Speculations for a Time of Planetary Transition
“You know, sometimes I feel like I was shipwrecked here. It’s like I don’t have the right tools, and I’m supposed to just improvise. It seems impossible.” Half weary, half frustrated.
“But we’ve got the right tools.” “The tools are rusty and broken, Jim,” she said, sighing.
Jeff Vandermeer, Absolution
Linear history ought to have lost all credibility. Yet, while the planet burns, floods and melts, sunny future scenarios linger on as modernity’s afterimages alongside proliferating visions of catastrophe and extinction. These Anthropocene archetypes (Alberti 2016: 209)—infinite progress or coming apocalypse—bespeaks a poverty of imagination. In the evacuated middle, all that is left is a slow descent into rubble (Gordillo 2014) or ruins (Tsing 2015).
The Ends of the World explored “thought experiments about the downward turn of the Western anthropological adventure” (Danowski and Viveiros de Castro 2016: 6). Inspired by this work and in communication with critical zones (Latour and Weibel 2020), the pluriverse (Escobar 2020), The World Multiple (Omura et al 2018), and A World of Many Worlds (de la Cadena and Blaser 2018), this essay considers how a speculative ecology of world models might contribute to postpone the end of the world (Krenak 2020) and make mutual co-existence across divergence thinkable (Costa 2025).
Anthropocene disruptions form the backdrop to some striking transformations in the modern ecology of knowledges. Only a few decades ago, the dismantling of positivism, objectivism, and realism by anti-foundational thought led to the acrimonious “science wars.” New materialism, appearing on the scene to pick up the pieces after postmodern theory and constructivism, seemed to be vindicated by the increasingly evident and dangerous reality of climate change. Atsuro Morita has commented that it was certainly more enjoyable to deconstruct reality when it didn’t seem as if reality was also deconstructing us. But it not clear that new materials or realisms are adequate responses (Smith 2020).[i] What drove the great acceleration was not, after all, distrust in the existence of matter but oil-fueled mass-consumption. Nor do the working sciences suffer from reality or objectivity deprivation, notions that play no discernible role in the making of robust knowledge, including about the climate crisis.[ii]
Meanwhile, another transformation seems to run in the exact opposite direction. Danowski and Viveiros de Castro (2016: 7) wrote that SF has become the “pop metaphysics (or the ‘mythophysics’) of our time.”[iii] Indeed, one can observe an impressive turn to everything speculative in many parts of the ecology of knowledges (Debaise 2017, Rao, Krishnamurty and Kuoni 2014, Wilkie, Savransky and Rosengarten 2017). It would be a mistake to see this as mere escapism. The abundance of speculative concepts, methods, and materials in the environmental humanities, social science and the design disciplines might be better understood as symptomatic of the realization that our tools for thinking are rusty and broken.[iv] Climate scientists realize the need for storytellerswho can make potential consequences feel alive to those who will be affected (Morita and Suzuki 2019). The modeling of earth systems, too, has an inherently speculative dimension, as it involves the virtual multiplication of not-yet-existing future earths.
Isabelle Stengers (2020: 224) proposed that new earthly sciences would depend on a culture of modeling in continuous interaction with “collective, nonscientific activities.” Expanding and transforming this proposition, this essay seeks to open paths for the discovery and invention of world models, material and imaginative renderings of actors, relations, and dynamics that compose whole worlds without pretending to be everything. Such models appear in many places and practices – scientific, indigenous, technological, artistic, indigenous. Each offers its own version of the world and together they elicit the uncommons (Blaser and de la Cadena 2017, Jensen 2017).
We might imagine the ecology of world models as responding to a double absence. Gilles Deleuze (2013: 222ff) liked to say that “the people” – all those whose lives and thoughts are trampled underfoot by masters and colonizers – “are missing.” These missing people can certainly deliver a multiplicity of site-specific world models (e.g. Kothari et al. 2019, Savransky 2021). And yet, as ways of living rapidly erode across the planet, appreciation of these models in their singularity does not seem quite enough. For indeed, it seems increasingly unlikely that the practices and thoughts of the missing people are sufficient to protect their own worlds. Keeping those worlds liveable and in good shape might well require an infusion of ideas, techniques, and visions coming from elsewhere.[v] It then becomes relevant to imagine divergent ways of grappling with problems of co-existence and world sustainment as multi-directional challenges, illuminations, adaptations, and transformations.
However, the problem is not only that the people are missing right now. When Deleuze and Guattari (1994: 99) sought to “summon forth a new earth, a new people” they did not have climate disruption in mind. But perhaps the strange, unpredictable earth we leave to future generations will only be habitable by a people yet to come. From that angle, the ecology of world models can be conceived as a summoning circle with which to empower the children of tomorrow (Jensen with Stengers 2025).
Models? World Models?
Models are, of course, everywhere in the natural sciences and technical fields, and among those who emulate them. Elsewhere, they are often viewed with suspicion. And not without reason. The history of the social sciences is full of bad models. Models of the “Good Anthropocene” string together flawed assumptions, and the rise of large language models and “AI” amply confirms garbage-in garbage-out as a professional modeling hazard. Besides, many will rightly object that various forms of situated, contingent, or “untamed complexity” are inherently “unmodellable” (Allen et al. 2016: 6, also Taylor 2005). As a counterpoint, it seems undeniable that many models, from ecological patch dynamics to cancer development, or trauma recovery to evapotranspiration do enhance our capacity to grasp important aspects of complex phenomena.
During the heyday of constructivism, the sociologist of science Andrew Pickering’s (1995: 183n2) refused to surrender the term reality just because conservative philosophy had given it a bad name. Reclamation of models might also turn out to be a worthwhile project (Holzhey, Kesting and Peppel 2025). That will require an open-ended and experimental concept of models and modeling that is not beholden to all-too-modern dualisms like tamed and untamed, simple and complex, or modellable and unmodellable (Smith 2005). There are some excellent starting points in the philosophy of science although we must go further.
Max Black (1962: 222) defined models as “symbolic representations of some real or imaginary original subject to rules of interpretation designed to reproduce as faithfully as possible in some new medium the structure or web of relationships in an original.” Since only the “structure or pattern of relationship” (Black 1962: 223) must be maintained, the possibilities are almost endless. Nancy Cartwright (1983: 158) characterized models as “specially prepared, usually fictional descriptions of the system under study.” Models are indeed simplified, purposefully, but they are also “speculative instruments” (Black 1962: 237, citing Richards 1955) that transport modelers beyond their initial understandings.
Ian Hacking (1983: 219) evoked an “Argentine fantasy” to capture the relations between models. “The Library of Babel” in Jorge-Luis Borges’ (2007) story is “composed of an indefinite and perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries,” each wall filled with shelves of books of uniform size and different letters. This infinite variation (“New World Leibnizianism”) appealed to Hacking (1983: 219): “For every book, there is some humanly accessible bit of Nature such that that book, and no other, makes possible the comprehension, prediction and influencing of what is going on.”
In turn, the historian of science John Tresch (2007) coined the brilliant term cosmogram for worlds contained in scientific things. Everything from cabinets of wonder (Daston and Park 1998) to cybernetic government (Medina 2011) or a Volkswagen beetle “may contain an entire cosmos” (Tresch 2007: 84). Conversely, the whole universe can be “treated as just another thing”– a cosmic thing. Frédérique Aït-Touti’s (2011: 1) explored cosmopoetics in early modern science. There is cosmopoetics when Johannes Kepler deciphers the structure of the universe from a snowflake in winter Prague, in Francis Godwin and Cyrano de Bergerac’s strange lunar fictions (11), and in Christian Huygens’ cosmological contraptions “whose workings as machines guarantee their credibility as models” (128, italics in original). Yet cosmopoetics does not belong exclusively to science. Peter Sloterdijk (2016: 227) describes Hermann Broch’s The Death of Virgil (1945) as a “cosmo-poetics of breathing,” which updates the Platonic idea of a “world soul” in the aftermath of WWII chemical warfare.Donna Haraway (2017: m29) depicted Alice in Wonderland as a model, a work object, or “miniature cosmos.” As indicated by her extrapolation, there are also different ways of thinking about the relations between science, myth, fiction and reality. The boundaries might be fuzzy or leaky (Haraway 1991).[vi]
Michel Serres (1982 and see Brown 2002) pioneered a form of philosophical modeling that explored analogies between science and myth. While Baal’s statue—inside which victims were burned alive—and the exploding NASA Challenger space shuttle are totally different in terms of their empirical elements, their “identical operations” elicits the sacrificial foundations of social order. Thus, nothing “could be more mythical or anthropological, nothing more religious in its primitive sense, yes, naïve and native, than the contemporary state of the sciences and technologies” (Serres 2015: 22). Foreshadowing later arguments about the Anthropocene (Swanson et al. 2015), Serres (1989: 15) likened “true knowledge, prescience” to what “is nowadays called science fiction.”
It is not very surprising that the scientist emerges as the primary “ambassador of the cosmos” (Aït-Touti 2011: 125) in the history of science. Yet, the incongruence of scientific cosmograms (Tresch 2024) counteracts the supposedly critical but profoundly modern tendency to erect a single fixed macro dichotomy between the pluriverse and the “one-world world” (Law 2015).[vii] Indeed, Tresch (2007: 84) suggested that cosmograms facilitate “comparison and connection between ‘the industrial world’ and other modes of ordering the universe.” The ecology of world models seeks to also multiply the amodern perspectives from which such comparisons are carried out (Jensen 2011). After all, world models like those enfolded in Yanomami spirit houses (Kopenawa 2013) or the Dogon’s cosmic egg (Griaule 1965) require very different ambassadors (see also Brown 2019).
Andrew Pickering (1995: 19) conceptualized cultural change as an open-ended process of modeling and the anthropologist Roy Wagner (1975) imagined the invention of culture in terms of analogical extension. The fieldworker, Wagner (1975: 18) wrote, creates analogies that are “extensions of his own notions and those of his culture, transformed by his experiences of the field situation. He uses the latter as a kind of ‘lever,’ the way a pole vaulter uses his pole, to catapult his comprehension beyond the limitations imposed by earlier viewpoints.”
Catapulting the One-World World
Almost two centuries ago, the German explorer-scientist Alexander von Humboldt (1858) depicted the Cosmos as a beautifully ordered and harmonious system. Between November 1827 and April 1828, audiences in Berlin listened with rapt attention as he painted this one-world world in painstaking, exquisite detail over a span of sixty-one lectures.
In written form, Cosmos splendidly illustrates what Alfred N. Whitehead (1920: 30) would describe as “bifurcation of nature into two systems of reality … One reality would be the entities such as electrons … This would be the reality which is there for knowledge, although on this theory it is never known. For what is known is the other sort of reality, which is the byplay of the mind.” Thus, Humboldt’s first volume portrayed an objective, indivisible mono-nature (Viveiros de Castro 2005) “from the remotest nebulous spots, and the revolving double stars in the regions in space” to “organic forms (such as plants, animals, and races of men” (von Humboldt 1858: x). Taking readers on a journey of the mind, later volumes discussed cave paintings, gardening and poetry, primitive celestial observations and modern science – all the different ways in which men have apprehended nature’s glory.[viii]
Almost a hundred years later, the bifurcation of nature provided structure to Lewis Mumford’s ([1922] 1962) The Story of Utopias. He described the earth’s physical environment as a “definite, inescapable thing,” which places “narrow and obvious” limits on what it is possible do (Mumford 1962: 14). Even so, turning their minds to the heavens, or the “world of ideas,” people never stop imagining their best possible lives. Whereas utopias of reconstruction imagine practical, social and technical improvements in communities like those found at home, utopias of escape work through a “complete breach” (Mumford 1962: 19) with normal surroundings.[ix] It is easy to infer the default position of this “home” from the fact that the exotic antipode is usually a “self-sufficient island in the South Seas” (19). But if the South Seas can function as a phantasmatic site of escape, it is, of course, because it is imagined as not at all the same as the North Sea. Those narrow and obvious limits, in other words, were not imagined as planetary but as geographically specific.
