that disruption has been vastly increasing because of the sensor systems that we have set up and the progress of science in understanding these disruptions. And we refer in the book to this process of increasing awareness through the technological affordances of these systems as growing planetary sapience. In other words, the self-understanding of the planet by the planet of which humans are the vehicle for that realization.
James Quilligan (JQ):If this was a new economic regime, how would the planetary limit capitalism? Would the planetary be capitalist or neoliberal? And how would the world arrive at an agreement on this, given today's geopolitical and economic competition over resources?
Nils Gilman (NG):At least two questions that are embedded in what you just asked, James. So, the first one has to do with economic systems. And the second one has to do with how would we possibly get to some kind of a system of governance that would be capable of addressing these issues? Let me take a second question first. What we propose in the book is that for specific kinds of planetary scale disruptions that are taking place, we should set up narrowly focused, functionally focused institutions that are specifically meant to address those particular challenges. So, there should be agencies that have enforcement power to deal with things like carbon emissions that can help with actually active enforcement of effective biomedical monitoring interventions to deal with pandemic risk and so, on and so, forth. We think about that for a whole variety of things like biodiversity laws or ocean protection, various protections of planetary commons of various sorts. How would we get there from here? Because obviously a system of governance of that sort would require that nation states be willing to give up pieces of their sovereignty to these narrowly tailored institutions. Right now, it's hard to see how that would happen. The book is sort of written with a vision for a long-term future. But what I would say is in general, and this is where to Hagen's earlier point, I think of this often in historical terms. Governance institutions, well, institutions in general, but governance institutions in particular are by definition kind of conservative and slow moving and slow to change. They're set up at a certain point in time, usually to deal with a very acute set of policy challenges that are coming to a head at the particular moment when they're set up. And then after they're set up, they just want to continue to do what they're doing. These kinds of big institutional changes, the transition, for example, from empires to nation states or from small village governance to national governments. These are the big things that happened in the course of the last decades of the last centuries of the last millennium all over the world are things that usually only take place in the wake of crises. And so, I'll just give a couple of examples. National states emerge as the kind of dominant form of governance in Europe, only in the wake of World War I. I mean, nationalisms have been rising throughout the 19th century as kind of political movements, but it was the crisis, the cataclysmic crisis of the Great War that led to the collapse of four different empires, right? The Ottoman Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the German Empire and the Russian Empire. And what emerged in the wake of that were national states or in parts of the Ottoman Empire mandates that would eventually become national states. So, it really took a crisis, a cataclysmic crisis, to arrive at this very different mode of governance. Ideas, likewise, for a parliament of nations had been proposed as long ago as 1795 by Emmanuel Kant in his essay on perpetual peace. And it took 150 years from then until the United Nations was founded and several world wars before we got to that particular institutional form. So, ideas for big transformations in governance architectures often have to be developed over time and then have to be implemented or likely to be implemented only when the bankruptcy and crisis of the old system becomes so, apparent that people are willing to try something new. Whether we are on the brink of such a crisis is something that time will tell. But I believe we are. I believe we're seeing that in the crises of electoral democracies and not just in democracies, but also, in autocracies all over the world. And I think the intensification of the crises related to climate change and biogeochemical disruption that we're seeing all over the world will make such crises almost inevitable unless we come up with institutions that are capable of mitigating that.
Hagen Schulz-Forberg (HSF):You mentioned Chakrabarti Dipesh Chakrabarti a couple of times, Nils. And of course, his book has been very inspirational for various scholars. And I've read it too with a lot of a lot of interest. And he's been, of course, very well known before that for his book on provincializing Europe. And his conceptualization of the global, his critique of the global is, I would say, more than just capitalism or globalization. But he also, infuses the idea of hierarchy, colonialism, you know, various accesses to knowledge, to resources. So, global inequalities are what he also, subsumes under the idea of global. And thus, the planetary emerges as something almost egalitarian, you know, giving a new playing field. So, I wonder how far you follow that criticism of the global as bringing that colonial story with it and the planetary of opening up a new kind of platform. And also, how do you then and sorry, maybe a follow up question. How do you then if depending on your answer to the first question, how would you bring in voices from global south?
Nils Gilman (NG):I basically agree with most of Chakrabarti's view that the globalization, the idea of the globe and globalization has always had a kind of Janus-faced quality. There's always been on the one hand a view that this is a positive description of global integration. And there's also, always been a critique of the way in which that global integration was happening in terms of the way it continued or deepened class inequalities across the world, economic inequalities across the world. And of course, because globalization has unfolded under the sign of capitalism has led to great extractivist profit oriented regimes. And there's a critique of that, right? So, I think that the way in which I read Chakrabarti is that the planetary offers a potential way to think about that critique in a new way, in a register, not of neo-nationalisms, but in the register of a new form of universalism. That's not a universalism of the human, but a universalism of the multi-species assemblage of the planet. I do think that that offers a kind of philosophical opening for thinking differently about how to critique the existing system that isn't just about inequalities between countries or within countries but thinking really about how do we create a program of habitability for the planet as a whole and for all those creatures on it.
