Geology, Power, and the Planetary

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Earth as Praxis

JEROME WHITINGTON
Gallatin School of Individualized Study, New York University, USA

ZEYNEP OGUZ
School of Social and Political Science, University of Edinburgh, UK

Abstract What conditions of possibility have emerged for learning to live on a new earth?
This special section builds on scholarship in the environmental humanities, critical Black
studies, and geophilosophy to explore how emergent ways of becoming human are forged in
relation to powerful earth dynamics, even while earth’s powers are constitutive of contem-
porary forms of domination. Geologizing Sylvia Wynter’s understanding of being human as
a praxis, it proposes that earth as praxis (a) provides a diagnosis of the deeply embedded
forms of power that have been materialized, over several centuries, in the earthly condi-
tions of life itself; and (b) represents a critical potential for creating new ways to live on
earth through the practical exploration of geosocial relations. We highlight three modes of
earth praxis. Inhuman territorializations calls attention to the landscapes and earthy matter
subjected to racializing and territorializing modes of power. In turn, such practices partici-
pate in the constitution of dehumanized, racialized, and dispossessed bodies and peoples.
Becoming geological refers to the ways human forms of living have become shot through with
earth system dynamics, mineralogical relations, and energetic possibilities, to the extent
that people cannot be who they are without these pervasive anthropogenic geologies. Fi-
nally, planetary predicaments helps diagnose the politically vital and collective but deeply un-
equal and nonhomogeneous conditions of the present. Earth as praxis offers an analytical
grip on emerging planetary earth relations that breaks with abstract, universalizing catego-
ries, and is capable of diagnosing the wide range of today’s violent, creative, and liberatory
planetary practices.

Keywords praxis, geology, planetary, Anthropocene, decolonization

Planetary Resonance

I n February 2021, radioactive orange-pink clouds loomed over France and Spain and
as far north as Germany, covering fields and roofs with a thin but pervasive layer
of nuclear dust.1 Originating in the Sahara Desert, the storm carried its sixty-year-old

1. Cereceda, “Irony as Sahara Dust Returns Radiation.”

Environmental Humanities 15:3 (November 2023)

DOI 10.1215/22011919-10746045 © 2023 Jerome Whitington and Zeynep Oguz
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of a Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0).
146 Environmental Humanities 15:3 / November 2023

intercontinental payload across the Mediterranean from nuclear weapons tests con-
ducted in the French-colonized Algerian desert at the height of the Algerian War. The
radioactive dust was an archive of French colonialism and the violent territorialization
of the earth. On February 13, 1960—a year before Frantz Fanon would pen The Wretched
of the Earth, with its incisive class analysis of the limits and possibilities of anticolonial

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violence—France carried out the first of three above-ground atmospheric nuclear tests,
code-named Gerboise Bleue (Blue Desert Rat, or jerboa), in the Algerian Sahara.2 By 1966,
another fourteen underground tests followed, exposing Algerians, Berbers, and stationed
French soldiers to lethal levels of radiation that lurk in the desert to this day.3
Long after the detonations, radioactive waste still contaminates geopolitical bod-
ies and subjectivities. Before France moved its testing to Polynesia, the military buried
debris throughout the test areas in the Sahara Desert. These highly radioactive military
dumps were progressively exposed by the Saharan winds and the metals were stripped
for scrap. “From the abandoned nuclear testing bases, people have recovered plates,
beams, electrical cables and equipment of all kinds, all of which is radioactive,” re-
ported Larbi Benchiha, a journalist.4 “They have incorporated them into the construc-
tion of their homes.”5 Perhaps anywhere from twenty-seven thousand to sixty thousand
people were affected by these tests. Yet in Europe, the swirling, transcontinental dust of
2021 was interpreted sharply within the conventional frame of risk politics, with ex-
perts taking the predictable role of reassuring the public that there was nothing to
worry about. A Euronews article cast the situation as “Irony as Sahara Dust Returns Ra-
diation of French Nuclear Tests in ’60s.”6 As European news and social media could not
help but observe, the irony was simply the failed expectation that France’s colonial
legacy would respect international borders.
What strikes us about these events is the conflicted materiality of their spatial
and temporal resonance across continents, decades, centuries, and even millennia.
Continental difference was central both to the testing location in France’s colonial
“backyard”—much like that of the US testing on Indigenous lands in the Pacific and
American Southwest—and to the rupture of that distance when the dust refused to
stay put under certain atmospheric conditions.7 European anxiety as a cultural politics
of risk and calls for responsibility toward the former colony must contend with the
excessiveness of these material relations. A “politics of strata” binds the ungovern-
able volatility of an inhuman earth with the violently governed, enforced inhuman-
ism of racial and class difference.8