The problematic of planetary boundaries emerged later, in tandem with the realization that many of them had already been breached. The proximate cause was the emergence of mass utopia as a political project shared across the cold war divide after WW2 (Buck-Morss 1999). War continued in the “peripheries,” while the problem of “peace” came to mean avoidance of nuclear destruction in the centers. Meanwhile, the concept of “abundance” was resolved as mass consumption, requiring copious infusions of resources from the rest of the world. Accelerating extraction from both sides of the iron curtain gave rise to unprecedented environmental destruction.
As we survey these scenes of destruction, the role of one-world world(s) should not be underestimated. But we must avoid empowering these worlds by buying too much into the stories they like to tell of themselves. After all, the one-world world, too, is just a model, a component of reality rather than the thing itself. Its self-proclaimed universality is undermined by the existence of multiple other worlds and compromised by the existence of competing one-world worlds that claim universality based on different principles. And yet, over times the one-world worlds have scaled up and grown in reality.
One might think of mono-nature, a common feature among the one-world worlds, as an esoteric but rather harmless belief. However, it becomes exponentially more dangerous when placed under what the philosopher Didier Debaise (2021) calls an “operational definition.” With the constituent elements of nature turned into available resources, extraction is limited only by technical capacity. Without other constraints, extraction can be done freely, simply because it is doable. Embedded in colonial and imperial assemblages, operational nature became a vector of annihilation of all “the other ways of relating to and inhabiting the earth.” The process accelerated during the cold war, as capitalists and communists worked to keep their respective dreamscapes alive. Thus, the monumental disaster known as the great acceleration (Steffen, Broadgate, Deutsch et al. 2015) goes hand in hand with a radical, violent downscaling and derealization of other worlds.
From the 1960 onwards, awareness of “self-devouring growth” (Livingston 2019) began to manifest in writings like Silent Spring (Carson 1962) and The Limits to Growth (Meadows et al. 1972). The architect and systems designer Buckminster Fuller (1969: 14) declared himself an astronaut “aboard a fantastically real spaceship … travelling at sixty thousand miles an hour around the around the sun.” The spaceship came with no instruction manual but refusing to learnsafe operations would amount to nothing less than a case of cosmic bankruptcy (28).[x]
Planetary boundaries seem to gain reality in proportion to how much they are transgressed. As late as 1997, they were completely invisible to the narrator of the marvelous Atlas: Archeology of an Imaginary City (Dung [1997] 2012), for whom the earth evoked a “consoling feeling of permanence… seemingly unchanging through the ages”- not unlike Mumford’s “definite, inescapable thing.” Experimental fiction enlivened this naturally stagnant and dull affair. But now the contours of the earth grow indistinct. Hence, Atsuro Morita’s troubling image of a world that is “deconstructing us” and Latour’s (2020) insistence that life in critical zones raise unsettling questions of where and when we are.
The growing fear of the moderns responds to the sense that their ways of life are becoming more evanescent and spectral day by day. The rapid decrease of modern reality is an Anthropocene signature. Where Rachel Carson could no longer hear the insects humming, Alan Weisman (2017) imagines what the world will be like “without us.” Yet, calls for ecological and ontological reclamation (Bawaka Country 2015, Plumwood 2002, Stengers with Jensen and Thorsen 2019) accompany speculative apocalypticism. An ecology of world models might improve their chances.
An Ecology of World Models
Donna Haraway (1988: 590) famously insisted that the “only way to find a larger vision” is “to be somewhere in particular.” But a larger vision still also requires venturing beyond where one is situated. And this especially be the case, when usual ways of acting and thinking do not seem to work too well anymore even where one is situated. In the worlds of Isabelle Stengers (2020: 223), situated knowledges can begin to “stammer” when ungrounded by the earth.
Focusing on earthly sciences, Stengers (2020: 224) imagined that an “active, debate-oriented culture of models” might create antidotes to this stammering. The aim would not be to create consensus through methodology, reliability, and validity. Instead, each model would be a proposal of what is required to grasp an uncertain, unstable situation from one specific angle.
The attractions of the culture of models might be brought out by comparison with two short stories by Borges. We have already come across Ian Hacking’s favorite “Argentine Fantasy.” Upon closer inspection, this a very poor model, drowning in redundancy and nonsense. In the library, amidst “leagues of senseless cacophonies, verbal jumbles and incoherences,” there is only the faintest glimmer of hope of finding meaning. Even worse, a sense of history and agency is entirely lacking. “The certitude that everything has been written,” observes the narrator, “negates us or turns us into phantoms.”
In contrast, temporality is critically important in “The Garden of Forking Paths,” which revolves around a Chinese vision of “an infinite series … a growing, dizzying net of divergent, convergent and parallel times,” forking “perpetually toward innumerable futures.” In one timeline, we might be friends – but we will be enemies in another. Split-second break temporal symmetry and hurtle people along irreversible trajectories. In terms of urgency and attention to consequences this model is obviously superior.
