4.1 Introduction: Why Should You Care?

A blanket of ozone, an unstable bond of three promiscuous oxygen atoms, cossets the globe from harmful UV radiation. Without it ‘life on Earth would not be possible’ (Mohr Reference Mohr2021: 31). At ground level, however, this same bond of oxygen atoms is hazardous – interfering with the flourishing of human and plant life caught in its presence. Industrial-age human activity has done two things: destroyed beneficial stratospheric ozone and created destructive atmospheric ozone. The activities of some humans, therefore, interfere with the well-being of themselves, other human beings, animal and plant life. Furthermore, they interfere with the oxygen bonds that make ozone itself and ozone’s natural relationships. The focus of this chapter is on stratospheric ozone, and it is, I think, important to have noted the contradictory impacts of ozone at stratospheric and atmospheric levels on human and other planetary life forms. It is also important to note that the natural balance of ozone at both levels is disrupted by the activities of those industrial/Western/modern human beings who pay scant heed to any form of responsibility to maintain harmonious relationships with the non-human realm.

It is this lack of a sense of responsibility to the natural realm that the idea of the planetary boundaries seeks to address – not in an ethical frame but a scientific one. Put simply, while the ozone layer high in the stratosphere supports ‘life on earth’ in its multiple meanings, a particular anthropocentric ‘life on earth’ has reciprocated not in a relationship of care and nurture, but one that seeks to define acceptable limits to ozone’s destruction. That is, as with all the planetary boundaries articulated in Rockström et al.’s seminal works (Reference Rockström, Steffen and Noone2009; Steffen et al. Reference Steffen, Richardson and Rockström2015), the idea of an ozone boundary rests on (at least) two assumptions. First, the natural systems that support human well-being can be ‘extracted’ from for the accumulation of human property and/or wealth. By ‘extracted’ I mean may be interfered with by human activity in a way that reduces their natural extent and/or functions. Second, natural systems can be viewed as bounded, that is as non-relational.Footnote ¹ In what follows I will argue that, while undoubtedly an agent of good, the idea of planetary boundaries rests nested in an anthropocentric, colonial ontology that silently undergirds the epistemic community (Haas Reference Haas1991)Footnote ² of Western science, a community that deliberately expunges (or claims to expunge) values from its reckonings. Furthermore, the scientific endeavour of planetary boundaries is wrought from that same ontological furnace. The question then is, can you resolve a problem from within the same ontological foundations whence it arose?

My goal here is to try to (un)think planetary boundaries and (re)think planetary relationships. My intuition is that to describe a set of boundaries up to which ‘we’Footnote ³ may pollute, assumes the same basket of rights that is leading the planet and all that draws sustenance from it to a precipice. The assumptions underpinning the concept of planetary boundaries are another example of a colonial relationship, or to paraphrase Max Liboiron (Reference Liboiron2021), planetary boundaries are colonialism. That is, they have imbedded an ethics that legitimizes the enclosure of a commons (in this case stratospheric ozone) for the benefit of a privileged few, who are often, but not exclusively, the heirs of historical colonial appropriation of others’ Land-basedFootnote ⁴ territory – the wealthy Western states and their citizens (although not all citizens equally). My claim is ozone destruction and the ozone boundary might be framed as a property right founded in an ethics that legitimates the way that some human behaviour messes with the natural relations within the air, within the atmosphere and stratosphere. This chapter is less about how much we can pollute to be safe (the Montreal Protocol has successfully eliminated the main culprits (Weber et al. Reference Weber, Arosio and Coldewey-Egbers2022)), but, rather, it is a challenge to that framing – a framing that suggests (some) humans have a legitimate right to interfere in atmospheric and stratospheric relationships to the point/level that is just below one that is harmful to humans. My claim is that rather than a simple duty to protect humans, there needs to be a reconfiguration of the conception of duties and responsibility to support the well-being of ozone and ozone’s (and all other planetary boundaries’) basket of relationships – with humans and other planetary beings, the air, elements, and stratosphere.

An anticolonial approach challenges the root assumption that humans can legitimately ‘extract’ oxygen atoms from ozone up to a certain level. I suggest that chemical pollution does harm to the natural relationships that exist within the blanket of ozone that cossets the earth – it is an extractive relationship that generates negative externalities: burnt skin or scorched crops say. Secondly, I use the idea of extraction to indicate that the governance frameworks and the planetary boundaries literature represent ozone as independent from its relationships (and from any human obligations and duties to ozone itself) and that this representation is a function of governance regimes and epistemic and ontological formations – ones that isolate elements one from the other and create an illusion of boundaries. These are the same epistemic and ontological foundations from which the need for a scholarship on planetary boundaries arose. Equally I challenge the legitimacy of creating ozone at terrestrial levels and thus burdening human, plant, and animal life with reduced welfare and intervening in natural atmospheric chemical relationships and elemental processes and relationships. However, and to reiterate, here the focus is on stratospheric ozone the subject/object of the planetary boundary.

This chapter takes the following form. I assume you have read the introduction to this section and are familiar with the basics of the ‘ozone hole’ and the Montreal Protocol. However, the chapter stands alone without that background. I briefly outline the ozone success story, that is that the ozone hole is the only planetary boundary that has been rescued from a tipping point.Footnote ⁵ I will then introduce the idea of ozone as relationship, followed by a more comprehensive discussion of planetary boundaries as colonialism. I conclude by proposing an anti colonial alternative in which I posit that humans have a responsibility to enhance ozone’s natural relationships and demonstrate that in so doing the need for (imaginary) planetary boundaries collapses.

4.2 Ozone as Success Story

Limiting depletion of stratospheric ozone is rightfully lauded as a global success story: one of exemplary scientific and political cooperation. There were tailwinds, of course, that facilitated this success: scientists willing to implement the precautionary principle quickly;Footnote ⁶ politicians prepared to respect scientific advice; the euphoria of ‘the end of history’Footnote ⁷ as the Cold War ceased and international cooperation heralded a new future; a small number of producers of the key chemicals (chlorofluorocarbons or CFCs) responsible for stratospheric ozone’s depletion; and suitable, cost-effective replacement chemicals readily at hand. Scientists identified a problem that industrial science could resolve under the right regulatory conditions, and politicians acted quickly to enact that regulation.

First, the Vienna Convention of 1985 and then the Montreal Protocol, 1987, provided the right regulatory conditions. From the time at which it was realised that man-made/manipulated chemicals, those produced in industrial and agricultural processes and used in consumer-ware, were destabilizing the fragile bonds of ozone’s oxygen atoms to the implementation of the Montreal Protocol was rapid. The chemistry and risk were illuminated, for instance, by Crutzen (Reference Crutzen1971, Reference Crutzen1972, Reference Crutzen1974), and repeatedly thereafter. Pressure for action was mounting on and in political circles when in 1985 Farman et al. (Reference Farman, Gardiner and Shanklin1985) provided irrefutable evidence of a hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica. The Montreal Protocol was adopted swiftly thereafter.Footnote ⁸ So successful has been the regulatory regime that the UNEP Ozone Secretariate wrote in 2019:

And yet in April 2020 Nature reported a hole in the ozone layer above the Arctic (Witze Reference Witze2020), a big hole the headline said, possibly the biggest ever recorded. The cause? Unusually cold temperatures. However, temperature was not the direct cause: the blame must still be placed on anthropogenically produced and emitted pollutants. The cold allowed high-altitude clouds to form and the pollutants reacted with the clouds to destabilize ozone’s fragile bonds or, as the article claims, to ‘chew away at ozone’ (Witze Reference Witze2020: 19). In 2021 NOAA announced the ozone hole above the Antarctic was enlarged – in the top 25 per cent recorded (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration 2021). The culprit they were quick to note was not chemical alone but rather again a matter of colder than usual Antarctic temperatures. The suggestion is that the Protocol may be said to remain a success story. However, simultaneously the ozone layer remains vulnerable. These stories highlight two features relevant to my argument: (1) the Montreal Protocol limited emissions of ozone ‘chewing’ chemicals but did not eliminate them from either production or release; and (2) ozone exists as a set of spatial, temporal, elemental, and chemical relationships, not as an individuated chemical bond.

Let’s circle back to the previous quote from the Ozone Secretariat (is it quaint to think a chemical blanket 15 kilometres above the earth’s surface should have its own secretariat? Perhaps not). They say the agreements ‘control production and consumption of … ozone depleting … substances’. Despite the science of harm, the ethics underscoring the agreements rests in an assumption that some production and consumption of these chemicals may and will continue. That is, there is agreement that some human beings are entitled to consume a portion of the global commons that is stratospheric ozone. I suggest it is possible to draw a direct line from three historical moments which continue to foist great weight on some – some people, some environments, some elements – and the ethics of the Montreal Protocol and the logic of planetary boundaries: the enclosures of common lands in Europe; the appropriation of lands from the indigenous First Peoples in the colonies and their transfer to private title; and Locke’s rationale for legitimating such enclosures (Laslett & Locke Reference Laslett and Locke1997: § 5). That enclosure was/is legalized does not make it just. At each juncture what was previously held in common for the good of all was re-labelled ‘property’ and assigned to the benefit of the owner.

I approach the ozone boundary as an object of colonization because it seems to embed a property right to pollute the global commons, an assumed right to ‘eat into’ or ‘extract from’ the atmosphere and stratosphere. Here I attempt to weave an anti colonial approach to human responsibilities to ozone.