2. Henia, “Oil, Gas, Dust.”

3. Panchasi, “Atomic ‘Adventure’ in Empire.”
4. Magdaleno, “Algerians Suffering from French Atomic Legacy.”
5. Magdaleno, “Algerians Suffering from French Atomic Legacy.”
6. Cereceda, “Irony as Sahara Dust Returns Radiation.”
7. See DeLoughrey, “Myth of Isolates”; Masco, Nuclear Borderlands; and Teaiwa, “Bikinis and Other S/Pa-
cific N/Oceans.”
8. Clark, “Politics of Strata”; Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality”; Yusoff, “Inhumanities.”
 Whitington and Oguz / Geology, Power, and the Planetary 147

If geos refers to earth itself, and not only to its mineral parts, then geological rela-
tions have become the domain of social theory.9 The critique of the geological not only
captures the political stakes of fossil fuels but also contends with the creatively destruc-
tive power of volcanoes, the time-telling capacities of fossils, and the pull of other geo-
logical forces that are not immediately problematized in political terms.10 Yet geologi-

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cal relations also extend beyond the primacy of the ground, rock, or strata. Theorists of
ocean systems have emphasized the creative appropriation of ocean and wind currents
as critical to European conquest.11 In the Arctic, the precipitous collapse of polar ice has
provoked a substantial shift in geomilitary arrangements.12 Extractive earth relations
were essential to settler-colonial projects in North and South America, and they con-
tinue to define how settler states and their militarized resource empires engage with In-
digenous peoples.13 Atmospheric, hydrological, geomorphological, tectonic, and even
cryospheric dynamics have provoked a wide range of engagements that refuse to be de-
fined by the terms of mainstream scientific knowledge and efforts to weaponize it alike.
Earth as praxis offers an analytical grip on emerging planetary earth relations that
both breaks with abstract, universalizing tendencies toward the planetary and is capable
of diagnosing or affirming the wide range of today’s violent, creative, and liberatory plan-
etary practices. “The planetary” has emerged as a powerful and perhaps all-encompassing
problem across social and political inquiry, from comparative literature and postcolo-
nial theory, to Anthropocene studies, to expansive discussions in anthropology and geog-
raphy of climate, weather, and earth system management.14 Over more than a decade,
Nigel Clark and Kathryn Yusoff have redefined the conversation around geosocial rela-
tions and the challenge that earth relations pose to social and political thought.15 Fol-
lowing Clark and Szerszynski’s notion of planetary social thought, we emphasize earth’s
capacity to become radically different from itself and the radical plurality of ways people
are constituted within these planetary forces.16 That plurality is constitutively bound to
the appropriation of earth’s powers in the material formation of contemporary domina-
tion. For Kathryn Yusoff, a plurality of Black Anthropocenes subtend “white geology,”
organized as a “stratum or seismic barrier to the costs of extraction, across the coal
face, the alluvial planes, and the sugarcane fields, and on the slave block, into the black
communities that buffer the petrochemical industries and hurricanes to the indigenous

