One Planet, Many Worlds: The Climate Parallax (The Mandel Lectures in the Humanities at Brandeis University)

A historian offers a unique look at the pandemic, climate change, and the human versus nonhuman. Climate change represents a deep conundrum for humans. It is difficult for humans to give up the unequal and yet accelerating pursuit of a good life based on an insatiable appetite for energy sourced mainly from fossil fuel. But the same pursuit, scientists insist, damages the geobiological system that supports the existence of interrelated forms of life, including ours, on this planet. The planet, seen thus, is one. The global sway of financial and extractive capital connects humans technologically, but they remain divided along multiple axes of inequality. Their worlds are many and their politics still global rather than planetary. In the narrative presented here, Chakrabarty continues to explore the temporal and intellectual fault lines that mark the collapse of the global and the planetary in human history. "The book opens with a discussion of the pandemic, then investigates the modern origins of the separation between "natural" and "human" histories, and what may be at stake in that separation. Does having different worlds make it difficult for humans to deal with a planet that is one?"-- Provided by publisher Contents Preface Introduction The Planet and the Political 1. The Pandemic and Our Sense of Time 2. The Historicity of Things, including Humans 3. Staying with the Present Acknowledgments Notes