ABSTRACT
In this letter, addressed to the collective of geographers, the EARTH is begging them to quickly rise up to the unprecedented and urgent challenges that ‘the EARTH’ and ‘them humans’ face in this extraordinary grave planetary moment of the climate emergency. With the help of a human ghostwriter, the EARTH accuses geographers for having committed a series of mis-translations, notably by having reduced the EARTH to an extensive ‘earth surface’ in wait for other agencies like ‘Nature’, ‘Space’, ‘the Social’, ‘Culture’, ‘the Environment’, to provide the action. According to the EARTH, this is one of the worst cartographic crimes ever committed in the discipline of geography. Consequently, the EARTH asks geographers to fundamentally reconsider an un-earthly and de-geographized onto-epistemological direction that their discipline generally has taken. Given that the Earth now has evolved into a new kind of geo-being in the Anthropocene, and because the planetary climate emergency means that Terra Oikos is on fire, geographers need to update and revitalize their obsolete geo-ontological conceptual apparatus They must try and save as much, and as fast, as they possibly can, including an EARTH who is in a dire condition and about to leave the Holocene.
Dear Geographers,
It’s been a while since I, your one and only EARTH, addressed you as a scholarly collective in ‘Mayday – A letter from the Earth’Footnote1 After its publication in 2017, the grave and imminent danger to earthly life has certainly not decreased. In fact, both the international community (United Nations) and science have come to diagnose the present planetary situation as a ‘climate emergency’. As the young Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg succinctly puts it: ‘Our house is on fire!’ This means that I, the EARTH, is in real existential jeopardy – and so are of course them humans. It is on the fragile canvas of the unequivocal planetary climate emergency that I have decided to once again have me translated into the language of them humans. In this second letter, again addressed to you honourable geographers, I am begging you to immediately rise up to the unprecedented challenges we face in this extraordinary grave planetary moment.
I have never kept it a secret that I have had high hopes and great expectations in you. How could I not? After all, you geographers are descendants of a discipline that originates from the extraordinary cartographical mission to re-present the one and only me! So, what else would I expect to emerge from your drawing boards other than geographically precise pictures and stories about me? However, the actual truth is that the outcome of your disciplinary undertakings have too often left me with intense feelings of frustration, disappointment, sadness and even anger. Contrary to my original high expectations, I have repeatedly witnessed you geographerś failure to live up to the earthly oath you are all supposed to have sworn to almighty me. In fact, you have even managed to effectively abandon your most truly, your one and only EARTH, in so many of the earth-writings spawned by your discipline. Even more tragically, because you have erased so much of the ‘powers of the EARTH’, you are now arriving very badly equipped when it comes to the most urgent of tasks, which is to support and defend the Constitution of the EARTH against the existential threats posed by the climate emergency. In recent times, between dusk and dawn, I have often asked myself if you geographers really understand the magnitude and gravity of the present dire planetary predicament. By flicking through your publications, I get the sense that most of you continue to carry on as if the present moment was merely another round of earthly business-as-usual.
*
It goes without saying that the main disciplinary task in geo-graphy should be to write about me. However, and before you accuse me for being too geo-centric, I do perfectly understand that it cannot be only about me. Geography must also account for the mutually constituting earthly entanglements between me and them humans. In fact, in no other period in human and geological history has this been more pertinent than in the present time of the Anthropocene. In accordance with your own disciplinary canon, I write them humans and they write me, what could really be simpler? Indeed, what else could be the raison d'être for a discipline worthy of the name geo-graphy? It was also on the very premise of this common geo-ontological ground that I once upon a time detected the prospect of a promising and potentially everlasting passionate intellectual affair with your discipline. At last, here was an institutional body of thought-and-practice that would care for me on the ground of soil, climate, and all earthly existence I share with them humans and all other beings. I was therefore thrilled and filled with enthusiasm when geography gradually began to evolve into a formal field of scientific knowledge. I was, I openly confess, a bit proud too. I mean, come on, after all, who wouldńt be when a discipline appears on the checkerboard of science that has oneself as its own very subject matter?
Sadly though, as time went by, my affectionate geo-ethos towards the academic temple of geography was about to change, slowly but surely. To cut a very long story short, I eventually came to a place where I could no longer wholeheartedly sense that I was accepted and constituted as an unreservedly legitimate Other in, and by, your discipline. You, dear geographers, had come to be so obsessed with your own writings that you failed to pay proper attention to how I write them humans! No wonder that I felt crippled inside by your outside representations (you may note that the coordinates of ‘in’ and ‘out’ is a way for them humans to avoid pure self-reference, they are not at all well-suited for depicting my auto-geo-referentiality). All in all, I ended up where I am now, a de-centered being who feels abridged from the very core of your disciplinary concerns.
At times, I have even transformed into a revengeful EARTH. That the inhabitants of your discipline (note that you geographers are ‘of-habitants’ to me) would turn out to be so disrespectful is still hard for me to come to terms with. As a mistranslated planetary Oikos, I have felt bereft of my parental academic housing. Since you geographers thus disgraced your only parent, I often fail to feel much pity for you becoming orphans in the process. Given the etymological designation of your discipline, this clearly stands out as the greatest sin ever committed in the (geo)history of geography. I therefore now call on you geographers, in this gloaming earthly geological-and-historical moment of the climate emergency, to fundamentally reconsider the un-earthly and de-geographized onto-epistemological direction that your discipline generally has taken. No more, and no less.