Stengers’ culture of models is also temporal. But very different from the garden of forking paths where possibilities for change are foreclosed because the timelines never cross,[xi] occasions for learning are multiplied by feeding the culture of models with dense, imaginative stories from many practices. As a speculative platform for experiments in resituating knowledges and practices, this idea is crucial to the ecology of world models. However, a more decentered perspective makes it possible to see the stories not merely as feeding scientific models but as themselves models that elucidate the composition of worlds from distinctive angles.
As Patrice Maniglier (2020: 69) remarks, “the Earth is not only in the computers of the IPCC; it is also in the modification of the behaviour of the Gwinch’in hunter as well as in the bowels of the caribous. Those too are ‘modelizations’.” The ecology of world models, then, is a temporally emergent catalogue of variable material and imaginative renderings of worlds, interactions, transformations, and problems of co-existence. [xii]
An eminent precursor is Cannibal Metaphysics, where Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (2014) reflects on Bruno Latour’s (1996: 5) argument anthropology and natural scientific objects of inquiry are equally significant. Thus, the kula is “on a par with that of the black holes … Understanding the theology of Australian Aborigines is as important as charting the great undersea rifts … the Trobriand land tenure system is as interesting a scientific objective as polar icecap drilling.” However, Viveiros de Castro (2014: 190ff) suggested, in some tantalizing paragraphs, that comparing concepts is more pertinent.
Thus, he imagines comparing the Melanesian dividual (Strathern 1988) with Locke’s possessive individualism, seeing the Hegelian state through the philosophy of Indian chiefdom (Clastres 1987 [1962]), and elucidating affinities between Maori cosmology, the Eleatic paradoxes, and the Kantian antinomies (Schrempp 2002) – or between Amazonian and Leibnizian perspectivism. Perhaps the Dogon egg might be imagined as a holographic (un-)model of cosmic knowledges (Griaule 1956, Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 154-160). Within this comparative relativism (Jensen 2011), it is no longer a matter of providing concepts for other worlds and practices but of learning from the concepts with which others make worlds.
The benefits are of the order of ontological politics. The pluriverse becomes thinkable. And immediately one becomes aware of how many other things also need thinking. It is, for instance, clear that the ways in which the world multiple becomes thinkable depend radically on the worlds from which the thinking is done. This is the source of possibility, invention and constraint on all that follows. It is painfully obvious that relations between worlds often do not work very well. But how to deal with challenges of ontological inter-inoperability as they appear from different sides?[xiii] How to grapple with problems of co-existence from the point of view of multiplicity without smuggling universals in through the back door? Are there collaborative possibilities appropriate to a quilt work of differences, open to fluctuations, small movements initiatives, dispersion and ephemerality rather than bloc-making and consensus? How to imagine intra- or cross-world alliances empowering collectives to reinvent their methodologies for living in a world on shifting grounds?
Travel out of orbit can provide some unusual angles (Battaglia 2012; see also Salazar 2025) on these questions .
Planetary Parabolas
For von Humboldt (1858: 71), the cosmos was “the assemblage of all things in heaven and earth, the universality of created things constituting the perceptible world.” His one-world world painted natural history on a planetary scale. But planetary thought has always been a speculative enterprise. For Peter Sloterdijk (2014: 774), von Humboldt’s choice of an “openly anachronistic title” provided Cosmos with a chance to compensate for the loss of earlier globular closure through Greek philosophy and Christian religion. And when the geographer Kathryn Yusoff (2018) claimed the earth itself as the site of struggle, N. K. Jemisin’s (2015-2017) Broken Earth lingered in the background. This multiple-award winning trilogy takes place in the Stillness, a seismically hyper-volatile continent where civilization depends on the ability of orogenes to sense and manipulate geo-energies. However, the orogenes are repressed, hunted, tortured, and enslaved by humans. In a unique variation on “the geology of morals” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 39ff), this story entwines the shattering of empire and of the earth.
Wherever we turn, reality and myth, science and science fiction blur. A young Carl Sagan (1961) sketched the “science fictional thought processes” involved in his modeling of Venus’ lower atmosphere. In a work of speculative planetology (Buse 2020: 55), Frank Herbert modeled the planet Arrakis in Dune (1963-1965) on Where There is Life (1962) by the ecologist Paul Sears (Buse 2020: 67). Half a century later, the executive director of the International Geosphere-Biosphere program Sybil Seitzinger (2010) depicted climate scientists as “planetary ecologists” – with reference to Arrakis. In between, Sagan’s (1980-81) Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, which presented billions of years of history on television and reflected on the possibility of encountering alien life in the future, had been a pop-cosmological smash-hit.
Recently, Octavia Butler has been hailed as a modern-day Nostradamus due to her “fictive prediction” that the US would descend into authoritarianism in the 2020s following the election of a strongman campaigning to “Make America Great Again.” The Parable of the Sower (Butler 1993) follows Lauren who navigates a deteriorating Californian landscape after the murder of her community.[xiv] While California suffers massive wildfires, racial segregation and slavery reappears in company towns owned by foreign businessmen. In these dire circumstances, Lauren envisions Earthseed as a new religion and preaches that the only viable future for humankind is among the stars.
Kodwo Eshun (2003) imagined future African archeologists (some silicon, some carbon) reconstructing the earth from sonic fragments like the Mothership Connection and Sun Ra’s oscillating African modes of existence. Somewhere between the “Black-Atlantean Mythos” (Gilroy 1993) and “The Extra-Terrestrial Turn,” the Detroit electronic duo Drexciya makes an appearance. Their 1997 album The Quest introduced an aquatic species evolved from black people thrown overboard from slave ships during the middle passage (Baucom 2005). To coincide with the 2002 release of Grava 4 which focused on space colonization, the duo purchased a star from the International Star Registry (Eshun 2003: 301)
Space offers a wide canvas for narratives of transformation and redemption as well as experiments in fear. While the Drexciyans sunk into the sea and learned to breathe underwater, David Brin’s Uplift series (from 1980 onwards) humans guide the leap of dolphins into space. From an intergalactic perspective, humanity is a pitifully backwards “patron race,” and there is no shortage of aliens inclined to end life on earth. However, willingness to keep experimenting with multi-species collaborations turns out to be humanity’s saving grace.
