-
Full text
-
Geography Compass
-
REVIEW ARTICLE
OPEN ACCESS
Planetary Futures: On Life in Critical Times
Julia Verne1 | Nadine Marquardt2 | Stefan Ouma3
1Department of Geography, University of Mainz, Mainz, Germany | 2Department of Geography, University of Bonn, Bonn, Germany | 3Department of
Geography / Institute of African Studies, University of Bayreuth, Bayreuth, Germany
Correspondence: Stefan Ouma (stefan.ouma@uni-bayreuth.de)
Received: 14 September 2024 | Revised: 6 January 2025 | Accepted: 10 January 2025
Funding: The DFG for support of their joint research through the project “Shelter technologies in action: humanitarian geographies of precarious housing
across North‐South divides” (VE 978/1‐1, MA 7127/2‐1).
Keywords: anthropocene | habitability | more‐than‐human geographies | planetary turn | planetary urbanization | plantationocene
ABSTRACT
Based upon the opening keynote address at the German Congress of Geography held in Frankfurt am Main in 2023, this article
traces the current debate on the planetary in the humanities, social sciences and Earth System Science in three parts. Instead of
taking the concept of the planetary for granted, we explore the question of how it is reflected in our respective fields of research
(cultural geography, social geography, and economic geography) and what potential it harbors for unearthing new insights. In
particular, we consider the possibilities for a planetarily‐oriented cultural geography beyond anthropocentrism, a social ge-
ography of housing that focuses on the concept of planetary habitability, and an economic geography that centers the trans‐
historical and trans‐geographical impact of plantation logics. From our point of view, the planetary is not simply an addi-
tional scale but rather a style of thought that increasingly characterizes our present. Since natural and social science approaches
meet here in a new way, it seems particularly relevant to ask how we as geographers might allow ourselves to be intrigued and
unsettled by the planetary.
1 |
Introduction
Our title references the motto of the 62nd German Geography
Congress, held in Frankfurt am Main in September 2023
(“Planetary futures”). The following is a slightly amended and
extended translation of the written version of the opening
keynote address we presented on September 20th, 2023. The
written version was originally published as J. Verne/N. Mar-
quardt/S. Ouma (2024), Planetary Futures: Über Leben in kri-
tischen Zeiten.1 Geographische Zeitschrift 112(4): 151‐171. This
version is a translation by Matt Hannah, University of Bayreuth,
Germany.
Though a focus upon the great crises of our time is surely not
surprising, we want to resist taking the term “planetary” in
“Planetary Futures” as self‐evident. As is to be expected in light of
this overarching theme, we are concerned on the one hand with a
dialog between natural‐ and social‐scientific perspectives. Yet our
address is also essentially the result of a dialog between the three
of us on the potentials of the concept of the planetary for geog-
raphy, and a reflection upon the ways in which a planetary
perspective is currently being taken up or could be taken up in
diverse subdisciplines. Our own fields of cultural geography (Julia
Verne), social geography (Nadine Marquardt) and economic ge-
ography (Stefan Ouma) serve here as illustrations.
[Correction added on 31 January 2025, after first online publication: The section heading numbers have been updated in this version.]
Translator's note: The German Geography Congress (Deutscher Kongress für Geographie or DKG) is held every two years and is the largest conference of German‐speaking geographers, drawing
participants from Germany, Switzerland and Austria as well as other parts of the world. It is the German‐language equivalent of the AAG or the RGS/IBG (although an increasing number of keynotes
and sessions are held in English).
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly
cited.
© 2025 The Author(s). Geography Compass published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
Geography Compass, 2025; 19:e70015
1 of 12
https://doi.org/10.1111/gec3.70015
2 |
Planetary Futures I (Julia Verne)
2.1 |
From Global to Planetary: The Planetary
Turn in the Humanities and Social Sciences
It wasn't so long ago that we talked above all about “global-
ization”. The motto of the DKG in Hamburg in 1999, “locally
anchored, globally connected”, was not only appropriate for the
Hanseatic host city2 but also an expression of a “global turn” in
geography. As in the social sciences and humanities more
broadly, globalization and perspectives on the global have
occupied our attention for almost 30 years. And although the
conversation at the DKG in Kiel in 20193 already indicated an
interest in new departures and upheavals, we appear now to
have finally arrived in a new, “planetary age”.
As the historian Dipesh Chakrabarty put it in his 2021
book The Climate of History in a Planetary Age, [o]urs
is not just a global age; we live on the cusp of the global
and what may be called ‘the planetary’. In thinking of
the last few centuries of human pasts and of human
futures yet to come we need to orient ourselves to both
what we have come to call the globe and to a new
historical‐philosophical entity called the planet.
(Chakrabarty 2021, 3)
But what exactly is meant here by the planetary? And how does
it relate to the global? The starting point for Chakrabarty's
thoughts on the planetary is the question of whether the
“global” in globalization really means the same thing as in
global warming. Or whether the term global in these two con-
texts does not actually express two linked but very different
ways to think of the planet and the relation between humans
and the Earth (see Chakrabarty 2018).
The narrative of globalization essentially concerned the creation
of global markets and exchange relations between different
parts of the world—thus the global in globalization focused
chiefly upon a history of humankind. From Chakrabarty's
perspective, however, such a “global” perspective is inadequate
to the task of understanding the new historical‐philosophical
entity we call the planet. Our present is thus marked by a
growing divergence between the meanings of the terms “global”
and “planetary” (Chakrabarty 2018, 266).
Gayatri Spivak, too, engages with both terms, indeed already in
1997—at the highpoint of the globalization debate—in an
invited lecture for the Swiss foundation Dialogik. This lecture
would later be published under the title Imperative to re‐imagine
the planet (Spivak 1999), and would play a prominent role in her
work Death of a Discipline (Spivak 2003).
I propose the planet to overwrite the globe. Global-
ization is the imposition of the same system of ex-
change everywhere. In the gridwork of electronic
capital, we achieve that abstract ball covered in lati-
tudes and longitudes, cut by virtual lines […]. The
globe is in our computers. No one lives there. It allows
us to think that we can aim to control it. The planet is
in the species of alterity,4 belonging to another system;
and yet we inhabit it, on loan.
(Spivak 2003, 72)
Although the global of globalization appears concrete, it is not
the world we live in. The planetary, by contrast, stands for the
encounter with the other, on whom we live and with whose
alterities we inhabit the Earth together (Bonneuil 2020, 6).
Building on this idea, a planetary turn has developed in recent
years in the social sciences and humanities. Here it is essentially
a matter of turning from the global ‐ as a political, capitalist,
technocratic system that grasps the planet as a surface funda-
mentally determined by humans ‐ toward the planetary, a shift
intended to resist the totalizing, anthropocentric concept of
globalization and to perceive the planet instead as “world‐
ecology” (Elias and Moraru 2015, xvi; on the concept of world‐
ecology see Moore 2003).
Of course, this consciousness of the “coincidence of world‐
system and Earth‐system”, and thus of the biophysical di-
mensions of the world (Reghezza‐Zitt 2015, 79, 45) has its
predecessors—differentiated by Bonneuil and Fressoz (2016)
into six grammars of ecological reflexivity. Yet it is the crises
triggered by globalization that have clearly highlighted the
planetary or the necessity of thinking in planetary terms; the
categories of modernity simply no longer seem adequate either
to grasp or to respond to current dynamics.
In this turn to the planetary, the planet in its specific materiality
becomes available for theorizing as a non‐negotiable ecological
basis of human and non‐human life. Earthly phenomena infil-
trate our conceptual deliberations, they become part of the way
we see the world and they find a place among our interpretive
categories (Elias and Moraru 2015).
2.2 |
Debates Between Planetary Turn and
Planetary Boundaries
With this focus upon the physical basis of the planet it is no
surprise that the influence of the planetary turn reaches beyond
the humanities and social sciences. A view of the planetary was
an essential foundation for the establishment of Earth System
Science. In contrast to the framework of globalization, which
attends to our globe alone, Earth System Science draws upon
observations of other planets in developing a picture of the
Earth. In this sense as well, an engagement with global warming
drives a wedge between the global (the Earth alone) and the
planetary (the Earth as one among a number of planets).