4.3 Ozone’s Relationships

The planetary boundaries literature describes a ‘safe operating space for humanity’ (Steffen et al. Reference Steffen, Richardson and Rockström2015), and the Montreal Protocol is held as the case study for successfully navigating one boundary’s limits. I trouble this notion by focusing on the relational entanglements of the planetary system – human, animal, vegetable, mineral, and elemental. I am suggesting that ozone cannot, and should not, be seen as separate from its own relationships – its own kinships as Anja Kanngieser and Zoe Todd might have it (Kanngieser & Todd Reference Kanngieser and Todd2020). I am steering you towards understanding ozone not as individual molecules, nor as a cossetting blanket, but rather as a set of relationships. Furthermore, I am also suggesting ozone’s protection is ethically something more than the safety of humanity. All life on the planet depends to some extent on stratospheric ozone. Ozone exists as a set of spatial, temporal, elemental, and chemical relationships, not simply as an individuated chemical bond, a molecule. The very existence of the ‘ozone layer’ suggests a relational coming-togetherness predilection in ozone. The layer is not ‘just a layer’ but a(n) (o)zone of relationship. It exists despite humanity and humanity exists because of ozone. It has liveliness of its own that is worthy of respect: it is not simply a passive victim of human misadventure.

Ozone is not a ‘case-study’ (Kanngieser & Todd Reference Kanngieser and Todd2020). Oxygen is a promiscuous element – in and out of relationships constantly. This, admittedly, is an observation from someone who is neither a chemist nor a physicist. Nevertheless, this seems an appropriate description for an element that readily detaches from one chemical bond to form another. ‘Stratospheric ozone is formed and consumed naturally by photochemical reactions’; its oxygen atoms move in and out of relationships such that ‘[a]t any time, the formation and consumption of ozone proceed simultaneously’ (Freedman Reference Freedman, Nemeh and Longe2021: 3272). It is this promiscuity that might be said to have led to the ozone hole. The love triangle of three oxygen atoms that form ozone quickly collapses once chlorine, fluorine, or nitrogen, and other pollutants, join the party. It is the relational instability between the three oxygen atoms of an ozone molecule that the Montreal Protocol acknowledges and that the concept of planetary boundaries wishes to (re)stabilize by limiting the number of disruptive chemicals in the stratospheric commons.

But what of ozone’s origin stories – these too are relational. The earth’s oxygen, the precious life-giving oxygen of the atmosphere, originated in a relationship between cyanobacteria – blue-green algae – sunshine, water, and carbon dioxide. A planet without these tiny organisms, energy from the sun, and the carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen caught in bonds of water and carbon dioxide is a planet without oxygen. Atmospheric oxygen originates from a critical relationship between plant life and the sun, and yet the concept of the ozone planetary boundary does not directly protect the critical ‘feed stock’Footnote ⁹ life-form required for ozone – oxygen. The boundary focuses on the direct destruction of ozone in stratosphere.

Burning plant life, or more accurately the death and destruction of large ecosystems, is attributed to the destruction of stratospheric ozone in 2020–21. Directly linked to the wildfires that razed one-third of Australia’s natural forests, the ozone layer shrank in those years. Particulate matter, dead trees, dead animals, and dead insects not only insinuated their way into the lungs of Australia’s human and surviving non-human animals but rode an atmospheric elevator into the stratosphere. The figures of death and destruction from those Black Summer fires are now legend. What is less heralded is their effect on the ozone layer. ‘1 million tons of smoke particles [were slung] into the atmosphere, reaching up to 35 kilometres above Earth’s surface’ (Chu Reference Chu2022: n.p.). These catastrophic fires and others, incinerating forests around the globe in what seems like an endless seasonal global procession, insert their presence into the stratosphere and play cuckold to the ozone bonds. Such fires enter a relationship with ozone, albeit a destructive relationship. Researchers ‘estimate that [a] smoke-induced chemistry depleted the column of ozone by 1 percent’ which exactly cancels out ozone’s gains over the past 10 years (Chu Reference Chu2022: n.p.). The Ozone Secretariat’s expectation that the ozone layer will be fully repaired by the ‘middle of this century’ now seems hopeful at best, naïve at worst because it addresses only one of the colonizing relationships of modernity; that of industrial chemicals. Land use, land abuse, the tumults of climate change triggered by colonial extractivismFootnote ¹⁰ are also members of the ozone attack-gang.