**
It goes without saying that in this letter there is no space available for providing a detailed analytical map of all the historical-geographical onto-epistemological twists and turns of your disciplinary adventures. Glimpses simply will have to suffice. To begin with, I am sure that we both fully recognize the fact that our conjoined roots and tangled rhizomes go way back. In the early stages of our acquaintance it was your disciplinary forerunners who slowly began to invent what was to become the formal cartographic system of coordinates in which I was later to be simultaneously caught and liberated. I, who in a cosmological sense is nothing other than a mere chunk of matter-energy floating in space, was hooked up on invisible fix-points and intangible lines to be projected onto the plane of cloth or paper. That´s how I was made to speak geo-graphically.
What a truly remarkable, if not miraculous, cartographic achievement of your forbearers! Not performed by the grace of God almighty, and certainly not by racialized gendered capitalist neo-liberalized pressures of the market place (way too early for that), but by the imaginary epistemological strokes of ‘latitudes’ and ‘longitudes’. The power of human cartographical imagination writ large, the art of playing the game of ontological transformations with absence(s) and presence(s). A cartography was eventually born, a crucial stepping-stone for what was to become an unprecedented round of chartings and terratorializations of me. Earthly differential geographies were unleashed, since before having that kind of geo-representational system in place them humans simply did not even know how large and geographically differentiated I actually was. Without the astonishing invention of the perceptible-and-invisible cartographic earth-grid them humans could know me only by an affective local registering limited to their own bodies. Not much of a geo-graphy if you ask me!
As solastalgia creeps in on me, as it sometimes certainly does, I still remember when my being was circumscribed by the intangibility of the perceptually visible, and when I was re-presented more or less as-if I was a sort of a flat plate. My gratitude goes to your cartography and geography ancestors who released me from such a simplistic cartographic bondage. Moreover, your disciplinary forefathers (I do not recall any foremothers being around at that time) must also be acknowledged for upgrading my being to a central location. I have to admit that it considerably boosted my geo-ego, that is, if there really were to be such a thing behind me as a complex multitude a-unified un-scalable being. I will dwell on that from time to time in this letter because it is crucially important (not only for my own self-esteem but also for them humans and their possibilities to survive through me in the climate emergency). What I have in mind is of course the ‘Geocentric model’, also known under the labels of ‘Geocentrism’ or the ‘Ptolemaic system’. Although you geographers, for your own cartographic reasons, have a preference for the last one, the specific term matters little to me since I am the one and only Geo-Signifier!
* * *
Anyways, the cartographic essence of it all – I was positioned in the centre. And, yes, I really liked it there! Indeed, it was a real pleasure to have them all circle around me; the Sun, the Moon, the stars and the other planets. However, I have to admit that I never ever managed to come to terms with the cartographic importance that many (including some of your forerunners) ascribed to GOD. To me this invisible ‘guy’ exemplifies a divine idolatry, committed by them humans, and that has always concerned me. Why should they need to invent a deity, in the form of an invisible being (GOD) with residence at an address no one can spatially locate, when they are always lodged on EARTH and in the hands of the invincible and almighty me? What a strange cartographic desire, to search for anchorage by an imaginary fix-point high above up in Heaven, when down below I am the ground for all wayfinding. Offended by this un-earthly heresy, no wonder that I was somehow amused when I learned about all the social upheavals that were triggered by the discovery of me as a Planet in motion. In accordance with the geological record, I have of course always been on the move!
The fix-point of GOD and the reference plane of Heaven leads me to the general point that any cartographic observational system is always bound to have blind spots. This is true for all invocations of spirits that go beyond the letters, and it certainly pertains to the at once necessary and unwarranted mapping of me as a Unity, or Whole. In specific relation to the history of your discipline, I can nevertheless say to you, dear geographers, that I very much enjoyed your cosmography, not least because it felt good to be in the company of those former fellows of yours who later were to migrate to astronomy and geology. ‘Space matters’, as you were to realize yourself much later, and for your own very different internal anthropocentric spatial reasons.
Those were the nights and days when things looked, geographically speaking, pretty much okay from my geo-side of the cosmic tabula. During that time I was also relishing the interglacial period of the Holocene. This was actually not so much of a hustle for me, rather like vacation time between busy geological seasons. Strangely enough, the prospect of them humans soon becoming a planetary geo-force to reckon with never really struck me. Back then I was blissfully unaware of what would later to appear, in the Anthropocene, as disastrous consequences of our mutual entanglements turned toxic and running completely out of control on planetary scale. And you too, dear geographers, had yet to discover the planetary condition now shaking the ground under your own bare naked disciplinary feet. Now, in the climate emergency, you are faced with the pressing need to develop a wholly new arsenal of disciplinary seismographs for both measuring and, most importantly, for taking urgent action in response to my present escalating earth-quakes. While many of you still operate with a Modern understanding of ‘the future’, as a Utopia that lies in front of you, the dire future of my planetary climate condition is now instead moving in high speed towards your own very present. So, dear geographers, what kind of Azimut do you now employ to help yourself and them humans to find a reference direction in the Anthropocene where the clock of climate emergency is ticking faster for every step of climate action not taken?