Nevertheless, this does not mean that scholars in the human-
ities, social sciences and natural sciences are in complete
agreement with their conceptions of the planetary. And in our
view, this is a decisive point with special relevance for us as
geographers!
In the quest to comprehend human effects upon the Earth
system, the concept of planetary boundaries has become a
prominent touchstone. The specific perspective on the planetary
2 of 12
Geography Compass, 2025
17498198, 2025, 1, Downloaded from https://compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/gec3.70015 by Universitätsbibliothek Bayreuth, Wiley Online Library on [03/03/2026]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License
crisis that it implies is certainly the view most often referenced
at this conference when trying to establish a connection to the
conference theme. Many colleagues may interpret a planetary
perspective as simply equivalent to a view of planetary
boundaries.
From our perspective, however, there are a few essential dif-
ferences that need to be considered more carefully. As most of
you present in this lecture hall today are probably aware, the
model of planetary boundaries was developed by a research
group at the Stockholm Resilience Center and introduced into the
debate in 2009. Against the background of the Anthropocene‐
thesis that humans have become the central geological factor,
the model defines safe operating spaces for humanity within
which resource‐use and CO2‐emissions can take place without
threatening key support systems for life on Earth. Some of the
planetary boundaries cannot yet be quantified, others have
already been crossed (Rockström et al. 2009; Steffen et al. 2011).
Thus, not only the necessity but the urgency of countermeasures
becomes clear. For, once planetary boundaries are exceeded,
there is no going back, and the habitability of the Earth hangs in
the balance—a theme Nadine Marquardt will pursue further in
the second section of our talk.
Natural scientists thus agree in principle with social scientists
and humanities scholars that we humans must alter our rela-
tionship to the planet we inhabit as decisively and as soon as
possible. The goal of their measurements and models is to
calculate how the state of the Earth in the Holocene—the only
era of Earth's history that represents a safe operating space for us
—can be maintained. It is a question of upholding the status
quo; this is to be achieved with the help of what has been
termed Earth system governance, or a new planetary stewardship
(Steffen et al. 2011), which places its faith primarily in techno-
logical innovations. This approach, however, continues to
follow
a
modernist
paradigm
(see
Dürbeck
2018;
Bier-
mann 2021). In this respect, exclusive attention to quantitative
statistical series as it dominates Earth System Sciences fore-
grounds a view from outside that erases every geographical and
social differentiation in favor of aggregated socio‐economic
factors (see Heymann 2019). Anonymous processes take the
place of concrete historical practices leading to “paralyzing ab-
stractions of planetary politics” (Mahony 2022, 706).
The planetary turn, however, takes a different approach. Its
impetus is to break with the still‐dominant techno‐scientific
framing of Earth system change and to ensure that humanity's
engagement with the planetary crisis is shaped in a more mul-
tivocal and open way that acknowledges the political dimension
of how the crisis is represented (Bonneuil and Fressoz 2016, 71).
Social science and humanities scholars thus strive for a
concretization of the analysis and the rejection of universalizing
approaches. It is ultimately not “humanity” that is the
destructive
force,
but
rather
concrete,
historically
and
geographically locatable societies, modes of economic activity
and social groups—a point taken up in more detail primarily by
Stefan Ouma in the third part of our talk.
Against this background it should come as no surprise, as long
as the idea of Earth system change and of the natural‐scientific
approach to the Anthropocene continues to hold sway, that
social scientists and humanities researchers feel increasingly
uncomfortable with the grand claims emanating from the pre-
vailing paradigm (Castree 2017). Among the strong reservations
of critics is the sense that “natural scientists have learned little
from critical social thought about the close relationship between
power and knowledge—and especially about the problems
associated with speaking on behalf of others” (Clark and
Szerszynski 2021, 34). In this regard it seems crucial to ask
ourselves how planetary thinking informs human geography
and in what ways this may challenge or alter common, often
rather natural scientific understandings of how to approach life
in critical times.
In what follows we will discuss the possible implications of
planetary thinking for our different fields of research. I will
begin by briefly sketching out how planetary thinking is
impacting cultural geography at the moment, particularly
regarding the question of the relations between humans and
nature, one of my own research areas.
2.3 |
Toward a Planetary Cultural Geography
A focus on planetary thinking calls into question the usual
separation between humans and the environment. As Shee,
Woods, and Kong (2023, 2) have recently pointed out, “it has
ushered in a philosophical moment that challenges us to radi-
cally rethink our existence in the cosmos, and to reorientate
ourselves to the complexities and messiness of becoming‐with‐
others”. The goal is now no longer to elevate humans above the
world in the sense of the Enlightenment, and to deduce from
humankind's special position a right to exploit nature for its
own purposes. Instead of understanding ourselves as “global
agents” or “stewards” of the Earth it is more appropriate to see
ourselves, in Spivak's sense, as “planetary subjects” (Spi-
vak 2003, 73), and to behave accordingly.
“Posthumanism” has by now become an established theoretical
framework within which to think of humans as one among a
range of equally entitled parts of the world, and to attempt
finally to overcome the dualistic picture of the world that has
shaped cultural geography for so long.
Among other things, this directs our attention to the liveliness
of the non‐human world—Anderson speaks here of a “prolif-
eration of life” (Anderson 2020, 612)—in cultural geography. In
view of an “eventful Earth and cosmos” (Clark and Yusoff 2017,
4), the idea of life and liveliness is troubled and expanded as
cultural geographers ask “how planetary dynamics, geological
disjunctures and Earth‐historical trajectories may themselves
have left their mark on the social beings we have variously
become” (ibid., 5). Here it is a matter of engaging all the more
strongly, from a cultural‐geographic perspective, with the so‐
called critical zone, the thin layer in which water, soil, subsoil
and the living world come together and where human and non‐
human life, as well as the resources that make this life possible,
are concentrated (see e.g. Mahony 2022; Hawkins 2023).
This focus brings out two essential points: first, the fore-
grounding of the critical zone is intended to make clear that a
3 of 12
17498198, 2025, 1, Downloaded from https://compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/gec3.70015 by Universitätsbibliothek Bayreuth, Wiley Online Library on [03/03/2026]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License
planetary cultural geography must move beyond the universal-
ism initially suggested by a planetary perspective. In contrast to
the planetary as an all‐encompassing scale—a planetarism from
above or from outside, we need a planetarism from below on the
basis of concrete landscapes and places (Jazeel 2011). This in-
cludes a particular attention to seemingly peripheral, alternative
or marginalized environmental knowledges (see e.g. the recent
discussion in Bulkeley and McFarlane 2024).
Second, these places and landscapes are no longer to be un-
derstood as a stage for the presentation of a human history
shaped by humans according to their interests, but as them-
selves living protagonists (Ghosh 2016, 6). As Anna Tsing puts it
in her work on the global trade in Matsutake mushrooms:
Over the past few decades many kinds of scholars have
shown that allowing only human protagonists into our
stories is not just ordinary human bias. It is a cultural
agenda tied to dreams of progress through moderni-
zation. There are other ways of making worlds.
(Tsing 2015, 155–156)
For
making worlds is not limited to humans […]; in fact, all
organisms make ecological living places, altering
earth, air, water. Without the ability to make workable
living arrangements, species would die out. In the
process, each organism changes everyone’s world.
(Tsing 2015, 22)
The research that emerges from this perspective seeks to tease
out the close interweaving of ecological and social forces in
specific places and processes, and thus the manifold forms of life
(in contrast to classically understood ways of life) (Ander-
son 2020) that express the inseparability of life and form (see
Porting et al. 2020).
To return to the essential point: Although cultural geography
has long been concerned with relations between humans and
world (typically as Um‐Welt), it has foregrounded the social
construction and political steering of this relationship in the
context of globalization. The planetary perspective moves our
gaze beyond the political constitution of the world. It radically
questions the idea of controllability and the associated anthro-
pocentrism, and instead asks what the world actually does with
us, how it affects us, and what it demands of us.
3 |
Planetary Futures II (Nadine Marquardt)
3.1 |
From the Global to the Planetary: Planetary
Urbanization
The shift from the global to the planetary described by Julia
Verne has left prominent traces in geography, above all in the
area of urban research. Work on Global Cities around the
millennium was followed in the 2010s by the debate around
planetary urbanization. In contrast to Global City research, the
planetary urbanization discourse is not so concerned with
networks between global financial centers, social inequalities
within metropoles, or worldwide flows of capital and labor
power organized by Global Cities. Instead, work on planetary
urbanization is focused upon relations between city and hin-
terland. It asks how capitalist processes of urbanization also
shape spaces far away from cities: agricultural regions, forests,
oceans, deserts. It becomes clear from this perspective that
urbanization non only alters the immediate surroundings of
cities but also intervenes in metabolic processes of planetary
scope.
If a global urban age is indeed currently dawning, this
circumstance cannot be understood adequately with
reference to the formation of global cities or large‐
scale
megacity
regions,
but
requires
systematic
consideration of the tendential, if uneven, operation-
alization of the entire planet—including terrestrial,
subterranean, oceanic and atmospheric space—to serve
an accelerating, intensifying process of urban indus-
trial development.
(Brenner 2014, 20f; emphasis added)
In line with this expanded understanding of the urban, the
cover of Neil Brenner's book Implosions/Explosions. Toward a
Study of Planetary Urbanization shows not a city but a scene of
fossil resource extraction: a tar‐sands mining area in Canada.
Research around planetary urbanization calls upon us to see
these landscapes as central settings of capitalist urbanization.
Planetary urbanization is hotly debated in geographical research
on cities. I, too, could draw a series of demarcation lines here.
For the purposes of our talk, however, another, more general
point is more important. Research on planetary urbanization
clearly shows that the conceptual shift to the planetary in ge-
ography is accompanied by stronger attention to material re-
sources and the ecological effects of urbanization, a keener
interest in mapping its planetary imprint.
3.2 |
Exploited or Unavailable Nature?
Discussions of planetary urbanization emphasize above all the
scope of exploitation and the destructive terraforming of the
Earth by capitalism. The figure of the planetary in this debate
signals that capitalist processes have attained the highest scale,
that they operate “without an outside”.
For some geographers, however, research on planetary urbani-
zation does not go far enough—not so much with regard to the
theorization of the urban as in terms of the planet as object and
concept.
Planetary urbanization doesn’t go far enough in its
thinking about and through the Earth […] while the
issue of ‘what is a city?’ is amply addressed, the
question of what a planet is or might be goes unasked.
(Clark 2022, 181)
4 of 12
Geography Compass, 2025
17498198, 2025, 1, Downloaded from https://compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/gec3.70015 by Universitätsbibliothek Bayreuth, Wiley Online Library on [03/03/2026]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License
The figure of the planetary is deployed above all in these strands
of the debate, to which authors such as Nigel Clark or Kathryn
Yusoff (2018) belong, to emphasize the unavailability of nature
—and thus to bring a nature into focus that is not simply an
unproblematically available “resource” which humans as sov-
ereign exploiters can access at will. Instead, we are presented
with a nature that withdraws itself from the human grasp—
because it operates on geological timescales that exceed our
imaginative abilities, and because it follows erratic patterns we
can scarcely predict.
In these debates, too, there is a heavy reliance upon Earth
System Science, which not only shows that the planet consists
of interlinked systems but emphasizes above all how unpre-
dictable these systems are in their complex interactions. The
experience of a nature that is alien, overwhelming and inac-
cessible to humans nevertheless does not contradict the motif
of the Anthropocene, in which humanity has become a
geological force. It is indeed just this massive human inter-
vention that has changed nature in a way that renders our
attempts to dominate it ever more difficult. Nature increas-
ingly follows the pattern of self‐reinforcing rather than self‐
regulating feedback mechanisms, and thus becomes so un-
predictable that it no longer appears as “nature” in the
modern sense. “This ‘nature’ has left behind its traditional
role and now has the power to question us all.” (Sten-
gers 2015, 2):
We are no longer dealing (only) with a wild and
threatening nature, nor with a fragile nature to be
protected, nor a nature to be mercilessly exploited. The
case is new. […] Offended, [the planet] is indifferent to
the question ‘who is responsible?’ and doesn’t act as a
righter of wrongs—it seems clear that the regions of the
earth that will be affected first will be the poorest on the
planet,to say nothing of all those livingbeings that have
nothing to do with the affair. […] It is not a matter of a
‘bad moment that will pass,’ followed by any kind of
happy ending—in the shoddy sense of a ‘problem
solved.’
(Stengers 2015, 46f.).
Nature is no longer the mute foundation with which one can
literally reckon. The transition from the Holocene to the
Anthropocene means the loss of a nature upon which all human
domination and survival strategies up to now could build. In
opposition
to
the
planetary
urbanization
debate,
current
ecological catastrophes stand here not for a further—if prob-
lematic—high point of capitalist valorization of nature and
human history, but rather above all for their termination
(Folkers and Marquardt 2024).
Thus, to speak of the planet means not only to point to the
planetary reach of human interventions but to bring into view
the threatening possibility of a world from which humans have
disappeared as a result of planetary catastrophes. Planetary fu-
tures? Yes, they surely exist—but as it appears at the moment,
probably without us.
3.3 |
Uninhabitable Earth: Planetary Social
Geography
Posthumanist planetary geographies constitute a provocation
for our traditional forms of research and theorizing. Of course,
they cannot replace the analysis of social relations, but they help
us understand what is at stake now. They call attention to the
fact that capitalist domination of nature, portrayed as compre-
hensive in the debate on planetary urbanization, has actually
long since lost control.
How can we take on board this provocation of the planetary
without thereby sacrificing the impulse of critical geography?
Here I would like to give at least some idea of how an answer to
this question might look by addressing my own field of social
geography and, more specifically, the potential for “planetary
housing
research”
(planetare
Wohnforschung5).
Housing
research is represented at this conference by a number of
panels. But what does housing research actually have to say
about the basic challenge to the habitability of the Earth posed
by the climate crisis? Or, to take up again the question Julia
Verne formulated in connection with Clark and Szerszyn-
ski (2021): how can notions of the planetary intrigue, unsettle,
or transform the assumptions on which social‐geographic
housing research is based? And how can we pick up the
social‐critical thread of the planetary urbanization debate, but
also thematize phenomena of unavailability?
It seems a fairly obvious starting point to investigate possibilities
for sustainable habitation. Yet this perspective still only asks
how our dwelling practices can be more or less beneficial to the
planet, or which strategies should be undertaken to render our
habitation less damaging. From the planetary perspective just
sketched, however, the tables need to be turned and the question
posed of how the planet makes dwelling possible or impossible.
In fact, debates around the planetary are full of references to the
habitability of the planet. Prognoses from Earth System Science
foresee a drastic reduction of the human niche—that is, the
regions of the planet (“climate niches”) habitable by humans
(Lenton et al. 2023). The IPCC warns that extensive parts of the
Earth where humans have lived for millenia will already
become uninhabitable in the next few decades with a global
warming of 2 degrees Celsius or more (Pörtner et al. 2022).
Especially Africa, South America, Australia and the Indian
Subcontinent will be impacted, but also large parts of North
America and Southern Europe.
With an eye to the impending uninhabitability of the planet, at-
tempts to comprehend the destruction caused by climate change
in terms not limited to economic costs alone have since reached a
broader public beyond the realm of scholarly debates. Thus for
example, the New York Times bestseller The Uninhabitable Earth
by David Wallace Wells (2019) describes the bleak vision of a
planetary future in which ecological changes create ever‐larger
zones of uninhabitability. The question is no longer how but
rather where it will still be possible to live. The question is not only
that of who dispossesses whom, but of how global warming itself
creates new forms of dispossession by disaster. Thus, housing
5 of 12
17498198, 2025, 1, Downloaded from https://compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/gec3.70015 by Universitätsbibliothek Bayreuth, Wiley Online Library on [03/03/2026]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License
research that takes planetary thinking seriously must become
habitability‐ or uninhabitability‐research.
