Defining the Planetary with Jonathan Blake

What do we mean when we talk about the planetary? Why not just use familiar terms like global or international? 

For the first episode of our new season on planetary diplomacy, we sat down with Jonathan Blake, Associate Director of Programs at the Berggruen Institute, to define our terms. 

Jonathan is the co-author, with Nils Gilman, of Children of a Modest Star: Planetary Thinking for an Age of Crises, a provocative re-imagining of our institutions in the face of supranational challenges like climate change, pollution, global pandemics and more.

In this conversation, we explore how planetary thinking can offer a useful perspective on the intertwined natural, social, and technological systems that shape life on earth, and how it can inform governance from the local to the global scale.

This season is part of the Planetary Embassy, a global initiative across the Swissnex network. Discover more at https://swissnex.org/planetary-embassy/

Tectonic is a production of Swissnex in Boston and New York. Find us online at https://swissnex.org/boston/ 

Transcript

Brendan Karch

If my high school teachers taught me anything, it’s that you should always start a new topic by defining your terms. So I thought I’d start by looking up ‘Planetary’ in the dictionary. Courtesy of Merriam Webster’s, here’s the definitions:

Planetary, adjective. One: of, relating to, being, or resembling a planet. Two: of, relating to, or belonging to the earth: terrestrial, global, worldwide. Three: having or consisting of an epicyclic train of gear wheels. Uh, yeah, we’ll ignore that last one for now.

So if you take the first two, planetary can refer to the world beyond earth — any planet in the immense, erratic, wandering cosmos. But it can also mean our planet — Earth. Precisely, it can mean that thin layer on our surface of molten rock that supports all wondrous life. And it’s this second, earthbound definition that animates our discussion of the planetary. Sorry, Star Trek fans.

Welcome to Tectonic. I’m your host, Brendan Karch. In this season we are exploring the theme of planetary diplomacy.

Today we speak to someone who has thought deeply about this category of the planetary. Jonathan Blake, our guest today, is Associate Director of Programs at the Berggruen Institute, a Los Angeles-based think tank. He is the co-author, along with Nils Gilman, of the 2024 book Children of a Modest Star: Planetary Thinking for an Age of Crises. Their work has helped shape the concept of the planetary, particularly in relation to planetary governance – the provocative idea that we can, and should, build structures of power and authority to effectively manage a planet in crisis. In our discussion Jonathan will help us define this concept of the planetary, and then discuss what it might take to create forms of planetary governance.

Brendan Karch

So thank you, Jonathan, for joining us today on the podcast.

Jonathan Blake

It's my pleasure.

Brendan Karch

We're here today to talk about the planetary, but first I thought maybe we could talk about you a little bit. So maybe you can just tell us about your background and about how you came to be interested in and grapple with this idea of the planetary.

Jonathan Blake

So I direct the Planetary Program at the Berggruen Institute, a position that I've been doing for several years. I first came to the Institute in early 2021 to start thinking about these issues, writing a book, Children of a Modest Star with Nils Gilman, and then going on to direct the program. I'm a political scientist by training. I worked originally on issues pretty far off. I did my dissertation and first book were on ethnic conflict and social movements, so issues that were not particularly close to the more ecologically minded focus that I have now. But after graduate school, I ended up working at some think tanks where I started thinking a lot about climate change and migration, issues like that, that seemed to fall outside of the established order of the nation state. And so started kind of grappling with these issues that as Kofi Annan called, were problems without passports and thinking about how to understand them, how to deal with them, and the established vocabulary of things like the international or the global didn't quite seem to capture the issue. 