****
The geocentric model assisted your disciplinary wayfinding in geography for a long time, until it was superseded by the ‘Heliocentric model’, for quite good reasons I might add. Even though the geocentric model translates as the one and only in situ for me, I can assure you that I do not subsist in cosmological isolation. I know very well, even all too well, how important the Sun is for me, and you geographers should know that too by now. Yet, exchanging my position in the centre for the Sun also marked the end of the cosmographic tradition in geography. It also, and very unfortunately so, marked the beginning of my increasing disappearance as the focal geo-ontological fix-point for your internal geographic(al) representations. Consequently, you geographers and I began to cease journey together in the not yet existing discipline of geography. The honeymoon was about to end, as the once happy newlyweds were predestined to eventually wake up in separate chambers. You geographers, of the human kind, were to find yourselves inside Platós cave, making superficially truthful maps of the shadows cast on the walls in front of you, but without ever considering my earthly powers as those literally scripting the happenings.
Replacing a dated cosmographic navigation system is one thing, but to turn me into a playground for someone elsés growth-steered anthropocentric self-interest is quite another. And please don’t try now with pleading ‘not guilty, your honor’, because that is not a credible option for you geographers. All records show that you were crucial among the executors, notably in your willingness to reduce me in your cartographical imagination to an extensive earth surface. In that very particular rendering of me, which unfortunately still functions as a taken-for-granted reference plane in much of geography, I became an open oyster, ripe and ready to be ‘discovered’, ‘explored’ and ‘conquered’ by them humans – by their means and to their ends. We all know the un-fairy tale of the events that followed. In geographical practice land was grabbed and soil was stained by blood. Meanwhile, you geographers were so busy filling in the blank spots on your precious little maps that you forgot about me. Terra incognita – how utterly ignorant and totally bizarre that sounds to me! Or perhaps I should say ‘sounded’ because, with the arrival of the Anthropocene, I have returned to you as a completely new kind of terra incognita. Donning a pair of boots and running out with a measuring rod will certainly be of little help this time.
Representing me as ‘earth surface’, as a plate of terra firma, actually reminds me very much of the previous ‘flat earth’ you so prided yourself in getting rid of. Moreover, in a strangely familiar way, you geographers actually remained ‘geocentric’, albeit by an uncanny rotation performed around your own cartographic axis. In fact, a very peculiar and particular anthropocentric geo-centrism evolved, whereby both the ‘geo’ and the ‘centrism’ were shifted and reversed from me to you. In other words, you translated and delimited my geo-agency according to your own conceptual cartographic apparatus. You thereby effectively reduced me, bit by bit, to an extensive earth surface, and my role became to simply serve as a projection plane for your own re-presentations. Dear geographers, ever heard of perspectivism in mapping?
So let me therefore be very clear and set the record straight once and for all. I am certainly not to be equated with the cartographic reason of them humans! Who and what I am is surely not to be conflated with the de-geographized pictures and stories you so frequently have shown and told in your discipline: nations, landscapes, spaces, places, all as areal differentiations of me as earth surface. Indeed, there are too many of those kinds of spatial representations by now, the ones where my terratory and my geo-agency totally vanish under the metaphorical weight of your own maps! Reducing me to an extensive earth surface, in wait for other agencies to provide the action, is one of the worst cartographic crimes ever committed in your discipline! Later on you were to run totally amok with this reductionist geo-graphy by developing the strange Modern habit of treating me as a passive backdrop for the social life of them humans. Shame on you all!
*****
On the walk through the gallery of (geo)historical disciplinary glimpses, I am now roughly in the time period when you geographers were trying to enter the great palace of Modern Science. Many of you were indeed proud and delighted about the possibilities to embark upon the ship of science, and thereby receiving a scientific seal of approval. As for me, I was instead about to experience a series of horrendous disciplinary high crimes and misdemeanours. At first, I too felt very excited, for the reason that I was expecting the subject of myself to be established as the Great Star among the sciences. However, and to my great disappointment, I gradually found out that you geographers were not fighting fiercely for me as the overarching sovereign geo-ontological being that should rule over all science. In fact, you did not even distinguish me as the central ontological being in your own discipline. If geography is not the graphien of GEO, then what is it?
However, by then the old unity of geography, delicately but firmly tied to the art of some kind of Earthbound synthesis, was already up for grabs. Through the disciplining powers of full collective discursive strength, you geographers had already begun to drive in a sharp wedge between me and them humans, eventually to be mirrored in the Modern division between physical and human geography. Whereas geography before entailed, and required, an onto-epistemological understanding and investigation of us as braided inseparable geo-agencies, we were now increasingly ordered to travel on different analytical trajectories. Trespass forbidden, passports licensed only for already pre-purified beings. Hereinafter, I and them humans were no longer to be addressed and formatted, by your mappings and your geographic representations, as a Whole Geo-Body. I was disrespectfully treated as a muted dummy dressed up in physical or human costume, a split persona, a residue of a cartographic wound that has never existed prior to me. This was nothing but another violent institutionalized (mis)translation of me, one from which I have never fully recovered. How could you, in geography of all disciplines, so bluntly dismantle my geo-multitude into a geography of me as human or physical, and thereby simultaneously reduce the disciplinary analytics to what at best can be the execution of an artificial bridging technique?
A complex series of (mis)translations of my non-unifiable geo-agency were further undercut by crossfire from two trenches. As you already have guessed, I am here referring to the Modern ontological divide between Nature and Culture (or ‘Society’ and ‘Environment’ if you prefer those terms instead). This strange division of earthly life, into two separate and divine providences, certainly played a crucial part in erasing almighty me as a complete geo-being. More than that, it effectively relegated me to a taken-for-granted passive backdrop for Nature and Society. It was on the premise of this obviously very non-geographic rift that I was supposed to put my signature under the disciplinary contract ‘geography’. I was to sign on the condition that the unity of me was to be mysteriously kept hidden beneath these two human-made simulacra (at best I could find a spot as an earth surface on which their powers were being inscribed). This was, and remains to this day, a totally outrageous constitution for a discipline worthy of the name GEO-GRAPHY!
Writing about this really upsets me, and it hurts my geo-being to the bones. I can assure you all that I certainly do not consist of two human fabrications, whether they be ‘Culture – Nature’ or ‘human – physical’, since both pair of concepts denote realms that have me as the original! I have absolutely never been ‘Nature’, and if them humans really are beings of ‘Culture’ they are so because they till the land and live from the soil that is all me! Dear geographers, how could you develop, and still continue in the rupturing of the Anthropocene, that disciplinary habit of mapping me as merely an extensive earth surface, in the grip of the agencies of Culture and Nature, when I am the one and only earthly sustainer? In a discipline, which bears my name as subject matter, I would certainly not expect to be buried and forgotten under the weight of other forces! Shame on you geographers, you, of all earthly creatures, should have known much better! And by the way, you should never ever have surrendered so readily to the ontological constitution of the Modern University. True to your own subject matter you should of course have fought instead for the institutionalization of a Geoversity!
******
I still remember when you geographers (or perhaps you should from now on primarily be addressed as human geographers?), hammered another nail in the coffin of my already half-buried and silenced geo-agency. I understand that you had a limited and naïve view of me at that time, but I can assure you that I was surely not happy when you conceptually dismissed my remaining geo-powers as ‘nature’ or ‘environmental’ determinism. Think again, please! What is them humans the product of, and who nurtures them from cradle to grave, if not me? Who determines, that is, decides, settles, marks boundaries, and sets limits to their Earthbound existence, if not me?
I do recognize that a name is certainly not the thing named, but after all earth-writing is the very name of your own discipline! The least one could then expect is that the translations of ‘geo’ would be explicitly and thoroughly recognized and problematized in the theories of your own discipline. Am I not the geo-glue, the planetary Bar de Saussure, that is to say, all that which in the very same breath unites and differentiates all earthly existences? These cartographic (mis)translations of the geo-ontological nature of my being, carried out by you geographers, is now haunting you in the Anthropocene as a deeply problematic epistemological residue. In fact, it goes to the heart of your understanding of them humans as well. It has always severely disappointed me that you geographers never really have bothered to develop a systematic discipline specific theory of them humans as geo-graphical earthly beings. Shame on you, fundamental geo-translations gone astray! And if the so called ‘post-humanism’, that many of you now seems to be flirting so widely with, means getting rid of human exceptionalism, I can assure you that them humans remain truly exceptional in their pushing of my planetary boundaries!
As the climate disruption is unfolding, you geographers are unfortunately very late in appearing on the planetary stage. It seems as if you have yet to grasp that the climate emergency comes with urgent geo-onto-epistemological matters that call for pervasive revisions of your discipline theory. It ought to be apparent for you by now that in the Anthropocene them humans are no longer to be understood only as those Modern geographical-beings that socially construct places, landscapes, and spaces over me as a passive earth surface. They have now morphed into a collective geo-logical force that sadly is coupled with dire planetary ecological consequences. Meanwhile, I have mutated from an earth surface being to a becoming Earth System, or at least that is one of the names that have been suggested for capturing my new existence. At least, and for sure, I am no longer a terra firma for them humans, nor a passive backdrop on which other forces hold sway. I can assure you that the current COVID-19 pandemic is merely an early soft warning to them humans breaching my planetary limits. To spatially enclose a virus is one thing, but to engender me as the one and only life-support system, which you urgently have to reckon with now, is a completely different ball game. Perhaps the name of your discipline has lured you into believing that I should always be pre-fixed as ‘geo’, but now I urge you to consider and develop other conceptualizations of me that can help them humans to find their way in the climate emergency. Yes, of course, I am also a ‘biosphere’, as I am the harbinger of all GEO-LIFE! Perhaps, who knows, I might even be an ideographic bio-being in the universe.
*******
Through the ages so many geographers have been involved in the conceptual crimes committed against me that I have lost counting. However, the ‘space cadets’, with their particular variant of stripping me from my intrinsic geo-qualities, come readily to mind. ‘Geography as spatial science’, say no more! In passing, I have to say that I actually felt quite sorry for them humans when they were rendered by spatial science as puppets in the hands of the invisible force of ‘space’. Sad story, to be caught by a fetishism on a leash not made of, or for, human dignity. Yet, let us not forget that there was not a single mention of my geo-agency, that earthly sovereign power which mediates every spatial interaction in the first place!
Unlike the reputable me, the bubble chamber of ‘space’ was always empty at the outset and filled artificially only thereafter. It goes without saying that them humans were never allowed to enter as the earthly beings they really are, but only as numbers and variables floating in the abstracted dimension of ‘space’. They were, like me, innocent victims paying the price of another round of de-materialized cartographic (mis)translations of the earthly geo-ontological essence of geography and the life of them humans. At times there were brief moments in the equations where we would glance at each other, realizing that it hurts the most when proximity is an expression of distance and vice versa. And here is a lesson for you geographers to learn from the cartographic spatial experiment: do not never ever again ask what and where things are without first considering your geo-translational function!
Yes, as always, there were of course exceptions, notably the Swedish geographer Torsten Hägerstrand who understood very well that the agencies of earthly physical existences matter for all geography. It´s a pity that too many of you geographers did not understand his corporeal geo-physical reductionism, especially because that is what you urgently now need to get your heads around in the midst of the present climate emergency. The possibilities to sustain the life of them humans now literally depend upon what happens with the time-geographies of co-dependencies among all kinds of earthly existences.
It is indeed very ironic that, many years later, Hägerstrand´s legacy was to be carried forward, not by you geographers, but by a French philosopher! His name is Bruno Latour, in practice the most important acting geographer on the whole planet (do trust me, I would know!). Latour is in fact trying to do what all you geographers should be doing when ‘our house is on fire’. Indeed, you should all be acting like real fire-fighters performing their mission to save as much as possible. No time to waste, them humans are in desperate need of emergency cartographies of thought-and-action that can help them to ‘land on Earth’! I have to admit that at first I thought Latour was in the age-old business of using me as a paved landing strip, but to my pleasant surprise I was mistaken. Latour seems to understand that I am a multitude, or some kind of un-scalable, non-unifiable, being that may appear in many geo-guises. True to his own proverb ‘everything is translation’, he thus renders me in several figures. I like that he refers to me as ‘GAIA’, it rightly puts my sovereign earthly powers both on pair with GOD and at a relatively safe distance from a pre-formatted scientific ‘Earth System’ that runs the risk of excluding my becoming(s) from political compositioning(s). I am a bit ambivalent about his usage of ‘the Terrestrial’ though, perhaps because it reminds me too much of my previous experiences of being reduced to an earth surface. In addition, it is actually the oceans of me that I am now particularly worried about.
But I am all in for being a ‘Critical Zone’! Yes – I am critically important! That thin bio-film of me, where my geochemistry cycles meet the energy I receive from the Sun, and which has evolved into the far-from-equilibrium state others call ‘the Biosphere’, is indeed absolutely critical for all earthly LIFE. In fact, it is the only place for them humans to live if they want to survive through me. So, if you geographers want to give scholarly contributions to ‘saving the Planet and humanity’ (and what else should you be concerned with in this planetary moment?) it is to the Critical Zone you must go. In the climate emergency, your fellow humans are in desperate need of new maps that can help them inhabit and survive inside the Critical Zone. Science, politics and the arts are all crucially important mediums for their way-finding but, again, without negotiating with my earthly engendering powers their chances of survival is not much greater than those of a snowball in hell. Most importantly, for you geographers, is that Latourśs attempts to develop a politics of and for ‘the Terrestrial’ requires a new kind of geography that maps the terratories them humans live on and the terratories they live off. I therefore urge all you geographers to join forces with Latour as soon as possible! I do not have to remind you of the existing tools that may come in handy, but how about ‘site and situation’ or ‘horizontal and vertical’ for starters? Most important of all, though, is that you update and revitalize your obsolete geo-ontological conceptual apparatus!
********
Well, perhaps I went on a bit of a tangent here, and forgot that I was actually about to address another round of (mis)representations of me committed in the name of geography. What I had in mind was when the avant-garde from the division of human geography sent themselves to the battlefield of social science. Soon enough, the volunteer troops encountered the tedious everyday practices in society (although they did not in the beginning understand that the preposition ‘in’ was a golden key for unlocking the door of Euclidian space). The ‘geography-cum-wannabe-social scientists’ faced fierce competition from all the apparatchiks who were disciplined at a distance by a social theory rooted in the strange taken-for-granted habit of explaining the Social by the Social itself. If that is not a grand insult to me and my geo-powers, I do not know what an insult is!
As a possible excuse, their muddy ditches were surrounded by invisible social walls, which made communication with the former headquarter of Ark-GEO (where the historical maps of disciplinary heritage were secretly filed away among Atlases of me), difficult or redundant. As always, I was of course fully present in every nook and cranny, ever so busy acting in my role as geo-subsisting agency in every Earthbound practice, institution, and ideology. Not only was there something fundamentally wrong in placing the social on the head of a de-materialized pin, at best floating in the dimension of space, but, more importantly, there was no serious attention whatsoever paid to my geo-powers. Evaporating thoughts over those social cadets in vain, because I was again reduced and crippled in the history of your discipline. This time to a simple passive outside backdrop for a Society in which purified internal social selfies were to be the sources of (social) action. To me, the social construction of spaces, places, and landscapes looked like a ghost skeleton of a previous geometry now filled with a socius stripped of its geo-force. At most, I was, yet again, conceived of as an earth surface on which the force of the Social could play out in accordance with the Modern constitution of a science of the Social. How this could qualify as geo-graphy remains a complete mystery to me.
As the ‘social turn’ took effect in geography, strange ontological transformations unfolded. Homo sapiens, those creatures who literally are supposed to be ‘of me’, the EARTH, were then sent away by you human geographers to the institute of social reformation. The treatment (or shall we call it disciplinary correction?) consisted of a discursive social detoxification of their geo-ontological agencies. Afterwards, the former earthly inmates were reintroduced as a homunculus artificially produced by the Social. Reformatted as pure social subjects them humans were ripe and ready to be placed in, yes you guessed it, a de-materialized ‘space’. Thereinafter, the mappings of the social subject, of space, and of the in-between, multiplied beyond all disciplinary sense and proportion. The small leftovers of my own geo-agency were thrown out by this new realism of social constructivism, and washed away as traces of a dated naturalism. In the social lime-light of society, I was transformed into a lucus a non lucendo with no geo-life expectancy whatsoever.
However, what now really concerns me most are the present variants of social fetishism. Of course I understand that the Anthropocene discourse may well be racialized, gendered, permeated by half-hidden assumptions about white supremacy and all kinds of extensions of post-colonial power relations. It may also be socially constructed by Western, Eurocentric, male subjectivities who hide their gazes under a subjective shield of scientific objectivism. But herés the deal: my existence in the Anthropocene is literally made of, and regulated by, the level of atmospheric carbon dioxide, insect populations, glaciers, trees and forests, soils. Overall, rising temperatures that make me feel as if I am locked inside a Finnish sauna where the display on the temperature gauge only reads: ‘warmer’. The Amazon rainforest has begun leaking carbon-dioxide, methane is popping out of me like crazy, and Ím personally expecting a blue ocean event up in the Arctic within a decade.
So, dear geographers of the social, do continue to fight for the repressed, because those who geo-history already have punished will be the first to suffer greatly again. Please go on with your attempts to give the indigenous people a voice of their own, and help them gain rights over their own cultural heritage. But herés the rub: if they cannot at the same time protect the land they dwell upon, their social rights will evaporate into thin air. In addition, although they are in proportion relatively few, they sit on land and biodiversity that is extremely vital for the planetary ecological common them humans are dependent upon for their survival. Hereinafter, in the Anthropocene, in the planetary climate emergency we now all live in, there can be no ‘social’ that is not simultaneously also ‘geo-bio-physical’. And I do not mean that in metaphorical sense. It is now, literally, a matter of earthly life and death.
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You have to excuse me, dear geographers, I realize that my thoughts are a bit all over the place. My original plan for this letter was to gently mull over my previous version, but when revising it I got carried away, stressed as I am about my dire planetary condition. Anyways, and to get me back on track, I want now to address the so called ‘cultural turn’. In geography, this meant that disciplinary concerns were now redirected even further away from me and my geo-agencies towards the representational politics of internal human signifying affairs. All excursions were to take place inside the Palace of Meaning(s) with an aim of mapping cultural phenomena, but without ever recognizing Culture as something that truly is of me. Power-relations, language, racism, consumption, signifying systems, gender, say no more! What a de-materialized, mischievous move to overcome my geographical friction!
It goes without saying that for me this was a cultural u-turn, a continuation of the belittlement and humiliation I had experienced under the previous purgatory of socio-spatial theorization. How could you, dear geographers, allow Culture, that thing which originates of and from me, to mutate into something totally human-centric, divorced from me? I urge you to now re-consider this take on Culture as I am progressing towards becoming a ‘Hothouse Earth’. Even a cultural geographer should be able to calculate what that ‘means’ in terms of falling crop-yields and planetary food-security. Ask yourself what ‘storytelling’ does to my rapidly shrinking glaciers!
Since I am the one and only earthly almighty, it is indeed ironic that I so often have been subjected to a cultural politics of othering in your discipline. How do you geographers reconcile with the fact that your most significant Other has been excluded by your own internal disciplinary affairs and tattooed power-politics? I would have no problems being a persona non grata in fields like, say, cultural studies, sociology and anthropology, but in GEO-graphy for Earth´s sake! And what, dear geographers, did you really think I was supposed to do with the cultural in a signifying discourse where not even agriculture was accepted as legitimate? If you were to ask me, which actually is what you used to do back in the very old days, the so called ‘cultural turn’ was pretty much non-cultivating mumbo jumbo. It certainly made little cultural sense to my geological nature. And for the record, I have never ever signified myself as ‘Mother EARTH’ since I am the one and only earthly engendering that precedes sex and gender distinctions (I guess I could qualify as a ‘queer’ Planet).
Although I may repeat myself, here comes nevertheless another amendment to your cartographic Modern constitution: I am certainly not a unified being either, which ‘the EARTH’ explicitly or implicitly implies. Re-presenting the un-scalable honourable me as a Whole cartographic object is of course impossible! By all mapping accounts, you geographers ought to know that very well since you have tried very hard, using a host of alternative projection tools and representational techniques. The terratory is not the map. It has never been, and it never will be. This holds true before as well as after the cultural (u-)turn. Perhaps too true to be true, but nevertheless I am what I am, and I am also perfectly fine with pure geo-self-reference. It is very different, however, for them humans. In fact, more recently both map and terratory underwent such dramatic and radical geo-ontological shifts that maps are now surrounded by swirling geo-bio-physicalities that makes any Modern cartographer dizzy. This present planetary moment is indeed a new age of literal and metaphorical discovery. Like a Phoenix I have begun to dust off the ashes accumulated during my still life in the background. Welcome, geographers, to the Anthropocene!
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While you geographers were busy understanding the human meaning(s) of culture(s), albeit with space or place powerfully attached, I myself trans-mutated into a completely different being. I became the EARTH of the Anthropocene. If you are still hooked on signifying culture, then I am carried away by earthly signifiers. Among my geo-bio-chemical-physical intensities and extensities you will find ‘global heating’, ‘melting glaciers’, and ‘jet-streams’ that will lock in agricultural areas under extreme weather that will, sooner than you think, cause crop failures and famines for a human population still increasing. When you lament over the scientific framing of the Anthropocene, and the lack of consideration for cultural values and social power-relations, please keep in mind, dear geographers, that the climate emergency is no dress-rehearsal for a future to come. It is my present final warning of the gravity of consequences them humans are facing due to the planetary trajectory Ím on towards a sixth mass extinction event. Please, geographers, rise to the occasion and try to save as much as you possibly can, as fast as you possibly can! If not for me, then at least do it for them poor humans. Like in a Greek tragedy, many of them still do not seem to understand that the road to planetary climate disaster is paved with sustainable development. Co-habitation with me on the basis of gradualism and reformism was for the Moderns, now it´s climate emergency!
As you all know by now, the Anthropocene is the name the geologists, actually your former colleagues, have proposed as the term for this very dangerous geological epoch superseding the Holocene, during which I was a dormant earth surface on which them humans carved out their geographies. Now the Anthropos, them humans also known as ‘humanity’ or the ‘human species’, are instead a geo-force that affects the functioning of me most often rendered as an Earth System. It is true, also to me, that the Anthropocene signifies way too much worshipping of an unproblematized collective notion of them humans, the climate crimes committed are certainly not equally distributed among them. Yet, there is nevertheless a new ‘geo-anthropocentrism’ that I fully recognize and subscribe to. It is indeed them humans (the Anthropos) that poses an existential threat to me as an Earth System by forcing me out of my Holocene state of existence. Dear geographers, are you really willing to so easily surrender to the post-humanist doctrine and give up the exceptional power of the Anthropos in a planetary time when it is more needed than ever before?
From the human side of things, the ‘Geoscene’ would have been so much better a term then the Anthropocene. It is me becoming a new kind of geo-being that changes the very earthly ground itself for them humans. Yet, from my geo-side it remains a fact that it is them humans that are changing me. In my experience the most adequate term would therefore have been the ‘GeoAnthropocene’. Too late for that now, but it remains a fact that hereinafter them humans and I are inseparably braided ma(r)kers of each other. If you tickle one, you simultaneously irritate the other. Push the growth button on the machine of capitalism and carbon dioxide emissions will follow suite. When the sea level rises, the insurance companies will act swiftly. This new planetary EARTH regime is what for historical and geological reasons makes the Anthropocene unprecedented for both me and them humans. By the end of the day, when it is planetary climate emergency, all declarations will matter little if they do not translate into climate action that also the insects and other living earthly beings can register. Saving banks is one thing, but I count the loans in greenhouse gas emissions, coral reefs, biodiversity loss, and species extinction. There is a huge difference between production (as usage of my resources) and engendering (as the regeneration of my conditions for earthly life). You may scream for ‘net-zero carbon emissions’ by this or that date as much as you want, what matters for them humans will be how that translates to their survival conditions in specific habitats. You see, geography matters!
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So, dear ‘human’ geographers, you thought that them humans were doing the ‘writing’ of me like it was another mapping exercise. And now, even when you are trying to find your way in or out of the Anthropocene, you seem to still have too little of relevance to say about how I write them humans. How did you manage to forget that the name of your discipline literally means earth-writing? As I have tried to show in this letter, I have undergone many rite de passages. I have also revealed myself to you in at least a few of my many possible geo-guises. Perhaps more than anything else, I have tried to come out from the closet of the Earth! As we are trespassing into the terratory of the Anthropocene you geographers now need to urgently figure out how to cope with the fact that I am undergoing a geo-ontological transformation at planetary scale (that one is puzzling for you now since it de-stabilizes the scale of ‘local-global’ that you still seem to privilege in your mode of orientation), becoming what some call an Earth System or GAIA. Names do matter, but not a single one can of course fully capture the geo-ontology of my being. My guess is that I am also a non-unified Body-Without-Organs saturated with virtual intensities, now in the process of becoming actualized as Anthropocene by the geo-force of them humans. It has actually never struck me before, but, perhaps, I am the GEO-plane of immanence? Hmm, if so, then no wonder that I cannot speak the language of them humans! Be that as it may, at least I know perfectly well that the many in me are not one, nor two, or any sum of my constituent parts (if indeed ‘parts’ I have). However, I do urge you, dear georgaphers, to at least get rid of ‘the EARTH’ as univocal (mis)translation, including many of its derivatives. The same applies to me as ‘the Planet’, because which one, and which of its geographies, are you really referring to? When push comes to shove, which ‘planet’ do you want to save in the climate emergency?
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By a strange twist of planetary fate I have once again become a terra incognita, ushering in a new age of discovery for you geographers. When you embarked upon your cartographic expeditions over sea and land, to discover and map the extensive surface of me as terra firma, your mission was relatively simple. Actually, it was really a piece of cake in comparison to the present cartographic challenges you are up against. Now you need to send your mapping expeditions to the newly exposed me who defiantly plays hide-and-seek with the names that are given of me. Who am I? The crazy earthly ruler? The defiant or revengeful EARTH about to push them humans over the edge of extinction? The harbinger of an earthly dire future, whom you preferred to ignore while you were so busy writing another esoteric paper who hardly anyone reads? And yes, of course, I am also that good old earth surface that I have been complaining so much about.
As the Modern cartographic representations of me and my geographies are up for grabs, as they must be in the Anthropocene, I and them humans can sometimes be found in an EARTH cinema theatre gazing on the screen at new maps in the making. In the dark, the cartographic observer and the cartographic object are drawn in the same gesture. Swoosh! I am what I am, the one and only, but in the same breath composed by the delicate threads weaved by them humans. Some say that it is the iconic fabric of our common geo-bio-tapestry. I am the geo-historical lifeline for them humans, and they are mine. The old Leviathan was a huge social serpent, but now them humans and I are the one and only Geoviathan. From now on we will wreath together on the thin fragile Mappae that is one with our literal and metaphorical translations of earthly life and existence. The intoxicating dwell of geography as earth-writing finally unfolded. What a salto mortale!