James Quilligan (JQ):This concept is very closely related to what's being discussed now under the heading of the Anthropocene. Could you comment on the similarities between the planetary and the Anthropocene? The Anthropocene was a concept that was first proposed almost 25 years ago now by the atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen. And what he proposed then was that the world, the planet, was on the verge of, if not had already crossed into, a fundamentally new geological era, so, that we were exiting the Holocene, which is the era we've been in since the end of the Pleistocene, the end of the last ice age, which lasted about 12 years. During the Holocene, since the climate restabilized at the end of the last ice age, we've had a very stable climate situation, actually, remarkably stable compared to most of the last several hundred thousand years. The last 12 years has been very, very, stable. And it's that stability that has afforded humans the ability to thrive and grow and eventually start eating our way through the entire planet. That fundamental stability, however, has been increasingly disrupted as a result of this extractivist and polluting process that we have been engaged in in order to industrialize and enrich so, many people all over the world. Creating a global middle class, as now exists, has been extremely expensive in terms of the way in which it has extracted resources from the planet, as well as extruded various kinds of pollutants into the planetary system. So, there's been a debate that's been unfolding since Crutzen proposed this concept about when exactly the Anthropocene began. And there was a working group that was put together about a decade ago to try to figure out when we should date this entry or exit from the Holocene and entry into the Anthropocene. And in the end, this particular group of geologists, for the most part, decided that they didn't want to declare that we were in a new geological era at all. They didn't feel like that was something that was warranted by the kind of evidence that geologists like to use, geologists and paleontologists like to use, in order to date and periodize different periods of geological history. Whatever we make of the scientific argument about when the Anthropocene may have begun, whether it began in 1945, when we start putting nuclear isotopes into the atmosphere and therefore sinking into the soils, whether we think it began in 1800 or so, with the rise of industrialization, which starts the carbon loading of the atmosphere, whether we think it should go back to an earlier period with the transatlantic biological exchange following Columbus' uniting of the new world and the old world, or whether we think it should go back even further to you know, maybe tens of thousands of years as humans kill off megafauna everywhere we go as humans spread across the planet. Whichever place you want to put that; it's an important debate because the question of how humans and why humans are engaged in planetary disruptions varies depending on what you think the crucial starting point is. Basically, the further back in time you put it, the more you probably think it's kind of intrinsic to human nature as opposed to our current institutional organizations. But however you date it, there's an agreement at this point outside of the geological community that we are really in a new era. And that's become kind of a popular concept that I think exceeds whatever decisions that these geologists and paleontologists decide about when they want to periodize it. I think people have it's become a popular concept as well. Now I have to say, in contrast to the planetary, I'm not super enthusiastic about the Anthropocene as a concept, because one of the things that we're trying to do with the concept of the planetary is to decenter humans from the story about what's happening with the planet, to try to understand ourselves as simply one part of the much more complicated biogeochemical feedback mechanism that defines the world as it actually is in terms of the biological facts of the planet. Humans are just one creature. We're now an incredible percentage of the animal biomass of the planet, but fundamentally, we're just one system. And life was here before us, life will be here after humans are gone. Fundamentally, we're a bacterial planet. And megafauna like humans is relatively recent phenomenon in the larger panoply of life, larger span of life. So, one reason I don't love the concept of the Anthropocene is that I feel like it smuggles a kind of human exceptionalism back into the story of these disruptions that we are somehow have a kind of unique agency and perhaps mission in the world. And so, it reaffirms the kind of human exceptionalism that I think is part of what drove us into the current planetary crises we have. It just does so, with the negative valence, instead of saying, as you know, some humans, particularly in post enlightenment European traditions have said that we're the top dogs, we have an ability to control things and so, on. It now says, yeah, we're the top dogs, but we're not good guys endowed by God with special insight. Instead, we're kind of bad guys who are unfolding like a cancer all over the planet. And what I think the planetary does in contrast to the Anthropocene as a concept, is it suggests a much more modest view of both human causality and human agency in the entire process.
Hagen Schulz-Forberg (HSF):In your book, also, in, what you just said right now earlier, you this is, you know, we're bacteria, we're a bacterial planet, but we organize ourselves in nation states, as you say. And so, what is the planetary versus the nation state organization that we have right now, it doesn't really fit, does it? So, could you maybe elaborate on how you would have the planetary as a concept deals with that question? You identified it as a problem, but what's your solution?
Nils Gilman (NG):Right, so, nation states were set up to handle the problems of humans. And the international system, as it currently exists, was set up to try to adjudicate and provide forms for the negotiation of competing interests between different nation states. And these things were all focused on the things that humans are concerned with on a day-to-day basis, economic development, trade, peace, security from other human beings. I mean, these are the fundamental things that nation states were set up to deal with. You know, modern nation states were set up to provide security to their population, which took the form of security from other other states on the one hand, but also, what we sometimes call social security or human security concerns inside of the nation states of building up welfare systems and healthcare systems, so, on. These are other kinds of security. And national states were basically set up on that basis to deal with human challenges. Planetary challenges are extra human, they unfold, they obviously can potentially threaten human well-being if these disruptions become severe enough, but they're not fundamentally an adversarial thing. You can't deter a virus. You can't block the carbon that's coming out of our tailpipe from crossing borders. Fundamentally, humans have set up these institutions, these national institutions, but the bacteria and the molecules don't care about our borders at all. So, that means that the kind of institutional matrix that we've used to govern our human concerns is simply not fit for purpose for governing these kinds of planetary concerns. So, this is why we're suggesting we need a new category of institution in order to effectively address those issues. Let me say one other thing on this, though, which is that our view is that the national state in general is getting very long in the tooth, even for managing human-centered things. I think that there's kind of a backlash now to the fact that globalization of the economy has massively decreased the power and effectiveness of national states. And you're seeing rising neo-nationalisms that are attempting to recapture or recreate the kind of control systems that were powerful in the second half of the 20th century. I personally think that that's a quixotic goal. We're not going to be able to turn the clock back to the late 20th century, no matter who we decide to elect into various offices. So, we need to move forward to think about how do we manage the challenges of the disruptions to the planetary systems in ways that go beyond the national states, the national state can't do it. And I think the crises that the national states are facing actually opens up an opportunity for eventually doing a massive rethink of the very structure of governance as a whole.
James Quilligan (JQ):One of the ways you propose in the book and in terms of addressing this problem with the nation states is to introduce the concept of subsidiarity that brings greater power to local and regional levels. So, how do you think that that kind of bottom-up decision-making would work?