In our own timeline, many also think there ought to be aliens somewhere.[xv] Yet, despite serious efforts, none have been detected.[xvi] This curious absence, known as Fermi’s paradox or the Great Silence (Brin 1983), is at the center of the novel The Dark Forest (Cixin 2008), which hypothesizes that fear of annihilation makes everyone prefer camouflage to communication. This is an intergalactic model of paranoia. In a universe full of potentially superior, hostile forces, staying put and very quiet is the only existential option.
The discrepancies are huge. While The Dark Forest reduces being situated to hiding in a corner, David Brin adopts an uplifting spirit, taking species transformation as a premise for risky experiments in inter-galactic co-habitation. The Word for the World is Forest by Ursula K. Le Guin (1972) elicits a completely different version of situatedness – and forest! On the planet Atshe, life is a matter of deep belonging that comes with requirements and obligations. The ground rules can certainly be changed—as the peaceful natives do by expelling terrran invaders with violence—but there are irreversible consequences.
Emergent Cosmopoetics for Landing on Earth
Kim Stanley Robinson’s (2015) Aurora seems like a fitting turning point for the planetary parabola. After traveling for 170 years on a generational spaceship, several thousand people arrive at a supposedly habitable moon in the Tau Ceti system. The death of most of the landing party from an unknown infection catalyzes a conflict between those who want to stay and those who want to go back to earth. The return trip is a complete disaster with only a few survivors, saved by the ship, which has become sentient in the meantime. Back on earth, they are denounced as cowards and traitors for preaching that life is situated – a “planetary thing.”
Earth might, after all, be humanity’s only home. It is a tiny blip in the cosmos but also a multiplicity.[xvii] But… what kind of multiplicity is it? New cosmograms and forms of cosmopoetics address this question. Today, only a few will find solace in Kepler’s beautiful derivation of the cosmos from a snowflake in Prague, but many might be intrigued by the reading of a billion-year history from a single piece of Welsh pebble (Zalasiewicz 2010). Contemporary naturalists are more likely to be captivated by the “The Anthropocene Square Meter” (Zalasiewicz 2020) than to go on lunar voyages with Cyrano.
Critical zone laboratories examine the composition of land by interacting physical, geochemical, hydrological and biological processes. For Latour (2020), this research raised cosmopolitical questions. How far does land reach? How deep, and how high? What is in it? But for others, land raise questions about decolonialization, dispossession, and belonging (e.g. Murphy 2020, Tuck and Yang 2012). Adopting the term emplacement, which in geology refers to lava that has lodged in older rock from which it is almost impossible to separate, Mario Blaser (2025: 15) evokes the “multiplicity of existents” (15) that emplace specific collectives, making them extremely “resistant to partition” (35).
These conceptual landforms exist in a relation of mutual complication – which is not the same as inevitable antagonism. By unsettling the composition of the land on/with which people live, critical zone flows pose challenges to analyses revolving around belonging and emplacement. For where are we, actually, if our lands are effects of distant flows? When are we, if those flows have origins in other times and consequences in far futures? Who are we, and who are we with, if multitudes of unnoticed others sustain us where we live? But conversely, how do we know what are the critically important properties of this land? Are those properties found or are they made – and by whom? Who has the right to interpret and decide what should be done with it? These mutual complications raise fresh questions about the cosmopolitical disposition proper to Gaia (cf. Blaser 2019).
Even a town square can contain more than a square (Corsín Jiménez and Estalella 2016, Blok and Farías 2016: 232), and pebbles may not be part of mountains but of earth-beings (de la Cadena 2015). The question “How many earths are there? (Maniglier 2020) remains open. However, by turning squares that are more-than-Anthropocene and pebbles that are other-than-micro-mountains into great mobile elements (Deleuze 2004: 184, Jensen and Brown 2025) traveling between practices, the ecology of world models seeks to catalyze learning opportunities among the earths.
While Latour (1993) convincingly showed what it takes to conceptually stop being modern, the practical entailments emerged as a rather sore point for his Gaian politics. Specifically, the powerful idea that realities grow or shrink with the relations that make networks proved to be an obstacle for imagining amodern transitions. This became especially obvious with his regrettable claim that indigenous wisdom, however valuable, has little to offer as it is not scalable “to the size of the giant technical metropolises” (Latour 2013: 128).[xviii] As Danowski and Viveiros de Castro (2016: 95-96) note, the comment seems oblivious to the possibility that what will be scaled down, willingly or not, is precisely the consumptive lifestyles of the giant metropolises.
For those soon to be ex-moderns who would like to keep some cherished dimensions of their previous existence (clean water, food, medicine, and barbarism avoidance, for example) in a shrunk reality, there might be object lessons from those who have already survived several ends of the world. But while the ongoing modern decomposition might open avenues to an amodern cosmopolis (Toulmin 1992), the situation will appear radically different depending on where one comes from and hopes to be going (Blaser 2025: 167ff.). There are also dangers and blind alleys.
Friendly Absorptions
Degrowth, the “planned downscaling of energy and resource use to bring the economy back into balance with the living world in a safe, just and equitable way” (Hickel 2022: 29), offers a variation on possible relations between modern and amodern world models.
