The inner life of the planet: Earth system science in moral time

Introduction

According to a widespread view that I learned growing up, the planet has no inner life, if by “inner life” we mean the soulfulness based on introspection or inwardness that the expression tends to connote. The planet is not a consciousness even if it is a kind of autoregulating system. The planet is objective while inner life is subjective, and to speak of the planet's “inner life” is delusional anthropomorphism. Planetary “inner” life could then indicate only the ecologies deep underground where surprising beings do exist in strange forms under great pressure and in very high heat.

But there is another way to hear the expression. One could speak of the inner life of the planet when the scientific epistemology and category of the planet comes to shape people's orientation toward their own lives. This would focus on human inner life as it is affected by or in relation to Earth: of as in from this planet. Considering the broadly subjective internalization of the meanings of the planet, what kinds of claims are “of” the planet in this sense? Should they be ones that are only epistemic or scientific? This paper argues that they should additionally involve moral claims on oneself as an agent of history.

I will argue that the Earth can have a claim on people through moral time, where that category belongs to a soulful relation to the planet. When I hear the word “soulful,” music and salt-of-the-Earth people come to mind, for example, my Slovak ancestors of this Rust Belt region of the United States of America, immigrants fleeing political oppression between the Russians and the Habsburg empire. My grandfather woke each morning to sing in Slovak from a hymnal before going down into the Earth to extract profit for capital in a dangerous, violent, fatiguing process that he and his brothers chose to survive. For these people, their social attachments helped them survive. The soulfulness was not in the theology but in the singing, the language, the early morning hour, and the effort for one's family.

“Soulfulness” also reminds me of Black life in the city where I live and locker-room conversations in the YMCA where my 88-year-old father and I go to swim every week. In the Black culture of my city, it is important for people to “have some soul.” The word “soulful” from my land carries these kinds of multicultural, moral, and spiritual connotations. But there is no clear sense of a theological dualism in them. They speak to the state of people's hearts. ¹

By “soulful,” then, I mean, in our consciences as these are spread out in the range of our feelings, moods, dreams, intuitions, sensibilities, and what have you: “in human souls.” “Soulfulness” means, for instance, music and longing, not a categorical standing in theology. The quality evokes people carrying their attachments to loved ones and their relationships with others deep inside them. Can the planet manifest soulfully for people? If so, what are the moral dimensions of such appearances? How does time relate to these matters?

These questions press against the claims of some scholars and scientists. For instance, Dipesh Chakrabarty's groundbreaking work in historiography is premised off of the view that the planet cannot be accommodated in moral thought and that the planet is categorically alien from human inner life. An important scholar in the environmental humanities, Chakrabarty has renarrated history from the implications of such claims. This paper explores them to see if they are justified, tracing a prominent version of them in Chakrabarty's major work, The Climate of History (2021: chapters 7–8 especially) itself interpreting the views of a number of prominent Earth system scientists. Unlike his recent short book from his lecture series at Brandeis University (Chakrabarty, 2023), The Climate of History is the text with the most conspicuous claims about the amoral status of the planet.

Chakrabarty's effect on the environmental humanities is substantial. Since 2009, his work on humankind as a geological agent recasting how the discipline of history should approach its craft has reached out into many neighboring disciplines and fields (Chakrabarty, 2009). To analyze his claims is to attend to highly influential statements. ² The views of scientists appearing foremost in Chakrabarty's account misplace moral claims by not recognizing the planet's meanings in people's inner lives, and Chakrabarty telegraphs this misplacement. Since to flourish as a human being is to relate morally to our lives, the nature of the planet, and the kind of claims planetary epistemology generates must be taken as remarks for the moral imagination. The moral necessity of internalizing the planet's meaning drives what is possible. This paper's purpose is to diffuse the position Chakrabarty centers in his historiography because it mislocates the thing, morality, about which it is critical.

