Our Planetary Condition: Foundations for a Politics with the Earth (MIT Press 2026) by Frederic Hanusch, Liza B. Bauer, Clemens Finkelstein, and Claus Leggewie.
Available open access.
Our Planetary Condition inserts itself in the swirl of planetary thinking. However, rather than following existing currents, the book provides new impulses that push the ever-moving field further along. The book achieves this by centring, not political institutions or structures of governance, but agencies.
Conceptualizing Agencies: Flows of inter- and intra-actions
The book takes its cues, and arguably draws inspiration for its title, from Arendt’s The Human Condition. Like Arendt, the authors insist on political action as the foundation for political theory. Their critical move, then, is to reject anthropocentric notions of agency, instead borrowing (in part) from Barad’s agential realism to develop a taxonomy of planetary agencies as flows of inter- and intra-actions. Agencies are not ‘discrete units’ (41) but on-going and emergent potentialities that become operative precisely by resisting containment.
With this, Our Planetary Condition develops a taxonomy that comprises non-living, living, and technological ‘types’ of agency which operate against the backdrop of ‘fundamental planetary forces’: gravity, electromagnetism, and nuclear radiation. Cutting across these agencies are nine ‘dimensions’. These range from the mediation of planetary cycles, energy transformation, material (re)cycling, communication, problem-solving, cultural and aesthetic practices, sustenance, and regeneration. It is precisely this analytical move through which the book sets out to compare, link, and dissect non-living, living, and technological agencies – even when they are not unfolding across consistent material, semiotic, and phenomenological premises.
Narrating Agencies: Non-living, living, and technological
While chapters 1 and 2 mark the book’s conceptual intervention, chapters 3 to 5 apply it. They do so by narrating stories of planetary agencies – ‘review[ing] compil[ing], and discuss[ing] various sources … through qualitative meta-analyses’ (48). What stands out, to me, is how these chapters manage to tell stories that render abstract, and frankly odd, forms of agency concrete and meaningful.
They take me back in time to the Leonids meteor storm of the night of 12/13 November in 1833 during which up to 150,000 meteoroids burned up in the Earth’s atmosphere (per hour!); to the ocean floor off the Sydney shoreline where an unlikely colony of octopus constructs ‘Octlantis’; to honeybees who may find inspiration (or not) in the waggle dance of robot bees; to the ‘wood wide web’ keeping forests alive; and right back to childhood memories of cycling along the river which figures in the Lahn avatar – an installation involving ‘local materials, flowing water … and an integrated screen that briefly mirrors each speaker before displaying the avatar’s responses’ (149).
These chapters are a lesson in methodology as much as in theory. They combine existing research from across disciplines with descriptions of on-the-ground experimental and experiential interventions to make abstract ideas relevant, tangible, and meaningful.
Institutionalizing Agencies: Scaffolds for a Planetary Politics
Chapter 6 switches gear. Its opening propels me back to Latour’s Parliament of Things. A few pages on and I realize that something more may be going on. In a speculative register, the chapter develops an ‘outline of a planetary political order’ (163) in which multiple assemblies, as ‘situated, polycentric, more-than-human forums (195), convene non-living, living, and technological agencies. Procedurally, the aim of these assemblies is to enable any agency to participate in politics that concern it (what the authors call the ‘all-effecting principle’), while substantively, the aspiration is to sustain or enhance the Earth’s capacity to support its agencies (the ‘habitability principle’).
In this imagined world, where a politics with the Earth is possible, ‘bioregion assemblies’ convene agencies across ecologically defined areas (such as the Amazon Basin), while ‘cycle assemblies’ convene agencies operative in the Earth’s non-territorially bound dynamics. Issues affecting multiple bioregions or cycles or the whole-of-the-planet, would be relegated to the trans-bioregion, trans-cycle, and the planetary assembly.
What lies at the heart of this speculative proposal is a break with engrained spatial and institutional ontologies. The very logic of political organizing and ordering is cut open – pushing the geographic grid of international law and international relations (the World Map) to the background, instead foregrounding agencies as unfolding on terrain and in the ground, under water, in the air, and atmosphere. At the same time, what it means to act institutionally is reimagined – things are virtual, networked, immaterial, and mediated.
Having been drawn into the swirl of planetary thinking, I am left with a multitude of questions. And I am fortunate to have had the opportunity to discuss some of them with Frederic and Clemens.
Laura: I find the phrase ‘semiotic and phenomenological fissures’ (40) intriguing. It resonates strongly with what I describe as ‘interrelatedness-and-otherness’. In chapter 5, you present technological agencies as potential mediators of these fissures. Having read the book, I ask myself, whether there is indeed a way out of anthropocentrism, our necessarily human and embodied way of perceiving the world and communicating about it?
Frederic and Clemens: No, only in parts. “Interrelatedness-and-otherness” captures it quite well. Anthropocentrism is twofold. We can never not be human. This embodied, human way of perceiving and communicating is a condition we can hardly escape. Another anthropocentrism concerns how we inhabit the world. Here, a sort of spectrum exists in how we organize relations. It is an arrangement we can change, one that lets us attune to the more-than-human world.
