Planetary Choices

Planetary Thought in the Early Soviet Union —A Conversation with Daniela Russ

• Center for New Critical Politics and Governance • Season 1 • Episode 10

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In the final episode of Mapping the Planetary, Daniela Russ, Junior Professor at the University of Leipzig, joins hosts Hagen Schulz-Forberg and James Quilligan to explore the fascinating intersections of energy, science, and planetary thoughts in the early Soviet Union (1917–1945). Drawing on the pioneering work of scientists Vladimir Vernadsky and Boris Veinberg, the conversation reveals how Soviet thinkers imagined planetary transformation, in both scientific and political contexts and how these early renditions of planetary thinking, still resonate in today’s debates on the environmentalism, globalism and the Anthropocene.

Academic Reference:

Daniela Russ, Hagen Schulz-Forberg, James Quilligan; Planetary Thought in the Early Soviet Union—A Conversation with Daniela Russ. Global Perspectives 10 March 2025; 6 (1): 150340. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/gp.2025.150340

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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

Planetary Thought in the Early Soviet Union — A Conversation with Daniela Russ

Hagen:

Welcome to Planetary Choices! Today, James and I are delighted to welcome Daniela Russ to Planetary Choices. Daniela is Junior Professor for Global Dynamics and Resource Use and Distribution in the Global and European Studies Institute at Leipzig University in Germany. Her work lies at the intersection of historical sociology, energy and resource history and a critical theory of nature. She is especially interested in how energy economies have been shaped over time, in both capitalist and socialist societies. Let's welcome her to our podcast and explore all this.

Daniela:

Thanks for having me.

Hagen:

Alright, well let's jump into things. Let's get going. In your research on social history, you've described how pioneering scientists and engineers in the Soviet Union during the 20's and 30's, that is the 1920's and 30's, were seeking to develop solar, wind and biogeochemical power as the energy of the future. Could you share how you began writing about energetic sciences and planetary thought in the early Soviet Union? Because frankly speaking, it's not a big field. There are not many of you.

Daniela:

Yeah, thanks for that question. When you introduced me, you already gave a clue to that, because I got really interested into the concept of energy. Primarily the concept of energy, how it is used in practice, at engineering practice, in working with natural forces and making them work and through that research, that was more based on German sources, French and British sources, I also started reading a few of the Russians and was just really, struck by how different the language was and how much broader the context was that those engineers understood their work to be. I can give one example, for instance, the Commission on the Electrification of Russia, which is probably really well known. So, the first electrification plan was then, uhm, made public in a couple of propaganda leaflets and the introduction that was written to those leaflets was by a novelist and he really put this electrification plan, which for us is something really technical, into what this would do with the metabolism of society. So, this really struck me as being a different way of talking about energy that I got really interested in, which is now my project.

James:

Well, you've been writing that these early Soviet scientists developed a very strong vision of the planetary biosphere and noosphere. Yet, for reasons of national security and geopolitics, the Soviets turned to the development of Siberian oil after 1945 and then they moved into nuclear energy in the space program in the 1950s and 60s and this sidelined their earlier experiments in the biosphere and noosphere by the 1970s. So, this seems to be a forgotten chapter in the history of the Cold War. How much of the shift away from the planetary vision was pragmatic, or did this systemic change reflect a deeper ideological choice by the Soviets?

Daniela:

Yeah, that's a great question and I should say from the beginning that I don't think that question is settled. I still, I mean, you will notice that in the article that I wrote, I also proposed it as a question of what happened to this tradition of biospheric-noospheric thinking, but maybe I start with explaining a little bit what the biosphere and the noosphere mean. So, I draw a line from Vernadsky's conceptualization of the biosphere. He's not the first to use the word, but he conceptualizes it as a sphere between the atmosphere and the earth crust, where life —and life for him is living matter, so it's not single organisms, but all kinds of matter in those organisms’ dwells, or can exist. And this biosphere has a particular, also energetic meaning and I guess we're going to talk about this a little later too, but just to already mention this. And then the noosphere for him would be the idea that at the end of development of the biosphere, through the development of the human brain, develops a new relationship, or new era in geology where the biosphere is remade by the human brain. And I argue in that article that, to the extent, that Vernadsky was also practically involved in planning and in doing research during the First World War, but also later he influenced certain projects of measuring wind power, for instance and then there's other scientists who are related to that and who experiment with renewable sources. So, back to your question of, what happened then in the 1930s and 1940s and I have several ideas, but I don't think I really explore or explain why it's cut off. I think one of them is that in the 1930s, the preparation for the war, or you know, the Soviets observed that there's preparation for the war going on in Germany and in Europe and they ram up the oil production and it is already felt that preparation for the war is more important and these kind of experimentations, are not considered as important anymore, but then it's also that the development of nuclear power, that kind of substitutes the development for solar power. So, you can see scientists moving from photoelectric research into nuclear research and this is something that is not yet researched enough I would say and I don't really have an answer, even for individual scientists, why they chose doing that. I mean, one thing is probably that nuclear was also more important strategically in the war. Another reason could be that photoelectricity required certain kinds of technologies that were not within reach. So, those are maybe the two reasons that I consider for the very immediate pre-war time. The more general movement that you described, towards an old-based economy in the 1970s and 1980s, I think this has to be seen more in the context of an integration in the global economy, where the Soviet Union also became dependent on selling oil for foreign currency and this became, towards the end, it's so important that they really depended on keeping the oil production extraction going. But this is again, I wouldn't say I have yet researched that enough, because there are also interesting solar thermal power experimentations later in the 60s and 70s.

Hagen:

Thank you. That's interesting. That will be interesting to find out what happened in the 60s and 70s. I think I would like to go back a little bit to the concepts of biosphere and noosphere, or noosphere. How do you pronounce it actually?

Daniela:

Noosphere.

Hagen:

Noosphere.

Daniela:

Yeah.

Hagen:

And to understand that a little better and then in relation to, maybe other concepts that are floating around today. So, am I right in understanding noosphere, as the sphere of the human mind? Somehow? Because that's how you explained it in relation to biosphere. I think how you explained Vernadsky's concept of a biosphere, as that realm where life exists between the earth crust and the skies and then the noosphere is the human mind that enters. And what is the effect here? What is the conceptualization of the human mind in relation to shaping the biosphere? Could you dwell on that?

Daniela:

Yeah, I mean, you point to an interesting-, because when you kind of compare the biosphere and the noosphere and try to build them analogically, then the noosphere would be this sphere of nervous systems in a sense, but I think this is not what he means. As I understand him, the noosphere is the biosphere remade by the human mind. So, it is still a biosphere, but it is a biosphere that is consciously, intentionally remade by human beings, using their brain.

Hagen:

Okay, great. That's clear now. So, if we say this is the noosphere, according to Vernadsky, or according to a Soviet discourse in the 30s. How do you think this relates to environmentalism, or the Anthropocene, or ideas of global warming today? Do they share similarities? Or what are the differences? Is this an early rendition of the Anthropocene?

Daniela:

Yeah, I mean, maybe we can go back one step because the first question you asked is about how biosphere relates to the noosphere and this also means historically, right? So, for Vernadsky, the noosphere develops out of the biosphere and the biosphere, as I already said, is life for him as a force that remakes the biosphere. So, it is a mechanism that stores and conveys energy that expands the biosphere over the globe. And so, life is already a force, but then when the human brain develops, that is, you know, also it develops within humans, within living beings, but it becomes another kind of force for him. So, the noosphere is remade by this kind of force of the mind and I think it's important when we talk today about the Anthropocene. It is a very, it is, we don't have the same understanding of, uhm, we are nature acting on itself, that Vernadsky had in his understanding of the noosphere. So, you would say a difference would be that Vernadsky's understanding is that there's no nature culture, or nature brain gap. It's part of it. Whereas the Anthropocene would be conceptualized as humans interfering with nature. Yeah, I mean, I should be clear that he says things that are very close to the Anthropocene, is that human being, humankind, becomes a geological force, but what he understood, the force for him is not something that is out there and objective, but it is... Well, it is a force that's kind of effective through himself as a scientist also and this is something that we don't, uhm, or we rarely, I would say Anthropocene scientists rarely think about them in the same way. Think about themselves in the same way.

James:

You in your article about this, you also say that uhm, the early Soviets were convinced, that coal was damaging the environment. So that would reflect the Anthropocene, sort of. But uhm, they also tried to slow down the production of petroleum, because they decided that they wanted to move in the direction of the biosphere, noosphere and as you call it, the energy of life and those dynamics in science. So, do you see this as a kind of characteristic of different ways of approaching these things? For example, the biosphere and noosphere in Europe, may be seen, or maybe had been seen, more as ontology and epistemology rather than, you know, some kind of construct like the biosphere and noosphere. Does that ring a bell with you, or does that seem right?