The most conspicuous way the planet's meanings can be internalized is through what I call “moral time.” Moral time is any way that time must be told by moral relations. Since moral relations are inter- and intrasubjectively historical, so is moral time. A consequence is that engaging in planetary thinking ought to involve relating morally to the planet through a certain, historically loaded form of justice work out of which and in which the epistemology and discourse of Earth system science appears should orient and arrange itself. To do so in moral time is both to relinquish unjustifiable control over the Earth and to seek progress on Earth in terms of moral integrity and deepened moral relations. But the particular axis of this work is to undo the objectification of the planet and of all its existents that is itself a legacy of colonization of the globe and of the Middle Passage. Moral time then is “in the wake” of the history that brought all beings on Earth the planet as a narcissistic object of control and exploitation predicated off of the erasure, abuse, and use of others for short-term and elite gain and power (Sharpe, 2016; Ferdinand, 2021). ³ In this summary way, this paper argues for a soulful sense of time against a socially alienated and purportedly objective sense of deep, geologic time.

Introducing moral time

In my tradition, morality is basic to human practical reasoning (Aristotle, 2002; Anscombe, 2000), as ordinary as figuring things out in society. It's centrally about relating well with others in ways that lead to mutual flourishing. According to this practical and prosocial tradition, morality involves thick, connotative terms called “virtues” or character-traits (Foot, 1978). These traits express interpersonal and personal relationships of care with each other and regarding ourselves as another (Whyte, 2018; Winter, 2022; Nussbaum, 2023; Bendik-Keymer, 2023; Levinas, 1969). Core concerns such as being fair, kind, compassionate, dependable, and a person with some genuine integrity show up in moral thought. They prevent too much emphasis on the judgmental connotations of (narcissistic abuses of) morality.

Time in this paper is not the objective time of metaphysics but broadly subjective temporality, that is, how objective time means something to us. ⁴ To understand time through its adjectival qualification, “moral” is to take time as inter- and intrasubjectively marked by moral obligations, goals, events, and so on. Even historical time can be understood in this way. While history can be staged beyond the subjective, it can also be approached through moral history where the active nature of the subject has responsibilities to shape the legacy of society and the meaning of its past.

The adjective “moral” modifies the noun “time”—time inflected through moral relations. So being, time must be told by those relations. For instance, one might hear that “time is money.” Call this a money-making temporality. But money-making works by a different logic than morality. As Aristotle (2002: 1091a 6-9) argued before Marx, money-making places a means as an end without necessarily being oriented by the end of living a flourishing human life in society. By contrast, when one lives through moral relations, time cannot simply be money. It cannot be told that way. One cannot just watch the clock and count it in terms of money lost or gained. Instead, time must be told by one's attachments and responsibilities. For example, one might think that parents should tell time by whether they have time away from work so as to be with their children. This could help explain why parents might resent oppressive working conditions that preoccupy their time. Even when parents need to make money in order to provide for their loved-ones, time is not money; instead, time is family, that is, the chance to provide for them. And so forth.

This paper ultimately addresses the temporality of history. Moral time is historical because our relations are historical. This temporality involves both a past and a future because the stories of history are relayed to those to come and because they involve hopes for the future, directions in which things should be going. Consider how people recount their times in terms of moral progress or decline. Many people ask, “Are we taking some good steps to make our world more just for our descendants?” (Kitcher, 2021). Another way to think of such history is through what humans owe to each other or descendants because of past wrongs or accreted patterns of injustice (Táíwò, 2022a). Time is then told by the responsibility to bend the arc of history toward justice. ⁵

Nuances appear. Moral time inflects hope and despair. The meaning of conventional terms such as “day,” “night,” “week,” “season,” and “year” takes on an underlying sense based on what people hope for or despair of in them. Here, time come to reflect, and in that actually understates, everything that counts time in tacitly moral ways: What is a day for those you love as opposed to a day given your despair over those you love? Might you tell it by the timing of the song of gratitude or by the timing of the blues?

One assumption of my tradition is that solid, everyday people with good enough character—nothing fancy; just grounded, mindful, and responsible—live in moral time alongside other registers of time. Otherwise, they risk being socially alienated from their relations to some degree. Though not insurmountable in personal life and not damning, the alienation introduces some social distortion into how to approach the world. Moreover, the alienation may partially obscure the moral purpose of being in time, one that can be personal and historical at once.