And so I came across the language of the planetary through the work of Dipesh Chakrabarty, like I think so many of us. And I just found his work so powerful, saying that there's been a category error. We've been thinking about these things in terms of the global. We've been thinking about global climate change in the same register that we were thinking about globalization. But that these are fundamentally different categories and that the “global” of globalization, as he puts it, is not the same as the “global” of global climate change. That where the global of globalization is about the movement and circulation of human intentions, of our goods, our services, our capital, people, etc. But ultimately at the center of it all is a story of humans spreading human things for human desires and human intentions. But there's this whole other set of things that move around this planet outside of those intentions, whether that's carbon compounds in the atmosphere, other species, ocean circulations, the nitrogen cycle, the phosphorus cycle, viruses, and even now to some extent technological developments like data. I felt that it was really missing something that as a political scientist and as someone who's been working in policy for a while, it missed the “what do we do about it?” I found the critique extraordinarily compelling but then was left not knowing what I or any of us should do about  the problem of the planetary. So Nils and I took it on ourselves to try and come up with an answer. Not the answer, I'll say, but an answer, and really to try and provoke the conversation by shifting it really from the register of science and the register of philosophy of science and philosophy more broadly into the policy domain and into the policy problem. So that's how I ended up really working on the question of planetary governance, as we put it. 

Brendan Karch

So in the book, Children of a Modest Star: Planetary Thinking for an Age of Crises, you already mentioned this, but you talk about things in terms of planetary as opposed to, say, global. And I think a lot of our audience will be familiar with traditional nation state diplomacy where two countries talk to each other. They will also be familiar with multilateral governance and forms of diplomacy that happen at the UN or the WHO or other multilateral organizations. What makes planetary issues, planetary governance, planetary diplomacy different from these preexisting forms?

Jonathan Blake

So the planetary, I think of as something that crosses boundaries of all sorts, political boundaries, certainly, but also disciplinary boundaries, even the species boundaries. So these are issues that just are much broader, I don't want to say bigger, because sometimes they're actually much smaller than, the typical categories of you know most importantly, what we're talking about is the nation state. So global governance and international relations is the relationship between states. And the premier example of this is, of course, the United Nations. But the United Nations is just that, the United Nations. It's not there to speak for the planet or for the oceans or for the regions. It's there to be an international body, a multilateral body, where all the different nation states, I think there are 193 currently, come together and can discuss their problems together and try and hash things out. Now that's extremely important. This is not to say that this should disappear, but that leaves out a lot. It leaves off a lot of things that don't neatly fit into this framework of foreign and domestic, international and national. 

So by planetary governance, we'd want to think about how human and non-human systems are entangled together at the level of the planet itself, but of course at many other levels or scales as well that we can talk about. But now we're right now we're talking about global governance, so I'll talk about kind of at the planetary scale. So there are things like climate change being the premier example. So one could say, okay, why not just have a one world government then? If the problem of climate change requires us to have a planetary wide jurisdiction, why not just solve it all with a one world government? And and there are a number of reasons why I think that's not the case, but one of the basic reasons comes out of the structure of planetary challenges themselves, which is that even though climate change and all these other challenges I've talked about exist or function at a planetary scale, their impacts are not just at the planetary scale. So nobody really cares about the global average temperature. And obviously, you know, climate scientists do. But for most people, when we're worried about climate change, we're not worried about the global average temperature, we're worried about how that global average temperature, how the general amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, impacts us directly where we live. And that is a function not just of atmospheric chemistry but how the atmospheric chemistry interacts with our local topology and climate and ecologies, and importantly socioeconomic factors as well. So you can't just decree one thing at the top and say, okay, we've solved climate change. You need to be able to integrate problems that both have vast causes and functions, but have impacts at the very local, very human scale, as well as of course ah the non-human scale as well. This effect affects not just us humans, but all the species on the planet.

Brendan Karch

Great. So you talked a lot about climate change, and I think climate change is obviously a key, if not the principal example of a planetary issue everyone thinks about. Maybe you can give us some other examples, and I think maybe here even dividing what would be considered a planetary issue where we need this new idea of planetary governance and diplomacy to tackle, versus more traditional issues where our multilateral governance structures or traditional diplomacy is still able to tackle that. 

