Children of a Modest Star
Planetary Thinking for an Age of Crises
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
A clear-eyed and urgent vision for a new system of political governance to manage planetary issues and their local consequences.
Deadly viruses, climate-changing carbon molecules, and harmful pollutants cross the globe unimpeded by national borders. While the consequences of these flows range across scales, from the planetary to the local, the authority and resources to manage them are concentrated mainly at one level: the nation-state. This profound mismatch between the scale of planetary challenges and the institutions tasked with governing them is leading to cascading systemic failures.
In the groundbreaking Children of a Modest Star, Jonathan S. Blake and Nils Gilman not only challenge dominant ways of thinking about humanity's relationship to the planet and the political forms that presently govern it, but also present a new, innovative framework that corresponds to our inherently planetary condition. Drawing on intellectual history, political philosophy, and the holistic findings of Earth system science, Blake and Gilman argue that it is essential to reimagine our governing institutions in light of the fact that we can only thrive if the multi-species ecosystems we inhabit are also flourishing.
Aware of the interlocking challenges we face, it is no longer adequate merely to critique our existing systems or the modernist assumptions that helped create them. Blake and Gilman propose a bold, original architecture for global governance—what they call planetary subsidiarity—designed to enable the enduring habitability of the Earth for humans and non-humans alike. Children of a Modest Star offers a clear-eyed and urgent vision for constructing a system capable of stabilizing a planet in crisis.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Political scientists Blake (Contentious Rituals) and Gilman (Mandarins of the Future) ponder how to "effectively manage planetary issues" in this sweeping polemic. Arguing that current global governance is not up to the task of solving planet-wide problems (especially climate change, but also other transnational crises like antibiotic resistance and plastic pollution), Blake and Gilman advocate for "the creation of new institutions at larger and smaller scales than existing national states"—a concept called "subsidiarity." The idea is "that larger-scale governing institutions should not intervene unless and until a smaller scale is unable to carry out a particular task." This will theoretically prevent institutions from becoming inefficient or tyrannical, while still allowing for coordinated action on all-encompassing issues. The authors point to the E.U., with its common courts and currency but separate nation-states, as a promising example. They do a good job of spelling out current pitfalls of global governance ("The primary problem with the national state is its claim to absolute sovereignty, not its size or scale") and tracing its recent history (the nation-state did not become a "hegemonic organizing unit" until after WWI). Envisioning future changes to global governance as inevitable, the authors hope to stave off more harmful and chaotic alternatives, especially "decentralization and privatization" (which they define as the full dissolution of hierarchy and grasping of power by non-state actors). It's a stimulating argument.