The alienation of earth as a “geological object”

In the chapter “Anthropocene Time” from Chakrabarty's (2021: 155–181) major work on planetary historiography, moral time is unseated in favor of a scientific temporality. ⁶ Here's the backstory: Scientists involved in accounting for the ways that human social processes are forcing the planet's systems (e.g., the climate system, the hydrological system, or the nitrogen system) speak of human effects as matters that exceed particular patterns of responsibility and self-awareness. These effects have accreted over thousands of years reaching back into prehistorical times during the killing of megafauna and the beginnings of deforestation. At the same time, many activists, politicians, and environmental humanists and social scientists talk today of the same effects as matters for which people are responsible because they are purportedly results of systems of power in place such as modern nationalism (and its nation-state fragmentation of global governance; Gardiner, 2011) or industrial energy (and its extractivism often predicated off of colonial views of land as resource; Liboiron, 2021).

The heart of Chakrabarty's analysis of his historical situation is that there has been among this latter collection of people an almost narcissistic tendency to subvert geological claims about human force by illicitly converting them to social scientific claims about human power (2021: 159–64). This conversion follows on how,

the Anthropocene has had two lives, sometimes in the same texts: a scientific life involving measurements and debates among qualified scientists, and a more popular life as a moral-political issue. (Chakrabarty, 2021: 158)

Chakrabarty locates the moral domain in “questions of historical responsibility for the [global] warming that has happened so far” (2021: 159). A premise of this domain is the matter of causation: what has caused the Anthropocene and who has caused it? In so far as the pressure here comes from worries about real injustice, we are in the area of blame.

But drawing on his reading of and involvement with Earth system scientists, Chakrabarty has two problems with making geological questions of planetary forcing into social questions of power. The first and main problem is conceptual and methodological. There is a methodological and categorical switch going on in the conversion from force to power. To examine human beings and their effect on the planet geologically involves what Chakrabarty calls a “geological object.” As he writes, “there is no geological time without geological objects” (Chakrabarty, 2021: 171). He relies on Earth scientists to make this point:

[T]his time is written into the strata of the planet. “And indeed it is the strata, with their radionuclides, fly ash, microplastics, supermarket chicken bones and so on that form the core of the argument for the ‘geological [stratigraphic] Anthropocene,’ writes Zalasiewicz. (Chakrabarty, 2021: 171)

The issue here is methodological, where “[t]he impact on the lithosphere is what matters; the author of impact is not important” (Chakrabarty, 2021: 170). This is where questions begin to arise for the reader. Is what matters the changed geological register from all sources, not the selection of some as matters of human social power? It is hard to see what Chakrabarty might be saying. If a meteor strike or a string of volcanic eruptions leads to a geological change such as the Fifth Mass Extinction since life began, geologists do note that. Clearly the cause of the change matters. Perhaps what Chakrabarty is trying to point out is that the causes of our planetary environmental situation emerge before recorded history, for instance, with deforestation, the rise of agriculture, and the killing of megafauna at a distance. Even so, it helps to remember that the very idea of the Anthropocene for stratigraphers is to correlate human products and actions with the sedimentary evidence. Isn't that a matter of a thin and initial causal exploration?

But Chakrabarty is actually after agency, not causality. ⁷ The issue is intentionality. “Agency” is the name for the power to act, and actions are distinguished from events by intentionality (Anscombe, 2000). By contrast, events are explained through causality that is not intentional. The geological evidence looks at results and correlations, not intentions. Human beings have been on a course to force the planet's systems since before recorded history; the combined causes of human civilizations have been many. They seem to have risen toward planetary forcing in varying degrees and at varying levels irrespective of specific questions of social power. Hence, the human being is forcing the planetary environment as a species. This is not an intentional process. Humankind is not intending to do it. You can hear this line of thinking inter alia when Chakrabarty reveals that,

[T]he Anthropocene, so long as it is seen as a measure of human impact on the planet, can have only plural beginnings and must remain an informal rather than a formal category of geology, capable of bearing multiple stories about human institutions and morality. (2021: 168–169)

This remark collapses his two points into one: geology does not concern itself with social powers, and human beings have been forcing the planet since before recorded history. But why would it not matter if, say, a form of social power like fossil fuel combustion were as powerful as a meteor strike? It seems that such a power would have to matter. What Chakrabarty really wants is to do away with “questions of the subject,” that is, of responsible agency, ⁸ and it is here that worries about social alienation begin to surface.