The question of habitability unsettles the still‐anthropocentric
idea of sustainability. For Chakrabarty, sustainability and
habitability are even complementary terms in which the
different emphases of global versus planetary perspectives
become especially clear:
The difference between the global and the planetary is
perhaps best illustrated by a quick contrast between
[…] the ideas of sustainability and habitability. Sus-
tainability […] owes its development to Europe’s
experience of agriculture and farming at a time of
European expansion and thus belongs firmly to the
history of the global. […] The idea of sustainability puts
human concerns first. […] The key term in planetary
thinking that one could contrapose to the idea of
sustainability in global thought is habitability. Habit-
ability does not reference humans. Its central concern
is life—complex, multicellular life, in general—and
what makes that, not humans alone, sustainable.
What, ask ESS [Earth System Science] specialists,
makes a planet friendly to complex life for hundreds of
millions of years)? […] Humans are not central to the
problem of habitability, but habitability is central to
human existence.
(Chakrabarty 2021, 81ff; emphasis added)
Habitability thus implies a third perspective beyond sustain-
ability or resilience. Contrary to human‐centered notions of
sustainability, the question is not merely that of the long‐term
yield of a nature exploited as resource. But it is also not sim-
ply a question of the resilience of the Earth system as a whole,
which would do just as well without humans. Instead, the
concept of habitability makes it clear that we need to transcend
the narrowmindedness of our view of nature in order to secure
our conditions of life.
There is indeed something unfamiliar about this shift of
perspective. We typically do not consider the planet as our
living‐space—perhaps particular landscapes, but not the Earth
system as a whole. However, as soon as we begin to understand
the planet as our home, we begin as well to sense that we are not
“masters in our own house”. “[T]o invoke the planet [is] to
render our home uncanny” writes Spivak (2003, 72f). Here
Spivak takes up Freud's play on the words heimlich/unheimlich
[secret/uncanny] to highlight her point. In German this play on
words works better than in English: heimlich/unheimlich—both
words contain the root Heim [home], but also the other, the
alien and alarming that eludes our understanding. To speak of
the planet means for Spivak that our own home is becoming
uncanny. It means we realize that we dwell on a planet whose
habitability for humans is not at all self‐evident—and crucially,
will become even less so.
Posing the question of planetary habitability appears to lead
almost inevitably to a convergence of physical‐ and human‐
geographic perspectives, of the natural and social sciences.
Earth System Science is full of formulations that imply an un-
derstanding of the limits of the Earth system as limits to human
habitability, for example “safe operating space for humanity”,
“planetary boundaries” or talk of the “human niche”. Bruno
Latour has recently taken up the concept of the “critical zone”
to make clear how small the portion of the planet is that can
serve as the abode of life. In his view as well, this insight de-
mands a reorientation of materialist social research.
Being materialist, today, means that, on top of the
reproduction of material conditions favourable to
human beings, we need to take into account the
habitability conditions of planet Earth.
(Latour and Schultz 2022, 14)
For social geography as well, it is clearly important to take these
debates seriously and, as Latour has increasingly done in recent
years, to enter into dialog with the natural sciences. At the same
time, I want to warn against simply adopting scientistic de-
marcations of the habitable uncritically from Earth System
Science.
In fact the scientific determination of habitable zones has a long
and inglorious tradition. As Sylvia Wynter (2003) shows, until
1492, Europeans strictly divided the world into habitable and
uninhabitable parts. With the advent of colonialism and the
realization that humans actually lived in the supposedly unin-
habitable regions, the clear coding of habitable/uninhabitable
was rewritten in racist terms. Particular places were understood
as habitable only for certain bodies, and climatic theories argued
that people living outside European climate zones must be
culturally or biologically “underdeveloped”.
European colonialism understood itself from the beginning as a
project of terraforming in which it was a matter of making the
world habitable for European settlers. In this sense, climate
change was a planned colonial project long before being recog-
nized in the present day as an “unintended side‐effect” of
modernity (Beck 2007). Thus “Founding fathers” of the United
States such as Thomas Jefferson, as well as many proto‐
geoscientists of that time, believed that the cultivation of land
could contribute to the development of a more “moderate”, more
“European” climate. The doctrine emerging from such ideas, that
“rain follows the plow,” encouraged European settlers to believe
that they could farm in the deserts of the USA or Australia—the
rain would begin to fall as soon as the soil was turned
(Folkers 2024).
Aside from such phantasms, the project of colonial rule did in
fact alter the environment in the colonies to a significant degree.
Not infrequently, this terraforming damaged the lifeworlds of
indigenous people severely enough to render the land unin-
habitable for them (Saldanha 2020; Whyte 2018). Habitability
for some was purchased at the price of uninhabitability for
others. Placing discourses around habitability in historical
perspective is thus central to a reflexive view of questions of
uninhabitability in the present. It is a fallacy to believe that the
interdisciplinary debate around the climate crisis is in and of
itself a progressive arena of knowledge production in which
6 of 12
Geography Compass, 2025
17498198, 2025, 1, Downloaded from https://compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/gec3.70015 by Universitätsbibliothek Bayreuth, Wiley Online Library on [03/03/2026]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License
natural‐ and social‐scientific analyses can be brought together in
novel ways. As Neel Ahuja (2021) notes:
[C]oncern about global warming as a driving force in
the current displacements is growing, and crisis
thinking is quickly generating depictions of Black and
Brown migrants from Africa and Asia fleeing shrink-
ing zones of habitability. […] Do those discourses offer
pathways for addressing the forces that generate
displacement as a form of structural racism […]? Or
are we witnessing how climate security discourse is
helping to produce new forms of racialization in
speculative constructions of at‐risk groups whose
homes and homelands are configured as uninhabit-
able (and thus, disposable) in a warming world?
(Ahuja 2021, 12f.)
Far from addressing such issues, many current analyses of the
climate crisis reveal instead a new—or, if we glance back at his-
tory, not a new but rather an old—positivism. This new‐old
positivism bandies about terms such as “climate migration”,
“vulnerability”, and again, “habitability”, as though these are self‐
evident phenomena. In the process it leaves in the background
questions of socio‐economic destruction, as well as historical and
ongoing, active processes of making‐uninhabitable.
Thus, social geography must show that habitability cannot be
deduced from climate models. This necessarily means laying out
the political genealogy of ideas of habitability and placing
currently prominent talk of habitability in Earth System Science
within a longer history of ideas regarding the livability of the
planet. The point is not to dismiss or trivialize knowledge of the
disappearance of the human niche. On the contrary, it is a
matter of widening the debate. It is necessary to emphasize the
contested, political character of habitability, addressing socio‐
economic inequalities, racist inclusions and exclusions, and
socio‐technical structures as phenomena that determine habit-
ability and uninhabitability.
4 |
Planetary Futures III (Stefan Ouma)
4.1 |
The Rural Origins of Our Crises
The ideas associated with planetary urbanization are helpful
for positioning cities and their spatially extensive extractive
connections in debates over the Anthropocene within and
beyond geography. As detailed in the previous section, these
ideas raise questions about what remains in a world that is
shaped through and through by urban lifestyles whose de-
mand for ever more resources exceeds what is available on the
planet (Arboleda 2016).
The thesis that there is no longer an “outside” to this world has
not been spared critique. I will not rehearse all the objections
here; but a central question we must confront is the place
granted by researchers in the tradition of Neil Brenner to rural
space and the non‐human realm. The “triumph of the cities”
anchored in such analyses and fixated on the present in fact
loses sight, on the one hand, of the active and historically
constitutive role of “external” rural spaces in the maintenance
of the urban “inside”. The resource‐hunger of cities is located ‐
broadly speaking ‐ in industrialization. Earth System scientists,
as well, take this as a starting point for problematizing the or-
igins of our current malaise, many of them fixing the era be-
tween 1800 and 1850 as the point of departure for their analyses
of the planetary geological impacts of humanity. It is industri-
alization that successively incorporates the rural outside as an
objectified resource‐space (Saldanha 2020; Whyte 2018).