Daniela:

Could you- I think the last question I didn't fully get. The difference between, whether the biosphere is an ontology and epistemology, or a construction?

James:

Yeah, so there's-, so some people would argue that the biosphere represents to us beingness and others would say that noosphere represents knowing, or epistemology. So, do you think that the West became a little more rationalistic, or positivistic in terms of seeing things in those terms, rather than seeing them in terms of the, as we might call it, the planetary vision of a biosphere and noosphere?

Daniela:

It's a really hard question, also because, I mean, I should say that what I — the people I look at, is only a small group in a sense, it’s Vernadsky who is really influential of course, but it is a couple of more physicists and engineers. So, I wouldn't say that Soviet thinkers or planners in general shared that idea, but it is at least, it is an idea that was influential at the time and especially when you, you know, the relation to coal for instance. If you look at the numbers, the Soviet Union is very, very coal based, the propaganda is very much on coal workers and so on, until the 60s. So, there's no majority of Soviet engineers or energy planners who stand behind the project of, you know, putting all energies into developing renewables, but that said, yeah, they did have some of, there was a group who shared that coal was maybe not damaging, because in the more broader discourse, climate change didn't figure importantly. It did in those kinds of novels that I cite, but not so much in energy decisions, but they did debate that coal was limited for, you know, another couple of hundred years. And there's in general, in the time in the 20s, before large oil reserves in the US were found, there's in general, globally, an idea that maybe oil is not playing a role, because there's just not enough around. And this is the context in which it becomes reasonable for, not only for those who already think in these sanitary terms, but also for energy engineers to say "Well, we at least have to study other sources," but this is never, never a majority, I would say. Uhm. I think the way Vernadsky thinks about it is very special and there's not many people in the Soviet Union, or around, who have this kind of natural philosophical understanding. So, I would even, I think, you know, when you then read the planning discourse, which I also did, because I looked at energy planning, not only energy, I don't know, missions or imaginations, then it is really, really similar to what you read in a very pragmatic and very, yeah, uhm, objective. You know, you make nature into an object that you plan and dominate and you don't constantly reflect on iron and natural force as well, which is basically what Vernadsky says, when he says noosphere. So, I think there are thinkers and influential thinkers who make the point that you mentioned, but I wouldn't make the difference between the rest of these so big, that it really reaches into, how the energy economy is concretely planned. Only in these few experimentations that I point out, but that are always, yeah, kind of marginal experiments that never make it into an important point of the energy balance of the Soviet Union.

Hagen:

Yeah. So, if I understand you correctly Daniela, from what you just said, it was really a scarcity driven exploration into the planetary if you wish, or this Soviet decision to invest into other forms of energy, or other forms of, you know, research in leading them to this biogeochemistry approach and the Vernadsky thinking. Is that right, that it was, okay? The assumption that there’s scarcity of other resources, so we have to think out of the box and move into that direction? And how did that then develop? Did that take shape in reference to, let's say, Western ecological thought, or what's the difference between a Soviet approach that developed there and maybe what happened in the West?

Daniela:

Just to be clear, I wouldn't say that. You know, Vernadsky's idea of biogeochemical energy is not connected to scarcity. This is connected to what the role of living matter plays, as a cosmic mechanism, but this means that there's a certain role of using solar energy at different places and also the role of energy, in making other places inhabitable. So, I think those are the ideas that can be linked to Vernadsky. The way I describe it in the paper is more that I think there comes together certain interests of different people, so this would be Vernadsky's understanding of energy as a-, and the role of the biosphere. This links together with engineers, who try to develop different sources of energy and the Bolshevik state, who needs to develop the economy and has all kinds of really concrete scarcities in the sense of, there's no oil coming anymore from Baku to Moscow. The oil— and the coal that's coming from Donbas cannot reach all regions in the Soviet Union —Russia, the Soviet Union and then they think about, at least a certain group of engineers starts to think about, whether there could be a place-based development of energy. So, whether you could use the energy that comes from the sun on the earth in these places and this is where the wind power and solar power thinking, or the experimentation comes from. For those engineers, it is connected to, they always, you know, to justify and legitimize what they do and why they focus on a technology that no one else focuses on, they often use calculations of, "we have so and so much coal, we have so and so much oil, but now, if we calculate how much wind power we actually have, or how much solar power we have, there's much more" and then this is how they justify to look into it, I would say. And this is, as I already said, I think in the relation to that, oil could become scarce and this debate is really international in the 1920s, but there's still differences. I mean, it's also what I argue in the paper, not all, uhm, it is uncommon for a country that has oil resources to say, “we're not actually building an oil-based economy” and they do exploit the oil, but they're mostly, I mean, it's also not, you know, they, around the oil economy, there's also a heat oil economy developing, but they, I would say in terms of propaganda and in terms of how this energy system is to be envisioned in the future, electricity and coal and solar power is much more important than oil.