“[T]he time of Earth System Science [is] vast and incomprehensible in terms of the concerns of human history … all “process without subject" … a narrative of many dispersed and networked actors, none acting with the sense of internal autonomy with which humanist historians suffuse the word agency…”. (Chakrabarty 2021: 174)

Rather,

… Earth System Science [i]s about producing and observing planetary processes …  and about thus describing not a subject … but some kind of an “it” that was plural in its internal construction—the planet as an unstable system of interlocking processes … . (Chakrabarty, 2021: 177)

Geological reflections are said to surpass thought about intentionality and agency, thus suspending the category of moral responsibility for what people do. Until recently, humans have not known what the species causes on planetary scales (and scientific communities still do not know that much yet). Claims of humankind's aggregate effects depend on paleontology, climate science, Earth system science, conservation biology, and so on, all recent arrivals to human history and all relatively uninternalized in existing human civilizations. Yet is it really true that because one knows not what humans cause as a species, one cannot become responsible in relationship to it after the fact?

History drops out here as the effort of a people, or even of humankind, to grow, become aware, and to adapt reflexively through institutions intergenerationally (cf. Dryzek and Pickering, 2019). Yet of course Chakrabarty's history of the rise of planetary epistemology and discourse is intended in the spirit of advancing our collective self-consciousness as humans on Earth. So, is then Chakrabarty's idea not simply that geology treats civilizations like meteor strikes but that the things that conjointly rise to the level of meteor strikes exceed specific regimes of ideology, social organization, etc.? To blame some social process would be beside the point.

Yet that line of argument is confusing. Why would not one take the complexity of human forcing of the planet as a pressure to develop more complex causal schemes and a more complex sociology and politics? For instance, why would not one take humankind's complex, unintended, aggregate effects on the planet as a challenge to develop anthroponomy—the forming of coordinated agency at the level of humankind so as to internalize humankind's effects within responsible schemes (Bendik-Keymer, 2020a).

Perhaps the reason is that Chakrabarty assumes that a moral relationship to the planet depends on humankind being intentionally responsible for planetary-scaled effects. ⁹ That has to be at the heart of his thinking since he understands moral responsibility on the model of agency, and since his criticism of moral logic in relationship to the planet is mainly that humankind's effects—our “force”—is not intentional but an aggregate of unintended causes interwoven with unstable and bundled processes of planetary biochemistry.

Yet doubts remain, and it is here that the loss of moral time breaks through the account offered. Even beyond the suggestion that what Chakrabarty identifies could just as easily be seen as a challenge to agency as a defeat of it, there's a reductive assumption in presuming that moral relationships pertain only to what we intend. Morality is more than practical reasoning and it need not depend on it completely. Morality is just as much personal relatedness, in which practice commonly arises as needed. What would change in the picture under discussion if we began with morality as a matter of primarily nonpractical relationships? ¹⁰

One thing that would change is the sense of time. This point should be emphasized when considering the inner life of the planet, that is, how people can have a soulful relationship to planetary logic (cf. Bendik-Keymer, 2020b). Perhaps the picture under discussion does not go in this direction, because it seems to assume along with Earth system scientists that humans cannot be truly concerned with the inhuman immemorial vastness of the impersonal planet (Chakrabarty, 2021: chapter 8). Yet this begs questions: What is “true concern”? What can and cannot we take the immemorial vastness to mean? Who are “we,” the cultures at the center of Chakrabarty's tale? If one did focus on the primary relationships that make morality how it is, one would understand how the planet appears first and foremost as morally important before humans intend, act, or focus on blame for what humankind has done. Then what would we be looking at when we speak of the planet as “morally internalized”? One thing we would be looking at is a planet which gives us a kind of moral destiny, that is, a way that human time should be shaped.

