Anthropocene Boundaries and Planetary Political Thinking

After fifteen years spent debating its scientific potential, and despite claims of procedural irregularities and a challenge to the validity of the vote, in March 2024, twelve of the twenty-two members of the international sub-commission on quaternary stratigraphy chose to reject the applicability of the term ‘Anthropocene’ to signal a new geological epoch. For some geologists and Earth System Scientists, the point of such a designation would have been to signal a determinate epochal boundary, a golden spike in terms of residues and remains in the lithosphere, that could signal a chronostratigraphic shift from the Holocene to the Anthropocene. They wanted, or some of them at least wanted, a clear boundary marker. In this case, the mark in question was set at 1952, located in the mud in Lake Crawford, Canada, and coterminous with what many environmental historians have long considered the proximate origins of the Anthropocene, the period of the Great Acceleration following the Second World War.[1]

If that place and time was rejected as marking a new geological epoch, what difference does it make to the Anthropocene more broadly, which has already long moved beyond the bounds of the geological? Innumerable histories have shown, whether written by climate scientists or not, that human beings have been geological and planetary agents for aeons.[2] Though perhaps it is only more recently, however, that they have become self-conscious of the fact. If so, the point is not to find a singular spike or boundary marker that would tip Holocene climatic stability into the crises that have been part of an increasingly public political discourse about climate for at least seventy years. Instead, the issue is more about intensification and process.[3] This would still be focused geologically (the Anthropocene as an ongoing, intensifying, planetary ‘event’ rather than epoch). But it can also be focused historically and politically (as an ongoing, intensifying engagement with the path dependencies of modern capitalism, grounded in regimes of extraction and violence, that have shaped the modern world and its climatic catastrophes), or epistemically (as an ongoing, intensifying, understanding of the conceptual shape of a world often dubbed ‘after nature’).

This latter point in particular is crucial to understanding the politics associated with the Anthropocene. Scientists often refer to those intensifications that have transgressed several of the nine ‘boundaries’ within which a ‘safe operating space for humanity’ might be found (viz climate change, the nitrogen cycle, and biodiversity loss).[4] But historians and political theorists just as often refer to the need to break down false oppositions between politics and nature. The latter, in fact, is something that has always been constructed and framed by very real human interests and powers. Jed Purdy’s recent histories, considering the dynamics through which modern politics and law has self-consciously adopted different visions of nature and environmentalism according to different needs, show this clearly. Whether the racialised forms of environmentalism through national parks, underpinned by the political actions of Teddy Roosevelt’s government, or a long lineage of settler-colonial claims about land seen as terra nullius, through to more recent disputes over land and energy in the Appalachian coalfields, for Purdy and others one thing is clear: America has ‘always been Anthropocene’.[5] If modern America, modern politics, modern history even, has always been ‘after nature’, then it has never really been ‘modern’—in the sense that there never was an objective, human-independent ‘nature’, even though human beings have cleaved to such a conception for centuries to make sense of their politics and their boundaries.[6] If the Anthropocene allows us to see this sort of ideological co-constitution in new ways, that is because it focuses attention on those intensifications of human effects on the environment. Now, the boundary lines and intensifications across what is ‘planetary’ and what is ‘global’, rather than what is political as opposed to what is natural, seem set fair to fix the terms of any future engagement.

For political theorists and historians of political thought, this raises several pointed questions about the relationship between time, history, and politics. And here, Dipesh Chakrabarty has done more than most to suggest how the attempt to construct such an Anthropocene ‘regime of historicity’ might be a productive intellectual challenge for those working in these areas. The term, ‘regime of historicity’, is borrowed from François Hartog, and provides a heuristic to frame a society’s overlapping ways of relating past, present, and future at particular moments. Such regimes might last generations, even centuries, depending upon the dominance of particular understandings of the world. But for Chakrabarty, any Anthropocene-focused regime of historicity has to begin by taking seriously the arguments of Earth Systems Science (ESS). And these, as already noted, typically consider the Anthropocene as a series of planetary processes (tracking changes to the atmosphere and biosphere, as well as to the technosphere, and the climate). Nevertheless, according to Chakrabarty, ‘What we see in the history of ESS’, is ‘not an end to the project of capitalist globalization but the arrival of a point in history where the global discloses to humans the domain of the planetary’.[7] This has upended not only those histories premised upon a distinction between human and nature, but geological agency makes bio-political histories of globalization and capitalist crisis management, on their own, redundant.[8] Because of this, in turn, the Anthropocene opens up various spaces for rethinking histories, and therefore positing alternative futures, to the fatalistic narratives that underpin most political discussion about climate today, at least in wealthy democracies.

The Anthropocene that is coming into view here pushes for more than the optimistic fatalism of a world where planetary futures are salvaged by human ingenuity, and a ‘good Anthropocene’ might be had through modernist technologies of politics and geoengineering.[9] It also demands more than the pessimistic fatalism of the ‘eco-miserabilists’ associated with the Dark Mountain Collective and the manifesto of Uncivilization. On the latter view, human civilization is already lost. The Anthropocene shows us that this, and precisely this idea of civilization is what needs to be reckoned with, mourned, and moved on from. Roy Scranton has suggested that the tools of ancient Stoicism might have some purchase in this regard, in helping us learn how to die in the Anthropocene. In a different fashion, Matthias Thaler salvages something of this eco-miserabilist position from the teeth of critics who see it as nothing more than pessimistic fatalism. Thaler finds in their critique the foundations for radical hope of a new beginning, a new world brought into being by an appropriate mourning of that which is lost.[10] Jonathan Lear is the source for such thinking, first, in writings about the possibility of renewing ethics and meaning by communities compelled to live through cultural devastation, using the example of the Crow Nation and its Chief, Plenty Coups. More recently still, Lear has updated his own rendering of this prospect, by offering a new imagining of what ‘mourning’ entails. Now he presents mourning as a form of practiced imagination, and looks to the many worlds lost to climate change, for a focal point to an argument that takes him back to Freud (another student of ancient Stoicism). There, Lear (and Freud) ask us to think about what it means to actively reject something one has been part of, and benefited from, something destructive precisely because its lustre and its seeming naturalness and permanence was little more than a transient illusion. For Freud, this meant (among other things) rejecting the ideological veneer of a particularist and hierarchical model of European civilization and progress, which had been unmasked and undone by the First World War and numerous war neuroses. As the barbarism underneath the civilizational façade was made clear to Freud, and once the mourning over what was lost has been undertaken, he invested hope (akin to the sort of ‘radical hope’ that Lear had earlier conceptualized), in human capacities for restoration, to build back better, in the current argot, and move past failures. To help them do so, new sorts of histories and exemplars and models need to be found.[11] Now the question becomes whether a boundary politics of radical hope in the Anthropocene might help avoid the twin poles of an optimistic, or a pessimistic, form of fatalism about the future by rethinking the past. Could such a move avoid binaries and epochal overstatements, leaving space for imaginative possibilities and events?

Well, one thing that interpreting the Anthropocene as a form of boundary politics does do is offer the possibility of seeing the world, earth, or globe differently, opening up more possibilities than it closes down. Here, things might take a ‘poetic’ (and agentic or vibrant form), where the Earth is Gaia, pulsating with ‘things’ and ‘actants’.[12] And because the Anthropocene also challenges narratives of ‘global’ history, by forcing them to confront a dissonant relationship with the planetary, it pits human dynamics of sustainability and development against planetary dynamics of habitability. For Chakrabarty, new forms of philosophical anthropology will be needed to interpret human attempts to experience these new-old times of the planetary, and which will allow for a reckoning with the processes of productivist globalization that have thrust awareness of this planetary perspective upon the human species. By so doing, new questions are raised about whether such lineages can really support a move towards a political economy robust enough to meet the challenges of the Anthropocene, as opposed to a Green New Deal, for example.[13]

The fact that so much current discourse about climate politics and the Anthropocene is fixed with reference to wartime, and particularly the wartime of the New Deal under Franklin Roosevelt, now becomes a little more understandable. The mobilizing metaphors and rhetoric are obvious manifestations of a call to action, bearing an implication that governments, agencies, corporations, and citizens are to see themselves as all in it together. Yet when wartime is, and who decides so, and where it matters, are precisely the questions at issue. For some, most obviously anti-liberals like Carl Schmitt, the capacity to decide upon such issues is the foundational building block of the concept of the political itself. Determining friends and enemies, making war and peace, and deciding upon the extremes fixes the political through the actions of sovereignty; events help to determine boundaries and thus to divide epochs. But who, amid the boundary politics and fissiparous sovereignties of climate crises, can, or will, determine the shape of the political within the scale of the planetary? That the effects of climate change already affect unequally those whose histories were already unequally affected by myriad forms of exploitation is glaringly obvious. Such history augurs inauspiciously for a more progressive form of collective politics moving forward, and suggests a likelier prospect of doubling down on conventional politics grounded in old models of sovereignty, dividing the world along the lines of national interests into increasingly uninhabitable futures.[14]