9. See Oguz, “Introduction: Geological Anthropology.”

10. Holmberg, “Sound of Sulfur”; Roosth, “Turning to Stone.”
11. Duara, “Oceans as the Paradigm of History.”
12. Whitington, “Fingerprint, Bellwether, Model Event.”
13. Bonilla, “Coloniality of Disaster”; Estes, Our History; Gómez-Barris, Extractive Zone; Henry, “Extractive
Fictions”; Lea, Wild Policy.
14. Among others see Arboleda, Planetary Mine; Chakrabarty, Climate of History in a Planetary Age;
Mbembe, Out of the Dark Night; Spivak, Death of Discipline; Pratt, Planetary Longings; Gabrys, Program Earth;
and Latour, Down to Earth.
15. Clark, Inhuman Nature; Clark and Yusoff, “Geosocial Formations.”
16. Clark and Szerszynski, Planetary Social Thought.
148 Environmental Humanities 15:3 / November 2023

reservations that soak up the waste of industrialization and the sociosexual effects of
extraction cultures.”17
Formal and subjugated knowledges are very much at stake. Elizabeth Ferry, in her
foreword to this collection, argues that sciences of the earth and the ability to appropri-
ate its powers form a fourth flank to the trinity of colonization, the transatlantic slave

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trade, and capitalism in defining the terms of the present. Drawing on Michel-Rolph
Trouillot, she calls this the “inorganic slot” to emphasize the role of formal and prac-
tical knowledge. Geography and geology are spatially organizing modes of knowledge
that simultaneously expulse, fossilize, and dehumanize Black and Indigenous people,
as Katherine McKittrick argues.18 Yet for McKittrick Black ecologies and geologies forge
counter-cartographies of oceans, land, and people to disrupt such dehumanizing geo-
spatial arrangements. Sylvia Wynter’s dynamic philosophy of praxis refuses any neat
settlement between the natural and social worlds because, as McKittrick emphasizes,
“the natural sciences (geologies, ecologies, and physiologies), human activity (origin
stories) and psychic activity (emotionality) are not only entwined but emerging, simul-
taneously, as knotted knowledge systems that can read our planetary futures outside
market time.”19 Against ongoing colonial legacies, Tiffany Lethabo King takes up the
shoal as a register and metaphor of “liminal space between the sea and land,” making
possible “convergence, gathering, reassembling, and coming together (or apart)” of Black
and Indigenous histories.20 And the shoal is not merely metaphor, when shifting mud-
banks from Jakarta to Guyana serve to catapult Dutch colonial geoengineering into
today’s climatic vulnerability.21
Earth as praxis repoliticizes the planet by exposing the violent processes through
which it has come into being, metaphorically and materially, while providing nuanced
tools for retheorizing what such geosocial formations have excluded, produced, and
made possible.22 The planetary is not a uniform or fixed set of conditions but, rather, a
condition of proliferating material formations of difference, including collective respon-
sibility for and possibility within those differences. We build on Elizabeth Grosz’s explo-
ration of the preindividual and impersonal force of the geologic as the precondition for
the human and for life, complicating any clear distinction between life and inert mat-
ter.23 Grosz’s feminist geophilosophy examines how the “forces of the earth itself” work
prior to, through, and beyond life, constituting the dynamic conditions for material po-
rosities, mutable forms, and constant change.24 In our terms, life and humanity are not

17. Yusoff, Billion Black Anthropocenes, xii.

18. McKittrick, “Rift,” 244. See also Hosbey, Lloréns, and Roane, “Introduction: Global Black Ecologies”;
Pulido and De Lara, “Reimagining ‘Justice’”; and Roane, “Black Ecologies.”
19. McKittrick, “Rift,” 265.
20. King, Black Shoals, 4.
21. See Vaughn, Engineering Vulnerability; and Goh, Form and Flow.
22. Clark and Yusoff, “Geosocial Formations.”
23. Bosworth, “Thinking Permeable”; Grosz, Yusoff, and Clark, “Interview.”
24. Grosz, Yusoff, and Clark, “Interview,” 135.
 Whitington and Oguz / Geology, Power, and the Planetary 149

transcendental entities, but rather are outcomes of the ongoing emergence of earth’s
own capacities for existence. Conversely, contemporary forms of political and economic
domination are not an addendum to the humanity of the Anthropocene, but rather are
fully constitutive of the planetary formation itself. Thus, emergent geopolitical and geo-
social formations are collective, deeply unequal, nonhomogeneous, and nonuniversal.

