On January 1st, I took on the minor ambition of reimagining our planetary condition as my new year’s resolution. It’s best seen as a counter-revolutionary manifesto. Wait, what? You didn’t think we were living under a revolutionary regime, did you? You would be right in thinking so if you only heard our great leaders, but don’t pay attention to what they say and ask what they (and we) do and have been doing for the last two hundred years. Industrial society is a revolutionary regime headed by the Carbon Liberation Front, aka the People’s Republic of Exxon, Aramco and Gazprom.

Trotsky wanted us to live in a permanent communist revolution, but the liberation of the proletariat is nothing compared to the liberation of carbon, which is the one liberation theology that unites socialists, communists, capitalists, fascists and every other istist. Unfortunately, the carbon revolution is running out of gas (and steam). What comes next?

We are entering an era of existential politics, where the current obsessions of government such as taxes are going to be replaced by the elemental obsessions of air, water, food & climate. That thought entered my head about a year ago. A few months later, when I read David Wallace-Wells’ spectacular piece of climate pornography and learned that it was the most shared article in the history of New York Magazine, it struck me that I am not the only person in the world thinking about existential politics. Every hurricane, every fire and every drought increases the ranks of my fellow travelers. It’s only a matter of time when instead of worrying about Russian spying we will start worrying about oceans eating away our lands — we should be doing so already, but soon we will be forced to do so.

We aren’t used to inviting oceans into the senate but the survival of the human species depends on a politics that embraces the non-human world.

Don’t we know that already? Isn’t the interrelation of all beings the oldest Indian insight that’s been tweeted by every new age guru in the world? Yes, but there’s a new twist: the interrelation of all beings has left the concert grounds of Woodstock and is on its way to the halls of power and money. We are at the cusp of organizing a planetary liberation struggle.

I don’t need to tell you that a politics in which oceans and glaciers get a vote will be radically different from our current one. Existential politics will completely transform our idea of society; in fact, I think we will need to rework the basic categories through which we experience the social — history, freedom, production and most importantly, the category human.

What happens when the human bubble bursts. In any case, shouldn’t we be poking it until it does?

I am of two minds here.

Yin says: if humans are a geological force as the anthropocenic scientists claim, the natural is being assimilated into the social.

Yang responds: if human survival is at stake because of climate collapse, the social is being assimilated into the natural.

So what’s the right image: is the earth a giant factory or is the revenge of Gaia upon us? My gut says both images are true and my head adds that we can’t answer such questions systematically. In fact, we don’t even have the right terms in which to formulate an answer.

I consider that lack of categories to be a challenge rather than a problem: it’s exciting to imagine a radical expansion of the political to include earthworms and sheep along with blue collar laborers in Michigan and subsistence farmers in Madhya Pradesh. While we continue to write history as if it were that of humans alone (and until recently, of certain human cultures alone), the actual story of our times has always been more than human. While Earth-huggers have been talking about the intrinsic value of the non-human world for decades, now the expansion of the political sphere can be motivated on hard-edged grounds as well (see halls of power above). If you don’t believe me, consider that a few centuries ago, only kings were considered sovereign but now, throughout the world, we take for granted (in principle, if not in practice) that people are sovereign.

Why did that happen?

The transition from kingdoms to democracies is certainly a sign of moral progress, but it’s also a necessity — you simply can’t run a modern society along feudal lines: the changes in production, trade and consumption necessitated a new kind of society with an altered distribution of power. Similarly, the dramatic shifts we are seeing now necessitate a transition.

A transition to what?

Answer: to a planetary politics based on solidarity across species boundaries, a planetarity. Don’t ask me what planetarity is, I am not going to give away the season in the pilot :) Instead, let me introduce the ABCs, the three planetary themes that I will be tracking throughout: