Our Planetary Condition (Foundations for a Politics with the Earth)

An actionable framework for doing politics with Earth’s nonliving, living, and technological agencies to expand planetary habitability.

Our Planetary Condition advances a simple yet transformative claim: we do not live on but are part of a planet whose nonliving, living, and technological forces actively shape politics. If keeping the Earth habitable is the defining challenge of our time, then politics must be restructured beyond human-centered and state-bound frameworks. Earth is not merely a system to manage but an agential complex to govern with. Authors Frederic Hanusch, Liza Bauer, Clemens Finkelstein, and Claus Leggewie propose a new approach for planetary politics—one that recognizes the collective agencies of nonliving, living, and technological actors as integral to our coexistence.

Rather than relying on human proxies to represent more-than-human concerns, the book shows how to do politics with planetary agencies—rivers and forests, cyclones and currents, even space weather—that actively shape political conditions. Across seven chapters, the authors unsettle inherited ideas of political subjectivity and representation, outlining a conceptual and practical framework for engaging these agencies that operate outside conventional registers of deliberation.

Merging political theory and the environmental humanities with research on planetary dynamics, ecological relations, and technological infrastructures alongside Indigenous and non-Western knowledges, this book introduces an actionable model for rethinking politics for the planetary age.