James:

I'd like to ask you a question, going back to the former Soviet Union. In the 1930s, the Soviet engineer Yuri Kondratyuk, who was later known for his work in spaceflight theory, he was working on a large-scale wind energy project that was very significant apparently. But then in 1937, after the death of a powerful Soviet industrial leader who had supported him, Kondratyuk's wind project was abruptly canceled. So, what I wanted to ask you is, to what extent did Stalinist politics, like this incident, cut short the Soviet Union's renewable energy ambitions? And do you think that this resistance to the vision of planetary renewables came from within Soviet science and politics, or do you think the obstacles were more about material feasibility?

Daniela:

I'm afraid, I'm not sure that I can really, fully answer that. I think, really, more people have to work on it, but I can try and answer. So, you mentioned the second largest wind power station that they planned to build. This is related to the plan I mentioned that Vernadsky starts to initiate a commission for the study of natural productive forces, already during the war and the first study they do, the first survey is on wind power. And following this survey, research on wind power is institutionalized in several institutes in the Soviet Union and there are prototypes of really large wind power plants and those prototypes were, at the time, the world's largest wind power plants. One of them stood in Crimea and then the second one you mentioned was supposed to be even bigger and this was not built anymore. My impression is that 1937, this is already, really preparation for the war, where you see, you know, when you look at Germany, you see there's something going on and this could become dangerous. So, all these kinds of experiments are not very important in terms of the preparation for war. You also see that oil already becomes more important in the late 1930s. I'm not sure whether I would say, uhm, you know, you can see that there is an attempt in the early 1920s to do a certain kind of energy planning and you can show that Stalin, whether he's not really against energy planning or against those kind of engineers and the power they wield, that he cuts short these kind of experiments and then those engineers end up in the Academy of Sciences and found the Institute of Energetics. So, you know, you could say that by dedicating their work to research, maybe even in a sense, they started this focus on renewables. So, I'm not, this is just a long way of saying that I think that we really need more research to understand why those projects were cut short. In general, of course, if you have coal and your railways work, then you have a source of energy that is much more powerful than any of these kinds of, really, newly built technologies that don't yield so many kilowatt hours. So, I think there's also an efficiency argument to it. Yeah and I mean, in terms of the, I think the photovoltaic, there I would say, probably there's also an argument about, you know, how mu- like, you need really high temperatures to form these kinds of crystals, but I don't know what a bottleneck was, but I can imagine there was some kind of technological bottleneck that they just didn't manage to build these kind of waivers for photo electricity, but I don't know yet, where that actually was located.

Hagen:

I would like to look at the other side of abrupt changes and projects unfinished and build on, what you quote as well, that socialism is not just built for a hundred years. You know, a hundred years is short, you know, it's built for eternity, or much longer. So, there's a long-termism as well in the conceptualization of these projects. This, you know, okay, then there are political changes, some of them are cut short, but there's a vision of, let's say, a planetary eternity or long-term vision. Now, obviously from a political standpoint, anybody who says that this country should live for a thousand years comes across as a little dodgy, if not dangerous, but, but I'd like to stick with a long-term view here. Do you think that, you know, what kind of long-termism could be and I'm asking you to think a bit out of the box here, or out of out of the 30s, up until maybe this century's 30s, can we use some of the long-termism to guide today's climate thinking and climate policies? Some of the stuff that they've been talking about, do you see any parallels of some more ethics of long-termism that is maybe missing today, because it's more of an alarmist situation?

Daniela:

I mean if you invoke long-termism, you're already saying more, right, because this is an ideology that is even more than. Maybe we could stick for now with, with just, you know, the kind of timescales that we consider politics now and then, without calling it necessarily long-termism, but uhm.

Hagen:

Okay!