Yet the rural itself is a rather amorphous category. A more
precise ontological specification is needed. In addition, we
should not simply take for granted that human labor and non‐
human organisms and materials are to be seen as resources.
No other formation better captures the extractive provisioning
function of rural spaces than the plantation. Centering the
plantation is necessary not only on analytical grounds; it is also
essential for thinking about survival strategies in the light of
multiple crises. Scholars influenced by planetary thinking have
elevated cities to central arenas from which the transformation
to sustainability is to be carried out. A good example is the
doughnut‐economy
approach
of
economist
Kate
Raworth
(Doughnut Economics Action Lab 2024). With reference to the
concept of planetary boundaries, she argues that we can save
the planet through the restructuring of cities. In contrast to
this perspective, we can propose a “planetary ruralism” (Wang,
Maye, and Woods 2023, 13) that calls upon us to attend to the
rural as a space of extractive world‐making and of crisis
experiences, socio‐economic and ‐ecological conflicts, but also
as a place of the imagination and practice of alternative
futures.
4.2 |
From the Plantation to the Plantationocene
The modern plantation currently stands at the center of a broad
interdisciplinary dialogue over planetary futures in which geog-
raphers are also involved. Representatives of Black Geographies or
authors from the African diaspora, such as Eric Williams, Sylvia
Wynter, Kris Manjapra, Clyde Woods and Katherine McKittrick,
have delivered important impulses here (Ouma and Pre-
mchander 2022). I describe the plantation deliberately as “mod-
ern” in order to consider its essential specificity in the context of
the development of capitalist modernity (Scott 2004). This cannot
be thought apart from the rationalizing and world‐ordering im-
pulse of the Western Enlightenment and its oft‐neglected “darker
side” (Mignolo 2011). As highly extractivist forms of agricultural
production, modern plantations are distinguished, despite
regional variations, by a series of common traits:
Their emergence is often tied to flows of capital over great
distances; (1) their space of commodity distribution is the world
market. (2) They generate surplus value through total or at least
strict control over racialized and gendered forms of work; the
enslavement of Black men, women and children is a mode of
exploitation of labor, but not the only one.6 (3) A modernist
view of agriculture (cultivation of the “wilderness”, rational
improvement, efforts aimed at productivity and efficiency, the
significance of large‐scale production) informs the plantation
logic. And finally, (4) it is a matter of monocultures and the
7 of 12
17498198, 2025, 1, Downloaded from https://compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/gec3.70015 by Universitätsbibliothek Bayreuth, Wiley Online Library on [03/03/2026]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License
ecological leveling and simplification of multi‐species land-
scapes (based upon Davis et al. 2019; Haraway et al. 2016).
From the late 15th century to the late 18th century, modern
plantations spread successively from the Eastern Atlantic
(Madeira) to the Caribbean, South and North America and into
other parts of the world. The model was also taken up—in
altered form—by multinational agricultural firms in the early
20th century. In 1930, 30% of all foreign direct investment (FDI)
went to the plantation economy (Manjapra 2018, 379). But
plantation logics have continued to haunt us up to the present
day, as the geographer Katherine McKittrick prominently ar-
gues (McKittrick 2011, 2013). The plantation has a powerful
afterlife (Thomas 2023).
First, the model of plantation production has shaped the global
agricultural sector far beyond the boundaries of plantation
agriculture per se. The significant planetary ecological footprint
of modern agriculture can essentially be traced back to planta-
tion logics.
Second, the establishment of plantations was mostly only
possible through violent interventions, which could in some
cases reach genocidal proportions. They triggered moments of
crisis in those places where they were violently established, but
also in those places from which the labor needed to run them
was forcibly stolen. Even today, plantation logics and elites
continue to shape agricultural structures and politics in many
parts of the Global South (Chao et al. 2024).
Third, the experience of crisis by oppressed groups is a repeated
feature of plantation economies and the societies built upon
them. It is above all Black people, People of Color and indige-
nous communities who have lived through such crises and
continue to do so. For some people and ecosystems, the apoc-
alypse began a long time ago (Whyte 2018). Only now, when the
aggregate effects of the “imperial mode of living” (Brand and
Wissen 2021) can no longer be externalized, does survival
become prominent in the Global North as well as a figure of
thought and a category of experience. But with what social ef-
fects? Not only rightwing and racist parties such as the AfD
[trans.: Alternative für Deutschland (“Alternative for Ger-
many”)]—but they in particular—want to reformulate “sur-
vival” as “living like we used to”. They are currently selling this
idea with great success to a society pervaded by cold bourgeois
indifference (Kohpeiß 2023 calls this indifference “bürgerliche
Kälte”, connecting an older German critical theory term with
insights from transatlantic critical theory thinking).
It can be argued that the plantation has had such deep terra-
forming effects that the most appropriate term to describe our
era should be the Plantationocene. The anthropologists Donna
Haraway and Anna Tsing are prominent voices here (Haraway
et al. 2016), but colleagues from Black Studies and Critical
Agrarian Studies have also delivered important impulses, and
have urged a deeper engagement with the diverse power
structures that suffuse plantation logics:
Naming the modern era ‘the Plantationocene’ coun-
ters the tendency to think of plantations, plantation
politics, and peasants as limited to the past or to ‘pre‐
modern’ sectors of developing countries.
(Chao et al. 2024, 544)
The spatial history of the plantations is central to
understanding the nature of power in the modern
world and possibilities for more equitable futures.
Together, this work highlights the ways that planta-
tion dynamics have proliferated beyond historical
slave agriculture in the Americas and, thus, has much
to offer discussions of current global crises latent in
the Plantationocene concept.
(Davis et al. 2019, 6)
4.3 |
Economic Geographies of the
Plantationocene
Debates around the Plantationocene confront my own discipline
of economic geography, but also Earth System Science as a
“science of the whole”, with multiple challenges. Compared with
the concept of the Anthropocene, the Plantationocene points out,
first, that the terraforming of the planet cannot be thought apart
from the categories of race, class and gender. It is only a few social
groups and only certain economic forms that are responsible for
our proto‐apocalyptic situation. Race, class and gender are not
exactly key categories of economic geography, certainly not in its
German‐language versions, and certainly not in their intersec-
tional entanglement (Ouma et al. 2023)— more on this below.
Second, from this perspective there can be no analysis of the
planetary calamity without an ecological critique of capitalism
that focuses upon the social production of “land” and “nature”
(Vorbrugg and Ouma 2020). This is a global‐historical critique
that investigates dynamics in “growth”‐regions in terms of their
colonial‐extractive connections:
The origins of today’s inseparable but distinct crises of
capital accumulation and biospheric stability are
found in a series of landscape, class, territorial, and
technical transformations that emerged in the three
centuries after 1450.
(Moore 2016, 7)
Economic geography would do well to learn from the centering
of land, agriculture and ecological critique of capitalism in the
Plantationocene debate.
Third, the concept of the Plantationocene builds upon a multi‐
species perspective. The plantation is understood as a vector
through which a vital multispecies world is simplified, ratio-
nalized and robbed of its socio‐ecological complexity. As Julia
Verne mentioned earlier, this poses a challenge to anthropo-
centrism. Especially in research areas where nature is pre-
dominantly understood as “resource”, “factor of production”,
“externality”, “service provider” and “material sink”—that is, in
large parts of economic geography, too—can MEN7 distance
themselves from these categories only with difficulty. I say MEN
8 of 12
Geography Compass, 2025
17498198, 2025, 1, Downloaded from https://compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/gec3.70015 by Universitätsbibliothek Bayreuth, Wiley Online Library on [03/03/2026]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License
here not only because we are a deeply masculine discipline in
demographic terms (Narayan and Rosenman 2022) but also on
epistemic grounds. Masculinist forms of world‐making shaped
by the plantation context have severed humans both from na-
ture and from other humans. This “diacritical praxis” (Boeck-
ler 2005, 47) has served the exploitation of the non‐humans and
lifeforms thus objectified (Wynter 2003). “Man” is the motive
force of history, however, “Man” is not a universal category but
rather a particular one referring to the White, patriarchal, het-
erosexual men who have rationally organized the world to their
advantage.