Internalizing the meanings of the planet

Claiming that planetary logic is categorically amoral begs the question of what morality is. The study of the planet in Earth system science may be categorically different than the study of morality, or, by extension, social justice in history. But as moral beings, people should approach studies morally. ¹¹ Anything else introduces social alienation to some degree, since being decent or just is not the kind of thing that can be held at arm's remove or suspended from how one orients oneself in the world. That's not the kind of things these basic characterological qualities are, and it is what moral logic amounts to in its qualification of the human as a social being. Yet if we resist such disruption, then the question to ask is: What is it to study Earth system science morally? What should that do to our sense of geological or planetary time?

This subtle, adverbial shift changes much and opens up how people relate to planetary science. Still, one might worry if it begs the question too—namely, of whether humans can relate to the planet morally. But this is precisely why the core of the discussion ought to clarify what morality is and involves. Is it the kind of thing that can shape how people relate to the planet (or how people can relate to the logic of the planetary in its fragmentariness, incompleteness, uncertainty, and patchwork form as real, often flawed, approximate, and continually revising science)? Can morality help us do so?

A clue comes from asking a broader question: Is there anything that people cannot relate to morally? If people can relate to anxiety morally when anxiety is precisely about nothing (Kierkegaard, 1980; Heidegger, 1993), then it seems evident for any given thing—say, this lamp by which I write, the city in which I live, and the story by which I understand what I am doing, I can meaningfully ask, “what is this thing to me such that I can try to be a thoughtful person with some integrity and be responsible to my community with it?” In some cases, the answer will be, “this is not a fraught matter; don't overthink your toothpick choices or zone-out viewing on a streaming service.” ¹² But even that is a moral consideration, whether to let go of overthinking things given what truly matters or how to live well with others.

It seems okay to ask the question of how to aspire to be a thoughtful person in community given anything people deal with. So, what about asking the question while coming to terms with the unintended, aggregate effects of prehistorical deforestation and megafauna hunting practices? What about asking it when studying Earth system science? It mattered in community how people hunted then, and it matters now how I relate to my community through my study of what happened then. Moreover, let it so emerge that I have to contend with a mind-expanding object of investigation: the entirety of our species history as it is entangled with other species and with the manifold history of life and biochemistry in this geological moment of our planet, further realizing that this entire history is but a flicker in the deep time of the planet. Nonetheless, it still matters how I am to relate to others and myself in community given that contention. It still matters when facing deep time how I am to relate to the immemorial vastness of geological time as someone in a community who additionally has to live with themself.

Chakrabarty is a broad-minded and nuanced historian reflecting on fundamental changes in historiography through his dialogue with planetary science and Earth system scientists. He is also a moralist of sorts in the venerable tradition of history as a discipline that once had the purpose of helping liberally educated leaders acquire good judgment. As he has confirmed (2023, personal communication), his interest in the planetary involves illuminating a morally needed “provincializing” of the human (2023: 18; see also 2021: chapter 8). So, the concern is not with Chakrabarty's moral orientation but with the way social alienation of a sort seeps into the text like groundwater working its ways through shale. The social alienation introduces a kind of static in the harmony of the system. When faced with the “planetary age,” there comes to be some confusion around what and how moral life works. This works against Chakrabarty's own goals, making it more confusing how to approach the world with moral clarity.

Suppose we were instead to start where we are, not outside ourselves with the “view from nowhere” of Earth system science (Chakrabarty, 2021: 177) but from what we have to consider as social, human beings. Since to flourish as a human being is to relate morally to our lives, then, the kinds of claims Chakrabarty reports and sometimes makes must be taken as remarks for our imagination. How might that work? Suppose that planetary forcing results from multitudinous social processes in conjunction with Earth's unstable bundles of biochemical processes. Why couldn't we live responsibly beginning with that perspective? Admitting that deep time exceeds the time scales of human projects, why couldn't we develop a sense of time from that ultimate delimitation of our egos (cf. Hatley, 2000)? Either of these things would engage morally with the meanings of the planet. People would squarely build the sense of the planet from the sense of moral time—and vice versa.