Daniela:

I do think there was a, like, this is the moment in the 20s and 30s that, you know, that makes it, I think, so fascinating for us that they say these things and it's not yet just propaganda and just, you know, you have later points in time in the Soviet Union, where the language is already so standardized that you have to say certain things, but here things are moving, it's not yet, a kind of, fixed code of how you say things. And so, this is why I take them really seriously when they say that and I think we could, you know, the quote goes on saying, "and we need a systematic siege of the energy question," and I think this is a good point. And it is, for them, this also made it possible to build and experiment with things that were not cost effective and efficient, at least for short period of time and I think this is something, where in a sense, you know, the political and the political will to just experiment with these things and to just like, take interest in it. Trump's economic consideration, at least for a short period of time and of course we can today ask, you know, what would be possible. Many things are technologically possible, but are not profitable, or not cost-efficient enough, or we have already certain kinds of processes by which we measure what, you know, what is feasible, how cost effective do certain infrastructure have to be and then it's just not built. So, I think what I like about it, there's kind of a political openness here to build things and try things out that, yeah, I think we are missing right now.

James:

I would like to ask a follow-up question to that. You know, long-termism is being discussed today in terms of intergenerational thinking, you know, doing more for our children and their grandchildren and all that, in terms of the environment and long-range planning was one of the things that the Soviet Union was really, truly thinking about. Not necessarily in terms of the climate, but I think the contrast here is in terms of that longer range thinking, which has a more ecological slant and the short-termism, which capitalist economies are known for. You know, it's a short investments time period and we can't look further ahead than three or five years, you know, it's hard for markets to be able to do that. So, following with that, I have a couple of questions. Is this one of the reasons why you believe that we're still more in a global age, than in a planetary age? And also, do you think that planetary biopolitics can actually teach us how to balance national interests with the limits of the planet? So, the long-range planning can be considered planetary and the shorter-term thinking can be looked at as market driven. And, and when I talked about the limits of the planet, I'm thinking more like Johan Rockström, there's planetary boundaries that we're encroaching, —we're actually going past them and a lot of people are saying that we need to stay within the planetary boundaries. So, what I'm saying is, can the planetary actually teach us how to balance national interests, within the planetary boundaries?

Daniela:

Uhm, I think the, even, I mean, if you look at the planning practice in the Soviet Union, you can argue that it was not planned and so, there's, you know, there's a lot of planning theory, there's a lot of good ideas of how you could plan, also do long-term planning, but if you see what happened on the ground, then you can make the argument that it was not. It was, it was not a planned economy, there were all kinds of, you know, spontaneous reactions to how you have to reschedule resources because it didn't work the way that you wanted to, or incentivizing behavior by factories that then work against the plan. All these kinds of things. So, I think they didn't escape... I'm unsure whether the kind of planning, even planetary planning, can ever escape the politics and the conflicts that are there and the different interests that actors have, you know, even if it's only in one sector. So, I think this is what all of the planetary thinkers, also the ones that I present in the Soviet Union, really miss. I mean they, you know, they describe these beautiful institutions, and how and the problems that were solved, but they rarely describe, I mean they don't, they don't describe institutional ways to deal with conflict, which they say this is democratic, but they don't actually work out democratic processes that would make it possible to plan the planetary way, with all these kinds of different interests and values that human beings have. I think this is really, I mean you see, most of them are natural scientists and engineers, so this is also not really their field of study, but it seems to me this would-, this was the problem and this would also be the problem today. We don't need, in a sense, a blueprint of an international governance of climate, but what we need is, I don't know, a political way to come from the fragmented watch politics that we have today to get there, right. And I don't think, again, this is not a problem of knowledge or measuring the bias, yaah, I mean this would all be important, but I think the more important thing to solve, or to work on, would be these kinds of institutional democratic forces that can actually bring people together.

Hagen:

I feel the need to ask a question about conceptual relations again. Similar to you finding your feet in this question here, I think you're totally right, by ending with, you know, a democratic institutional point of view towards the end, that this is really important, how we make it work. I would like to ask a question related to the work that you're doing, or we're doing, also as academics, or as people trying to understand what’s going on and how can we make sense and also picking up on James' idea of an epistemology here. If we look at, I want to ask you about a, maybe a 'Ménage à Trois' here, between three concepts, which is the planetary in two versions related to the global. If we open Chakrabarty's book about the planetary, it appears as a great alternative to the global, which he kind of rejects, or criticizes as, you know, being full of hierarchies, power, capitalism, colonialism, eurocentrism and as anthropocentric. And so, we need to move on to the planetary as this new human-nonhuman equal playing field. At least there's some, maybe it's a bit of an overstatement, but there's a bit of an ideal, almost utopian visionary of that type of the planetary, versus the planetary that you described, or the planetary of the early Soviets, of Vernadsky and the others. So, could you put those three, somehow, in a relationship? That would be very, very interesting. And then, if we had that kind of planetary thought, so that all thought relating to human fit in history. If we think of planetary thoughts, as that thought that relates human fate, to the fact that it happens on our planet, in relation to sun, space and all of that, this history becomes much longer and what changes when we write history from that perspective? It’s a big question. Sorry. Hope you can answer it.

