The Laboratory Planet: Laboratories for habitable futures

Published 25 May 2024 by la rédaction

Makery and ART2M are publishing The Laboratory Planet No. 6, ‘Planetary Peasants,’ this month as part of the More-Than-Planet programme. We are republishing here the editorial by the Bureau d’études collective.

Between 1961 and 2016, the number of people on Earth doubled, and the global area of cultivated land per capita was halved (1). According to United Nations projections, the world’s population is set to increase by 2 billion over the next 30 years, from 8 billion today to 9.7 billion in 2050 (2). In these new conditions, how can the Earth remain habitable for all?

In 2007, we created the journal The Laboratory Planet, based on the intuition that from a “factory planet” it was necessary to move on to the analysis of a “laboratory planet” – where “acceptable risk” is the adjustment variable for experiments on a scale of 1. We postulated that 1945 was the symbolic date of this transition, with the atomic bomb as marker and symptom. We were just beginning to hear talk of the “Great Acceleration” and the Anthropocene, but it was already clear that the construction of environmental monitoring, with its apparatus ranging from micro-sensors for terrestrial measurements to satellite observation, stemmed directly from the technologies and methodologies of Cold War nuclear deterrence. Without the deployment of this military-industrial complex, we now know that it would have been impossible to define either the Great Acceleration or the Anthropocene. The continuous monitoring of Earth System indicators is an indirect legacy, as are the institutions themselves, and the technocracy that accompanies them. Our aim is to highlight the “Anthropocene Bomb” (3) that exploded at the turn of the 1950s, and the “alien” character of computers’ conquest of the Earth (4).

But as science historian Christophe Bonneuil points out, awareness of the “planetary turn” goes back much farther than the view of the Earth from the Moon, or the founding of the International Union for Conservation of Nature at the end of the Second World War. He reminds us that, while the historian community now concedes the existence of a “consciousness of globality” since at least the 16th century, “regimes of planetarity” remain largely unclear (5). And as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak wrote in 1999, “The globe is on our computers. Nobody lives on it” (6). Since then, the Indian philosopher has been encouraging us to move away from the technicist vision of the “globe”, perceived as invading and controlling the planet, towards a “planetary” gaze that would encounter this other that we inhabit, as well as the othernesses with whom we cohabit on Earth.

At a time when living conditions are deteriorating ever further, ecologically as well as socially and humanly, this is the direction we propose to take. In this issue, we imagine a peasant and neo-peasant future, invented by planetary peasants, organized in diverse territories, cultivating biotopes that are more heterogeneous, more democratic, and therefore more habitable than those of imperial cities. This issue opens up to a central section on the recent Soil Assembly initiative, and develops some of the experiences, reflections and surveys collected within this emerging network.

The futurism that guides us here – that of the peasants who have demonstrated their millennia-old ability to shape living landscapes, and that of the neo-peasants who are inventing new forms of agricultural, pedagogical and social arts – is in solidarity with the Earth and its destiny. It does not claim to accelerate the biosphere and living beings, as we accelerate the evolution of the technosphere with capital. Rather, it seeks to thicken the living, to densify beings, to increase their consistency. This issue of La Planète Laboratoire is not leaving behind the dying Earth for the Moon or the stars, it is looking toward our soils, our hedgerows, our forests, our mountains, our deserts, our rivers, our seas and the teeming world that inhabits them.

Future Peasants

If one day the Moon becomes a host for agriculture, it will be in containers, managed by robots. The ancestor of these containers is the plantation. Modern plantation agriculture was foreshadowed in the late Middle Ages around the Mediterranean, in Cyprus, Crete, Sicily, southern Spain and Madeira. These were plantations of olives, vineyards, sugar and fruit, run by Arabs, Venetian and Genoese merchants. This plantation system spread around the world with the expansion of trade in the 16th century and the centuries that followed, right up to the present day, proletarianizing living beings – humans, animals, plants, microbes – all over the planet.

For better or for worse, this is not the majority story of world agriculture. Peasant farms that are relatively isolated from the growing pressures of capitalism have struggled for centuries to maintain their self-sufficiency. And others have fought and are still fighting to maintain their economic, cultural, social, political and moral independence (7).