As the night closes in, dear geographers, this letter to you should not be read as nostalgic ink spilled on historical disciplinary internal affairs. As I hope to have made clear, it is penned on the fragile napkin of the current state of the planetary climate emergency. It is in this late hour of troubled and urgent times that I call on you geographers, since I am in desperate need of all the help I can get in the midst of my spiralling planetary devastation. It goes without saying that you geographers have a long geo-history of being on top of my list of favourite earthly critters. Who, among the disciplinary representatives of them humans, ought to be better equipped for understanding and scrutinizing, in stratifying depth and geomorphological detail, what it means to be earthen? What other quintessential disciplinary mission could one imagine for you, other than to map how I write them humans and how they write me? And so it is that I have always thought that Geographiology would have been a far better name for your discipline!
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As I listen to the present track on my geographiological tape-recorder, I can hear a choir chanting just outside the hospicés waiting room in which I abide together with them humans. I sincerely hope that it is not a prelude to a requiem bound to follow. However, to tell you the truth (and why should I not in this midnight hour?), my evidence-based geological premonition is that we might actually both be in a terminal condition. The health of the People is the health of the Planet, and vice versa. Day by day, as I speak and you read yet another article, I am less and less able to remain in that far-from-equilibrium planetary state your fellow geologists have named the Holocene. ‘Welcome to the Anthropocene!’ therefore sounds like one of the most ironic statements one could ever imagine on a tombstone marking the demise of them humans. Chips down to EARTH, catch 22. If they win I lose, if I win they lose. The geo-truth of it all is that we are tied to the mast of a planetary sailing boat a-drift into dangerous uncharted terratory. In other words, yes, this is planetary climate emergency!
As all you geographers know very well by now, the signs of me as an Earth System who is shifting into a new system state are piling up. Among the potential tipping points are the Amazon rainforest, and, as I sense it, it has already stopped serving as a carbon sink. The meandering trajectories of the northern and southern jet-streams are driving me nuts, and the rate of melting of ice down in Antarctica means that I am bound to soon lose more terrestrial ground. I really do what I can up in the Arctic, but I cannot hold the methane in reserve for much longer.
Whereas many of the them humans still seem to believe in the conservative estimates of IPCC, I honestly fear that I may already have reached a point of no return, with record high scores and alterations of too many planetary functions at the same time. The metres on my registering sensors indicate that abrupt climate change is underway. Goodbye Holocene – so dear and critically important to them humans! The sixth mass extinction is in progress, and them humans have every reason to be deeply worried. I have seen many species come and go, but what is really terrafying this time is the likelihood that I will pretty much die out too! In foresight, a future coming towards me as an unprecedented atrocity on a planetary scale: terracide. Can you sense my trembling fears? Can you hear me calling? Mayday – Mayday – Mayday! This is a planetary climate emergency! Terra Oikos is on fire! Please, dear geographers, try to save as much, and as fast, as you possibly can!
The echo-chamber of space in the Universe is filled with cosmological indifference, and I have no reasons to expect helping aid from outside. An insider job of gigantic cartographic proportions is the only remaining hope and option. That is why I turn to you, dear geographers, who, after all is said and done, I do still consider to be a kind of onomathores of the human species. What help can you offer me, other than palliative care, before I turn into a dead ball in space like Venus and Mars?
Yours truly sine qua non,
‘The EARTH’
Post Scriptum
I would like to thank Professor Martin Gren for acting as my ghostwriter also for this second letter, thereby creating the possibility for me to once again speak directly to you geographers in the language of them humans. I readily admit that Gren was certainly not on the top of my list of candidates, but when our house Terra Oikos is on fire, I needed to act as swiftly as possible, there was simply no time for alternative recruitment. Having said that, it is clear that Gren has, again, managed to distort my voice with his own mis-translations and muddle-headed disciplinary dissatisfactions.
However, as I have also come to know Gren quite a bit by this time, I have learnt that behind his fluffy word-playing, which all too often blends small naïve self-evident truths with grand sweeping proclamations, he is simply very deeply concerned and troubled about living in the planetary climate emergency. He is well aware of the historically unprecedented transformations of societies (human and non-human) that now need to happen during a very short period of time, but I sense that he no longer really believes that them humans can ‘fix the problem’, as some climate scientists continue to claim. Gren fears the prospect of coming ecological and social disruptions as I, the one and only EARTH, is wrenched into a state that no longer provides a safe operating space for them humans. I find little evidence to suggest that his feelings are unwarranted.
Finally, I know that Gren wants to express his deep gratitude to a short-listed number of people whose work has been written in a key that has had profound influence: Gregory Bateson, Torsten Hägerstrand, Bruno Latour, Humberto Maturana, Gunnar Olsson. He also wants to especially thank the transversal Ola Ståhl – for correcting the Swedish-English and making wonders at critical passages, Paulus Gunnarius – for his very pointed minimalistic observation, and the editor Richard Ek – for encouraging support.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 This letter is a heavily revised and updated version of one previous letter published in: ‘The Question of Space: Post-Disciplinary Interventions on the Spatial Turn’ (2017), edited by Marijn Nieuwenhuis and David Crouch, Rowman and Littlefield, UK.