Degrowth is a response to a modern problem—the great acceleration and the breaching of planetary boundaries—but Jason Hickel (2022: 23) finds the seeds of a solution among ancestors who “saw no fundamental divide between humans and the rest of the living world … even with the planet itself.” Later, these knowledges were suppressed as backwards, unscientific and “a barrier to capitalist expansion” (32). But now, Hickel explains, we relearn that everything is relational. Biologists have become attentive to a multiplicity of microorganisms within our bodies, ecologists study tree communication, and psychiatrists acknowledge the mental benefits of living among plants. And degrowth an “ecologically coherent solution to a multi-faceted crisis” (208), emerges as an updated animist ontology for the times (32 ff.).
Depending on temperament, we might laugh or grimace at this slapdash history. But who can deny the comfort in being assured that “we know exactly what works” (Hickel 2022: 185)? Working towards what we know works—reduction of inequalities, investment in universal public goods, and redistribution of income—seems a sensible, even noble, aim. And yet it is hard to shake the feeling that something important is lost as animism is adapted as a program of socio-ecological rejuvenation for the moderns.[xix]
Marilyn Strathern (1988: 3) argued forcefully against seeking to validate Western preoccupations “by appealing to indigenous counterparts.” For a glimpse of what might be lost in Hickel’s friendly absorption, we might do worse than trying to “learn to see” with Strathern (2013) in her beloved Melanesia. Since it is as much a matter of learning to unsee what one already sees too much and too clearly, both rapid blinking and sideways glances will be required.[xx]
Roy Wagner (2012: 535) argued that, among the Usen Barok of central New Ireland, sociality “is very much a matter of thinking and feeling in images.” Artifacts like the carved malanggan and “word-pictures” like bung marapun (“the gathering in the bird’s eye” – for what we call “clan”) (536) condense and synthesize “whole realms of possible ideas and interpretations.” He was particularly interested in image transformations during mortuary feasts that “keep the Barok world in order” (540).[xxi]
Strathern (2013), too, elaborated an indigenous visual theory replete with variations on ecology, sexuality,[xxii] exchange, and the very idea of perspective among the Hageners. That required putting assumptions of what “simply exists” on hold (Strathern 2013: 27). She offered the naked human body as a good example of something that seems, to Westerners, to simply exist (cf. Jullien 2007). It is natural to be naked, but it is also a vulnerable position because one shows everything. From this perspective, it can be shocking to see people working their gardens wearing almost nothing. But Hageners feel most vulnerable when fully decorated. Their brilliant adornments reveal all the relations they usually keep secret within. Whereas in the gardens everything is concealed because almost nothing is worn (Strathern 2013: 59).
Hageners do not decorate for photo-ops but to stimulate exchange with visitors, whose eyes are drawn to the dancing bodies of their hosts. A complex pattern “of emanation and absorption” (2013: 95) emerge as the positions of visitors and hosts vary over time. Everything relates to “what each can extract from the other and take within” (95). However, the relations and dimensions of the exchange process bear little resemblance to Western formats. Westerners may be bewildered, for example, by the notion that certain ceremonial shell necklaces offer “the possibility of seeing both inside and outside at the same time … at the beginning and end of the journey at once” (Strathern 2013: 99). And they are likely to be severely challenged by the idea that a decorative mask itself is also a person – one worn by another person whose own head temporarily takes up residence inside it (Strathern 2013: 119).
There are illustrations of what Ailton Krenak (2020: 23 of ebook), an indigenous leader of the Amazonian Krenak people, had in mind when affirming that “the human chrysalis cracks open onto unlimited new visions of life.” Correlatively, they indicate why the incorporation of selected aspects of a generalized animism into Western projects, however well-intended, must be a violent business. Considering the vast difference between the Barok effort to turn the world upside down during mortuary feasts and the degrowth program to make public goods universally accessible, it should be added that it is also a profoundly silly business.
But that in no way denies the transformative potential of other encounters.
Garden Varieties (or, Cracking Open the Human Chrysalis)
Ailton Krenak (2020: 17 of ebook) explains that his people refer to Watu, the river, as their grandfather. And he observes that his people do not go to technical laboratories to design parachutes or make inventions, but “to that place beyond this hard earth: the land of dreams.” Indeed, it is dreams that, first and foremost, crack open the human chrysalis. We Are ‘Nature’ Defending Itself: Entangling Art, Activism and Autonomous Zones, the story of how a scattered collective of activists thwarted a new airport by Nantes, begins by citing Krenak: “Let’s develop our power to tell yet another narrative, another story, if we manage, we will delay the end of the world” (in Fremeaux and Jordan 2021: 9). His appearance among land defenders in French Brittany can easily be dismissed as yet another co-optation or a form of faux indigenous chic. In this case, however, the unlikelihood and partiality of the connection might enable new deployments and transformations (de la Cadena 2015, Strathern 1991)
The ‘Zone to Defend’ catalyzed a process that eventually stopped the airport. Moreover, the refusal to accept operational nature as the grounds for political contestation opened a crack in modern French politics through which other possibles might emerge. Something similar might be said about permagardening, a curious amalgamation of “agricultural practices, ecology, social justice, utopian and mythic worldviews” (Roux-Rosier et al. 2018: 555). The relations are, again, partial or even incoherent. But that is why these practices instantiate an “experimentalist variety of micro-revolution” (564). Placed alongside the gardens in the sky imagined by Cristóbal Bonelli (2025) in Chile’s devastated Atacama Desert, they contribute to an open-ended “‘archive’ of utopian possibilities” (Roux-Rosier et al. 564).
