Condition of Planetarity

Nils Gilman's organizing term for The Planetary: the inescapable embeddedness of humans in an Earth-spanning biogeochemical system, an ontological fact that has always held and that planet-scale sensing and intensifying anthropogenic effects have only recently disclosed. Modeled on Harvey's Condition of Postmodernity and Kant's conditions of possibility, a condition does not cause events but sets the terms within which they occur; "there is no Planet B." Gilman separates it from "planetary conditions" (the facts themselves) and from "the global" (human flows across borders, versus "borders crossing us"). Two epistemes contest it: the Spivakian, for which the planet is unknowable and totalizing models colonial, and the technoscientific, for which it is a design space. Its political corollary is habitability over sustainability.