Fourth, the term allows us to hear voices from outside the sci-
entific discourse dominated by a Western Enlightenment men-
tality: the voices of subalterns, who imagine an “other
economy” beyond capitalism and beyond the ontological cate-
gories dictated in advance by Western modernity ‐ and rarely
called into question by economic geographers or Earth System
scientists. These voices appeal to long‐established forms of
resistance to plantation logics. Indeed, some of the most
consequential visions intended to enable everyone to have a
good life within the boundaries of our planet have originated in
rural areas strongly shaped by plantation logics—Buen Vivir or
Pachamama from South America are probably the best‐known
examples.
These voices challenge the “Prometheanism” of Western
modernity. This term refers to the ideology and method
(Moore 2022) driving both the extension of capitalism to ever‐
newer resource frontiers and the management of environ-
mental risks that emerge from such projects. The belief that
(other) humans as well as nature can and should be tamed is the
essence of Promethean thought. The hubris of control and
technological reparability is crystalized most clearly in the ideas
of geoengineering, transhumanism and in efforts to become
interplanetary (instead of repairing the Earth).
Prometheanism and “Man” belong together. This kind of
thinking can be contrasted with ideas from the fields of post‐/
decolonial studies, political ecology, feminist science and tech-
nology studies, Black studies, Indigenous studies and critical
agrarian research. These perspectives seek to cultivate new re-
lations among humans and between humans and our non‐
human environment. They help us work toward a new,
radical relationality (Wang, Maye, and Woods 2023, 12) in a
world that should be understood, with Arturo Escobar (2018), as
a pluriverse. This can provide important impulses for economic
geography.
In the end, the Plantationocene challenges us to take part more
confidently in debates around the planetary that thematize
plantation logics, even where the concept of the Planationocene
itself is not explicitly invoked. We can think of work on tele-
coupling, or the exportation of labor, energy and land, but also
of research on the human, “material” and metabolic underbelly
of our mode of living (Dorninger et al. 2021), which—even
when dressed up as green—fails to break with the plantation
logic of externalization. Thinking the center from the margins—
historically‐geographically and epistemically speaking (Man-
japra 2020)— is a mode of critique and reconstruction that can
enrich debates around planetary futures immeasurably, both
within and beyond economic geography.
5 |
Conclusions
We have attempted to sketch current debates concerning the
planetary in three parts.
For cultural geography, engaging with the notion of the plane-
tary emphasizes the need to acknowledge our entanglements
with the more‐than‐human. Earthly phenomena infiltrate our
conceptual deliberations and become part of the ways in which
we see the world and find a place among our interpretative
categories. This way, the planetary lens significantly differs from
the
global
perspective
that has
long dominated
cultural
geographic approaches to the world. Moreover, it also entails
more than just a new thematic focus. Countering attempts to
model planetary processes from the outside and going beyond
abstract planetary politics, cultural geographers are encouraged
to turn to the “contact zones” of human and non‐human pro-
cesses. Among other integrative concepts the critical zone di-
rects our attention to questions of life in different ways, pushing
us to gain “more contextually sensitive insights into the diverse
modes of imagining, understanding, and inhabiting the trans-
formed planet” (Shee, Woods, and Kong 2023, 11). This means
to be particularly attentive to alternative or marginalized forms
of life, in order to challenge persistent modernist views of the
world while highlighting possibilities emerging from a more
multivocal and more equal pluriverse (Escobar 2018).
Taking up the concept of “planetary habitability” in social geog-
raphy allows for new connections between research on geogra-
phies
of
home,
housing,
displacement
and
the
climate
catastrophe. Critical social research needs to problematise the
ways in which habitability has so far been framed as a question of
“climate migration” and policy‐oriented research, often under-
pinned by apocalyptic imaginaries of uncontrollable movements
out of the most affected areas and desires for migration man-
agement. It can deepen this critique by highlighting the colonial
legacies of distinctions between habitable and inhabitable regions
of the planet, and the ways in which contemporary assessments of
shrinking habitability in the natural sciences echo this thinking.
Social geography needs to show that habitability cannot be
deduced from climate models and put the socio‐economic forces
that are actively making this planet uninhabitable front and
center. Finally, the concept of habitability challenges anthropo-
centric notions of dwelling and reminds us that we share this
Earth home with countless non‐human others. Focusing on
planetary habitability rather than sustainability, as Chakrabarty
and others propose, allows us to attend not only to the loss of the
“human niche” but of all the other non‐human worlds on which
human survival will always depend.
With regard to economic geography, we feel that much is to be
gained from acknowledging the planetary footprint of capital-
ism. More particularly, centering the plantation as a trans‐
historical formation, and the plantationocene as a “geological”
epoch
in
economic
geography
helps
us
to
unsettle
the
9 of 12
17498198, 2025, 1, Downloaded from https://compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/gec3.70015 by Universitätsbibliothek Bayreuth, Wiley Online Library on [03/03/2026]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License
discipline's heavy tilting toward regional economic growth, the
Global North, and the urban, which itself might be read as an
effect of the discipline's Western white‐male domination. While
work on the fringes of economic geography, such as political
ecology, has long centered concerns about the environment and
“race”, scholars that have been socialized in different traditions
are yet to embrace a perspective where global environmental
questions, “the economy” and historically constituted racialized
and gendered hierarchies that facilitate particular patterns of
human‐ and non‐human exploitation at a planetary scale are at
the center of attention.
Throughout our conversation, we felt it was important not to
take the concept of the planetary as self‐evident but instead to
pursue the question of how it affects our respective fields of
research and what potential it harbors for our discipline as a
whole. In our view, the planetary is not simply an additional
spatial scale but rather a style of thought that increasingly
shapes our present. Since natural‐ and social‐scientific ap-
proaches meet here in a new way, it seems to us especially
relevant to ask how we both as individual scholars in different
subfields but also as a discipline consisting of natural as well as
social scientists can allow ourselves to be intrigued and unset-
tled by the planetary—or, as Tariq Jazeel has put it:
Planetarity itself demands that kind of persistent
introspection over the objects we take‐as‐given […]; a
constant and humble decentering of the masterful
gazes we cast over the things we think we know with
certainty.
(Jazeel 2011, 89)
Acknowledgments
We would like to offer our heartfelt thanks to Matt Hannah who took
the time to carefully translate the keynote from German into English.
We are also grateful to Marc Boeckler and Robert Pütz for the invitation
to give the keynote address at the DKG in Frankfurt. Stefan Ouma
would like to express his thanks for the many fruitful exchanges with
numerous colleagues in the Excellence Cluster “Africa Multiple” (DFG,
EXC 2052/1‐390713894). Nadine Marquardt and Julia Verne are grateful
to the DFG for support of their joint research through the project
“Shelter technologies in action: humanitarian geographies of precarious
housing across North‐South divides” (VE 978/1‐1, MA 7127/2‐1).
Finally, we would like to thank Noel Castree for encouraging us to have
the paper translated into English, as well as one reviewer and the Edi-
tors of Geography Compass, Kelly Kay and Jana Kleibert, for their great
support. Open Access funding enabled and organized by Projekt DEAL.
Data Availability Statement
The authors have nothing to report.
Endnotes
1 Translator's note: in the original German subtitle, “über Leben” is a
play on words. It can be translated straightforwardly as “on life”;
however, the authors also intend to invoke the single term “Überle-
ben”, which means “surviving”.
2 Translator's note: Hamburg was one of the central nodes in the late‐
Medieval Hanseatic League, a network of ports and market towns
organized by German traders and stretching from Russia across the
Baltic and North Sea coasts to Great Britain and deep into the Euro-
pean mainland. Hamburg, today the largest German seaport, is still
known as “Hansestadt Hamburg”.
