Environmental Philosophy

Volume 19, Issue 2, Fall 2022

A Planetary Imagination: Responses to Chakrabarty’s Socio-Natural Historiography

Stefan Pedersen, Dimitris Stevis, Agni Kalfagianni

The Earth System, Justice, and Governance in a Planetary Age
Engaging a Social Turn

This commentary on Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Climate of History initially frames the work in the context of the ongoing transdisciplinary project of creating synergies or more precisely “consilience” between the sciences and humanities. When this project is engaged in on the premises of the humanities (and the social sciences), we end up with the Earth system and the planetary as the basic lifeblood of human society—what foregrounds existence in common. That this realization is already bringing forth new justificatory principles for governance in a planetary age is then related through a history of ecological justice concerns.