Daniela:

Yeah, I think the last way, the way you framed it in the end is how I would think about it. That, and this is also very close to how Christophe Bonneuil thinks about the planetary, which is more, it is always a, you know, historically situated way, how societies think themselves in nature, not only in nature, but in in planetary connections and this is not something that begins with the 70s, that is much, much older. And then this is more, you know, it becomes more of a history of a channel understanding of how, well as a sociologist, I would say, how societies are naturally conditioned and this can take different forms. I think where Chakrabarty is right, is that something changes in the twentieth century with this kind of understanding of how we are in nature, but I think the stronger, for me at least, the stronger candidate for what changes, is not that it is first global and then planetary, because this is already, you know, frankly, as an energy historian, already nineteenth century to think of a thermodynamic universe and to think of society standing in this thermodynamic history of decay is already, it's already a planetary understanding. So, I think it's, it's quite obvious that this is a much longer history but what I do understand as a change in the twentieth century is, kind of an explicit formulation of the contradiction in society's relationship to nature so that we, you know, we reproduce ourselves industrially, through the use of fossil fuels and by doing this, we undermine human life on earth. So, this kind of paradox of contradiction, by producing ourselves, by undermining our life and future is, I think, an insight that's typical to the twentieth century and that I would make stronger in writing the history of the planetary, I think. But this contradiction too, I would say, it's older than the 1970s, because it is already formulated in the world wars when there's a kind of an ambivalence about technological development and technology, becomes a destructive force. This is all a long way to say that I think where the Soviet understanding of the planetary is really different, is that they don't share this kind of insight in the destructive side of the technology at all. This is not something that you find in those planetary thinkers.You do have people like, you know, Andrei Platonov, I only mentioned him once in the in the paper, but I think there are a few persons who express a little bit of this, but very few and definitely not Vernadsky or Veinberg, which are my main persons. Yeah, so I think, and maybe to the last question, what changes then is, I think we cannot as easily understand the category of the planetary as, you know, already by itself, kind of, working against the political of bringing us together, or it's more, it is never distinct from that political history, but comes up in it and remains. So even, you know, even if the question is then, uhm, about habitability and no longer about politics, which is one argument by Chakrabarty that it is not directly about how to manage life, but about, how habitability is even possible. Then you already have to, you know, you have to ask who is the subject that is learning about this habitability and I think this already... In what context is this question posed, to what end —and to what end, are the results used and you already are entangled in political history again.

James:

I think this is a key point and I think that some of our listeners who have tuned in, may be wondering, why we're talking about the politics of the early Soviet Union, but your point here and what you've been stressing, is that going back to Vladimir Vernadsky, who developed the early twentieth century concept of the noosphere, it was an important moment, I think, because it showed that, uhm, it introduced the idea that human knowledge and activity form a new layer of the earth system, alongside the geosphere and the biosphere. So, in other words, it wasn't just their thinkers and institutions. No, this was actually something that noosphere became much more of a, uhm, a force of nature itself, that people were living and breathing thinking units. So, when you get to talking about Vernadsky's Commission for the Study of Natural Productive Forces, which organized the scientific exploration of the natural resources in the Soviet Union, you call it a 'quintessentially noospheric institution'. I think that's a profound statement to make, because in other words, it was to institutionalize this idea of the noosphere. Of course it failed, but it was a landmark in a way, which I think you've made note of. So, all of that is to lead to the question; Do you see today's strategies, like the biosphere economies that people are proposing now, as a continuation of Vernadsky's thought, or work? Or do you see it as more of a coincidence that this is something similar to what Vernadsky did, is now coming back? Or do you think there was some influential connection between the two?