3 Translator's note: The last DKG before Frankfurt 2023 was held in Kiel
in 2019. The Frankfurt DKG, originally slated for 2021, had to be
postponed due to the COVID‐19 pandemic.
4 After the term species of eternity coined by Spinoza to mean “from the
point of view of eternity” (Spivak 2015, 291).
5 I use the German term Wohnforschung to extend research on housing
and housing market issues with a broader perspective on the material
and symbolic geographies of dwelling and home. This use of the term
builds on the different meanings of the German wohnen. According to
Heidegger (1971, 146), “wohnen” (dwelling) “is the manner in which
mortals are on the earth”. Wohnen is thus related to the whole of life
and transcends modern meanings of housing. Housing research needs
to engage with the climate crisis because the crisis questions the very
“manner in which mortals are on the earth”.
6 Regarding different geographically and historically specific forms of
plantation labor not directly based upon enslavement but still involving
strong elements of coercion and control, see Manjapra (2018).
7 Translator's note: The singular “MANN” in the German original is a
play on words. “Man” with one “n” is the generic grammatical subject
“one” (as in, “one should not …”). “Mann”, on the other hand,
translates straightforwardly as “man” (a masculine‐identified adult).
Thus, in German, the familiar practice of taking the (white hetero-
sexual) male perspective as universal can be efficiently thrown into
critical relief by the deliberate addition of an extra letter.
References
Ahuja, N. 2021. Planetary Specters: Race, Migration, and Climate Change
in the Twenty‐First Century. Chapel Hill: The University of North Car-
olina Press.
Anderson, B. 2020. “Cultural Geography III: The Concept of ‘Culture’.”
Progress in Human Geography 44, no. 3: 608–617. https://doi.org/10.
1177/0309132519856264.
Arboleda, M. 2016. “Spaces of Extraction, Metropolitan Explosions:
Planetary Urbanization and the Commodity Boom in Latin America.”
International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 40, no. 1: 96–112.
https://doi.org/10.1111/1468‐2427.12290.
Beck, U. 2007. Weltrisikogesellschaft: Auf der Suche nach der verlorenen
Sicherheit. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
Biermann, F. 2021. “The Future of ‘Environmental’ Policy in the
Anthropocene: Time for a Paradigm Shift.” Environmental Politics 30,
no. 1‐2: 61–80. https://doi.org/10.1080/09644016.2020.1846958.
Boeckler, M. 2005. Geographien kultureller Praxis. Syrische Unternehmer
und die globale Moderne. Bielefeld: Transcript.
Bonneuil, C. 2020. “Der Historiker und der Planet. Planetaritätsregimes
an der Schnittstelle von Welt‐Ökologien, ökologischen Reflexivitäten
und Geo‐Mächten.” In Zukünfte der Nachhaltigkeit: Band 1. Gesell-
schaftstheorie im Anthropozän, edited by F. Adloff and S. Neckel, 55–92.
Frankfurt, New York: Campus.
Bonneuil, C., and J.‐B. Fressoz. 2016. The Shock of the Anthropocene:
The Earth, History and Us. London, New York: Verso.
Brand, U., and M. Wissen. 2021. The Imperial Mode of Living: Everyday
Life and the Ecological Crisis of Capitalism. La Vergne. Verso.
Brenner, N., ed. 2014. Implosions/Explosions: Towards a Study of Plan-
etary Urbanization. Berlin: Jovis.
Bulkeley, H., and C. McFarlane. 2024. “Changing Climate, Changing
Geographies?.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 49, no.
4: e12718. https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.12718.
10 of 12
Geography Compass, 2025
17498198, 2025, 1, Downloaded from https://compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/gec3.70015 by Universitätsbibliothek Bayreuth, Wiley Online Library on [03/03/2026]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License
Castree, N. 2017. “Anthropocene and Planetary Boundaries.” In Inter-
national Encyclopedia of Geography, edited by D. Richardson, N. Cas-
tree, M. F. Goodchild, A. Kobayashi, W. Liu, and R. A. Marston, 1–14.
Chichester: Wiley. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118786352.wbieg0027.
Chakrabarty, D. 2018. “Planetary Crises and the Difficulty of Being
Modern.” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 46, no. 3: 259–
282. https://doi.org/10.1177/0305829818771277.
Chakrabarty, D. 2021. The Climate of History in a Planetary Age. Chi-
cago, London: University of Chicago Press.
Chao, S., W. Wolford, A. Ofstehage, S. Guttal, E. Gonçalves, and F.
Ayala. 2024. “The Plantationocene as Analytical Concept: A Forum for
Dialogue and Reflection.” Journal of Peasant Studies 51, no. 3: 541–563.
https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2023.2228212.
Clark, N. 2022. “Planetary Cities: Fluid Rock Foundations of Civiliza-
tion.” Theory, Culture & Society 39, no. 2: 177–196. https://doi.org/10.
1177/02632764211030986.
Clark, N., and B. Szerszynski. 2021. Planetary Social Thought: The
Anthropocene Challenge to the Social Sciences. Cambridge, UK, Medford,
MA: Polity.
Clark, N., and K. Yusoff. 2017. “Geosocial Formations and the
Anthropocene.” Theory, Culture & Society 34, no. 2‐3: 3–23. https://doi.
org/10.1177/0263276416688946.
Davis, J., A. A. Moulton, L. van Sant, and B. Williams. 2019. “Anthro-
pocene, Capitalocene, … Plantationocene? A Manifesto for Ecological
Justice in an Age of Global Crises.” Geography Compass 13, no. 5:
e12438. https://doi.org/10.1111/gec3.12438.
Dorninger, C., A. Hornborg, D. J. Abson, et al. 2021. “Global Patterns of
Ecologically Unequal Exchange: Implications for Sustainability in the
21st Century.” Ecological Economics 179: 106824. https://doi.org/10.
1016/j.ecolecon.2020.106824.
Doughnut Economics Action Lab. 2024. Turning the Ideas of Doughnut
Economics Into Action: Retrieved from https://doughnuteconomics.
org/.
Dürbeck, G. 2018. “Narrative des Anthropozän – Systematisierung eines
interdisziplinären Diskurses.” Kulturwissenschaftliche Zeitschrift 1: 2–21.
https://doi.org/10.2478/kwg‐2018‐0001.
Elias, A. J., and C. Moraru, eds. 2015. The Planetary Turn: Relationality
and Geoaesthetics in the Twenty‐First Century. Evanston, Illinois:
Northwestern University Press.
Escobar, A. 2018. “Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence,
Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds.” In New Ecologies for the Twenty‐
First Century. Durham, London: Duke University Press.
Folkers, A. 2024. “Klimawandel.” In Glossar der Gegenwart 2.0, edited by
U. Bröckling, S. Krasmann, and T. Lemke, 197–207. Berlin: Suhrkamp.
Folkers, A., and N. Marquardt. 2024. “Planetary Response‐Inability:
Gaia, the Anthropocene, and the World Without Us.” London Review of
International Law: Online first. https://doi.org/10.1093/lril/lrae019.
Ghosh, A. 2016. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Un-
thinkable. Chicago, London: University of Chicago Press.
Haraway, D., N. Ishikawa, S. F. Gilbert, K. Olwig, A. L. Tsing, and N.
Bubandt. 2016. “Anthropologists Are Talking—About the Anthro-
pocene.” Ethnos 81, no. 3: 535–564. https://doi.org/10.1080/00141844.
2015.1105838.
Hawkins, H. 2023. “Cultural Geographies II: In the Critical Zone?‐
Environments, Landscapes and Life.” Progress in Human Geography 47,
no. 5: 718–727. https://doi.org/10.1177/03091325231152945.
Heidegger, M. 1971. “Building Dwelling Thinking.” In Poetry, Language,
Thought, 143–162. New York: Harper & Row.