Technological agencies mediate, never neutrally, rather than offering an exit. For instance, a hydrophone can narrow the phenomenological fissure, letting whales count in decisions about shipping speeds, without telling us what a whale means. And we would not want to close the fissures, even if we could. The interrelatedness-and-otherness that binds and separates is what makes this a political relation, rather than a managerial one; make everything non-human fully legible and the planet becomes a system to be managed. This is the very view the book argues against. Hannah Arendt opened The Human Condition with Sputnik and the dream of escaping the Earth. Our planetary condition asks for something less dramatic and more difficult: not a way out of the human, but a planetary politics that shares authority with what it will never fully understand, while remaining accountable for how it does so.
Laura: The phrase ‘our planetary condition’, you write, describes the ‘dynamic state of the Earth’ which is ‘shaped by the interplay among living, non-living, and technological agencies’ (49). When reading, I found myself asking, where do you locate power in all of this? How does the ‘we’ articulate the planetary condition as ‘theirs’ / ‘ours’? Concretely, how might the assemblies you describe deal with questions of power? And how might the formation and design of these assemblies already operate as power?
Frederic and Clemens: We remain rather implicit about power, and deliberately so. Instead of applying existing, anthropocentric notions of power to our planetary condition, we ask, more humbly, what this condition reveals about power and how assemblies could recognize it.
We locate power in the interplay itself, between non-living, living, and technological agencies, humans among them. This means resisting two easy answers. One says power belongs to humans alone. The other, tempting for a book like ours, says the planet is simply more powerful than we are. Earthquakes are a good test. Some six weeks apart in 2010, Chile’s earthquake released hundreds of times more energy than Haiti’s, and Haiti’s killed hundreds of times more people. Geology explains part of that difference; building codes, wealth and preparedness explain much of the rest. Planetary agencies exercise real power. They set limits, impose delays, veto plans. But they do not decide whom their force reaches. Agency is distributed. Accountability is not. Only humans can answer for how they use power, and the more they hold, the more they have to answer for.
This is also why the ‘our’ names no universal ‘we’ but an entanglement that is shared and asymmetrical at once. Nor can the ‘we’ simply declare the condition ‘theirs’. It can build settings in which more-than-human signals and affected communities test and correct its claims, rather than relying on proxies, where human power hides most easily. The assemblies we sketch answer power with procedure. Authority circulates across nodes instead of settling at a centre, guidance expires unless renewed, ledgers are open, and planetary signals such as a river’s low baseflow can force pauses that no one may override for convenience.
And yes, their formation and design already operate as power. Whoever draws a bioregion’s boundary, calibrates the sensors, trains the model, or picks the meeting place has decided much before anyone speaks. Planetary politics will not escape this. It can make such power visible, contestable, and reversible. That is why we offer scaffolds, not blueprints.
Laura: Building on the notion of the ‘scaffold’, you present the book as offering ‘workable tools’ that are ‘scalable, revisable, and open to refinement in use’ (49), and in the conclusion you explicitly set out a research agenda. This positioning is interesting, and, to me, it carries a sense of vulnerability – which, don’t get me wrong, I do not see as a weakness. With speculative work, this is perhaps inevitable. There’s a question here that I find interesting, that of continuity and break: How much do we carry with us in speculative proposals? Put differently, how do you see speculative interventions finding resonance in practice? Or is this not even the right question to ask?
Frederic and Clemens: Planetary politics already happens in fragments. Cascadia held its first bioregional congress in 1986. Why not scale this around the world? Some rivers hold legal personhood, Australia reserves water for the Murray–Darling itself, and prototypes such as the Lahn avatar exist. What these fragments, these tools, lack is political form, and our scaffold tries to give them one. The proposed Planetary Political Order is then itself a tool to be applied in debates about future political order.
Kant’s Perpetual Peace waited more than a century for the League of Nations. Our stance is pragmatist. Tools are meant to be tested and corrected in use, and a scaffold that cannot be revised would be a blueprint in disguise. We hope for possibilism in Albert Hirschman’s sense: widening what is thinkable and doable instead of conceding that there is no alternative.
Does this make our positioning vulnerable? We don’t think so. It is a question of perspective. Those who fear speculative work and testing tools will necessarily become vulnerable in a world characterized not only by planetary change, but also by geopolitical turmoil and technological upheaval.
Laura: Final question - what might present itself as an opening for further pursuing the questions which the book opens, institutionally, methodologically, epistemically? And where do you see yourself in this process?
Frederic and Clemens: We want the book to shift the question: no longer whether the planet is involved in politics, but what kinds of politics become possible once we take its involvement seriously. Planetary politics is not a niche; it is politics writ large.
Institutionally, we propose the Planetarities as an ‘undisciplined’ research horizon where the planetary humanities and social sciences meet the planetary sciences and situated practitioners, from Indigenous stewards to astronauts. Methodologically, ‘planet as method’ is becoming a teachable toolkit. To that end, we are co-editing a Handbook of Planetary Methods for the Humanities and Social Sciences with Oxford University Press together. Epistemically, categories such as freedom, legitimacy, and responsibility need rethinking.
As for us, we see ourselves less as architects of a planetary order than as builders of scaffolds, within a collective far larger than the four of us: Fellows, artists, and the trees, fungi and microbes. Form follows planet!