“Being an earthling in the present moment is an intrinsically sad proposition; arguably even sadder than previous incarnations due to the social dimension of disaster, hastening an already too fleeting finitude. In simpler terms, it did not need to be like this. Humans did not need to trash the planet. They – we – could have lived in a more mindful, respectful, sustainable relationship with it. Rather than treating the planet like a rented Airbnb, we could have recognized it as a beautiful, living home: one with which we have been briefly entrusted and feel a pride in passing on in good condition. But of course we did not. (We moderns, that is. Indigenous people the world over understood the stakes in scaling and speeding things up and put various checks and balances in place to avoid this scenario. And for this far-sighted wisdom they were treated as “backward” or “savage” by supposed advanced civilizations, who were too boorish to see the limits upon which they trampled.)”(36)
Pettman and Thacker’s SAD PLANETS takes this ‘sad proposition’ as a starting point and explores whether it is us human beings who project our sadness on the planet, or whether planets themselves can be sad. In my interview with Pettman,[i] he compared the first option to the premise of Inside Out 2 – “your emotions are almost like this corporate team that you have to manage”. This is the pathetic fallacy, the idea that we humans project feelings onto objects that do not actually have them. The Mars robot, Oppy, celebrating its birthday alone, out there in space is not actually sad. It’s just us projecting.
Instead, Pettman and Thacker opt for the second option. There is no pathetic fallacy, but pathetic facticity, which
“describes the fact that pathos is not merely a mental or emotional state, found only in the exceptional human being, but something that can be produced via recognition by other cognizant creatures. Humans do not simply produce pathos – as they do words or clothing or methane – but receive it, respond to it, rework it.”(286).
I start with this point about feelings because it’s one of the rare moments in the book where Pettman and Thacker explicitly take a stand and argue for something. And this is the power of SAD PLANETS: spending time with this book allows us to make up our own minds and hearts. The questions it poses are difficult, and so are the answers, but the book itself is easy to read. It’s light on concepts and consists of a series of micro-essays that each describes and discusses one or more cultural objects: books and films such as Chiang’s Story of Your Life and Solaris (the Tarkovsky version, not the shitty Clooney remake), genres such as ‘The Last Man’ in which the experience of the last person or last couple on earth is described, and cultural events such as the Opportunity Mars Rover’s birthday (the loneliest birthday in the galaxy), and that time debris from Elon Musk’s crashed rocket fell into the Rio Grande Valley National Wildlife Refuge. It’s up to us to receive them, respond to them, and rework them. And it’s a joy to do so.
This question haunted me while reading this book against climate madness. Why doesn’t reading SAD PLANETS make me sad? One part of the answer is that SAD PLANETS doesn’t moodsplain. It doesn’t tell me how to feel. It takes sadness as a starting point, not as something to analyze, remedy, or explain away. But as something to just spend time with while reading the book, about this sad genre of ‘the last man’ stories, this sad movie about the interstellar spacecraft Arania drifting in space without a destination, this sad observation about the pale blue dot earth selfie that “the scientific gaze tells us as much about the world as the male gaze tells us about women.”(13)
But the other part of the answer hit me when thinking about the title of this series of book meditations: Challenging Time. This title was inspired by a Yellowjackets composition named Challenging Times.[ii] This title, explained by lead saxophonist Bob Mintzer during a 2024 concert in Rotterdam, refers to the times it’s written in, as well as the time signatures of the song. He told the audience that the composition’s alternating time signatures were confusing, but if you just relax and don’t try to count along, after a while you find your foot naturally tapping along. And that’s what it was like reading SAD PLANETS, which is organized like a composition with alternating rhythms in different time signatures. And, like a blues song, listening doesn’t make me sad but actually helps me when I’m sad.
The book is ambitious and wide-ranging and, I expect, will turn out to be one of the reference points for exploring affect in relation to climate (or, as the authors formulate it in their “impact statement”: “we seem to be pairing an ancient science – astronomy – with a new field – affect theory”(76)) Each reader will engage with one or several themes in the book that connect to what they are feeling or grappling with at the time, and enjoy the ride for other themes. I cannot possibly do justice to the wide scope of the topics that are addressed in the book, so I will single out the two themes that interest me most: the difference between our individual death and our collective extinction, and the question of whose new climate feelings words like ‘solstagia’ address.
As Lisa Doeland discusses in Apocalypsofie [iii], if philosophy has been about learning how to die, in times of climate and ecological crisis, it should be about learning how to go extinct. Towards the end of the first sequence of SAD PLANETS, I thought about adding the possibility of extinction to “the numerous ego bruises that humankind has inflicted on itself since the so-called Enlightenment”(35) This truly sounds like a blues song a la BB King’s How blue can you get? (“I gave you seven children / And now you want to give ‘em back!”). We found out we’re not the center of the universe (Copernicus), the direct descendants of Adam and Eve (Darwin), or in control of our thoughts and feelings (Freud), we’re not even better at chess than machines (Deep Blue). And on top of all that, we’ll be the laughing stock of earth’s species, extincting ourselves at a rate rarely seen before. As Stephen Porder describes in Elemental,[iv] we’re the third world-changing organism in the history of this planet. But unlike the cyanobacteria over 2 billion years ago and the land plants almost 400 million years ago, we know exactly what we’re doing and have the power to change it. If we didn’t have all the knowledge, technology and political means to avert the climate crisis, at least it would have been a tragedy. And despite all these ego bruises, “most of us are closet human supremacists”.(446)
It seems easy enough to say that extinction is to our species what death is to an individual and to add the possibility of extinction to the list of collective ego bruises. But towards the end of SAD PLANETS, I’ve come back from that. We cannot just generalize Socrates’, Kierkegaard’s and Heidegger’s thinking about relating our individual mortality to the possibility of our extinction. Even though, when it comes to the extinction of humanity, “optimists and pessimists differ only on the end date.”(376) But Pettman and Thacker write:
“Extinction is, in a way, the shadow side of speciation. The analogy is often made between extinction and death. In the same way that the birth of the individual organism also signals its inevitable death, so does the emergence of a species also imply its eventual extinction. But the extinction of a species isn’t exactly the same as the death of an organism; the latter is implied in the former, but not vice versa.”(124)
There are many reasons why we need to take a step back and rethink this analogy between the end of my time and the end times. For one, because “it’s we human beings that have invented it all: the terminology, the definitions, the hypotheses and theories, the statistical tallying, down to the word ‘extinction’ itself.”(135)
Another reason is connected to the core theme of the book. “What exactly ends at the end of the world?”(227) To be more specific, if we speak about the apocalypse, whose apocalypse are we speaking about? “The wealthy European can only imagine the end of his or her life-world on a cosmic order […]. For those children of the slave trade, however, who are still living in the long shadow of its legacy, the apocalypse has already happened, and the contemporary world calls for post-apocalyptic survival skills.”(101)
The “feeling for apocalypse is related to our manifold, fraught relationship to time.”(224) In next month’s book, Marcia Bjornerud’s Turning to Stone,[v] she writes about the deforestation of Wisconsin: “For the Indigenous people of the region, the Objibwe and Menominee, whose cultures were wholly integrated with the plants, animals and waters of the woodlands, the deforestation was apocalyptic.” For many ‘members of our species’, the apocalypse has already happened or is happening now. There’s no such thing as ‘the apocalypse’ or ‘our extinction’.
SAD PLANETS starts with this observation:
“In recent years, a host of official terms have emerged which attempt to grapple with a new kind of sorrow: “climate anxiety,” “climate angst,” “environmental grief,” “eco-grief,” “eco-guilt,” and “solastalgia,” to name but a few. While they differ in their specifics, what these and similar terms have in common is a reckoning with the limits of human existence vis-à-vis the planet on which we are but temporary residents. Never before have we known so much about the planet; never before have we felt so estranged from that same planet – to say nothing of the wider cosmos.”
But it’s a privileged act to invent new names for what has always existed. “Solastalgia thus describes the belated era when such vulture-beaked chickens necessarily come home to roost, and the rapacious logic of colonial exploitation is now applied to the “home” of the white folks themselves.”(422) “The hundreds of different aboriginal languages that existed during the time of the First Fleet surely had their own equivalent for solastalgia, long before white Australians felt the need to affix an official term to their historical and existential discomfort.”(429)
Eco-anxiety connects us to the question of what our time is and when it ends, and solastalgia to the question of what our home is, and the question of what ‘our’ is. From my perspective, our planet is our home, the time of our planet is our time, and our fellow earthlings are what I mean by ‘our’. After finishing SAD PLANETS – and I hope you will read it too – we might be ready to cure some of our ego-bruises. And what better way to do this next month, than with a book by an author who introduced the concept of timefulness, and who argues for a more geocentric worldview? Next month, let’s read TURNING TO STONE.
SAD PLANETS is available from Wiley. You can listen to my interview with Dominic Pettman on Spotify or through the podcast website.
Published 28-08-2024
This series of book reflections and reviews is conducted by Mario Veen, an interdisciplinary philosopher and writer who is fascinated by global weirding. Mario is the host of the podcast Life From Plato’s Cave and the author of ‘Hoe Plato je uit je grot sleurt’ . Over the next twelve months, a new book review is published each month on Future Based. Additionally, two reading groups will be organized in the upcoming year to come together and discuss books, but more specifically: Climate Madness.
Previous installments:
Endnotes:
[i] Life From Plato’s Cave, Episode 47 Sad Planets with Dominic Pettman https://lifefromplatoscave.com/
[ii] https://open.spotify.com/track/7xTaIXlCte7aBaWqhKT6LF?si=bae5fa94714a4929
[iii] to be discussed later in this series, under the header of ‘why hasn’t this Dutch book been published English yet?’ – along with Jessica den Outer’s Rights of nature (Rechten voor de Natuur), Melanie During’s The last spring of the dinosaurs (De laatste lente van de dinosauriërs), and Chris Julien’s Everyday activism (Alledaags activisme)
[iv] Porder, Stephen. Elemental: How Five Elements Changed Earth’s Past and Will Shape Our Future. Princeton University Press, 2023.
[v] Bjornerud, Marcia. Turning to Stone: Discovering the Subtle Wisdom of Rocks. Flatiron Books, 2024.