Heymann, M. 2019. “The Climate Change Dilemma: Big Science, the
Globalizing of Climate and the Loss of the Human Scale.” Regional
Environmental Change 19, no. 6: 1549–1560. https://doi.org/10.1007/
s10113‐018‐1373‐z.
Jazeel, T. 2011. “Spatializing Difference Beyond Cosmopolitanism:
Rethinking Planetary Futures.” Theory, Culture & Society 28, no. 5: 75–
97. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276411410447.
Kohpeiß, H. 2023. Bürgerliche Kälte. Frankfurt am Main: Campus.
Latour, B., and N. Schultz. 2022. On the Emergence of an Ecological
Class ‐ A Memo: Subject: How to Promote the Emergence of an
Ecological Class That's Self‐Aware and Proud. Cambridge, Hoboken:
Polity Press.
Lenton, T. M., C. Xu, J. F. Abrams, et al. 2023. “Quantifying the Human
Cost of Global Warming.” Nature Sustainability 6, no. 10: 1237–1247.
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893‐023‐01132‐6.
Mahony, M. 2022. “Geographies of Science and Technology II: In the
Critical Zone.” Progress in Human Geography 46, no. 2: 705–715. https://
doi.org/10.1177/03091325211073142.
Manjapra, K. 2018. “Plantation Dispossessions: The Global Travel of
Agricultural Racial Capitalism.” In American Capitalism: New Histories,
edited by S. Beckert and C. Desan, 361–388. New York: Columbia
University Press.
Manjapra, K. 2020. Colonialism in Global Perspective. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
McKittrick, K. 2011. “On Plantations, Prisons, and a Black Sense of
Place.” Social & Cultural Geography 12, no. 8: 947–963. https://doi.org/
10.1080/14649365.2011.624280.
McKittrick, K. 2013. “Plantation Futures.” Small Axe: A Caribbean Jour-
nal of Criticism 17, no. 3: 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1215/07990537‐
2378892.
Mignolo, W. D. 2011. The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global
Futures, Decolonial Options. Durham: Duke University Press.
Moore, J. W. 2003. “Capitalism as World‐Ecology: Braudel and Marx on
Environmental History.” Organization & Environment 4: 431–458.
https://doi.org/10.1177/1086026603259091.
Moore, J. W. 2016. “Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History and
the Crisis of Capitalism.” In Anthropocene or Capitalocene_? Nature,
History, and the Crisis of Capitalism, edited by J. W. Moore, 1–13.
Oakland, CA: PM Press/Kairos.
Moore, J. W. 2022. “Power, Profit, and Prometheanism, Part I.” Journal
of World‐Systems Research 28, no. 2: 415–426. https://doi.org/10.5195/
jwsr.2022.1140.
Narayan, P., and E. Rosenman. 2022. “From Crisis to the Everyday:
Shouldn't We All Be Writing Economies?.” Environment and Planning
A: Economy and Space 54, no. 2: 392–404. https://doi.org/10.1177/
0308518X211068048.
Ouma, S., and S. Premchander. 2022. “Labour, Efficiency, Critique:
Writing the Plantation into the Technological Present‐Future.” Envi-
ronment and Planning a: Economy and Space 54, no. 2: 413–421. https://
doi.org/10.1177/0308518X211065452.
Ouma, S., C. Vogt‐William, F. Obeng‐Odoom, et al. 2023. “Reconfigur-
ing African Studies, Reconfiguring Economics: Centring Intersection-
ality and Social Stratification.” Critical African Studies 15, no. 3: 1–21.
https://doi.org/10.1080/21681392.2023.2226774.
Pörting, J., J. Verne, and L. Krieg. 2020. “Gefährliche Begegnungen.
Posthumanistische Ansätze in der technologischen Neuaushandlung
des Zusammenlebens von Mensch und Wildtier.” Geographische Zeits-
chrift 108, no. 3: 153–175. https://doi.org/10.25162/gz‐2020‐0006.
Pörtner, H.‐O., et al. 2022. Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation
and Vulnerability. Working Group II Contribution to the Sixth Assess-
ment Report of the. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
11 of 12
17498198, 2025, 1, Downloaded from https://compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/gec3.70015 by Universitätsbibliothek Bayreuth, Wiley Online Library on [03/03/2026]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License
Reghezza‐Zitt, M. 2015. De l’avènement du Monde à celui de la planète.
Mémoire d’HDR, Paris: Université Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne. Paris:
University in Paris.
Rockström, J., W. Steffen, K. Noone, et al. 2009. “Planetary Boundaries:
Exploring the Safe Operating Space for Humanity.” Ecology and Society
14, no. 2: art32. https://doi.org/10.5751/es‐03180‐140232.
Saldanha, A. 2020. “A Date With Destiny: Racial Capitalism and the Be-
ginnings of the Anthropocene.” Environment and Planning D: Society and
Space 38, no. 1: 12–34. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263775819871964.
Scott, D. 2004. “Modernity That Predated the Modern: Sidney Mintz’s
Caribbean.” History Workshop Journal 58, no. 1: 191–210. https://doi.
org/10.1093/hwj/58.1.191.
Shee, S. Y., O. Woods, and L. Kong. 2023. “When Planetary Cosmo-
politanism Meets the Buddhist Ethic: Recycling, Karma and Popular
Ecology in Singapore.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geogra-
phers 29, no. 2: e12654. https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.12654.
Spivak, G. C. 1999. Imperative zur Neuerfindung des Planeten/Impera-
tives to Re‐Imagine the Planet. Wien: Passagen Verlag.
Spivak, G. C. 2003. Death of a Discipline. New York: Columbia Uni-
versity Press.
Spivak, G. C. 2015. “‘Planetarity’ (Box 4, WELT).” Paragraph 38, no. 2:
290–292. https://doi.org/10.3366/para.2015.0166.
Steffen, W., A. Persson, L. Deutsch, et al. 2011. “The Anthropocene:
From Global Change to Planetary Stewardship.” Ambio 40, no. 7: 739–
761. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13280‐011‐0185‐x.
Stengers, I. 2015 In In Catastrophic Times: Resisting the Coming
Barbarism (A. Goffey, Trans.). Critical Climate Change. Lüneburg.
Lüneburg: Open Humanities Press/Meson Press.
Thomas, D. A. 2023. “Afterlives: The Recursive Plantation.” In Cam-
bridge Imperial and Post‐Colonial Studies. Global Plantations in the
Modern World, edited by C. Le Petitcorps, M. Macedo, and I. Peano,
353–364. Cham: Springer International Publishing.
Tsing, A. L. 2015. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Pos-
sibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Vorbrugg, A., and S. Ouma. 2020. “Transformationen des Ländlichen:
Land und Landwirtschaft in der Globalen Marktgesellschaft.” In Geo-
graphie: Physische Geographie und Humangeographie, edited by H.
Gebhardt, R. Glaser, U. Radtke, P. Reuber, and A. Vött, 3rd ed., 905–915.
Berlin, Germany: Springer.
Wallace‐Wells, D. 2019. The Uninhabitable Earth: A Story of the Future.
London: Allen Lane.
Wang, C.‐M., D. Maye, and M. Woods. 2023. “Planetary Rural Geogra-
phies.” Dialogues in Human Geography Advance online publication.
https://doi.org/10.1177/20438206231191731.
Whyte, K. P. 2018. “Indigenous Science (Fiction) for the Anthropocene:
Ancestral Dystopias and Fantasies of Climate Change Crises.” Envi-
ronment and Planning E: Nature and Space 1, no. 1‐2: 224–242. https://
doi.org/10.1177/2514848618777621.
Wynter, S. 2003. “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/
Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, its Overrepresentation‐‐An
Argument.” CR: The New Centennial Review 3, no. 3: 257–337. https://
doi.org/10.1353/ncr.2004.0015.
Yusoff, K. 2018. A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press.
12 of 12
Geography Compass, 2025
17498198, 2025, 1, Downloaded from https://compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/gec3.70015 by Universitätsbibliothek Bayreuth, Wiley Online Library on [03/03/2026]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License