Daniela:

Yeah, I mean when you ask about the continuations, I think there's also the relevance of what this story has for today. I think there's several ways to answer, at least for me. I think one would be, you know, as in intellectual history, to see where the noosphere and the biosphere concept comes from, what the context is, in which it develops. And here I find it is also really interesting that the noosphere concept is formulated by Vernadsky in the middle of the Second World War and I still want someone to explain to me how he can be so positive about the human mind in 1943. So, this is, I think this is interesting. Again, it's a puzzle that I can't really solve, but he's like, we see a lot of barbarism and destruction, but we are on the right way. I find this just really hard to-, and Veinberg at the same point dies of hunger, you know, this is roughly the same time, it's just hard to square this. And I would say and of course, but I would say there's a problem to which, or there's a, yeah.. a problem, but also possibilities that come up to which Vernadsky reacts, that are still with us. I mean, you probably, you're probably better to answer this, because you know much more about the field than I do. I think similarities are, maybe they are a little closer to the energy engineers, because at least those energy engineers are really interested in accounting. They really want to know how much energy flows where, which matter is when. I would imagine that biophysical economies is also about tracking stuff. And this is less, I think, what Vernadsky- well, at least this is not his main plan to just account and track. It's also part of it, but he's all thinking about relationships and all. So, maybe the link is more closely to the energy plan, as a few of them try to do more of a metabolic counting in the beginning of the 20s. So, there is definitely, I would say, a line there.

Hagen:

James, do you want to come in here?

James:

No, I think that was a very thorough explanation.

Hagen:

Well, I think so too. I mean, I guess I would be turning the conversation into another direction, because somehow we are listening to you and reflecting on the noosphere and how the human-, particularly that moment in 1943, how we can imagine all of this as a force of good or positivity, when all around him is in flames and his friends are dying. So it came to mind, Walter Mignolo wrote this book "The Dark Side of Modernity" and you know, you can be all positive about things and have a great, you know, possibly inclusive or optimistic agenda, for peace in the world and prosperity and all of that and you create the exact opposite in other parts of the world, in your own, or maybe even inside your own societies. So, there's a, let's call it "a darker side of the planetary." Is that there? Would you say that it exists? When we look at the noosphere as a force of the human mind, or human beings and the human mind is a geological force and they can use their knowledge to destroy the planet I mean, it is not just a knowledge that they can use to make renewable energies and all that, but if I understand it correctly, it is a force that can go in all sorts of directions. So, with that darker side of planetarity that I filter from talking to you and reading what you write, what do you make of that? And what does it do to the planetary as a critical category, or maybe even as Chakrabarty and others have embraced it, as a utopian category?

Daniela:

I mean, for me, that definitely exists in several ways, that you know, you see... You can read them in a way that you think when I take you seriously, I see the problem. So, I can imagine where this would go. And for me, one thing is that life is really a natural scientific, staying alive here and this is not the only thing that for human beings is important. For us, it is not enough to be alive. So, it's not enough to, yeah, to be living matter and to reproduce myself as living matter in the biosphere. Yeah, you can see how brutal this could be if you manage population and it's not what, you know, this is not what Vernadsky thinks, but I think this is inherent in a natural scientific understanding of human life and there's also something in that natural philosophical trend that he does, where he sees himself as, in a sense, acting out nature, but then, whatever comes, is in a sense, already naturalized. It's not a decision to build the noosphere, but it is the development of nature. So, it brings up, kind of a naturalization, almost an automatic process into it, where the political doesn't play, I mean, in general, the political doesn't play a big role for him in the development of nature. So, this would also be for me-, and this is different I should say, I mean, I talk about a single person, the cosmos are really a group where many different versions of cosmism exist. and there are cosmoses, for whom there is a kind of a human measure against nature and the whole development of human beings, would be to go beyond the necessities of nature. So, there's a rift within cosmism here. And then lastly, I think the story what I mentioned is you know, the ease with which they understand themselves, is clearly being able to manage the biosphere I mean, you see this in the in the little short story that I mentioned at the beginning of the text, where it was Veinberg, a geophysicist, writes a story about this committee on the improvement of the terrestrial globe and of course, this committee is entirely staffed by engineers and scientists and for him I mean, at least, it takes a long time to figure out how it all works. He measures this time in like a thousand of years, but still, there's no, you know, there's a plebiscite at some point, but there's no really democratic element in there, so it's mainly scientists and engineers who know what is good for the globe. So, in a sense, the experience of the planet is mediated through scientists and engineers and this is not problematized in any of these texts. So, I think there you could also see, if this was implemented, there's no chance, I think, there's no chance of these things really being implemented, because there are different values and interests around and people will not accept this. But you can see as a vision, how it is, uhm, well, it is a vision of a natural scientist and of an engineer, but not one that takes into account other kinds of knowledge, other kinds of ways to relate to the planet.