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The planetary, then, is perhaps best not understood in holistic or all-encompassing
terms, even while totalizing forms of earth systems science have become dominant and
vital. For Jennifer Gabrys, who is primarily concerned with technological mediations
of the planetary, “becoming planetary” involves an attention to questions of “colonial
imaginations and control, of racial and economic exclusions, of environmental injus-
tices, and of universal science and global abstractions that might be de-figured, super-
seded, and transformed in the search for more open and just ways of being human and
planetary that are still to be re-imagined.”25 In that sense, planetarity is central to what
Elizabeth Povinelli calls the four axioms of existence that cross the historicity of these
forms of domination with the ontological entanglements of planetary existence, with-
out requiring anything like a collectively experienced, singular planetary event.26 How-
ever, the emphasis on praxis serves to insist that, whatever the considerable insights
of critical theory, ultimately people’s intimate and embodied relations with the earth
will make possible human capacities for geosocial existence that can contend with the
deeply unequal and far from homogeneous collective predicament faced today. Praxis
is perhaps one condition of possibility for learning to live on a new earth.

Praxis as Possibility
Earth as praxis emerges most directly from Sylvia Wynter’s radical humanist project
that emphasizes the differentiating, plural, and nonessentialist modalities of being
human as praxis.27 Wynter draws this formulation from Fanon’s criticism of the de-
humanizing effects of the human sciences that objectified peoples as naturalistic objects,
mere animals. Those sciences of colonial and racial governance are the ancestors of econ-
omistic, behavioral, and normative psychosocial sciences today. Fanon showed the extent
to which humanism as a universal project was terrified of the wretched of the earth.28
By contrast, being human as a praxis invalidates both the transcendental human—in
the figure of Man or Humanity—and its scientific, insect-like empirical counterparts,
those real people whose plurality becomes the object of power through measurement
and dissection. Wynter’s radical humanism rests on a critique of “monohumanism,”
the imposition of a singular view of what it means to be human, inevitably with Euro-
pean overrepresentation of male whiteness as the very paradigm of humanity.29 By
contrast, the constant pluralizing efforts of being human bring into the foreground

25. Gabrys, “Becoming Planetary,” n.p.; her emphasis.

26. Povinelli, Between Gaia and Ground.
27. Wynter and McKittrick, “Unparalleled Catastrophe”; Scott and Wynter, “Re-enchantment of Humanism.”
28. Fanon, Wretched of the Earth.
29. Wynter and McKittrick, “Unparalleled Catastrophe,” 66.
150 Environmental Humanities 15:3 / November 2023

the whole domain of the symbolic without reference to an underlying universality.

As McKittrick puts it, “We fictively auto-institute or pseudospeciate ourselves as hy-
bridly human.”30 Rather than deficient or exemplary versions of the same, we have the
affirmation of real differences.
Into Wynter’s powerful vision of a politics of affirmative difference, earth as praxis

