"My sense is that politics — the question of 'what is to be done?' — is for humans alone… I don't see how the holobiont… can be made into a political subject in human terms."Dipesh Chakrabarty, "The Planet Is a Political Orphan," Noema, 3 February 2022
And, more starkly, from the book itself: "there is nothing in the history of the planet that can claim the status of a moral imperative" (The Climate of History in a Planetary Age, p. 24).
Chakrabarty gave planetary thought its best available term — habitability, not sustainability — and then, twice in print, declined to let it do any political work. His reasoning is careful: the planet is disclosed by science, not built by us, and politics has only ever been a human vocation. The reasoning holds exactly as long as habitability stays a condition — something found, not made. The moment it becomes a metabolic achievement, something a system does and can stop doing, his own wall has a door in it. This site is a bet that the door was there the whole time.