Of course, the temporalities of planetary habitability or the Anthropocene also have their own complex cycles and timeframes, whether understood as units of abstract time (geochronology) or through the material units of chronostratigraphic time, through which different material deposits (radioactive residues, pollutants, polymers) can be measured, like those found in Lake Crawford. Rather than seeking a singular golden spike, such complex temporalities also allow us to reimagine the world and its interwoven global and planetary histories, by tracing ‘slow’ histories of environmental violence visited upon the planet by those who live upon it, as well as the defiant response of the planet to intensified human activity.[15] And they allow us to do so as part of a longer intensification and acceleration of human impact on the planet. Carbon in fact shows the complexity of the problem well. Its overall lifecycle is stabilizing for the planet, while its climate cycle is massively de-stabilizing, particularly for life on the planet, while its explosive potential is part and parcel of the history of modern imperial and democratic politics.[16] The mineral has a complex agency, just as do nuclear isotopes, bacteria, microbes, and fungi, something the recent Covid-19 pandemic has reminded us of.[17] And the timescape analogy, which sees time more as a landscape than a series of measurements, perhaps in turn offers new ways of seeing the politics involved.[18]

In any case, rejecting the linear chronologies of breaks or epochs or ‘-cenes’, as much as the Anthropos prefix, is a prerequisite. Such a claim connects with critiques of the so-called ‘singular’ Anthropocene narrative (where the Anthropos, rather than the political economic ‘system’ of capitalism erected by human beings, becomes the problem). This is why the question of temporality is so vital—perhaps it is only possible for humans to conceive this in terms of deep time at most, that is to say, the time of human life upon the planet. But whether the timescapes that matter most to the Anthropocene are versions of deep time, or democratic time, or the accelerated time of the nuclear era, is a matter of serious contention.[19]

How then has the planetary resonated and been incorporated into historically-informed accounts of political theory or the political predicament of the Anthropocene thus far? And how is it possible to see such perspectives as attempting to chart the dissonance of planetary and global, as part of the new boundary condition of the Anthropocene? William Connolly finds in the planetary a challenge to what he calls ‘sociocentrism’. Sociocentrism is the attempt to analyse structures by discerning humanly legible patterns with reference to other humanly legible and constructed patterns. It thus presumes a human exceptionalism. The political challenge of the planetary therefore becomes a question of how to re-connect active human freedom with the impersonal scale of the planetary, in the form of what Connolly calls ‘entangled humanism’. While this suggests that ‘generic responsibility [for climate change amid the Anthropocene] must be replaced by regionally distributed responsibilities and vulnerabilities’, who exactly constitutes the ‘we’ of these entangled assemblages and their ‘temporal force fields’ is never clear.[20]

Equally, we might wonder when the planetary emerged into political thinking? Not in any obvious way, for sure. One claim concerns a human stumbling towards this new recognition with the planetary as a product of globalization. It exists in an older idiom, particularly for Marxist-inspired writers, for whom the confrontation with the planetary was equally a confrontation with permanent forms of capitalist-inspired catastrophe, given most obvious embodiment in the carnage of the First World War. Then, through such figures as Walter Benjamin, the epic scale of the struggle for human liberation from capitalist globalization suggested that only radical hope, libertarian revolution, or messianic redemption were appropriate to the task. Reverting to the same moment, Latour has suggested that new forms of diplomacy, rather than moralized conceptions of politics, are required to navigate this terrain, though whether this smooths over otherwise intractable political disagreements about the impact of the planetary upon the global, remains a live question.[21] For some critics of ‘planetary politics’, the ‘deep-rooted political-ideological divisions and structures of thought reproduce themselves anew [even] within discourses that declare them redundant’.[22] Nevertheless, pioneering figures in the development of environmental and indeed planetary thinking, like Vladimir Vernadsky, built on these foundations in important ways. His work on the biosphere, central in turn, to the new historical renderings of the atmospheric politics of the Anthropocene era, thought about planetary systems precisely because they related to very real, very worldly, problems. From his first research in 1917 in Russia for the Committee for the Study of Natural Productive Forces, which tried to understand how the state might gain better access to its rich mineralogical resources, Vernadsky moved to Ukraine in 1917, Paris thereafter, to research planetary and earth-systems-science. His work framed a world made already, it seemed, ‘after nature’, in the sense that human beings had evolved, and thus transformed the world, to such an extent that it seemed obtuse to him to think blocs of people on one side, and nature on the other.[23] For Vernadsky, understanding a transition from the biosphere to what he called the ‘noösphere’—analogous to what I have tried to discuss as the Anthropocene here—required a recognition of the long-term effects of human beings and their histories, as well as their physical and conscious development and capacities, which together rendered them into geological agents. Here, Vernadsky could construct a new boundary (the noösphere) where the planetary and global intersected as a space of intensified human agency and consciousness, and where progressive politics, just as much as, say, the ‘war ecology’ underpinning major conflicts such as those in the Ukraine today, could be found.[24]