Let us be explicit. The point is not at all that the French must learn think of their rivers as kin. For indeed, as Deleuze (1994: 23) wrote “We learn nothing from those who say ‘Do as I do.’ Our only teachers are those … able to emit signs to be developed in heterogeneity rather than propose gestures for us to reproduce.” Whether among the Krenak or in Bretagne what matters is cracking open the human chrysalis to find escape routes. From then on, the word nature itself hardly matters. It can go on being fundamentally equivocal (Viveiros de Castro 2004b) as long as it stops being homogeneous and operational.
Around 4600 kilometers almost straight north of Mt. Hagen one can visit Kyoto’s beautiful gardens. The experimental writer Italo Calvino (who is often compared to Borges) did so in 1976. He became fascinated by the claim that the Japanese were distinguished by a unique sensitivity to “atmospheric phenomena” (Dellacasa 2023: 232). [xxiii] This sensitivity crystallizes in Zen gardens composed with careful attention to the kokoro (heart) of all the plants and pebbles within (228). Where the (remote) possibility of spiritual enlightenment depends on grasping fleeting interconnections between oneself and “the multiplicity of surrounding forms of existence” (228), everyday gardening becomes a form of silent meditation. Bound in the net of Indra, rocks and trees are like “shining jewels reflecting all other jewels … from the standpoint of their own perspective” (233).[xxiv]
As the protagonist of Mister Palomar, Calvino’s last novel, meditates on his self as “simply the window through which the world looks at the world” (Calvino 1994: 102), distinctions between inside and outside are erased in a “cosmic extension” (Dellacasa 2023: 239). The effect is not unlike that which allows French activists to see themselves as nature defending itself. But it is also not the same.
Cosmicomic
What to do with a planetary multiplicity undergoing multiple devastations? Should the modern modes of existence be discarded wholesale? Might they be infected by amodern world models and transformed beyond recognition? Can inter-inoperable worlds be converted into partially compatible ones? Would that be a matter of inventing a new sense in common (Stengers 2023) or developing a taste for the uncommons? The problem is itself a multiplicity, so there is no definite answer. But if all endpoints are partial, incomplete, inadequate, how better to wrap up this invitation to the ecology of world models than with another open-ended co(s)mic extension?
From 1963, Calvino wrote a series of cosmicomics about aspects of cosmic history as seen through the eyes of the indefatigable Qfwfq.[xxv] “The Form of Space” begins with his reminiscence about happenings prior to the formation of our universe. Like the laminar flow of atoms in Lucretius’ cosmo-poem De rerum natura (Serres 2000), Qfwfq just fell indefinitely – in perfect parallel with Ursula H’x and the repulsive Lieutenant Fenimore.
Once upon a time, it was a minor philosophical scandal that Lucretius offered no explanation for the first tiny swerve, the clinamen, which, by diverting an atom ever so slightly, began the endless process of collisions known as history. As Andrew Pickering (1995) would say of events in his mangle of practice “it just happened.” Qfwfq, however, inadvertently stumbles on the solution while despairing at having to watch Ursula H’x arched back without ever getting any closer. The secret of is simply “to identify oneself so completely with one’s own state of fall that one could realize the line followed in falling wasn’t what it seemed but another.” The line had never been what it seemed to be. And with that magic trick space stopped to appear smooth and laminar, showing a grainy form, “all battlemented and perforated, with spires and pinnacles which spread out on every side, with cupolas and balustrades and peristyles, with rose windows, with double-and triple-arched fenestrations.”
Before the clinamen, paranoia and diplomacy are equally meaningless – nothing ever meets. Afterwards, thrilling meetings with Ursula H’x become possible but so does dreadful encounters with Lieutenant Fenimore and his thin black moustache. The paranoid path to Cixin’s dark forest is now open and space, now grainy, provides plenty of hiding places. But one could also imagine emerging uncommon alliances between the ancient enemies.
For contrast, “The Spiral,” explores a world model for mollusks for whom “the visible organic form has little importance … since they cannot see one another and have, at most, only a vague perception … of their surroundings.”[xxvi] At the time, Qfwfq was aimlessly passing “stuff from whatever side I felt like, inside or outside was the same, differences and repugnances came along much later.” With nothing to do but clinging to a damp rock splashed by waves, mollusk existence encouraged one to be “a narcissist to a slight extent.” It was indeed quite hard to avoid, as there was no one else around.
Mollusk entanglements began with Qfwqf’s realization that certain vibrations in the water signaled the presence of others. This aroused a terrible curiosity “to know whether something would happen between me and them.” Qfwqf began unconsciously expressing his being by secreting “calcareous matter.” As he turned over and over, a protective spiral was formed. Soon the world included not only his shell and the shells of the others, but also a multiplicity of shell-images moving hither and dither. That turned out to have “great consequences.”
These stories show speculation and materialism in different spiral dances (cf. Haraway 1991: 181). While the possibility of history, in the first, arises with the decorations of the universe (balustrades…fenestrations… chandeliers…), decorations, in the second, emerge as bodily expressions of encounters and transformations happening along the way. And isn’t there an undeniable Melanesian vibe to shells as defense mechanisms, records of history, and portable emplacements?
We see a co-implication of cosmo-poetics, cosmo-politics, and cosmi-comics, which opens outwards to indefinite horizons. Looking up from his rock, five hundred million years on, Qfwfq notices a train passing by, full of Dutch girls looking out the window, and a solitary traveler reading Herodotus in a bilingual edition. A peasant breaks ground in the garden of “an astronomical observatory with its telescopes aimed at the sky, ”while a girl deciphers the future in a magazine horoscope. Looking down to the earth, up to the skies, out of the window, or into their books, they are experimenting with world models.
Unlike Qfwfq we do not have half a billion years to take care of the possible, but we face the collective, existential task of prolonging the experiment.
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[i] Somewhat earlier, Viveiros de Castro (2004a: 484) remarked that, “there are ‘materialist ontologies’ on offer as cures for epistemological hypochondria, but I do not know what to do with them.”