Moral imagination becomes the issue, not whether the planet exceeds morality. Pace Chakrabarty, it is unclear what that latter claim could mean. Morality is about how we relate non-narcissistically to each other and to ourselves in the midst of the meaning of things, which are themselves shaped by how we relate to ourselves and to each other. ¹³ Given the vastness, depth of time, and unstable complexity that Chakrabarty underlines, what meanings could we internalize consistent with or following from a sense of relatedness, humility, integrity, and reverence? ¹⁴ How should Earth become part of people's soulful sense of themselves?

Integrity as a response to deep time

A conclusion of the line of reasoning presented here is that the discourse of Earth system science should frame itself in terms of moral time. This provocative claim requires some unpacking and justification. One can tell time by a clock, a calendar, or by stratigraphy. By contrast, when one tells moral time, it is told through moral markers, for instance, whether people came to grasp a moral challenge or avoided seeing it, whether people lived up to a responsibility or failed it. Moral progress is a form of moral time, but so is moral decline. Many religious stories are narrated by marks of moral time. A consequence of humans being temporal and moral beings is that human integrity, decency, and flourishing depend on the register of moral time. Again: moral time is any way that time must be told by moral relations.

What would it be for “geological objects” to be approached through moral time too? Suppose that we approached such objects through moral qualities (e.g., Whyte, 2018)—for instance, integrity, decency, or community. Take integrity. In Chakrabarty's historical reflections, there is an undercurrent of concern around the possibility of modern people's integrity as agents. On Chakrabarty's reading of geological objects, the “subject” drops out when people face deep time and the vast complexity of biochemical changes. But his noting this is has a simple consequence: how we live in ways that cohere with our commitments and values during our ephemeral presence on Earth becomes the thing that clearly matters, not questions of geological duration. The how comes to matter when the what is decided: how we will live now that we know what we will become (e.g., dust). This is the clue for how to approach geological objects morally.

The geological object can highlight people's coherence with their own commitments and values. We are destined for extinction in a mere geological instant. So, then, how have we lived? Here, the main moral relationship to the geological object—the soulful internalization—is in how the object reveals that a kind of autonomy matters above all, living the lives that truly and deeply make sense to us in this brief geological instant of time. Because of the nature of sense and meaning, no less relatedness, these must be non-narcissistic lives. ¹⁵ The very alienness, the “view from nowhere,” of geology reinforces the importance of living with integrity especially as we face our own kind's demise, humankind passing over into other forms of energy sooner or later. ¹⁶ Here, then, is a resolutely moral time born of integrity with the geological object.

Similarly, traditions of spiritual exercise challenge us to view our lives as bound to death (Hadot, 2001; Scranton, 2015). The geological object presumes this perspective on homo sapiens, just as paleontology does. Geologically speaking, we're always already fossils-to-be (Huffer, 2025; Bendik-Keymer, 2017). This idea possibly sounds morbid, but it can help us live unencumbered by vanity doing what is truly meaningful. It illuminates an advantage of the geological object: by taking the big picture of Earth in the cosmos (Williams and Zalasiewicz, 2022), the geological object invites us to let go of anything trivial that interferes with our moral time, that is, the register of sense and meaning bound up with our most soulful attachments and the commitments we shape around them. Now we are always already passing through the Earth, as many indigenous philosophies have traditionally taught, and the question is: how are we doing in our relations (Winter, 2022; Liboiron, 2021; Whyte, 2018)? Geological time becomes a ground from which to emphasize our poignant and temporary responsibility. ¹⁷

Given a fragmentary, uncertain, but expanding awareness of geology, how should people face their deaths, and how should people eventually let go of existence? If these questions seem strange, they still do not put deep time out of reach. They bring it closer, involving us as a significant instant when we have the chance to be generous, responsible, and humble (Nail, 2021; Hatley, 2000). Chakrabarty's question is pertinent: How should we relate to ourselves as always already “decentered” in deep time (cf. Chakrabarty, 2021, chapter 8)? But he misses a second question: How should we relate to each other in light of our eventual extinction and the entropy of the planet (Nail, 2021)? The temporality of geological time is the temporality of transience on Earth.

