Fear of a Dead White Planet

Joseph Masco is Samuel N. Harper Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago.Tim Choy is Professor of Science and Technology Studies and of Anthropology at the University of California, Davis.Jake Kosek is Associate Professor of Geography at the University of California, Berkeley.M. Murphy is Professor and Canada Research Chair in Environmental Data Justice and Science and Technology Studies at the University of Toronto.

• Part O. Invitation 1Part 1. Against the One World, For Conditions 41.1 What Is a Planet? 41.2 What Is an Intergalactic Bummer Train? 111.3 What Is Environment? 151.4 Who, Where, What? 291.5 What Is a Core / What Are Worlds? 391.6 What Is a Species / What Is a Loss? 48Part 2. Who’s Afraid of a Dead White Planet? 552.1 Situated Premise—Fear of a Dead White Planet 552.2 Some Propositions 78Part 3. Middles 873.1 What Is a Middle? 873.2 What Is Land? 883.3 What Is a Lung? 953.4 What Is a Virus? 993.5 What Is Thinking? 106Part 4. Terraformatics 1154.1 Resolve 1154.2 Impossible Methods for Terraformatics Research Studies 124Part 5. Conclusion and Future Assessment 1385.1 Welcome to the End 1385.2 Gleaning Group III.5, Work Log 21220401, Tamalpais Archipelgo, RSVTERRA9 139Acknowledgments / Work History 143References 157Index 181

“What can you break? What can you block? Jump on the Intergalactic Bummer Train (formerly known as planet Earth); they’re killing us, so throw words out the window and dance with rage. Fear of a Dead White Planet offers a sharp wit and sharper words: Land matters, and anything that doesn’t fix it is truly the problem.” - Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, coauthor of Field Guide to the Patchy Anthropocene: The New Nature "Fear of a Dead White Planet is a compelling manifesto and blueprint for figuring out collective approaches to politics, life, and inquiry on matters of shared concern. Humanists, social scientists, and others working within and against the university will find it to be welcome reading. Think of this book as a kind of polymorphously pessimistic version of R. Buckminster Fuller's Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, in which the urge toward 'charismatic mega-concepts' is undone, to be replaced with calls for attention to how One World systems are often totalitarian - a fact that demands inquiry into their conditions of possibility and therefore the conditions under which some version of the we may dismantle them." - Stefan Helmreich, author of A Book of Waves