Where then do we locate the planetary? Here, one further answer has been that the location of the planetary into the predicament of politics occurs wherever the ‘war’ for what constitutes the earthbound, or ‘geo-’, takes place. More prosaically, this means that the planetary is found in the ‘critical zone’ of earthly habitation. Latour and others have argued that because the prefix geo- has no stable meaning, the battle to control this language is analogous with a war for the planet, or for planetary survival (the two can be separate or interconnected). The power or authority to describe and define here is crucial because multiple, incommensurable worldviews about where the tensions between local and global and planetary reside exist in states of deep conflict. This leads to variously implied (or threatened) trajectories, from deepening processes of globalization to austere conceptions of planetary security; from those that seek some sort of escape from the planet, to a radical new politics for the terrestrials that remain, those whom Latour calls the earthbound.[25] Here, once again, the human politics of globalization has brought the planetary and the Anthropocene into view, forcing a reckoning for politics across scales and imaginations (global and planetary) that are not reconcilable, but which are nonetheless deeply imbricated. This is the climate parallax that Chakrabarty has referred to recently, of a single planet which contains within it many worlds.[26] And as the global and the planetary are continuously misaligned, it is in the boundary spaces of such misalignment that new forms of politics can take place.

What if any human politics, though, can only realistically focus on the global, with the planetary more a background noise than structuring condition? As Julia Nordblad suggests, perhaps ‘the temporal characteristics of the Anthropocene concept renders it unhelpful for thinking critically about how the current environmental crisis can be addressed and for forging political action’.[27] In their accounting, what present generations owe to future ones is the possibility of an open future itself, which means leaving open the space for future self-government without closing down options. Such an open, or optimistic model of the future, configured through climate change, is not only ‘prospective’, but asks a telling empirical question. How much resource are current people willing to leave to future generations? Here, the question of discounting remains crucial, but newly structured around a question of how to value an ‘open’ future itself, as well how to value future goods or future peoples. Seeing the future as a finite resource in this way might make it a new ‘tool’ for galvanizing action over population as much as decarbonisation.[28]

Finally, for Achille Mbembe, the challenge posed by climate crisis and the planetary scales of the Anthropocene is to be found in the need for a more radical rethinking of democracy itself. So, the question of who constitutes the planetary is raised again, in the hope of engendering a planetary consciousness that can be more democratic than not. While infrastructures and technospheres transform, it seems less and less likely that such infrastructures as have contributed to the current predicament will be plausible contenders to act as transmission mechanisms for a more bio-symbiotic future, the sort of thing Haraway talks of as making kin, and which Mbembe pursues with reference to a sort of shared heritage of alternative ways of seeing human and non-human connectivity.[29] This time, the point that unites is a shared capacity for agency, the breath of life, as it were, which animates any kind of motion or even consciousness for living matter. The right to life, as in the right to breathe, takes on many layers of meaning in the midst of climate crisis and histories of racialized violence and oppression, and is itself a form of consciousness raising about the need for anti-racist and anti-imperial forms of politics to align once again under the banner of democratic climate politics.