Nils Gilman (NG):First, let me talk a little bit about the concept of subsidiarity. This is a concept that I think is quite familiar in Europe but not very well known outside of Europe. The reason why it's well known in Europe is that the concept of subsidiarity was enshrined into the Maastricht Treaty in 1992 as one of the supposedly architectural principles of the European Union. So, subsidiarity is a kind of functionalist principle of governance design that suggests that decision-making authority for any particular governance task should be allocated to the smallest possible unit that is capable of actually functionally addressing the challenge. And so, the way that's usually interpreted in a multi-level governance system like the European Union is that the European Union should delegate down to nation states, things that national governments can deal with and national governments, likewise, should deal with delegate down to regions within their countries where they can solve those things, that those regions should potentially delegate those things down to local authorities. And there's a good reason why subsidiarity is a worthwhile principle in my opinion, which is that in general, decision-making is done best by people who are closest to the problems at hand, who understand the local details, the local preferences of the populations that are going to be affected by this decision-making. It also, allows the people who are going to be affected by these decisions to be able to exercise voice more effectively in those decision-making processes. So, you know, obviously, if you're in a polity of 50 million people, your voice is very small. And so, decisions that are made at that level, your individual voice is not going to have a lot of sway on the decisions that are made at that national level. But if instead it's a neighborhood council that's making a decision where there's maybe only a few thousand people, your individual voice, especially if you organize some of your fellow citizens to have a collective voice on a matter can become very important in what the decision-making process should be. So, in general, our argument is that there's many things, many decisions, many governance authorities that are currently allocated within the national state that we actually believe should be delegated to smaller units that would be able to be more effective at addressing particularly the effects of planetary disruptions, the adaptation requirements to planetary disruptions. And I'll just give one example. I sit in Los Angeles. Los Angeles has various climate change adaptation challenges. We have fire risk, we have heat waves, we have droughts. Take the other side of the United States, Miami, Miami doesn't face any of those kinds of risks. It faces basically hurricane risks, sea level rise, storm surges. Those are the big challenges that Miami faces. It makes no sense for Washington DC to be setting climate change adaptation policies for both Los Angeles and Miami. It makes much more sense for Miami, or perhaps the state of Florida, or Los Angeles, or perhaps the state of California, to think about what we want the adaptation challenges or adaptation strategies rather to be for those individual cities. At the same time, however, we're not just suggesting purely delegating down to smaller units, we're also, suggesting that these smaller units that understand their challenges in more discrete ways also, can engage in what we refer to as translocal networked governance. So, Los Angeles may not have much in common with Miami in terms of the climate change adaptation challenges it faces, but it has a lot in common with places like Cape Town in South Africa, or parts of the Iberian Peninsula, or Perth in Australia. These are all cities that are located at the southwest corners of continents that have Mediterranean climates that are facing similar challenges of fire, water, drought, and so, on. So, increasingly, there are in fact global governance networks that link together these sub-national groups so, that they can share best practices and expertise and technology that can allow them to effectively work together. And this is happening at a kind of sub-national network layer below the level of national state ministries, state foreign ministries trying to coordinate. So, that's one example of how we think that subsidiarity can be applied to deal with planetary challenges without just abandoning localities to their own devices to try to manage things on themselves. So, that's one half of it. The other half of what we argue with planetary subsidiarity is that while subsidiarity is usually interpreted as a concept which calls for delegating to smaller units, because smaller units are more effective at responding to local preferences, the functionalist aspect of the principle of subsidiarity, that the smallest unit should be the one that can functionally address the issue, suggests that for a certain class of issues, the class of issues we call planetary, we may need planetary institutions to address them because the only scale at which they can be dealt with is literally at the planetary scale as a whole. So, as opposed to climate change adaptation, which can largely be dealt with at a sub-national scale and therefore should be delegated to sub-national units, at least in large countries, to deal with those issues, for climate change mitigation, in other words keeping the carbon out of the atmosphere and out of the oceans in the first place, that has to be dealt with at a planetary scale. And so, we need something like an intergovernmental panel on climate change that actually has enforcement teeth that can actually impose binding limits on carbon emissions if we're possibly going to get ahead of the increasing carbon loading of the atmosphere.
Hagen Schulz-Forberg (HSF):That's great. It brings me back to a concept I'd like you to think about or to talk about a little bit, which is the concept of sovereignty, which probably is worth picking at a little bit as well. So, the subsidiarity, if we are building all these systems, we're feeding it into all sorts of panels and they're intercontinental or intergovernmental, what is your take on the concept of sovereignty in all of this?
Nils Gilman (NG):Yeah, so, sovereignty is a crucial concept and one that we try to wrestle with at some length in the book. So, some people have interpreted what we're arguing as saying we're against the national state. We're not against the national state. We still think that there's many functions for which the national level continues to be a good level at which to engage in governance, particularly issues having to do with economic redistribution, industrial policy, and so, on. Many of these things are probably best dealt with at a national scale or perhaps at a regional scale of some sort. What we are against is absolutist notions of sovereignty because absolutist notions of sovereignty are fundamentally at odds with the ability to manage planetary challenges and planetary resources. So, let me give an example. The Amazon is a biodiversity hotspot, and the biodiversity of the Amazon basin is a planetary patrimony and worth defending for the planet as a whole. However, the vast majority of the Amazon, depending on how you measure it, 85 or 90 percent of it, sits inside the sovereign borders of Brazil. And if we have an absolutist view of Brazilian sovereignty, then if Brazil decides to elect a leader who wants to chop the entire Amazon down, they should be allowed to do that. This concept of sovereignty emerges famously out of the Treaty of Westphalia, which was signed to end the 30 years’ war in Europe in 1648. And what the principle of sovereignty that was articulated in the Treaty of Westphalia was that every country has the absolute right or every sovereign, kings primarily at that time, kings and princes and dukes and so, on, was allowed to do whatever they wanted inside their own country and that no other country or no other sovereign had the right to invade or make war on a sovereign because of what they were doing internally to their own country. Now during the 30 years’ war, the main debate was over religion, religious practice. If a sovereign wanted to allow religious pluralism after the Treaty of Westphalia, he was allowed to do that. If he wanted to have it be, Catholicism was going to be the state religion and ban other ones, he was allowed to do that. If he wanted to have one particular flavor of Protestantism, he was allowed to do that and none of that was allowed to be, according to the sovereignty principle, a casus belli for another state. So, sovereignty is a concept in my opinion historically has been always mainly honored in the breach. What I mean by that is there's always been violations of sovereignty that have happened over time. Obviously, states have made war for all sorts of reasons, including