Toward Planetary Entanglement

With its tendrils reaching through our everyday lives into distant landscapes across the entire planet, human development can no longer be subsumed under the category of the 'City', or as the antithesis of the ‘Wilderness’. Today we confront the convergence of technological systems, ecosystems, and socio-economic forces in a field of entanglement. The functions and processes of ecosystems, once set apart as the antithesis of the city, are becoming recognised as agents within urban development, while at the same time, artificial materials produced by industry reach our most 'pristine' 'wilderness'.

To acknowledge our planetary entanglement means to de-centre the taken-for-granted idea of the 'human' as the benchmark of intelligence and agency in the world, and to build connections across difference; across culture, across geography, across time, across species, across kind.

The traditional distinctions modern knowledge institutes have been built on presume a neat separation of the natural from the human-made. Such categories fall apart when our human-made 'technologies' end up creating 'natural' disasters. When mono-crop agriculture produces dust bowls and irrecoverable biodiversity loss at planetary scale. Or when machines start to ‘reason’ as we thought only a human could.

By taking seriously the concept of entanglement, we acknowledge the unanticipated consequences and agential forces, ecological and technological, over which we have no complete control. From the weathering of soils to the circulation of molecules in our atmosphere, from internet infrastructures to extractive industries and their supply chains, from the mycelial transport networks delivering nutrients and energy throughout forests, to the microbiomes of our own bodies.

We might begin to think of the planet as not a resource but a collaborator, a correspondent, or a co-conspirator, which we reason with. 'Nature' will attend the table of human politics, whether we like it or not. So, we should work toward building a planetary literacy of entanglement with worlds of difference; with the human and the more than human agents and intelligences of our planet.