It is unlikely that there will be any easy reconciliation here, but forms of irreconcilability could demarcate political futures in some important ways that are themselves radically hopeful. In Mbembe’s calculus, if the ‘interfaces of life’ and ‘structures of provisionality have expanded well beyond what we have long been used to’, then certainly democracy as a theory and practice will have to develop, and in ways no longer bounded by their European presumptions.[30] Thinking of the earth as a global commons, for example, might suggest the need to revisit older arguments again about the unjustifiability (at the bar of democracy) of territorial borders, and a recognition of the limits of contemporary thoughts on freedom grounded in extractivist and racialized histories of affluence and abundance for some, at the expense of others. Freedom of movement (for all who have a right to live on the planet) without the fear of a loss of rights that has historically been the corollary of statelessness signals one side of this challenge. Can a brighter democracy be both rights-bearing and not conceptually meaningless, when uncoupled from its conventional mooring within the territorial bounds of a discrete political entity? How, too, to connect with forms of language that humans recognise but don’t fully understand, not just within and between peoples, but between peoples and others forms of life that clearly communicate, from the microbial and viral, to the tubular and fungal, as well as the animal and mineral. These can so often sound like academic questions only, or sometimes a sort of perverse focus on a proliferation of agents and actants designed on the one hand to ‘reconstitute’ the social for the new ‘terrestrials’, but also simultaneously to invalidate any more structural forms of political analysis and agency (particularly Marxist) associated with class or economic exploitation.[31] The work of mourning and hope through the intense and intensifying boundaries of the Anthropocene takes place alongside other forms of intellectual conflicts within and between different forms of political theory—informational, theoretical, historical—concerned with grasping meaning and interpreting trajectories and tracing evidence. Whether this kind of intellectual struggle has any chance of moving the dial on the depressingly more familiar forms of war and war ecology taking place all across the world right now remains very far from obvious.[32] Were we not to try, however, that would surely be the worst of all possible worlds.

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Duncan Kelly

Professor Duncan Kelly teaches in the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Cambridge. His latest book is Reconstruction: The First World War and the Making of Modern Politics (Oxford University Press 2025). His previous works include Politics and the Anthropocene (Polity Press 2019).

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[1] John R. McNeill and Peter Engelke, The Great Acceleration: An Environmental History of the Anthropocene since 1945 (Harvard University Press 2016).

[2] Lucas Stephens and Earl Ellis, ‘The Deep Anthropocene’ (Aeon, 1 October 2020) <https://aeon.co/essays/revolutionary-archaeology-reveals-the-deepest-possible-anthropocene> accessed 31 September 2024.

[3] Phillip Gibbard et al, ‘The Anthropocene as an Event, not an Epoch’ (2022) 37(3) Journal of Quaternary Science 395-9.

[4] Johan Rockström et al, ‘A Safe Operating Space for Humanity’ (2009) 461 Nature 472-5.

[5] Jedediah Purdy, After Nature (Harvard University Press 2015); Jedediah Purdy, This Land is Our Land (Princeton University Press 2019); Katrina Forrester, ‘The Anthropocene Truism’ (The Nation, 12 May 2016) <https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/the-anthropocene-truism/> accessed 31 September 2024.

[6] Alison Bashford, ‘The Anthropocene is Modern History: Reflections on Climate and Australian Deep Time’ (2013) 44(3) Australian Historical Studies 341-9; Andrew Fitzmaurice, ‘The Genealogy of Terra Nullius’ (2007) 38(1) Australian Historical Studies 1-15. Cf. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Harvard University Press 1991).

[7] Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘The Planet—An Emergent Humanist Category’ (2019) 46(1) Critical Inquiry 1-31, esp 17-9; more broadly, J Zalasiewicz et al, ‘The Anthropocene: Comparing its Meaning in Geology (Chronostratigraphy) with Conceptual Approaches Arising in other Disciplines’ (2021) 9 Earth’s Future.

[8] Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘Climate and Capital: On Conjoined Histories’ (2014) 41(1) Critical Inquiry 1-23.

[9] Jonathan Symons, Ecomodernism: Technology, Politics, and the Climate Crisis (Oxford University Press 2019).

[10] Roy Scranton, Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilization (Open Media 2015); Matthias Thaler, ‘Eco-miserabilism and Radical Hope: On the Utopian Vision of Post-Apocalyptic Environmentalism’ (2024) 118(1) American Political Science Review 318-31; cf. Mathias Thaler, No Other Planet: Utopian Visions for a Climate-Changed World (Cambridge University Press 2022) ch 5.

[11] Jonathan Lear, Imagining the end: Mourning and Ethical Life (Harvard University Press 2022), 37ff, 56ff, cf. 110ff; Jonathan Lear, Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation (Harvard University Press 2008).