sometimes because of dissatisfaction with the internal governance activities of the sovereigns in those cases. I'm not advocating for warfare at all, but I do think that relaxing the sovereignty principle is going to be absolutely necessary in narrowly tailored ways if we're going to be able to get our hands around these kinds of planetary challenges and govern them effectively. And I think this can be done quite narrowly and I want to give one example which I think might be helpful for making this more concrete rather than abstract. In 1958, the International Atomic Energy Agency was established, basically at that time, to manage the nuclear fuel cycle so, that countries who wanted to develop a civilian nuclear power industry could do so, without having to have their own nuclear enrichment facilities that would all represent potential nuclear weapons proliferation risks. So, the IAEA was set up, it was at the behest of the Eisenhower administration in the United States which had an initiative that they called Atoms for Peace which was meant to spread nuclear power all over the world while allaying the risk of nuclear weapons proliferation. And for the first few years that was basically its mission. But then in 1962 the Cuban Missile Crisis happened, and the world came to the brink of nuclear war between the Soviet Union and the United States. And this frankly scared the hell out of, well, everybody who was paying attention but in particular it scared the bejesus out of the political leaders in DC and in Moscow who realized how close they had come to what would have been a global calamity as well as in our terms a planetary calamity, would have been an ecological calamity in addition to a human calamity. And they realized how close they had got. And at that point they agreed to further empower the IAEA when by the way the IAEA sits in Vienna, it's a bunch of technocrats who are basically nuclear physicists for the most part. And what they are now empowered to do in the wake of the nuclear, in the wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis is to make spot inspections of nuclear facilities everywhere in the world for every country that is a member of a signatory to the IAEA treaty. And if you think about it, that's a pretty severe violation of sovereignty. These technocrats in Vienna have the right to go into any nuclear power facility at any time and inspect them to see if they're not engaged in anything that could lead to nuclear weapons proliferation. That's a very intrusive violation of sovereignty. Why did DC and Moscow who are, you know, places that are jealously guarding their sovereign prerogativism, why were they willing to do that? Why were they willing to have the empower the IAEA in this way? And the reason is that they saw the potential calamity that could unfold if they didn't empower some kind of an agency that was going to be neutral and above, in a sense, either Moscow or DC to be able to do this kind of facilities inspection regime. And, you know, now they didn't give up all their sovereignty, but they gave a very narrowly tailored slice of their sovereignty in order to deal with this one particular risk. So, that's kind of the vision that John and I have that we propose in the book is that there can be these narrow slices of sovereignty that countries will be willing to give up authority to these planetary scale institutions because they realize the calamitous risk that they're facing if they don't do that. And they know they can't solve this problem on their own.
Hagen Schulz-Forberg (HSF):Oh, so, well, that was, of course, also, the time of the high authority in the European integration process, where, you know, where, of course, you remembered, coal and steel and union happened, and they also, transferred lots of their sovereignty specifically on to the for that for that reason that you that you mentioned in order to govern it, and they had the high authority over this. There's of course, and this brings me to my next question, if I may, there's of course limited maybe if you if one may say so, limited democratic legitimacy in this. So, how do you see the process of legitimizing such, you know, sharing sovereignty or scraping off slices of sovereignty here and there? How is that supposed to happen? And how do you see it done in democracies?
Nils Gilman (NG):So, let me talk a little bit first about the European Union and the democratic deficit that European Union is often said to face. I part of the problem with the European Union, or the reason why faces this perception of a democratic deficit is that it was set up in a particular way. At the moment, it was initially set up as you know, 1951, there's a European coal and steel community. And then in 1958, you get the European economic community, and eventually you get the European Union in 1992. The currency union in 2000 was a part of the over parts of the EU. The focus was always on economics. And I do think that if you go back and you read the visionary statements that people like Jean Monnet and other important founders of the European Union, early leaders of the European Union had had in mind, they really did have a vision for ultimately kind of superseding national authorities on all sorts of things. And they thought that economics would be a way to get there. And they didn't really concern themselves very much with democratic legitimacy, partly because at the moment that they were emerging, at the moment they were doing this in the sort of early post war years, there was a widespread view that, you know, excessive democracy was actually part of what had led to fascism and various other kinds of populism during the interwar years just prior. And so, there was already a skepticism about democracy that I think was sort of baked into the European Union from the very beginning. And I think that the European Union is in a sense still suffering from the kind of context of its creation and has not fully solved that. Obviously, European Union has done things like where European Parliament had tried to engage in the process of subsidiarity to delegate decisions down to national and regional and subnational units. But there's still a problem that's kind of baked into the architecture of the thing from the beginning. In order to deal with that challenge, right, this is, you know, technocrats always have a problem of whether they are going to be considered legitimate by people who don't feel like the decisions they're making, or once they have voices in, we propose a system where the decisions that are being made by these frankly technocratic planetary institutions could be overridden by a democratic process through potentially a reformed general assembly process in the United Nations. And we could get into the details of what we propose. But I think that this would be one mechanism so, that if, so, specifically, the idea that we have is that every country would get voting rights based on the square root of their population, which would lead to you know, Vanuatu having one vote and China and India having about 800 weighted votes in the in the parliament. And then if you got some thresholds, super majority threshold, you could decide 55-60% to thirds of those votes, a decision that was being made, for example, about binding emissions limits by a planetary organization for the reduction of carbon could be overridden in one way or another. So, I do think that there's a way in which you can use existing institutions to legitimate a process of decision making, partly by allowing it to be overridden. So, I think that that's one of the things that would need to be done. In addition to that, part of why we actually propose subsidiarity is that for many other decisions that would get delegated to smaller units, I think that those would become more legitimate. I think, you know, part of this is perhaps reflects the fact that I'm an American. And what I'm about to say has become less true over the last few decades. But you know, obviously, United States, we all saw what just happened in the recent election is a highly polarized polity at the national level. But often there's much less polarization, at least partly based polarization at local levels, you know, there's more consensus about what needs to be done, fixing potholes, or addressing the homelessness crisis, or, you know, figuring out how to deal with local public health challenges, tends not to be a super ideological issue at local levels, people have a more pragmatic attitude often to dealing with those issues. So, our proposal to move many, many more decisions down to local and regional bodies, I think is also, another way in which these decisions can be legitimated democratically. In general, we feel like implementation issues should be handled locally so, that local officials can figure out what the most legitimate way to do implementation policy will be.