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builds the constitutive earthly powers as a renaturalization of the planet’s habitability.31
Forms of being human rely on, take advantage of, and ally themselves with the powers
of the earth both for creative and emancipatory politics and through the dehumanizing
politics of domination and expropriation. Earth as praxis demonstrates that the plane-
tary emerges not as an abstract universal category newly available to thought but as
the immanent outcome of a myriad material-discursive formations. For example, Alexis
Pauline Gumbs’s recent twist on being ocean as praxis presents a species-unraveling
encounter with slavery, climate change, and the challenge they pose to scientific and
other narratives about what it means to be human.32 By stressing the dynamic, inten-
sive, and situated engagements with earth processes and material formations, scholar-
ship can help identify the far-reaching but open-ended potential for alternative futures.
By emphasizing this position, we part ways from current efforts to theorize the
planetary human as a telos brought into being by collective calamity.33 This position has
no need for species-being self-recognition or the singularity of a defining political event.34
Being human as a praxis enables a shift from nouns (planet, human, race, species, popu-
lation) to verb-form processes that establish multiple genres of being humanly—and
being earthly. Praxis thus requires and makes possible an ongoing commitment to col-
lective learning and transformation.
A central aspect of praxis lends weight to a materialist theory of collective subjec-
tivity and subjection, what Michelle Murphy has called “reading Foucault as a material-
ist.”35 Yusoff argues that the “praxis of geology was used as an instrument of deforma-
tion in the possibilities of collective subjective and ecological life for black and brown
communities,” stressing both the mode of subjection and the powers of “praxis for
remaking other selves that were built in the harshest of conditions.”36 This aspect is
closest to Antonio Gramsci’s understanding of praxis as breaking open didactic and
totalizing theories in favor of historically dynamic, nondeterministic, and materialist
processes of collective subject formation.37 Praxis thus has crucial diagnostic utility,

30. Wynter and McKittrick, “Unparalleled Catastrophe,” 25.

31. On renaturalization, see Saldanha, “Reontologising Race”; Sharp, Spinoza. See also Grosz, Chaos,
Territory, Art; Yusoff et al., “Geopower”; Weheliye, Habeas Viscus.
32. Gumbs, “Being Ocean as Praxis.”
33. Chakrabarty, Climate of History in a Planetary Age; Balibar, Citizen Subject; Mbembe, Out of the Dark
Night.
34. Povinelli, Between Gaia and Ground, referring to her third axiom.
35. Murphy, Sick Building Syndrome, 181.
36. Yusoff, Billion Black Anthropocenes, ii.
37. Femia, Gramsci’s Political Thought, 66–81.
 Whitington and Oguz / Geology, Power, and the Planetary 151

even while it works to recuperate historical agency and provide a strategic orientation
to action by emphasizing collectively powerful relations to the earth.
In Paolo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, praxis represents the possibility of learn-
ing and a rejection of dehumanizing social processes, much in the way Wynter’s read-
ing of Fanon is a rejection of dehumanizing discourses of the human sciences. It means

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putting ideals of liberation into practice and affirming their commitments, risked in an
“act of love.”38 We consider this a redistribution of affects, such as Stephanie Wakefield’s
recent rejection of the disempowering crisis rhetoric of the Anthropocene.39 Kasia Pap-
rocki has documented a practice of anticipatory ruination in World Bank–led climate
adaptation programs, which also depends on an affective distribution.40 Against this
we join numerous calls for a politics of viability in the renewed experimentation with
distinctive ways of inhabiting the earth. We are not learning to die in the Anthropo-
cene, as Roy Scranton has argued, but learning how to live on the earth, which requires,
as Robin Wall Kimmerer teaches, new forms of attentive patience as much as the recu-
peration of historical agency.41 Praxis can thus be a synonym for learning if that is taken
as ethically formative and engaged with conditions of collective viability and not as an
extractive process of accumulation.
Our understanding of earth as praxis emphasizes three lines of engagement: inhu-
man territorializations, becoming geological, and planetary predicaments. Over the past sev-
eral centuries, global social relations have become geological by being suffused with
mineral and fossil energy relations, without which most people living today would not
be who they are. This implies the need to be attentive to the longue durée formative pro-
cesses that constitute the present. At the same time, powerful inhuman natures of the
earth are undergoing a profound renaturalization as a function of a wide range of de-
stabilizing anthropogenic forcings. The planetary predicament faced today is to figure
out what forms of being human can fully consider what it means to inhabit an earth that
is rapidly becoming unlike any world for which most of our collective systems have been
built. In the rest of this introduction, we discuss these lines of engagement along with
this special section’s accompanying articles.