Justice before humankind's eventual extinction

Given our transience, what is the role of justice? In my tradition, justice is basic to character (Aristotle, 2002). Shouldn't the time of our transience involve coming to terms with injustice? Wherever we are on Earth, we can find the changes caused by a history that has accelerated planetary environmental transformation supercharging the urgency and disaster all beings on Earth now face (Dryzek and Pickering, 2019, chapter 1). This is the history of fossil fuel industrialism (Daggett, 2019)—both capitalist and state-centered (Postone, 1993)—including the total contamination of the planet's surface with toxins and microplastics (Liboiron, 2021). It is also the superpowering of extractive and productive methods for mainframing and running the information age (Castells, 2009). Entwined with this history is Anglo-European colonization, extraction, and the rendering of humans into commodities for industrial labor, the Middle Passage (Ferdinand, 2021). This history has gotten all beings on Earth into the heat of the danger everyone faces in different ways, some much more severe than others but all consequential, across this century and beyond.

Given the roles that modern empires, colonialisms, and energy regimes have played in forcing Earth's biochemistry, relating morally to our time on Earth should involve coming to terms with their entangled histories. Evidently, the causes of our situation reach into the outer edge of the Holocene with the rise of agriculture, urban settlements, and killing at a distance (Chakrabarty, 2021: chapter 1). Further, deforestation seems to be the most potent way that ancient empires and modern economies have undermined the conditions of the current climate (Nail, 2022). ¹⁸ But the rise of fossil fuel empire through English capitalism and colonialism and its prior support in land abstraction from European colonialism (Ferdinand, 2021; Liboiron, 2021; Bendik-Keymer, 2020a; Pasternak, 2017) form the immediate forcing of the planetary environmental crisis. They are the proximate turning point of planetary injustice such as it now exists and so give good reason for justice to call on people to take a stand in relationship both to each other and with other forms of life in light of the planet (Celermajer, 2021). In this way, coming to terms with the geological object of the planet should involve facing modern history not as a rupture with questions of power (Chakrabarty, 2021) but as an intensification of them through the matter of integrity that appears when realizing our fundamental transience.

Rendering the planet as an amoral, alien object is indebted to the history of Anglo-European empire; 1492 is an important date for planetary injustice. During the “Age of Exploration,” the globe was literally constructed as a narcissistic object of conquest and wealth extraction (Bendik-Keymer, 2022). Caribbean scholar-descendants of those surviving the Middle Passage have been teaching this (Wynter and McKittrick, 2015; reaffirmed by Mignolo, 2015 in his commentary on Wynter). Muscogee Nation scholar Daniel Wildcat (2023) also suggested something congruent recently. ¹⁹ 1492 is a date for approaching time as moral history. From its reference point, it is possible to face the long unwinding of Anglo-European colonialism as an intermingling of planetary change with the structural injustice accreted along with the course of modernity (Mignolo, 2011; Táíwò, 2022a). So, 1492 can become a marker for the inner life of the planet, how the planet should be internalized as calling for moral and political responsibility (cf. Young, 2011). ²⁰

“1492” then means: at the dawn of modern empire, the globe as a narcissistic idea was created by mapping imperial territory (cf. Latour, 2017, lecture 4). Earth became a narcissistic object of control and exploitation predicated on the erasure, abuse, and use of land communities—their peoples included—for short-term and elite gain or power. “1492” is a mark of moral decline. Ferdinand (2021) calls the ecological part of the process marked by this time, “colonial inhabitation” and the interhuman part of it, “the hold” (of the slave ship; a figure he develops from Christina Sharpe, 2016). “In its wake,” the globe became organized around an Anglo-Eurocentric hierarchy of elite capture (Táíwò, 2022b) that spread through forms of production over hundreds of years, notably in capitalism but also in state-centered communism (Postone, 1993). This left vast inequalities of advantage and disadvantage, massive democratic deficits, cycles of precarity and violence, and polarized politics, among other things (Táíwò, 2022a).

