The “we” that speaks of a crisis

You make a distinction between the history of humans, “global history”, and that of the planet, although they are linked. Could you explain that?
One way in which I find it easy to explain is by talking about the oxygen we breathe. Oxygen is a reactive gas, it mixes up with other gases, and to retain it in the air at a certain level the air has to be constantly supplied with fresh oxygen. If you couldn’t do that, the oxygen would get reduced and we would die. This fresh oxygen is supplied not by humans, but by bacteria, by phytoplankton, by plants and trees, etc., forms of life that we think are inferior. And they have been doing it for almost 400 million years. As for us as a species, we are about 300 000 years old, so clearly the oxygen in the air was not meant just for us. It is one way of saying that this world does not exist so that only humans can thrive. When you tell the story of the oxygen, it decenters humans. Whereas when you tell the story of globalization, you ask who created technology, telephones, telegraphs, electricity – we did. So, when you tell the story of the globe, humans are the heroes. But when you tell the story of life, bacteriaand phytoplankton are the heroes. When we write global history, it is a history of human triumph. But when we use a planetary perspective, we decenter humans, it gives us more humility.

You wrote that Anthropocene could be defined as the rising consciousness of the planet and its geobiological history. But for whom does this new consciousness arise?

Let me take a step back and answer this as a student of both human society and technology. If you think about pre-industrial societies, peasant or indigenous societies: these are all societies that were critically dependent on the seasons. Weather mattered. Even wars sometimes were seasonal: in a rainy season, your powder could become wet and some roads were not navigable. The history of modern communication technology like railways, air travel and even military technology, all based on human consumption of large amounts of energy from fossil fuel, you can think of as a history of humans forgetting the importance of seasons. And because the seasons were one way in which the planet reminded you that it existed, I think the history of technology can be looked upon as a history of forgetting the planet. With the polycrises − species extinction, loss of biodiversity, climate change −, it was as though the planet reminded us of its existence.

But the same destructive technology that made us forgetful of the planet, eventually also allowed us to rediscover it. The technology you use to find samples of ancient ice is the same as what you use for drilling for petroleum, only modified for snow and ice. So, I would say that the modern scientific consciousness of the planet comes first to the interdisciplinary scientists − Earth system scientists − who are a by-product of the Cold War, because the first group of Earth system scientists under that name came together in NASA in 1983. Before that, NASA was debating whether Mars could be made habitable for life. The question of what life is, of what makes a planet habitable, came up in the 60s. It eventually made Earth system scientists ask what made the Earth habitable and allowed them to realize that we don’t dominate this planet, that we and our institutions are embedded in it. With technology, we developed the capacity to interfere with the processes that kept life going, and that produced certain crises that reminded us of the planet again.

The crisis reminds us of the importance of seasons, of the importance of weather, and thus the importance of the work that the planet does, of biodiversity. Through the crisis, we also know that humans are a minority form of life that has now gone everywhere and dominates the planet. The majority forms of life are microbial, life that you can’t even see except under a microscope. With the planetary perspective, we become aware that bacteria and algae are critical to keeping life going. We owe that scientific understanding to technology.

For almost 200 years, however, we have thought of technology as defeating weather, defeating the seasons. Even the bombs that Israel used to kill Nasrallah, the head of Hezbollah, were described as “all-weather” bombs. This idea of all-weather technology, this idea that you could grow food in any season with fertilizers and pesticides, is now being challenged. But that is not an anti-technology argument. I think the technologies of the future will have to learn about the importance of biodiversity.

Who is the “we” becoming aware of the history of the planet? You mention scientists but among heads of state, for instance, this consciousness is unclear. Is it a lack of consciousness or a choice to ignore?

That is the most profound question: who becomes aware? Who will act? In One planet, many worlds, I write that to the scientists, the planet may be one, but humans are never one. Our politics depends on difference. The argument for democracy − that you and I disagree − depends on difference. The argument for racism depends on difference. Human politics is built around difference, good and bad differences. And I think it is now clear that we are not on target to deal with the planet that is one.

There is a planet that is one: the Earth system for the scientists. IPCC talks about that. When it says we must decarbonize by 2050, that we is indeed all of us. But that we immediately breaks down into Trump walking out of climate agreements, nations saying “I need more time because I have to develop first”, China saying “I will decarbonize by 2060”, India saying, “by 2070”, etc. Human politics works better when we assume that we can bargain with the planet, or that the planet will wait − wait for India to develop, for instance – and then deal with the planetary problems. So, the we breaks up the moment you say it.