[12] Bruno Latour, Facing Gaia (Polity 2019).

[13] Jeremy Green, ‘Greening Keynes: Productivist Lineages of the Green New Deal’ (2022) 9(3) Anthropocene Review 324-43.

[14] See Ajay Singh Chaudhary, ‘We’re Not in this Together’ (The Baffler, April 2020) <https://thebaffler.com/salvos/were-not-in-this-together-chaudhary> accessed 14 March 2025; now expanded in The Exhausted of the Earth (Repeater 2024). The various options canvassed by Geoff Mann and Joel Wainwright, Climate Leviathan: A Political Theory of our Planetary Future (Verso 2018), continue to look like plausible extrapolations.

[15] Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Harvard University Press 2013); see also Clive Hamilton, Defiant Earth: The Fate of Humans in the Anthropocene (Polity 2017).

[16] Cf. Timothy Mitchell, Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil (Verso 2011); Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent, ‘Rethinking Time in Response to the Anthropocene—From Timescales to Timescapes’ (2019) 9(2) Anthropocene Review 206, 211, 212, 213-5. 

[17] Adam Tooze, ‘We are living through the first economic crisis of the Anthropocene’ Guardian (London, 7 May 2020) <https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/may/07/we-are-living-through-the-first-economic-crisis-of-the-anthropocene> accessed 31 September 2024.

[18] For a succinct critique of Anthropocene narratives in favour of what has become known as the Capitalocene, see Andreas Malm and Alf Hornborg, ‘The Geology of Mankind: A Critique of the Anthropocene Narrative’ (2014) 1(1) The Anthropocene Review 62-9.

[19] Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘The Climate of History: Four Theses’ (2009) 35(2) Critical Inquiry 197-222; cf. Duncan Kelly, Politics and the Anthropocene (Polity 2019) ch 1.

[20] William Connolly, Facing the Planetary: Entangled Humanism and the Politics of Swarming (Duke University Press 2017) 16, 18, 20, 33-4.

[21] Adam Tooze, ‘After Escape: The New Climate Power Politics’ (2020) 114 E-Flux <https://www.e-flux.com/journal/114/367062/after-escape-the-new-climate-power-politics/> accessed 14 March 2025.

[22] Peter Osborne, ‘Planetary Politics?’ (2024) 145 New Left Review 103; cf. Lorenzo Marsili, Planetary Politics (Polity 2021).

[23] Etienne Benson, Surroundings (University of Chicago Press 2018) 105ff, 118f, 122f, 132f.

[24] Vladimir Vernadsky, ‘The Transition from the Biosphere to the Noösphere’. Excerpts from Scientific Thought as a Planetary Phenomenon (1938). Translated by William Jones’ (2012) 21st Century 18-9 <https://21sci-tech.com/Subscriptions/Spring-Summer-2012_ONLINE/04_Biospere_Noosphere.pdf> accessed 14 March 2025.

[25] Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel (eds), Critical Zones—The Science and Politics of Landing on Earth (MIT Press 2020).

[26] Dipesh Chakrabarty, One Planet, Many Worlds: The Climate Parallax (Brandeis University Press 2022).

[27] Julia Nordblad, ‘On the Difference between Anthropocene and Climate Change Temporalities’ (2021) 47 Critical Inquiry 330.

[28] ibid 342, 343, 345, 347.

[29] See Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Duke University Press 2016); developed in Adele Clark and Donna Haraway (eds), Making Kin, not Population (Prickly Paradigm Press 2018).

[30] See the interview with Achille Mbembe, ‘How to develop a planetary consciousness’ (Noma, 11 January 2022) <https://www.noemamag.com/how-to-develop-a-planetary-consciousness/> accessed 31 September 2024; and his earlier essay ‘Planetary Entanglement’, in Out of the Dark Night (Columbia University Press 2019) 7-41.

[31] For a helpful recent overview of how Latour combined these positions, often with a Catholic-inspired agenda, see Alyssa Battistoni, ‘Latour’s Metamorphosis’ (NLR Sidecar, 20 January 2023) <https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/latours-metamorphosis> accessed 31 September 2024; Dominique Routhier, ‘Reactionary Ecology’ (NLR Sidecar, 26 February 2024) <https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/reactionary-ecology> accessed 31 September 2024.

[32] For a little more detail here, see Duncan Kelly, ‘Wartime for the Planet’ (2022) 20(3) Journal of Modern European History 281-7.