The ships came. They stole and tricked. They made humans into tools while the land and its beings became abstract and disembodied. The ecological crisis we now face is bound up with this historical process. Modern science down to its echoes in the Earth sciences are indebted to it too.

Earth system science—including for the moment its affiliation with geology, paleontology, and planetary science with its study of habitability—arose in complex and contingent ways within the moral decline marked by “1492.” Yet the scientific life as global, scientific enterprise (Shapin, 2008) sat inside the moral misrelations (Liboiron, 2021) of dominant social practices and institutions that came with the onset of European colonialism and its slave trade. Sciences rationalized racism, sexism, heteronormativity, and speciesism (Whyte, 2018; Ferdinand, 2021). Was that all?

Subtle forms of social alienation persisted. For instance, the scientific discussions that Chakrabarty has been carefully following as a historian positioned science as having epistemic authority irrespective of moral relationships (cf. Chakrabarty, 2023: 4–6, theses 1–4, 7). But for people oriented by moral time and its social justice, to know the planet and what it means cannot be divorced from the moral relationships people are meant to have around and in light of it. If there is no truth for a socially coherent soul that is not morally conditioned and inflected, especially by social justice, then there is no geological object for a morally responsible person without understanding it in moral time. Planetary justice becomes a meaningful category.

Sharpe marks our time as “in the wake of” the Middle Passage with its jettisoning of enslaved human beings overboard in a project predicated at its destination off of colonial genocide and erasure. The figure of the wake is a mnemonic for surfacing the trauma caused by the loss of moral relationships that allowed such atrocity, Christians though these slavers nominally were. That trauma became the background secret and social reality that had to be rationalized going forward: this world where people become objects in pursuit of the elite plunder of the globe, consolidated by an entire epistemological, philosophical, and institutional framework (Mignolo, 2011). We might then also claim that now in the face of planetary environmental crisis propagated conceptually, economically, and politically by the long unwinding of Anglo-European empire, humankind's moral time is in the wake of the global injustice that has historically structured the Great Acceleration (Dryzek and Pickering, 2019). Sharpe's argument is a nuanced argument of moral temporality that can shape how we internalize the meaning of the planet.

Then the “planet”—that category for all the fragmentary, incomplete, fallible traces of the vast reality that conditions all beings on Earth—silhouettes a claim people now on Earth can make of each other to work through narcissistic injustice in the wake of imperial and colonial trauma, undoing their “insidious loops” (Whyte, 2018). ²¹ The planet does not make the claim; it's the setting revealing how integrity is a matter of historically situated justice crying out for the time we have on Earth. ²² Earth is mysterious and far in excess of our time, and precisely because it is these things, it draws us out of narcissistic cycles, letting our transience settle in. When people face this transience, the temporality of historical justice, far from being alien to planetary thinking, should become dead central to internalizing the meaning of humankind's time on Earth before we eventually disintegrate into the cosmos.

Being “in the wake” is not a mere figure of speech, something merely ornamental. Sharpe (2016, chapter 1) evokes it as soulful. ²³ Guided by her sense of time, one faces the lost moral relationships the absence of which have haunted the modern world. Heartache, longing, devastation, and mourning become moral temporalities, no less relevant to facing Earth's tragic transformation for many who had no role in it (Celermajer, 2021). Here, too, are the temporalities of the future: the arc of justice (Táíwò, 2022a), the bridge of world-building (Ferdinand, 2021), the intergenerational responsibility of recovering and safeguarding good ecological relationships into the future (Winter, 2022). The modern world has been superpowered by modern science sometimes producing an alternative epistemic discourse of purported extramoral authority. To recover Earth system science in moral time, resolutely, is one mark of reversing this decline and facing social alienation even if we have not caused it. It's a somersault into the future.

Summer 2024

Cleveland, Ohio, USA,

rightful land of many nations