James:

I'd like to, last question for you on that very topic. You repeated just now what you had said earlier that there needs to be more democratic institutions to address these broader crises that we are facing in the world and you have said that during the past century, planetary thought as a social phenomenon, elevated scientists and technologies, rather than giving democratic agency to masses of people. So, I wanted to ask you if you see any hope in present day institutions? For example, does this problem still persist in climate science, or do you see a revival of noospheric, or planetary thinking in global climate governance, like the UN climate change conferences? Is there any-, do you see any possibility that the COP30 that's coming up in November, for example, could make any breakthroughs? Or do you think it's possible that it could lead to more democratic decision-making in the time, you know, in the few decades ahead?

Daniela:

Super hard question, especially for someone who's not really working on COP, but I'll try to. I mean, the reason why I say the planetary thought elevate scientists, or makes them more important, this reacts to Chakrabarty's point of the planetary is, you know, make I don't know, it- decenters human beings. And I'm always-, again, back to the question, well who is then producing that planetary knowledge? It's not decentering all kinds of people, but there is certain people who are then speaking for the planet and in those-, you can see that in Vernadsky and in Veinberg clearly, that they think scientists are really, very important figures to speak for the planet and they don't see what, you know, what the political problem, but also the backlash against this could be. So, whether- I mean, maybe we have to distinguish between what I'm doing right now is, you know, they make proposals for how to govern the global climate and I would say, well, they don't really take into account the differences and the conflicts between people. Of course, you can always call for the value of democracy, but I would even say it is not realistic to ever build these institutions if you don't have an understanding of the diversity, conflicts and so on. So, this is why I mean, like, you know, they would need-, they would have to spell out institutions to deal with these kinds of conflicts and whether we have them right now in climate science, I don't think it is looking-, well, in climate governance, I don't think it's looking that way. I'm also not sure whether, you know, it also depends on what time scale you want to-, it looks bad right now, but maybe in 10 years from now, there's a new kind of alliance of different states, maybe no longer Europe, maybe no longer the US, yeah well, there never really was, but other states who take on this global governance of the climate and then there might be, you know, in that kind of conflict that we're seeing now, it looks like there's nothing happening, or they just block each other. Maybe there's something else coming out of this, but I'm really not an expert on contemporary climate politics. It just, yeah, it just seems to me, it's not enough to just call for "it should be more democratic," but we would have to look at how could, in this kind of geopolitical fraud situation, how could there at least be, certain kinds of collaborations happen. I mean, you see this, for instance, with the Arctic Council, where I think the Russian war on Ukraine, kind of, you know, Russia no longer works together with them and this means that we don't have certain kinds of measurements that we need to observe the Arctic. So, these kind of things exist, but this would be about political scientists and diplomats and I don't know, figuring out ways in which this climate observation can still go on in these kind of circumstances.

Hagen:

Thank you, Daniela for this very insightful discussion. It was really, really, very interesting and relevant. There are a lot of takeaways I have. Not only did I learn a little bit about the noosphere and I hope all the viewers and audience as well and please, check the reading list if you want to read more, you can find it in the show notes to this podcast. But also, I found, that it echoed a lot of the problems that we've had throughout the whole season on the Planetary. That here is a possibly utopian, inclusive project, "The Planetary", that yields so much hope and makes so much sense and yet, it has a lot of internal problems, or possible, yeah, political consequences, in terms of how is the governance going to happen, how democratic is it, how legitimate is it, how preposterous is it, is it yet another reiteration of, you know, the human mind trying to subdue everything else, pretending that it's not. So, the very political nature of what you describe, I think, is really up for the, well, for the next podcast I guess, on planetary politics, or planetary political theory, which seems to be what we are lacking. Thank you so much!

Daniela:

Thank you so much for having me, it was really fun!

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The Earth, History, and Us. Verso Books.

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Global Futures, Decolonial Options. Duke University Press.

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Veinberg, Boris. 1922. [K dvukhdesiatitysacheletiiu nachala rabot po unichtozheniiu okeanov:

ocherk istorii chelovechestva ot pervobytnogo sostoianiia do 22 300 g.] Sibirskaia Priroda, 2, 24, 35.

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Hagen Schulz-Forberg

Host
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James Quilligan

Co-host
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Daniela Russ

Guest