Inhuman Territorializations
Inhuman territorializations refers to the processes through which the earth has been
subjected to modes of expropriative power and, in turn, how such practices participate
in the constitution of dehumanized, racialized, dispossessed, or exhausted bodies and
peoples. States, militaries, and security apparatuses have systematically sought to terri-
torialize and weaponize powerful earth relations as tools of surveillance, occupation, or

38. Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 50.

39. Wakefield, Anthropocene Back Loop.
40. Paprocki, Threatening Dystopias.
41. Scranton, Learning to Die; Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, 48–50.
152 Environmental Humanities 15:3 / November 2023

counterinsurgency. In occupied Palestine, for example, archaeological, hydrological, and

subterranean knowledge have all been instrumental to Israeli claims of indigeneity and
processes of state-making and territorialization.42 In Turkey’s Kurdish-populated re-
gions, limestone caves scattered throughout the Upper Tigris Valley have been central
to the Turkish state’s attempts to exert and secure territorial power, but also to the

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ways that Kurds in Turkey have attempted to unsettle colonial state power and territo-
rial politics.43 As terrain is weaponized, however, what Derek Gregory calls “the obdu-
rate and resistant forces of an inhuman nature” also complicate such efforts. Gaston
Gordillo refers to the “irreducible materiality” of the “raw excess of terrain” that hinders
or enhances human actions.44
Processes of extraction, settlement, and knowledge of the earth leave racializing,
toxic, and often dissociative traces in living bodies and geological strata. In her contri-
bution to this special section, Andrea Marston traces the trajectory of dehumanizing ter-
ritorializations through the lens of transcontinental circulations of tin. Analyzing this
process through a Marxian and geo-philosophical attention to the uneven metabolic
processes embedded in tin canning, Marston unpacks the violent distribution of tin’s
extraction, circulation, and consumption across geosocial strata in the form of discarded
tin cans and pulmonary fibrosis that unevenly affects human bodies.
In Zeynep Oguz’s contribution, uneven geosocial traces are found not only in Tur-
key’s extractive operations but also in the workings of warfare. Her ethnographic account
of state-led oil shale exploration in western Turkey during the eruption of war between
Kurdish freedom fighters and the Turkish state in southeastern Turkey demonstrates
the structural links between and everyday disavowal of resource exploration and anti-
Kurdish warfare. Holding two seemingly disparate forms of violence together, Oguz
reveals the “interscalar connections between the geographically, temporally, and strati-
graphically distributed forms of violence” in a moment of planetary inequality and
ecological endangerment (see Oguz, this issue). Her ethnographic account further dem-
onstrates how emergent geosocial relations between people and rocks carry the possi-
bility of reckoning with anti-Kurdish war and violence.
Jerry Zee offers a transpacific and multitemporal take on Asian racialization and
geological works centered on Richmond, British Columbia. He unpacks today’s luxury
construction boom financed by Chinese capital as a physical geological formation—a pro-
cess of orogeny—with uncanny echoes of the extensive use of exploited Chinese manual
labor for the systematic terraformation of the region’s muddy coastal islands for white
settlement in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Drawing on both themes
of inhuman territorializations and becoming geological, Zee theorizes orogenesis for
the social sciences to identify “seismic collisions of Asian racialization, capital liquidity,

42. Abu El-Haj, Facts on the Ground; Weizman, Hollow Land.

43. Oguz, “Cavernous Politics.”
44. Gregory, Colonial Present, 39; Gordillo, “Terrain as Insurgent Weapon,” 61.
 Whitington and Oguz / Geology, Power, and the Planetary 153

and evolving soil dynamics that transform river deltas into islands studded with con-
crete” (see Zee, this issue).

