---
title: "Condition of Planetarity"
description: "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."
type: "glossary-term"
canonical_url: "https://antikythera.wiki/terms/condition-of-planetarity"
md_url: "https://antikythera.wiki/md/terms/condition-of-planetarity"
last_updated: "2026-09-06"
site: "Antikythera Wiki"
---

# Condition of Planetarity

> A working definition written for this wiki from the reading notes; not Antikythera's own wording. From Antikythera Wiki (https://antikythera.wiki/terms/condition-of-planetarity), an independent guide to Antikythera's published work.

[Nils Gilman](https://antikythera.wiki/people/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.

## Appears in

- [The Planetary](https://antikythera.wiki/work/book/the-planetary) (2024-11-10)

_Glossary generated 2026-09-06._