Glenda Sluga in conversation with Stephen Macekura, and Jonathan Blake
Glenda Sluga: I’ve gathered us to discuss the importance of the concept of ‘planetary’ as a framing for environmental and political questions in the second half of the twentieth century (in the main). We have all worked in some way on this idea because it’s impossible not to if you study the shifting ways in which we imagine our world, and our place in it through the last century (at least). We will get round to discussing a chronology for this concept and its impact. In my own work it seems to really come to the fore as a concept in the discourse of international institutions and in the tackling of environmental questions, although not only those. Indeed, these are some of the issues we should take up in our historical discussion today.
Stephen, you are a scholar of US and global history, with a particular focus on U.S. foreign relations, international political economy, development, and global environmental history — in that same context you have written about the planetary in the past, particularly in The Mismeasure of Progress; Economic Growth and its Critics (Chicago, 2020).[1]Jonathan, you are a political scientist who directs the Planetary program at the Berggruen Institute in Los Angeles, and you have just dried the ink on a new book (co-authored with Nils Gilman, forthcoming with Stanford University Press) on planetary governance
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Read the full conversation here: Toynbee Prize Foundation