Jonathan Blake

Okay, to set up planetary issues, planetary challenges, and I think by that we mean that our planet is is is an entangled web of of natural, social, and technological systems that that cross political boundaries, and we've been talking about that, and also operate at multiple timescales, most of which really don't align with the timescales of our current dominant institutions, like the carbon cycle and or or other cycles are at a much longer timescale, but some of which are actually at a much shorter timescale than political institutions tend to think about. Most of the things that we think about as planetary challenges that fall into that entanglement of social, technical, and natural systems tend to be ecological ones, so climate change, the other kind of biogeochemical cycles, like I think I've already mentioned, nitrogen and phosphorus, the movement of species, the circulations of the oceans. But that would include the technosphere as well is now itself a planetary scale force, by which I mean all of the human-made stuff, not just technology, but there's there's estimates that now the the total mass of the technosphere, all of the human-made stuff, now outweighs the biosphere and all the biomass that's out there. So humans are, as we know, a geological force and are affecting the Earth not just through atmospheric force, which is again what we normally think about climate change, but just through the sheer amount of stuff. You can't really talk about the biosphere anymore without the technosphere, and you can't really talk about the technosphere without the biosphere. The two are fundamentally entwined and entangled. So this does leave, of course, things that that typical diplomacy is still vital for. The question is how do we get diplomats, how do we train the next generation to think in terms of not just what will this do for my GDP, but what will this do for you know the the the the carbon parts per million, what will this do to land use um that has biospheric impacts and biodiversity impacts, what will this do to impacts on watersheds and whatnot? So I would say that there still does clearly remain this line of typical traditional issues that will be jockeyed through traditional diplomatic measures, but I would certainly like to see that traditional diplomacy account for the planetary.

Brendan Karch

I think that one of the things I know your book gets into pretty deeply is, and also an article subsequently, I know Nils wrote this article about what diplomats need to know and learn and what a planetary-aware diplomacy is. So a diplomacy that not only considers the economic or trade interests of the nation, but also the planetary interests that bear on that nation. What does it mean to take parts per million into account when you are doing diplomacy? Of course, there already are places and platforms where this is being discussed. For example, most people may know the COP talks that happen on a roughly yearly basis. This has resulted in things like the Paris Accords. Now, your book is fairly critical of the current existing diplomacy or governance that happens around climate change. What do you think is the root cause of what you claim is more or less the failure or inability to tackle this issue?

Jonathan Blake

The root cause is twofold, I would say. They feed into each other. One is anthropocentrism, and the second is national sovereignty. So again, when the nations convened in Paris in 2015 to agree on the Paris agreement, they came not as emissaries of the planet, or the planet's interest, or the interest of all human beings on the planet, and certainly not of all living beings on the planet. They came as representatives of their nation states. And in particular, I think it's fair to say they mainly came as representatives of important interests within those nation states. And as a result, the agreement that was set was one that was really what those interests wanted. You don't have anyone there saying, well, what does the world need? What would be good for the planet as a whole? 

Brendan Karch

On the flip side, can we look to any successful examples of planetary diplomacy from the present or recent history, whether it's a small victory or anything where you feel like planetary governance or diplomacy was in action?

Jonathan Blake

There are small examples here and there. We do see kind of little shoots of things that are interesting and exciting. I'm really interested in non-national diplomacy, so like city diplomacy as an example of planetary governance in action. So you have groups like the C40 network of I think now about 100 cities who are all doing climate action together. There are other similar networks of municipalities that are working together to trade ideas, to exchange both knowledge and in some cases even some resources and best practices towards achieving planetary goals. There’s also, we can point to the success at a planetary scale of the international diplomacy around CFCs and the ozone layer through the Montreal Protocol. That's an example of how the international system came together to solve a planetary-scale problem, the hole over the ozone layer that was noticed in the 70s or 80s. And you know diplomats rapidly came together, along with representatives of industry, to really solve that problem. And it’s been quite successful. 

Brendan Karch

Yeah, the ozone example was a really interesting one from your book. I was also drawn in by the smallpox example, which is one of the only major diseases in the 20th century that we fully eradicated off the face of the planet.

Jonathan Blake

Yeah, exactly. In both the cases of smallpox and ozone, also importantly, it took people and institutions at all sorts of scales, working both kind of top-down and bottom-up simultaneously. The smallpox example involved obviously the highest levels of the World Health Organization, collaborating with local indigenous leaders in villages to be able to convince people to take the vaccine and everywhere in between, you know, governors, mayors, civil society leaders, religious leaders. It was really a global effort.