James Quilligan (JQ):Nils, I'd like to follow up on that. In devolving greater sovereignty from nation states to the local and regional areas, the planetary vision that you outline seems to emphasize more the political rather than the economic participation of people at the grassroots. So, my question is, is there a role for citizens in the production of goods and services in their local and regional markets?
Nils Gilman (NG):We're very much focused on the political in this book, we more or less completely bracket questions of models of economic organization. And part of the reason why we did that candidly is we think that any hope that there is going to be for moving towards this kind of in these kinds of planetary agencies will require a structure that is amenable to a variety of economic organizations, right? So, when DC and Moscow agreed to give up a slice of their sovereignty to the IAEA, they weren't getting into a debate about capitalism versus, you know, state socialism, that was just a narrowly tailored thing. And so, we think that the narrow tailoring can probably help make the system these kinds of institutions viable across multiple forms of economic organization. That's one half of the answer your question. The other half of the question, your question is what should be kind of the, if you will, grassroots or local level models of economic organization? I have to say I'm not very keen on ideas of de-growth. To put it mildly, I think the de-growth ideas are not only not politically viable, but even if they were politically viable, are likely to be somewhat pernicious in the sense that they basically require either the wholesale expropriation of large segments of the global middle class or the continued economic and poverty of the people who have not yet entered that class. My own view is that we have to accelerate investment into technologies that will allow for a more sustainable model of economic development over time. I think the many of those technologies are, if not here, they're in the pipeline, they just need to be deployed in a more rapid way. And that is an opportunity for both global governances, perhaps planetary scale interventions at the same time. Now, with that said, I, while I'm not keen on de-growth, I am quite keen on local circular economies as potentially a way for creating a more sustainable local economic context, which in turn will contribute to maintaining a more habitable planet as a whole. And so, I think there are many opportunities for everything from urban farming to more closed ecosystems to eating local models. I think all of these things are potentially things that can contribute to a more stabilized model of consumption on a planetary scale.
Hagen Schulz-Forberg (HSF):Let me add, Nils, if I may, to the economic question of legal order or legal regimes or call it the rule of law. What you describe are existing administrative units. Do you also, have a vision or do you also, have a space for, let's say, you mentioned the Amazon that cuts across a border. So, here we have trans-regional, trans-border biospheres or biological areas. Do you think they should be their own governance unit?
Nils Gilman (NG):I do think that the proper unit for thinking about a, how a particular ecosystem or ecosystem service should be managed depends on what the ecosystem service or the ecosystem in question is. Probably the most mature examples of this that exist already today are a variety of treaties that exist for governing watersheds. So, there are treaties, so, all the countries that are along the Nile have a treaty about how to manage the waters in the Nile. Likewise, along the Danube in Europe, there's been treaties governing water use in the Danube basin that go back to the middle of the 19th century. The Mekong River system in Southeast Asia that rises, Mekong rises in China and runs through Southeast Asia exiting in Vietnam, exiting into the Pacific Ocean in Vietnam, runs through, I think, 11 countries along the way. Maybe not 11, nine countries along the way. There's a treaty to manage that as well. So, absolutely, I think that for ecosystems or self-contained units, I think that is the right way to think about it. Likewise, to give another example here locally in California, we have air quality management zones, right? Because there are certain continuous areas where the air quality is all part of one system. It doesn't make sense to manage the air quality of Southern California county by county. There's, I think, six or seven counties, depending on how you describe Southern California, delimits Southern California's air zone. So, it doesn't make sense to try to manage that unit by unit. It makes more sense to think about the air quality management for the area as a whole. Likewise, it makes sense to think about air quality management for the Bay Area around San Francisco or the Central Valley. These are all separate air zones, you know, separated by mountain systems, but they're self-contained with multiple, multiple across multiple subnational jurisdictions. So, the state of California has set up air quality management zones that cross over the counties to manage these particular eco zones for the atmosphere, the local atmosphere. Along with the transfer of power from governments to citizens through subsidiarity, do you also, expect a reallocation of income and capital assets by governments to people at local levels? So, we don't really talk about redistribution. Issues very much in the book, except in talking about the why the national state became the kind of presumed hegemonic unit of political authority within the global system. I mean, one of the things we try to, we go to some length to explain is that it's actually quite recent how that we got to the national, the universality of national governments. If you go back to the year my father was born, 1944, the majority of the people in the world did not live in a national state. They lived in colonies, they lived in empires, they lived in mandates, a variety of other kinds of governance arrangements other than national states. And it was really only in the post-war period with the advent of decolonization that the national state became the kind of universal unit of governance authority. Now something like 99% of people live in a national state or are citizens of a national state. That process was very late developing and actually was not necessarily what all the first generation of post-colonial leaders were seeking. You look at Africa today, the national states that are in Africa today basically follow the administrative borders that were set up by the colonial powers, Britain and France for the most part, but also, Spain and Portugal and other parts of Africa. But many of the initial post-colonial leaders or colonial leaders seeking decolonization in the 1950s didn't necessarily want to have the administrative units they were inheriting from their colonial powers to be the administrative units that would become national states. You know, Kwame Nkrumah for example wanted a pan-African, a pan-African unit and you know there was a pan-Arabist movement that actually led to the temporary merger of Syria, with now Syria and Egypt, the United Arab Republic from 1958 to 1961. And it was only kind of late in the process that states all over the world converged on the national state as the universal form of political authority and governance, governance management. And the reason for that I believe is that the central project of governments and governance in the second half of the 20th century during the period of decolonization was figuring out how to do economic development. What was also, called modernization or sometimes tellingly also, referred to as nation building. This was a central project because all of these countries that were emerging from colonialism were often desperately poor, certainly had very large, largely agricultural, largely very poor populations, and they looked to the industrial north, and they said we would like to replicate the wealth and prosperity of the industrial north in various ways. And arguably the central debate of the Cold War was which model, the state socialist model of the Soviet Union or the democratic capitalist model of the United States was going to become the predominant model that countries would follow in trying to figure out how to industrialize effectively. But the other reason why national states are really important and became the predominant form of governance is that national governments are actually the only unit of governance in history that is actually engaged in a redistributionist politics effectively. All right, now there's of course many national governments that don't do that, but the only units of governance that have ever done serious redistributionist efforts have been national governments. Never happens in empires, never happens in city states except briefly in revolutionary Red Vienna or in revolutionary Paris at various moments in the late 18th and 19th century. These movements were almost always crushed and imploded in very short order. So, redistributionist politics for the most part, in terms of if they've been explicit, have happened at national levels. So, that with the building of welfare states is a redistributionist politics as well as an industrializing politics. So, the industrializing politics and the redistributionist politics went hand in hand in the form of the national state. So, now just because national states are the only units that have ever been effective at doing this doesn't necessarily mean that they're the only units that can be effective at doing it. But I guess the argument that John and I have in the book is that it's a pretty good bet that that's probably the best basis for a redistributionist politics. And the simple reason is that identities are currently mainly located in political allegiances and the kinds of communal feeling that allows for a redistributionist politics to be effective basically has only ever worked at the national level. And you know this is a result of nationalisms as they arose in the 19th century and it's not a coincidence that the rise of nationalism precedes the rise of welfare states as an institutional form always and everywhere. So, this is all a long way around to answer your question about do I envisage a redistributionist politics as going along with a planetary politics. The answer is yes; I do but I think that that's likely if it's going to take place to continue to take place through the good offices of legacy national states.