On the other hand, without the we, you cannot make these conditional statements. You can’t say “If we don’t decarbonize by 2050, maybe the warming will go over 1.5 or 2 degrees”. We are at a stage where we practically have to assume that the warming will go up over two degrees, and it will not be good. But the planet is not just this one planet. It is one, but it also exists on different scales. One of the things I sometimes ask my students is “What is your personal relationship to the planet?”Some of them say “we breathe oxygen”, and that’s true, although we breathe oxygen almost unselfconsciously. But what is the other way that the planet comes into your life? It’s your weight. That’s another way the planet is within you personally. The reason you can’t jump very high is because you experience gravitation. Which means that the planet is also very different at the same time: it is one and many. What will seem planetary if you think about the Amazon forests will be different from what will seem planetary in the Himalayan glaciers or in the oceans. There are also local regional manifestations of the Earth system that you can do something about, that you can maybe deal with. But the one planet that the scientists talked about, the Earth system, maybe we will not be able to manage it in time. We will have to live through the polycrisis while addressing it, but we have to address it through the limitations of being human. And one limitation of being human is that your politics works best if you can take the planet for granted.

The United Nations was based on the assumption that the planet doesn’t mind how long it takes to solve the Israel-Palestine problem or the Kashmir problem in India. We used to think that we get the same planet back after we fight a war. But now it’s clear that military emissions are a very substantial contribution to global warming. Some English researchers have already calculated the emissions from the Gaza war of the first two months, and it’s a substantial amount. Which means that as wars happen, you warm up the planet even more, and you don’t get the same planet back because it makes the warming more and more irreversible. Though humans behave as though wars were climate-neutral, the old philosophies of wars no longer work.

The planet as one is becoming less and less manageable. But the planet as many is something that we as many can work on. To give you another example of the planet as local: in the Bengal delta where I am from, there are fishing communities where the women go into coastal rivers waist deep and stand there all day, catching small fish. But the rivers are becoming salty. And the salt produces fungal infections in their uterus and reproductive organs. So, a bunch of mischievous doctors began to do hysterectomies on these poor women, charging them a lot of money. And the problem with a hysterectomy is that you can’t lift weight after the surgery. And these poor women have to lift weight. So now feminists are lobbying the state government to regulate hysterectomies. Imagine how a planetary condition leads to hysterectomies through bad politics! In that sense, the planet as many becomes personal in different places and in different ways. Frédéric Worms, a Bergsonian philosopher, has a philosophy that he calls critical vitalism. He thinks that one way to deal with the planet may be through health problems − to the extent that your health problems are being produced by warming, along with political factors like poverty, inequality and other such related things.

The planet may be one, but humans are never one. Our politics depends on difference. The argument for democracy − that you and I disagree − depends on difference.

But if health was enough to interest politicians into taking action, what should be made of the European politics regarding glyphosate, or any toxic fertilizers for instance? Knowing about its carcinogenic potential does not seem enough for an adequate political response.

There are two sides to the problem. One side is, clearly, there are experimental attempts to find another kind of agriculture. There are people in France who applied for a grant to experiment in doing agriculture measuring plots not with abstract measures – like measuring so many feet by so many feet – but ecologically, with criteria such as the habitat of bacteria. They didn’t get the grant, but they were trying. That’s one side. The second side, which is the negative one, is on another scale. Vaclav Smil, a Canadian scholar, has written a book called How the World Really Works, in which he says that if you did not use artificial fertilizers, 40% of humanity would go hungry. He’s saying that if you have human beings in such large numbers, 8 billion going towards 10, and becoming wealthier and wealthier, wanting to eat well, you can’t feed them without modern fertilizers and pesticides. But they’re all problematic solutions, because pesticides cause insecticides. Bananas are a good example: if you want to make food more or less uniform to the world, and if you say everybody must have banana, then there are only 1 or 2 varieties of banana that you can actually make global. Here is a problem of biodiversity. These are not easy problems to solve. If humans could come together as one and be rational as one, then I think we would do much better. But how do you predict that there will not be a Trump? You have to assume that humans will be divided.

The conflict between the unicity of the planet and the multiplicity of worlds is also at the heart of the work of many decolonial thinkers who oppose a plurality of narratives to the myth of a Western-centered universalism. Many of these thinkers have highlighted the complex knowledge of some indigenous traditions that were already well aware, before the Anthropocene, of the interdependencies and entanglements between humans and non-humans. Yet in your view, decolonising “global history” is not enough to address the problem of anthropogenic global warming. Could you explain?