Brendan Karch

Great. I do want to talk about the normative, I guess you could say, aspect of your book or the “what should be done” part of your book. Before I do that, though, I want to talk just about some of the precursors who were thinking about what should be done. I'm thinking in particular of this moment in the early 1970s, where you get groups and agencies that are proposing things that you could see as early forms or models of planetary governance. You have the Stockholm Conference, I believe in 1972, and then you have this Club of Rome group, which publishes the Limits to Growth around the same time. So what's what's happening here and what is achieved and what is not achieved in this moment?

Jonathan Blake

So, this is exactly right. The the late 1960s, early 1970s was this kind of proto-planetary moment, or maybe just it was a planetary moment, when people really kind of took this this new vision of the Earth inspired by things like Gaia, but especially by the space age and the images of Earth, the famous Earthrise photo and blue marble photograph. So this really did give people a totally new vision of the Earth and really an understanding that, yeah, we are this kind of miraculous orb that's floating against the blackness of space. We also see at this moment the very first Earth Day, which is this mass movement of people coming together around the environment. And so yeah, there was a moment where we could have gone in this direction of understanding that we're one planet and either care for it or don't. But instead, there was another movement going on in the 1970s that also had a planetary vision, and at the end of the day, that's the one that won out. And that's, of course, neoliberalism. So neoliberalism also provides a vision of the whole earth, but as one that should be unimpeded by things like tariffs and regulation and pesky things like taxes, and the earth vision that ends up taking place is the one of an unfettered global economy rather than an earth system.

Brendan Karch

Yeah, so maybe not the most optimistic vision of the past there, but then of course you say that there is something to be done about this. And this is where you get to the, I guess you could say prescriptive, maybe even speculative part of the book where you suggest what networks and initiatives would actually need to be built to address our planetary crises. um And as you already suggested, the answer in your eyes is not planetary a single planetary world governance. The answer, in fact, as you suggest, is planetary subsidiarity. A little bit of a mouthful to pronounce the word, but maybe you could explain to us what planetary subsidiarity is.

Jonathan Blake

Yeah, so subsidiarity is the idea, is the concept that things should be governed at the smallest scale at which they can be adequately resolved. So basically larger institutions shouldn't kind of step into the work of smaller institutions unless the smaller institutions are unable to resolve the issue on their own because it maybe involves multiple jurisdictions or something like that having to to make a single decision, and then then it's the sort of thing that should be dealt at a higher scale. But if you were to apply this kind of acid test of planetary subsidiarity and say, where should things be resolved? Where should the authority to make decisions lie? You would find that, in fact, some small subset of issues should be lifted from the nation state to some sort of planetary institution that can govern it for the sake of the planet as a whole, but many other authorities that currently sit with the nation state, should move to smaller scale institutions, whether that's regions, provinces, cities, one could even imagine local neighborhood councils being a part of this because some things really do depend on hyper local preferences or conditions that can vary neighborhood to neighborhood in some cases. So this is the vision that we lay out, one in which you have a number of different layers, a number of different scales of well-resourced, well-managed governance institutions that are able to manage the varied problems and their varied consequences across all these scales.

Brendan Karch

So now, of course, certain things can't be addressed at a local or even regional scale. There are certain issues, as you mentioned in the book, that have to be addressed at this truly earth-wide planetary scale. And the one that everyone would reference generally is climate change. Now, in your book, you propose a planetary atmospheric steward, I believe. um Now, we have global or multilateral governance bodies that are already looking at climate change. We have the IPCC, the International Panel on Climate Change. What is different about what you propose versus what is already being done for climate change?