Hagen Schulz-Forberg (HSF):Yeah, I agree with you that you know I would call it the social question. The nation state has developed or has been developed to successfully address, or well successfully. But at least it's been the most important policy system to address the social question. So, yeah let's agree on that. I think that's a fair point to make and you're suggesting that this will continue. I would like to ask you regarding also, redistribution system or levels of authority regarding another source of inspiration that seems to be in your book or that also, comes out in your inspiration in our conversation here that is the idea of the 'all under heaven' approach by Zhao Tingyang. Something tells me that this has been an inspirational read for you and I would like to know what you think of that and your position to that because it's of course a controversial approach regarding a liberal imagination of global order.
Nils Gilman (NG):Sure, so, Zhao Tingyang is a Chinese political philosopher. I first got to know him six or seven years ago now. He was actually a fellow with my institute the Berggruen Institute here in Los Angeles. He actually was a fellow at our offices in Beijing. We have three offices around the world here in Los Angeles, our headquarters and then we have offices in Beijing as well as in Venice, Italy. And I of course met him when he was a fellow with us and he you know I helped translate all right we sponsored the translation of his most important book which is called Tianxia - All Under Heaven So, Tianxia is an old concept in Chinese political thought. Tian means heaven and Xia means all under and it's been undergone a variety of different interpretations over time, but I found quite attractive Zhao Tingyang's particular interpretation of this idea which he developed actually in the era before Xi Jinping became the supreme leader in China. So, the idea that Zhao has for All Under Heaven is that there should be a system of governance that is planetary in scale that is particularly focused on collective co-becoming of all humans as well as non-human others. So, he really what I found particularly attractive about his ideas was that he understands that humans are in fact embedded in planetary systems and that we need a kind of authority for governance which recognizes our deep embeddedness and co-becoming with all the other systems and creatures on the earth that we are co-involved with and co-exist with. And so, he has a rather I think benign understanding of the way in which the authority of Tianxia could work. It understands there's a mechanism for thinking about a universality of fate that then can become a basis for a politics of shared fate. Now you refer to the fact that this idea is controversial and that's the reason why it's controversial is that there are also, other interpretations of the Tianxia idea which can be have been ascribed and certainly have been even promoted by other kinds of Chinese philosophers over you know decades and centuries to really have it be interpreted instead as kind of the absolute sovereign authority and primacy of China in the Middle Kingdom in particular and the idea that this can justify a kind of a tributary state system of the traditional sort that China had in East Asia prior to the 19th century. That's not the interpretation of Tianxia that Zhao Tingyang proposes or that I endorse following Zhao Tingyang.
Hagen Schulz-Forberg (HSF):That's true of course you're right but what he does write about is that the system as we see it which is in the modularized form of legitimacy in liberal systems so, that a lower unit gives legitimacy or sovereignty to a lot larger humanist citizens that give legitimacy to the nation state and the nation state and so, he criticizes that very severely and he says basically that has failed.
Nils Gilman (NG):Right so, he so, look I think that Zhao's interpretation is a kind of he follows a kind of neo-confusion interpretation of these things you know one of the principles of Confucian thought is that a harmonious system is one in which there is a clear hierarchy and everybody understands what their role in that hierarchy is and respects the both the rights that come with their position and the responsibilities that come with their position and that you get harmony by having people you know the model here is father to son, emperor to people, teacher to student and that in each case the teacher owes obligations to the students and the student owes deference to the teacher and that if the higher authorities in that Confucian hierarchy don't do the things that are their responsibility don't fulfill their responsibility with respect to their subordinates then their subordinates are no longer obligated to give them their fealty. So, there's details of this that I am not fully comfortable with perhaps because I'm a westerner I'm not Confucian myself I wouldn't say but the Chinese idea of harmony I think of everybody understanding their place and being given respect for their place in the system I think is something that could be could be generalized beyond the particulars of the Confucian tradition out of which it emerges. My own belief is that one of the reasons why we're seeing these political crises across the West in particular is that there's a sense that people no longer feel respected for their positions in society if they ever were and are very angry about that and feel like the systems have the system of meritocracy has created a system of contempt by the by the elites towards the people in ways that are fundamentally disrespectful and I think the backlash as you're seeing politically are a direct response to that. So, you see the limits of the western system that doesn't mean necessarily that the Confucian system is superior, but it does suggest that we might have things that we could learn in dialogue with some of the eastern ideas.
James Quilligan (JQ):To ask you this question given the world's ecological crisis do you expect that planetary society will decrease its rate of resource use and how would you judge the concept that you addressed earlier about degrowth in terms of that decrease in the rate of resource use?