First of all, decolonial thinkers are somewhat different from postcolonial thinkers. I’m often seen as postcolonial and not decolonial enough. Some of the decolonial friends want to mentally go back to a situation before Columbus and think from there. And the postcolonials think that we are too entangled with modernity to go back to such a place. In One planet, Many worlds, I discuss Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s work, which I find arresting. He was a student in Paris during May 68, and he got very inspired by what Deleuze and Guattari were writing. But Deleuze and Guattari were actually basing their theories on French anthropologists who had worked on Latin America and some in Africa. So, what you then begin to see is that a lot of Latin American facts were being processed by French anthropologists and then processed by Deleuze and Guattari, and then consumed by de Castro, who then takes them back. So, in some ways, de Castro’s decolonial thinking comes out of May 68, but May 68 comes out of Deleuze and Guattari reading anthropological facts about Latin America. It’s a world in which ideas circulate like that, and we all circulate. So, first of all, I want to say that you can’t erase 500years of mixing, of getting together.

But that said, there is a lot to learn from indigenous worlds because indigenous worlds that I know about, even compared to peasant worlds, were extremely stable – at least in the Holocene period. I used to take an interest in Australian Aboriginal people. And archaeologists show that Aboriginal people in some parts of Australia had a custom of going to a certain point on the coast to eat mussels. They would break the shells and throw the shells there and roast the mussels in the sun and eat them. And they would do it for such a long period of time that there would be a mountain of mussels. The English word for these mountains of mussel shells is middens. And today, it is possible to date these middens, to see how old they are, and some of them are 5000 years old. Imagine living in a society where for 5000 years and over hundreds of generations, you go to the same restaurant to eat the same food. You can’t imagine that kind of stability in modern society! That stability was part of their ecological wisdom or whatever. So, there are things you learn from, but you also have to realize that most indigenous societies supported relatively small numbers of people. That is why Europeans colonized for their own settlement lands where indigenous people were – because populations were smaller than, say, in a place like India in the same period. They didn’t settle in India because India was already crowded, but Australia or America were not. But when you have 8 billion, 10 billion people to feed, you can’t do that with just indigenous technology. So, there’s a lot to learn from indigenous people, but 500 years have gone by, and humans have developed the capacity to extend human life for more and more people. Death is not as much a companion for us as it used to be. There is a Bohemian proverb which said that as soon as a man is born, he is old enough to die. Well today, it is not as true. We have reduced infant mortality, we have increased old age, even when you get cancer, you get more years than you used to. All that requires technology. All that requires electricity. All that requires energy consumption.

In order to save a for us we kill b, c, d and e. We need technology that definitely doesn’t kill b, c, d and e. But that means changing scientific education.

Even if there is a lot to learn from decolonial thinking, if you are only decolonial, then you would be producing total solutions that wouldn’t work. Actually, de Castro said to me in correspondence once, “I’m not saying that the indigenous societies will solve our problems. I study the indigenous people to show that another world is possible.” I think that’s totally right, but we have to get to visions of the world that are feasible. It’s good to know that another world is possible, but it doesn’t answer the question of how I get from here to there. And the question of transitioning from here to there is the task of politics. It means you have to begin from where you are. And the reason you want to feed 8 billion people or 10 billion people is that if you don’t, then the first people to die will be the poor people.

If you care for the poor, then you are committed to the scale of human population at least for the present. That is why you cannot be just decolonial. Technology has to be part of the solution. But technologists so far have not had to study about biodiversity, about the history of life, species extinction. I think we need to retrain our technologists. French scholar Pierre Charbonnier once said to me in conversation, “We have to teach children about ecology in the same way that we teach them numbers.” And I just slightly modify it to say that we have to teach everybody about the importance of biodiversity. You may still need pesticides, but you have to make sure that your pesticides don’t become insecticides, because then they do more damage. In order to save a for us we kill b, c, d and e. We need technology that definitely doesn’t kill b, c, d and e. But that means changing scientific education. I think that change has to begin in universities, in schools, where syllabuses have to change. And because I’m an educationist, for me that’s the zone of activism, that’s the present, that’s where I act.

In an interview you gave on Swiss television, you mention this conversation with Pierre Charbonnier, but you then go on to say that it’s a long-term process that doesn’t really address the urgency of the situation.