Becoming Geological
Zee’s article shows that not only has the earth become humanized, but human beings

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in their plurality have become shot through with geological relations. But the point of
emphasizing this way of thinking is not to return to an anthropocentric focus. Nor is
it only to insist on the agentic powers of the earth, although we fully subscribe to that
perspective. Rather, we contend that the many ways that people exist are thoroughly
constituted by so many mineralogical, geological, and planetary relations, to the point
that people cannot be who they are without them. Becoming geological emphasizes
the sheer durability of geosocial relations inscribed in material fact. It also reveals how
subjectifying powers work through distinctive energy forms such as coal or gas, or, con-
versely, how the planetary can function through absent presences and impossibilities.
As Jerome Whitington suggests in his article, becoming geological expresses the mani-
fold ways that geological relations have differentially constituted human ways of being.
Tom Özden-Schilling’s intimate ethnographic work with a new kind of mineral
prospecting in British Columbia, Canada, demonstrates how settler relations to land
are geological. As the timber economy exhausts itself, many settlers and some Indige-
nous communities have turned to “desktop prospecting,” by which they review detailed
digital information looking for signs of commercially relevant mineral deposits. Hence,
specific forms of subjectivity and subjection combine to enable these communities to
remain financially viable in the face of long-standing boom-and-bust cycles of extrac-
tion and exhaustion. What Mishuana Goeman calls the “settler grammar” of place here
mutates at the same time that it replicates itself, while it is also clear that settlers’ cul-
tural preoccupation concerns a basic apprehension about what kind of place constitutes
home.45
Becoming geological thus tracks many of the “emic” considerations associated with
cultural and historical specificity, yet without demanding anything like an overt sym-
bolic or discursive regime to make the case of cultural relevance. Nigel Clark and Re-
becca Whittle’s article offers a provocative reconsideration of human evolutionary biol-
ogy that brings together both climatological theories of human evolution centered on
the African Rift Valley and theories related to the critical importance of distributed com-
munal childcare arrangements for human cognitive evolution. Taking paleobiology seri-
ously from the vantage of the social, they propose that “seismic and volcanic activity” of
the African Rift Valley “played key roles in the shaping of a distinctive ‘human niche’”
and thus pushed forward more rapidly certain aspects of hominin evolution. In doing
so, they question widespread assumptions in the humanities about “ontological recon-
ciliation between humans and nature that risk exacerbating the very problems they
seek to resolve” (see Clark and Whittle, this issue).

45. Goeman, “Disrupting a Settler-Colonial Grammar of Place.”

154 Environmental Humanities 15:3 / November 2023

In his contribution, Adam Bobbette invites geohumanities scholars to reckon with

the complicated and often uncomfortable history of geopoetics. Presenting an alterna-
tive political history of geopoetics rooted in the colonial politics of Indonesia and Cold
War geosciences, Bobbette’s contribution demonstrates that geopoetry was the cutting
edge of colonial expansion, a form of enchantment that sought to discredit Islamic syn-

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cretic cosmologies and helped shape contemporary standard narratives of earth his-
tory. For Bobbette, “contemporary geopoets might balk at such strategies as a view-from-
nowhere, or raise difficult questions about the political motivations behind aspiring to
such a position, or draw attention to the worlds that were violently erased through ex-
actly such totalizing, universalizing, and mononaturalist European modernist visions”
(see Bobbette, this issue).

Planetary Predicaments
As with the many, now old, debates attempting to resolve the binarism of globalization
and localism, the tension between earth as an abstraction and earth as a congeries of
the particular continues to confuse and distract, such as in Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Hege-
lian dialectics of the planetary.46 Here we emphasize Gramsci’s core insight concerning
praxis, when he underscored the passage from Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach: “All myster-
ies which lead theory to mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and
in the comprehension of this practice.”47 This observation holds for the planetary. In-
deed, the transcendental metaphysics of planet and human have emerged historically
alongside each other. By emphasizing distinctive earth praxes all over the world, which
are neither independent of each other nor compose a unity—many of which do invoke
provincial universalisms of the earth as their raison d’être—we believe that earth as
praxis obviates many of the conceptual distractions of universalizing terms like planet
and human.
Developing alternative planetary methodologies captures something of what we
mean by the term predicament. Predicament implies a situation or a state of affairs, espe-
cially one that is tenuous, unpleasant, or challenging, but ultimately one that is not pre-
given or obvious or that can be assumed to take on the appearance of a concrete fact. A
predicament must be diagnosed within a historical moment that is never quite up to
the task; as a result, it evokes an on-the-ground, fluid temporality that constantly must
recompose its mottled ethics and politics.48 It draws on Deleuze and Guattari’s sense of
a “cramped” minor philosophy of difference and presents an image of the planet very dif-
ferent from that of a passive condition or preexisting unproblematic ground for human
action—the mastery neither of ourselves nor of the earth.49