Nils Gilman (NG):The current rate of extraction of resources is not sustainable on the one hand and rendering large swaths of the planet uninhabitable creating basically sacrifice zones where there's complete environmental despoliation in order to pull out whether it's coal or oil or minerals of other sorts of lithium is the new big thing. That I believe is likely to or at least has the potential to come to a close. Human population is going to continue to increase for decades but the rate of increase is dramatically slowed and may eventually flatten out or perhaps even go into decline. At that point I think the idea of a circular economy becomes a much more viable idea. If we hypothetically imagine a scenario where we get to nine billion people by the time population stabilizes in some year in the future, 2075 say, once the population is stabilized and we reach a certain level of material comfort at that point we won't actually need to extract any more from the planet. We won't need more. If we've gotten to green energy and we have all the minerals out of the ground that people already need we simply need to recycle them. There is a technological pathway to get to this future. I'm not sure we're on it right now and I think part of the reason we're not on it is because incentive structures between states don't exist to set that up but it is possible to imagine a world where we would get to that. Now the question is whether in getting from there to here we're going to cause so, much damage that there's going to be irreparable breaching of what Johan Rockström and his collaborators call breaching and planetary boundaries. If we breach those planetary boundaries due to tipping points that lead to fundamental destabilizations that will unfold even if we get to a zero extractivist stabilized balance with the ecosystems that we dwell among. That's a great question. I don't know the answer to that. It scares me to think that the answer might be no.
James Quilligan (JQ):I mean you also, say in the book that in a planetary society the planetary institutions would have a role of resource provisioning and wealth redistribution. So, in other words could that be an answer to the degrowth quandary?
Nils Gilman (NG):So, I think the specific thing that we have in mind is that a planetary agency says for managing pandemic risk or say for managing climate change mitigation. One of their powers, authorities could be about technology distribution, which is a form of wealth distribution, right. One of the great successes of the European Union during the pandemic was that when the vaccines became available, they became available at the same time and at the same rate and had the same adoption pace in every country in the European Union whether they were the rich countries or the poor countries whether they were the vaccine producers or the non-vax or the vaccine consumers. Bulgarians got the vaccine at the same rate as the Germans and this was a real triumph right and so, that's a kind of model for how we might think of a planetary agency also, managing you know when the next inevitable next pandemic emerges, and we hopefully get a vaccine quickly produced that they would be responsible for the global distribution of this vaccine. I think it was a huge missed opportunity for both Europe and the United States frankly during the pandemic that the sharing of vaccines was not done on a global basis and that it could have been a real opportunity for a huge soft power win and that failure to do so, I think continues to stick in the craw and rankle many countries in the Global south and you can hardly blame them. They were told that they were on a planetary scale second-class citizens so, thinking about what the European Union did successfully there extending it to a planetary scale I think provides a model not just for vaccines but you can think about similar things for you know solar arrays and greener transmission lines and the electrification of grids and transportation grids rather and so, on and so, forth. There are all sorts of technology transfer that could become a form of redistribution as politics but really is in the service of ultimately addressing planetary concerns and the redistribution effect is sort of a positive byproduct rather than the design principle that governs how this rollout works.
James Quilligan (JQ):A follow-up to that would be I think that what measures would you propose to prevent the privatization of public goods or services under a more decentralized model like you're outlining?
Nils Gilman (NG):I think that there is plenty of space for a variety of different kinds of implementation arrangements. They could be private, they could be public, they could be public-private, partnerships of various sorts. You know one thing we know about you know one of the models I think about this for historically is the rise of universal healthcare systems. Let's leave the United States out of this for a second but if you just look at Europe every country in Europe now has some kind of a way to deliver universal nearly universal healthcare to its populations but the models will look very different from one country to another. In some countries there's a like Britain there's a national health service that's the primary vehicle for doing that. It's state-run, it's centralized and so, on. In other places there are insurance schemes that fund private sector healthcare systems. In other places there's a mixed model like France, there's a mixed model where some parts of it are provided publicly to all and other things that are private services that are funded by the state. So, I think that that actually is a metaphor or historical analogy that can be used for thinking about why there might be a variety of different kinds of ways at the local level to achieve the implementation of this and we are not particularly I guess we're agnostic as to what the best way to do this is and the principle of subsidiarity suggests that what works in one place gets us to a proper solution in one place may not be the ideal solution somewhere else. And so, I guess I'm not ideologically opposed to private sector provisioning per se if that's the best way it fits with the political economic culture of the particular zone, I'm not necessarily against that.
Hagen Schulz-Forberg (HSF):I was trying to count the various boards that you would need to run the show in your system and then I thought to myself, man that's a lot of experts. Where are you going to get all those experts from? How are you going to educate them? How are they talking to each other?
Nils Gilman (NG):Yeah, that's a really good question. Who's going to populate these entities? There's also, a question of how they're going to be funded. There's also, questions about enforcement mechanisms. The last few pages of the book obviously I'm laying out a very radical change in vision for how governance could work in this book and there's many open questions that John and I believe there's going to be a whole field of research that are going to emerge to think about how do we actually implement these things. But one of the things that we talk about in our final chapter is that one of the mandates that we believe every planetary agency should have been a mandate to enhance what I referred to earlier as planetary sapience. In other words, enhance the planet's knowledge of the particular question at hand. So, if there were a planetary organization for the reduction of carbon one of its missions would be what is currently the IPCC's mission which is to increase our understanding of what exactly is happening with respect to climate change. Actually, understand that. In addition to that we also, believe that one of the mandates that could come out of these institutions would be a mandate for training because planetary sapience isn't just about technological systems it's also, about human knowledge and the social networks for creating and propagating the knowledge that the technical systems help us create. So, we think that there should be a massive training effort that should really unfold that's going to ultimately have to intersect with educational systems which are some places they're national some places they're subnational. So, we really strongly believe that there should be a massive push for enhancing the techno-scientific competencies of people all over the world so, that they can become people who will join these kinds of agencies and provide the expertise that are needed.