[ii] As rhetorical devices they do, of course, play a role in legitimating the results (Latour 1987, Stengers 2018).
[iii] Twisting Jorge Luise Borges’ (2007) quip that metaphysics is a branch of fantastic literature.
[iv] Which is not, of course, to say that speculative futures are always superior.
[v] Around the Day in Eighty Worlds, a book with an amazing title, explores the pluriversal implications of “metaphysical indetermination” (Savransky 2021: 9) in practices from Mozambique to Japan. However, these worlds are hardly engaged from the perspective of reciprocal exchange or co-invention, which considerably lowers the “risk” involved. Meanwhile, indetermination places extremely high demand on other theories, which are practically all found wanting – the analytical effectof the mantra “ever not quite” seems curiously close to deconstruction.
[vi] Haraway’s series science fiction, speculative fabulation, string figures, so far – from her acceptance speech for the Science Fiction Research Association’s Pilgrim award in 2013 resonates with Isabelle Stengers’ (2018b) elucidation of the world-constructing powers of speculative science fiction.
[vii] John Law (2015: 126-7) characterizes the one-world world as a “European way of thinking” and a “mononaturalism” according to which the world “carries on by itself… outside us and we are contained inside it.”
[viii] For a discussion of how celestial phenomena were interpreted at the same time in Thailand drawing on Western scientific ideas and Buddhist scripture see Morita (2017).
[ix] While “Situated Knowledges” is conceptually radical, Donna Haraway’s (1988: 749) hope for “finite freedom, adequate material abundance, modest meaning in suffering, and limited happiness” evokes a humble utopia of reconstruction.
[x] Fuller (1969: 5) worried about extinction by pollution by the 21st century. Kenneth Boulding’s (1966) “The Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth,” now read as a pioneer or the circular economy, contrasted a reckless, romantic, and violent “cowboy economic symbolic of the illimitable plains” with a no-waste spaceship economy of closed-loops. Amidst a great “acceleration” of knowledge in society at large, however, “American Indians on reservations” provided only an illustration of knowledge degradation.
[xi] A curious example of temporal crossing is found in Kim Stanley Robinson’s (2002) Years of Salt and Rice, where the same group of characters keep meeting in the bardo, taking stock of their failures and achievements in between incarnations.
[xii] Thus, the premise is exactly opposite of Mumford’s (1962: 304) when he wrote that “there is very little profitable conversation to be had between a Greenlander, a Parisian, and a Chinaman, except the mere observation that they are all on the same little boat of a planet.”
[xiii] Modifying, via Steve Brown, a technical term—interoperability—normally used to characterize the ability of different systems to exchange information.
[xiv] For a parabolical discussion of the Parables see Chandrasekaran (2018).
[xv] Lenton and Watson (2011) depict life on earth as the consequence of a sequence of highly unlikely “critical steps” that must be taken within brief windows of opportunity. This is so improbable as to make life exceedingly rare even on galactic scales and considering vast differences in the possible expressions of life.
[xvi] Known as “Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence” (SETI).
[xvii] Destination: SEA 2050 (Acuña et al. 2023) focuses on Southeast Asia. The Handbook of Co-Futurisms (Taylor et al. 2024) organizes a catalogue of variations in terms of space and identity. In North American “native slipstream,” timelines emerge and vanish without any definite resolution (e.g. Jones 2000, Vizenor 1978). As pasts, presents and futures “flow together like currents” (Dillon 2012: 3) interspersed by “various levels of awareness and consciousness (17), temporality becomes a vehicle of experimentation (also White 2018).
[xviii] This is from his “Facing Gaia: Six Lectures on the Political Theology of Nature.” The lectures were later published with these formulations edited out.
[xix] Like Stengers’ (2005: 994) figure of the idiot, one feels like slowing down. (The idiot who originally held the attention of Deleuze and Guattari was Prince Myshkin, the protagonist of Dostoevsky’snovel).
[xx] Not unlike Deleuze’s (2003: 86) painter who must first empty a canvas virtually overflowing with cliches: “It is a mistake to think that the painter works on a white surface…The painter has many things in his head, or around him, or in his studio…They are all present in the canvas as so many images, actual or virtual, so that the painter does not have to cover a blank surface, but rather would have to empty it out, clear it, clean it.”
[xxi] The Barok say that the front of the taun (men’s house) is like the branches of a tree, but the ancestors, dwelling among the roots at the back, are guarantors of the world (Wagner 2012: 540). But for great mortuary feasts, a tree is set up outside the taun and the feast is held around it. Thus, “the feast contains the tree” (540).
[xxii] As Strathern (2013: 101) notes, Euro-Americans tend to stop searching for explanations as soon as they find a sexual one, whereas Melanesians take sex for granted as a starting point for considering other things: “the question for the anthropologist is what that means.”
[xxiii] By Tetsuro Watsuji, an influential nationalist philosopher inspired by German hermeneutics, Heideggerian existentialism, and Zen Buddhism.
[xxiv] This resembles Amerindian perspectivism in some dimensions and thus it may not be coincidental that one of its major theorists is a keen gardener who has also shown interest in Kyoto’s zen gardens.
[xxv] I write “he” because Qfwfq often carries human equipment and displays a great fondness for entities in the shape of human females. Yet, the anthropocentrism is not even skin deep, since his stories concern experiences like falling indefinitely in the void or living as a formless mollusk (cf. Viveiros de Castro 2004: 467).
[xxvi] Relatedly, a bizarre and fascinating fable by the exiled media theorist Vilém Flusser (2011 [1987]: 27) sought to “critique our vertebrate existence from the molluscan point of view” by adopting the perspective of a vampire squid.