46. Chakrabarty, Climate of History in a Planetary Age.

47. Marx in Vogel, “What Is the ‘Philosophy of Praxis’?,” 19–20, citing the eighth thesis.
48. Zylinska, Minimal Ethics; Whyte, “Indigenous Science (Fiction) for the Anthropocene”; Liboiron, Pollu-
tion Is Colonialism; Simpson and Smith, “Introduction.”
49. Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, 17.
 Whitington and Oguz / Geology, Power, and the Planetary 155

Whitington’s take on the emergence of earth sciences in the eighteenth and nine-
teenth centuries underscores something of Europeans’ pervasive racial anxieties pro-
voked by planetary projects of conquest and domination that came to be concentrated
by and expressed through geology and related sciences. If geology subtended questions
about European superiority, this was related partly to the post-Enlightenment experi-

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ence of a secular, finite, rocky, and contingent earth that was paradoxically not assumed
to be made providentially for the sake of human existence. Even so, the philosophical
isomorphism between the unitary earth and a unitary humanity, underwritten now by
the powerful syntheses of earth system science, today frames a kind of retrograde belief
that we cannot live without a specific commitment to Enlightenment reason.50
Planetary predicaments indicate a constitutive time that is abstracted, calculated,
and governed, yet at the same time shot through with alterity, uncertainty, and appre-
hension. In this regard, Ballestero’s article shows how notions of the Anthropocene or
planetarity are embedded in knowledge habits inherited from Imperial and Cold War
logics and often presume the existence of an all-encompassing observer who can grasp
the unity of the planet as such. Breaking from the ideal of a universal observer, her ac-
count offers an alternative methodological route for tracking geological resonance
across geological and everyday scales through her emphasis on the practices of casual
planetarities.
A predicament must be faced, that is, both composed as such and confronted. As a
wide range of scholars have increasingly come to insist, the planetary challenges that
humans currently face are neither homogeneous nor disconnected from each other,
neither reducible to a singular global history nor to be addressed by a politics of ruina-
tion. T. J. Demos has noted that “if the end of the world proves profitable for some,
then environmental humanities discourse invoking depoliticized geology only aids in
further distraction.”51 In particular, we push back on the many versions of apocalyptic
crisis narrative to emphasize a creative affirmation of the possibilities for reimagining
what it means to live on a planet. This calls for a much richer appraisal of the capacities
of the earth for making possible human and more-than-human flourishing.

JEROME WHITINGTON is an anthropologist and clinical assistant professor of environmental

anthropology at New York University whose research focuses on climate, energy, and ecology,
often in Southeast Asia. He is completing a book manuscript titled “Experimental Earth: A Specu-
lative Anthropology of Climate Change.” He is the author of Anthropogenic Rivers: The Production
of Uncertainty in Lao Hydropower (2018).

ZEYNEP OGUZ is an anthropologist and lecturer in social anthropology at the University of Edin-
burgh. Her research focuses on resource politics, extraction, and the geological in the Middle East
and the Eastern Mediterranean. Her current book project is titled “Unsettling Grounds: Oil, State
Power, and Earth Politics in Turkey.”

50. Chakrabarty, Climate of History in a Planetary Age, 34.

51. Demos, Beyond the World’s End, 8.
156 Environmental Humanities 15:3 / November 2023

Acknowledgments
We would like to thank the participants of the “Geological Anthropology” panel at the 2019 American
Anthropological Association meeting, the anonymous peer reviewers, and the editors of Environmen-
tal Humanities.

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