The planet is the Earth taken as an agentic, entangled system of human and nonhuman processes running across deep time. For me it's the ultimate giver of order. It's also the first object of thought, which is a big claim, I know.
How the word moved
In May 2022 I swapped one word in Dobzhansky and got "Nothing in society makes sense except in the light of the planet." In Feb 2025 the planet became the ultimate giver of order, bigger than the Globe. By Oct 2025 I was using it for the fusion of Earth, the physical system, and Globe, the human world, i.e. a dynamic field of interaction. In Jul 2026 it became the first object of Epistry, with habitability as its first concept.
In my words
"Nothing in society makes sense except in the light of the planet."
from The Planet is a Prefix, 30 May 2022
"The planet is not a problem to be solved but a condition to be inhabited."
from Bhumics: The Weekly Planet #1, 25 Aug 2025
"The planet is the ‘first object’ of epistry"
from Habitability: Recasting the Planetarity Syllabus, 27 Jul 2026
Related
- Contradicts Globe - Globe and Planet are the core pairing, and I'm on the planet's side.
- Related Planetarity - planetarity is what it's like to live on a planet understood this way.
- Related Habitability - habitability is the first concept for the planet as first object.
- Related Planetary Alterity - the planet is radically other, and that's part of what it is.
- Related Planet over Climate - planet names a coupled system, climate only one domain.
- Related Planetary City - one way in is to think of the planet itself as a city.
- Related Gaia - Latour's Gaia gives me a name for the planet's tangled agency.
Still open
I say the planet is a city to be governed and I say it's an alien we inhabit on loan. I affirm both and I don't know yet how they fit.