A Lodestar, Not a Ground
A syllabus entry, which starts from one quotation and pushes on it.
"Only such a structure of deliberate multiscalar governance, one that eschews the fetishization of national sovereignty, can ensure the habitability necessary to enable multispecies (and thus ultimately human) flourishing."
— Jonathan S. Blake and Nils Gilman, Children of a Modest Star (2024), via their own Aeon summary, "Governing for the planet"
I keep coming back to this passage because it's the closest anyone gets without quite arriving. Habitability, here, is what governance should aim at — "our new lodestar," in their own words a few sentences later. A lodestar sits ahead of you; it doesn't sit underneath you. Sovereignty in their account keeps its old job, just aimed at a better target through "planetary subsidiarity." What's missing, I think, is the harder claim: that habitability isn't the destination governance travels toward, but the ground it was supposed to be standing on all along, and that a government maintaining it badly should lose standing over the maintaining, not just adopt a nicer goal.