Capitalist modernism has sought to dismiss these peasant modernities from history. Yet today, hundreds of millions of farms are inventing territories that are very different from the 1% of farms worldwide, which now account for 70% of all arable land (8).

In these global laboratories, other futurisms have sprouted and continue to grow, far from international organizations and industrial complexes: laboratories that cooperate on a daily basis with the biocenoses of the planetary holobiont, already establishing a post-urban age: futurisms of peasants, indigenous peoples, migrants and creoles, from continents and islands, in the center and edges of Europe, Africa, South America, Central and East Asia, the Indian peninsula, the North Pole and the far reaches of Canada or Siberia. Socio-ecological commons such as satoyama in Japan, rice terraces in China and the Philippines, cultivated forests in South Korea, agroforestry systems in Indonesia (dunsun) and the Iberian Peninsula (dehesa), mountain pastures in the Alps and Jura, agroforestry crops in southern Germany.

We imagine these living territories scattered, forming the nodes of a mycelium, distributed all around the globe and in space. In this peasant futurism, the Earth is not a globe whose scale relegates localities to insignificance. For there is no separation of scales: the Earth’s destiny is the product of tangled local causalities. The Earth we’re talking about is not that blue globe photographed by military aircraft from space. It’s here, under our feet. It is what we are, as what happens in the ground produces what happens in our own intestines. Today, it is the movement of hundreds of millions of urban dwellers, perhaps billions, who, along with thousands of plant and animal species and torrents of bacteria and viruses, are migrating as the southern heat becomes too arid, soon restoring rural societies, forms of existence and arts to northern spaces. Whereas the European migrations of modern centuries have massively destroyed the populations of colonized territories (9), we want to work toward a different migration policy for the current century – one that aspires to the cohabitation of species, cultures and imaginations.

This hypothesis of the future, for the 21st century, is not a new Kolyma and its gulags of gold mining. We’re not talking about the forced villages imposed in Russia, Tanzania, Cambodia, Ethiopia or Somalia. Nor are we speaking in the name of the great monetary or proprietary regulations that a few impose in the name of the common good. For the terrestrial community does not subordinate the multiplicity of parts to the oneness of the whole, and does not regulate the multiplicity of parts – people, resources, ideas – in the name of governing the whole. Not because it shouldn’t, but because it’s impossible.

Perspectives for planetary laboratories

In 1970, in his song Whitey on the Moon, the precursor of rap Gil Scott-Heron spoke of the poverty of black plantation workers as white astronauts set foot on the Moon. A little later, in Burkina Faso, President Thomas Sankara proposed that 1% of the space conquest budget be devoted to the preservation of trees and life (10), and imposed that every newcomer to the country plant at least one tree, rather than show a residence permit (11). Our terrestrial situation faces the paradox that vehicles have crossed over icy terrain all the way to the planet Mars, but we still don’t know how many species exist on Earth. The living worlds on which we depend remain poorly understood, and we have forgotten how the society we form with them is organized.

The planetary laboratories that we have begun to survey here have inherited this interest in living worlds, giving rise to rural, agrarian, peasant, migrant, tropical, queer, indigenous and disabled futurisms, which prefer the analog space of existence to the virtual spaces of the control society.

Although less productive than mechanical and chemical agriculture, the peasant planetary laboratory is more efficient from an energy point of view, increasing the amount of solar energy accumulated on Earth and reducing the amount dispersed (12). This laboratory has also been able to cohabit peacefully with microbes, inventing arts and pedagogies of the living. In contrast to the biological universalism of the biopharmaceutical industries, and the biological equivalence of bodies, it has opposed the necessary contextualization of health and nutrition, pointing towards a medicine of territories, where the modalities of health vary according to place and environment (13). Finally, this planetary laboratory has developed, and will need to develop, a culture of hospitality, of hosting, of hybrid spaces and situations, of symbiosis too, as environments leave the relatively stable conditions of the Holocene.

Download The Laboratory Planet N°6 here.