Hagen Schulz-Forberg (HSF):I don't know about your timing, but my time says 20 past so, we should probably start thinking about wrapping up you need to leave us soon Nils even though this is very intense, and I guess we could continue a little more. James, do you have a do you have a final question?
James Quilligan (JQ):Yeah, I'm just I'm very interested in the idea of the ecological crisis that we're facing and how the planetary solution would be a way of solving that but you know given the world's vulnerable ecologies declining resources and growing populations will there actually be enough economic growth and wealth for national governments to redistribute on the regional and local levels? And I say that not in terms of any ideology involved but actually how much actual wealth can be generated during a period of planetary contraction of resources.
Nils Gilman (NG):So, I think one answer is that there's quite a lot of evidence to this point that we're seeing a progressive dematerialization of a lot of economic activity and here I would point to a recent book by a researcher at MIT named Andy McAfee who recently published a book called More from Less which is showing how there's actually we're seeing a progressive dematerialization a de-intensification of material use not just on a per capita marginal per capita basis but actually the material intensity of producing specific goods is becoming less it takes less material now there's more efficiencies in the system to produce a television now than a television in the 1950s even though the televisions now are much bigger and more fancy and have lots more contraptions they're actually less resource intensive than because of the efficiencies in the entire product you know product supply chain that goes into televisions. So, I do think that there's a possibility that technological advances will create a progressive dematerialization that we can have some hope for of course the planet doesn't care about progressive dematerialization or relative dematerialization it only cares about absolute dematerialization and here I think the real question is are we going to be able to create a kind of wealth level that people are going to be happy with fast enough that we don't continue to extract over-extract from the planet and here's actually where I don't have a solution in the book for this but I do think that like reducing global inequality is actually a really important part of the story because one of the reasons why one of the things that's very clear is as people move into higher wealth brackets often what they start to consume more and more of are what are known by what our economists call positional goods that are you know not necessarily about direct benefit but are about differentiating themselves from people who can't consume those kinds of goods and those positional goods are sometimes based on material scarcities and sometimes they're based on cultural scarcities of various sorts. I think the more we can move away from trying to have people compete over you know material resources I got to have a bigger jet than you obviously if everybody tries to compete that way we're not going to be able to create anything that's remotely sustainable or habitable on this planet and one solution that might be for fewer people to have private jets.
Hagen Schulz-Forberg (HSF):Nils, you're not only writing books and talking about these great ideas you're actually also, quite active in promoting these ideas outside let's say the bookish world and something's going to happen at the end of the month (November 2024) called the planetary summit and I'd like you to tell us a little bit about that and maybe also, midterm or longer term plans that you have in terms of bringing these ideas outside of your book outside your book.
Nils Gilman (NG):One thing I didn't mention is that kind of the motive of this book is to join a couple of different intellectual and policy and practitioner communities together so, we've tried to one of our ambitions is to try to create a narrative in a language that allows people who are working in currently very different and separate fields to see and recognize that they're actually engaged in a common project in the same way that the language of globalization allowed people in the 1990s who were you know creating global telecommunications infrastructure under the ocean and were trying to promote basketball as a global brand to see that they were actually engaged in a common project. We believe that the concept of the planetary can help people from politics international relations to technology to philosophy to activist networks to see that they're actually engaged in a common project and part of what we're trying to do by promoting that concept it's we've been going out and doing a lot of podcasts and briefing everywhere from think tanks to activist networks to academic institutions to you know I'm going to be talking to the McKinsey and Company's partner network next week so, there's a whole variety of different kinds of actors and I think are becoming interested in this concept because it speaks to a commonality of purpose in an interesting way. So, one of the things we're doing to help promote that idea is we're running a big conference in Venice, Italy at the end of this month several hundred people will be coming from all walks of life to participate in a conversation that will take us on this arc from the planetary as a scientific concept, the planetary as a kind of philosophical political theoretical concept, to the planetary as a practical matter of politics and policy. Great, but that's not the end of it right? This is really the beginning of a larger project you know obviously we started writing this book as I mentioned four years ago just published it this spring, but this book is only really dealing with one dimension of what the planetary exposes. This is using the planetary to rethink the state there's all sorts of intellectual work that needs to be done using the planetary to rethink the global economy. You guys are particularly interested in those questions here in this podcast rethink using the planetary to rethink the idea of freedom using the planetary to rethink the idea of community right there's a whole variety of concepts that emerge out of the European post-enlightenment tradition which were all anthropocentric concepts once we move to a post-anthropocentric idea of the planetary this is really a driver for us rethinking every category we have of political and policy practice and so, that's a huge amount of work that's not just one career's worth of work it's many careers worth of work and many different organizations are converging on that. We're interested in getting these ideas out as model curricula to universities and perhaps even to secondary schools all over the world we're going to be collaborating with the New America Foundation to create a kind of model curriculum for these things in 20 years, you know next in the next few years. There's going to be many efforts to reach out to folks across the world particularly in the Global South for whom I think these ideas are going to be particularly um there are many people in the Global South who are actually promoting many of these ideas in other idioms in a variety of different a variety of different philosophical and political traditions that have fed into this into this conversation so, I think this is also, an opportunity to join a different set of epistemological and political traditions into a single unified conversation, so, all of these are obviously very ambitious very long-term projects that we're only one component of but we're hoping that we can basically serve as a catalyst for bringing these ideas to a wider audience.
Hagen Schulz-Forberg (HSF):It's wonderful what you just said reminded me exactly also, of our motivation of why we're doing this podcast and where we're trying to focus in our research and our teaching on the planetary. As a conceptual historian or as a historian I like the conceptual approach to history uh you probably know Reinhart Koselleck's work of you know on begriffsgeschichte in conceptual history if a neologism arrives the new core concept arrives all of the semantic field around it changes as it as it gives information and instructs the semantics of this new concept and becomes a fundamental contested commonly shared concept and I believe just like you that the planetary can do precisely this. That it can become such a core concept in which we can reimagine and reconstruct the global order. Now it's time to wrap up this and thank you very much Nils, all the best for you. We're going to be talking to more people along the way in this format in our little podcast here called Planetary Choices.
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