Jonathan Blake

Well, we don't have a global body that deals with climate change. We have bodies that try and coordinate national policies around climate change. That's what the UNFCCC, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, does. And that's what the Paris Agreement does, it tries to coordinate policies among nation states. The IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, is a scientific body. And actually, I think at one point in the book, I think this is in the final book, we call for an IPCC with teeth, a body that actually does take a planetary-scale view. So what we'd like to see is, in the case of climate change, something that has both the epistemological characteristics of the IPCC, that they have the knowledge of the IPCC, the knowledge of the earth that comes out of the really detailed and rigorous science, but it is then able to act on it rather than just saying our model shows that temperatures will go up by 2.6 degrees if you do X, Y, and Z. Have the authority to be like, all right, let's not do a let's not do X, Y, and Z. Let's take path A. 

Brendan Karch

I did go ahead and look at some of the critiques that have been raised about the book. And one of them, I mean, it's quite obvious, this planetary atmospheric steward would most likely not have an army, whereas nation states would have an army. And I think that the big question that gets raised with any of this, and we understand this is perhaps a bit speculative. This is not a proposal for something that you expect to see created in the next one or two or maybe five years. But what about enforceability?

Jonathan Blake

So this is obviously a vital question and not one that I have an easy answer for. In part because, yeah, as you point out, we're developing ideas that we don't expect — I wouldn't even say, when you say one or two or five years, I mean, I would say one or two or five decades, potentially even centuries. These are ideas that we think are, if they were to happen, it would be happening far in the future. I also should say that the ideas we put forward are very much meant to be provocations. They're not meant to be fully fleshed-out plans that could be operationalized tomorrow, they're meant to spark a conversation. So that said, we should have an answer to this big question of enforceability. And you know there are examples of bodies that are able to do this sort of important sovereignty-crossing work without an army, and so one interesting example is the international atomic energy agency IAEA. So the IAEA has developed over the past several decades this authority that is recognized by countries that they can come and inspect your nuclear material, which is something that if you and I tried to go into a nuclear facility, you know, could be a capital punishment. But they come in with inspectors and they have tags on all the nuclear materials to know where it is and at all times. And they have cameras going twenty-four seven in facilities. So this is an example of even when the current international system, for all of its problems and its lack of enforcement, has been able to to really make a difference and has been able to enforce international norms even without having an army.

Brendan Karch

I do want to maybe finish up with one other potential conflict or tension with this kind of planetary governance and or diplomacy, which is expert-driven politics, what some might call technocratic politics versus democratic politics. I take it that you are in general a fan of democracy or at least agree with Churchill that it's the worst form of governance aside from all the others. And yet reading this book, I couldn't help but note that so much of the policymaking seemed like it might need to be taking place through sort of expert committees, scientists. And there's a tension there potentially with democratic politics. I just point, for example, last year to a vote that Switzerland had to modify their constitution to honor the planetary boundaries and to change their political system to match that. Now, this failed. It failed very significantly by roughly one third to two thirds. There were many reasons for that. These constitutional amendments structurally don't do well. It was promoted by a youth party. It maybe didn't have the best messaging, etc. Nonetheless, it was a fairly wholesale rejection of this idea that an entire society should submit itself to a new political system based on the planetary boundaries. So what do you make of this larger tension between expert-driven technocratic politics and democratic politics? And do you see any methods for resolving that?

Jonathan Blake

So I think there has to be democratic legitimacy, there has to be popular buy-in, especially because there won't be a military, as we've as we've already discussed, to just enforce these things. But, you know, we also need to compare it against what the opposite of planetary governance is, which is, I think, basically anarchy, international anarchy, which is also not a democratic system. So I think importing some sort of planetary governance that has elements of democracy, even if it's not a perfect democracy, would still be more democratic than the current system. So creating institutions with authority, I think, opens the door to have a more democratic international system that currently exists. So is it a perfect democratic system? No. But is it more democratic than the status quo? Yes. And like I said, these are proposals to provoke. I'm not saying that what we propose is the end-all be-all. Far from it. It's meant to start the conversation, not end it.

Brendan Karch

Thanks, Jonathan, for joining us today.

Tectonic is created by Swissnex in Boston and New York, a Swiss science consulate promoting exchange in education, research, innovation. Production and editing of the podcast is done by Frederic Atwood and Hayley Bartley. I’m your host, Brendan Karch.