Notes:

(1) It decreased from around 0.45 hectares per inhabitant in 1961 to 0.21 hectares per inhabitant in 2016 (FAO, Land use in agriculture by the numbers, 07 May 2020).
(2) https://www.un.org/fr/global-issues/population
(3) Ewen Chardronnet, « La Bombe Anthropocène », AOC, 28 March 2024.
(4) See previous issues of The Laboratory Planet.
(5) Christophe Bonneuil, « Der Historiker und der Planet. Planetaritätsregimes an der Schnittstelle von Welt-Ökologien, ökologischen Reflexivitäten und Geo-Mächten », in Frank Adloff et Sighard Neckel (dir.). Gesellschaftstheorie im Anthropozän, Frankfurt, Campus, 2020, pp. 55-92.
(6) Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Imperatives to Re-Imagine the Planet (Vienna: Passagen Verlag, 1999), 44. Cited in Jennifer Gabrys, « Becoming Planetary », e-flux Architecture, 2018.
(7) Enrico Dal Lago, Agrarian Elites: American Slaveholders and Southern Italian Landowners, 1815 – 1861, LSU Press, 2005.
(8) 475 million farms of less than 2 hectares still exist in the world today (Sarah K. Lowder, Jakob Skoet, Terri Raney, The Number, Size, and Distribution of Farms, Smallholder Farms, and Family Farms Worldwide, World Development, Volume 87, 2016, Pages 16-29). In the European Union, 50% of farms have a surface area of less than 2 hectares, but they only exploit 2.4% of farmland.
(9) The transatlantic slave trade, a segment of the global slave trade, transported between 10 and 12 million enslaved Africans across the Atlantic Ocean to the Americas between the 16th and 19th centuries (Thomas Lewis, Encyclopedia Britannica). Between 1750 and 1930, 50 million Europeans migrated, driven from behind, as the European population grew, but arable land did not. Updated United Nations projections show that Africa’s population is set to double between 2010 and 2040, from 1 to 2 billion people (four times the population of the EU28). A migration of 200 million climate migrants is predicted for the current century.
(10) « Qu’au moins un pour cent des sommes colossales sacrifiées dans la recherche de la cohabitation avec les autres astres servent à financer de façon compensatoire, des projets de lutte pour sauver l’arbre et la vie » (“That at least one percent of the colossal sums sacrificed in the search for cohabitation with other stars be used to finance compensatory projects to save trees and life.”) (Silva, Actes de la conférence sur l’arbre et la forêt, Paris, 5 au 7 février 1986).
(11) « Le reboisement est une exigence pour tous. Entrer au Burkina Faso exige, implique que l’on accepte de planter au moins un arbre. (…). L’étranger qui refusera de planter un arbre sera expulsé du Burkina Faso. C’est une loi que nous prenons au même titre que d’autres pays ont décidé d’imposer des cartes de séjours ou autres formes de contrôle » (“Reforestation is a requirement for everyone. Entering Burkina Faso means agreeing to plant at least one tree (…). Any foreigner who refuses to plant a tree will be expelled from Burkina Faso. It’s a law we’re adopting, just as other countries have decided to impose residence permits or other forms of control.“) (speech given on 25 April 1985 in Bobo-Dioulasso).
(12) We are referring to the works of Kohei Saïto, or of Sergueï Podolinsky.
(13) See Rupa Marya & Raj Patel, Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice, ‎ Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021. Citation: “Our bodies have evolved in systems of deep relationships with the sun, soil, water, tides, seasons, archaea, bacteria, viruses, animals, plants, fungi, and the rest of the teeming world. Each of those depends on relationships with one another. The study of ecology is becoming indispensable to the study of medicine because humans are not just a single animal, but a multitude, an ecology of beings living on us, in us, and around us. (…) Decolonizing medicine begins with the project of rehumanization and reconnection, linking scans to people’s faces; patients to their families, their cosmologies, communities, and histories; peoples to their lands and mountains and waters; and relatives to one another across the vast web of life. It is a process of imagining a ‘we’ that is bigger than the sum of you and me.”, pp.26-27