Yes, it is very slow because the university structures still reflect the 19th and 20th centuries. It will take time to change them, but at the same time, if the crisis becomes bigger, it will make things more urgent. The problem with climate change at the moment is it still seems episodic. This year it’s very hot in Southern Europe. Another year there are fires in L.A. Another year there are floods in Australia. It seems like it is not one event but rather so many events. But climate change is real for the poor people on the coasts almost everywhere on the planet because the seas are rising, and there are more cyclones. Climate change is here and now for underprivileged people, while for privileged people, it is still episodic. But if the science is right, and if Trump walks out of the climate agreement, and in a situation where it was not at all clear that even the Paris Agreement would keep us below 1.5, the planetary situation will become worse. And that may in itself produce other kinds of urgency, but it can also make the world more barbaric, as Isabelle Stengers points out. There could be more anti-migrant sentiments, more anti-refugee sentiments, the rich nations trying to protect themselves, middle classes from poorer nations wanting to get into the richer ones. I don’t rule out these possibilities.

What you are talking about is a series of desynchronisation (decolonial thinkers who can’t go back to the time before, the fact that there are several histories at the same time, that we are never in the same place at the same time, the desynchronization of global history and planetary history), so what do we do about it? Is it possible to find a time that would be common to different societies?
First of all, there is a negative sense of time we have in common, which is the sense of a planetary crisis or a polycrisis. Everybody acknowledges that we have an uncertain future in terms of technology. We don’t know where AI and digital technology will take us. We think that the human population will eventually decline, and that by the end of the century, humans will become an ageing and urban species. The very nature of work will change. Work is another uncertainty. What is the future of work? Who will do the work? Will machines work? So, it is a polycrisis and there is a sense of the present in which we inhabit this polycrisis. There is a kind of “same time” in that sense; it brings us together and makes it legitimate to say “we face a crisis.”

The crisis is synchronous: we are all in it. But how we deal with it is non-synchronous.

But then this “we” and its time breaks up. Our calendar of events is disrupted. It exists to express our sense of sharing a world in which there are polycrises. But going forward, the more the science presents the picture of one planet – and I think the planet is one in one sense – the more that one planet becomes very difficult to address, because through evolution, humans are used to arguing with different senses of time. The argument about civilizations is sometimes an argument about different senses of time. The whole Ernst Bloch idea, the simultaneity of the non-simultaneous, or the synchronicity of the non-synchronous, now exists only as a description of a crisis. The crisis is synchronous: we are all in it. But how we deal with it is non-synchronous.

So the polycrisis will get worse. Can we imagine then bringing people to the negotiating table?

Your own question has the word we. This is the we of the crisis. The we makes sense negatively. There is a we that speaks of a crisis. There is no we that speaks of a solution. If the solution is geoengineering, the we will break up: I will say you’re trying to colonize, you’re a rich country, you’re using technology against me. If the we is carbon sequestration, I will say it is the oil companies that are trying to keep selling oil, which is what happened in Doha and Dubai. So, the we exists only in the negative sense of a crisis, and the breaking up of the we is what humans do. And Trump’s exit actually tells you how fragile the global we is. Americans are actually talking about drilling 600 million acres of the seabed – their coastal seas – for oil and gas. So, if the climate science is right, it is going to get worse. But at the same time, I feel that there are many other things to do on non-synchronous timetables.

The synchronicity is of the crisis. The solutions are non-synchronous. The IPCC talk about decarbonization by 2050 is about synchrony. But all countries, all nations meeting at 2050 or 2060 or 2070, with the idea that we will keep the temperature down: that looks like it will not happen. If that does not happen, then the chances of powerful nations doing geoengineering will increase. Now, geoengineering carries with it risks, some of which are known, some unknown. Maybe in 20 years they will know those risks better. But knowing the risks doesn’t mean that they will manage them better.

I’ve often thought that climate change fragments the future, whereas dreams of capitalism, dreams of socialism united it. But this project of uniting human futures was a project of the 19th and 20th centuries. Before that, we had again many futures, more fragmented worlds. And we may be moving towards many futures. My hope is that such fragmented future worlds will not necessarily see an increase in barbarism.

An Indian development economist called Pranab Bardhan, a retired professor in Berkeley, has just published a book called A World of Insecurities. And one of the most interesting things he says in it is that today, it is the super rich people, like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, who seem not to believe in liberal democracies. According to Nobel economist Abhijit Banerjee, there are about a thousand such individuals in the world. And they have gained power in different places. And they seem to be in favor of more authoritarian politics. And when wealthy people don’t believe in liberal democracies, it’s troubling.