Forest (wild) fires, though, are related to other ‘modern’ practices and are intimately entangled with the other great atmospheric threat, climate change. In Australia (and the west coast of North America) these forest fires sear a straight line of culpability to colonial violence, land theft, land-use practices, and Indigenous repression. The philosophies of modernity severed practices of relating and stewardship and embedded those of dualismFootnote ¹¹ and extraction. The idea of property rights enclosed Land and created land from which Indigenous people (and their philosophies of entanglement with and care of Land (Celermajer et al. Reference Celermajer, Schlosberg and Rickards2021; Kimmerer Reference Kimmerer2013; Stewart-Harawira Reference Stewart-Harawira2005; Whyte Reference Whyte, Heise, Christensen and Niemann2017; Winter Reference Winter2022)), native animals, and plant life are excluded and replaced by extractivist farming,Footnote ¹² forestry, and mining. The Lockean philosophy that underscored land-based enclosure now underpins the idea of planetary boundaries – the right to ‘enclose’ the atmosphere (and land, waterways, etc.) up to a ‘safe operating limit’ to facilitate progress, productivity, and GNP. Chemicals production continues, climate is changing, forests are ablaze, and the ozone layer at least doubly damned. Damned first by CFCs and now, on the cusp of restoration, damned by the entangled relationships between intensive agricultural extractivism, colonialism, climate change (and thus also fossil fuel mining/extraction), and wildfires.

Furthermore, the relationship between oxygen atoms forming an ozone molecule depends on prior elemental relationships. Ozone’s origin story begins with cyanobacteria – blue-green algae which converts sunshine, water, and carbon dioxide, and produces oxygen. And beyond energy from the sun, ozone has another elemental relationship – with lightening and light. Lightening is known to create ozone – at both stratospheric and atmospheric levels – and ozone is produced also ‘from the photoexcitation of the (O₂)₂ species’ (Braslavsky & Rubin Reference Braslavsky and Rubin2011: 1517). Its creation, in other words, relies on a complex web of relationships between living and non-living matter, elements and natural phenomena, sun and earth. Conversely, its destruction ‘is the collateral damage of industrial society’ (Haas Reference Haas1991: 225).

4.4 Ozone’s Planetary Boundary Is Colonialism

The description ‘planetary boundaries’ camouflages ongoing colonial practices of privatizing the commons: hidden within the fabric of the descriptor is an assumption that humans – some humans – have a right to pollute (up to some predetermined limit), a right to ‘colonize’ the stratosphere, to ‘enclose’ it. This does two things: it means only some humans get to access the limited availability to enclose (and I will expand on this concept fully next, please bear with me for now); and it makes ozone’s relationship to thriving – for human, animal, and plant life – tenuous, precarious even, for others. The underlying assumption is some degree of environmental harm is tolerable if it enhances GDP and some human lives, even when it involves appropriation of a global commons.

Human-induced ozone depletion, which grows from a system that assumes nature is the ‘sink’ for human waste and waste products (Liboiron Reference Liboiron2021), is a form of extractivism. Like the profligate use of fossil fuels, so the convenience of CFC propellants to eject hairsprays and whipped cream ‘extract’ oxygen atoms from ozone to created new bonds with chlorine and fluorine and carbon from the CFCs reaching the stratosphere. Likewise, the release of CFCs when refrigeration and air-conditioning units are dumped – as a product of planned obsolescence – ozone becomes the victim of corporate profits. The fragile bonds of three promiscuous oxygen atoms are easily shattered to soak up the unnatural by-product of human convenience, luxury, corporate bottom lines, and waste (Winter & Schlosberg Reference Winter and Schlosberg2024). Ozone’s very being is then extracted from the stratosphere, its existence terminated. It is apparent, then, that in these processes we find there are no boundaries – everything, everyone, every inter- and intra-action (Barad Reference Barad2012) is connected.

The stratosphere, that which might once have been imagined an infinite sink, a convenient ‘away’ for industrial externalities,Footnote ¹³ a repository so infinite that it need not be accounted for (in the multiple meanings of account), is now recognized (by some) to be otherwise, to be fragile and perilously finite. Scientists’ realization that the ozone hole existed as a result of human activity is a vivid reminder there is no ‘away’. Making this realization palpable has been one success of the planetary boundaries project. It has been a success too of the Montreal Protocol. However, presenting each domain of planetary overreach as bounded – as discrete and contained – means the relational is subsumed by the bordered. Subsumed too are the world’s extant knowledge traditions that base their epistemologies within relationality.

4.5 An Anticolonial Planetary Boundary for Ozone

The message of this chapter is: boundaries are an illusion. The ‘boundary’ between you and me is broken the moment we share air mingled with our breath or as microbes jumped ship from me to you as we shook hands (Yong Reference Yong2016). Even if there is not physical contact between us, our brains can be forever changed as we share ideas, knowledge, emotions, and theory, and our synapsis lay them down as memory. That is, as Barad suggests earlier, being on earth means being alive to the world in its wholeness. The idea of boundaries creates an illusion of separation where there is interaction, blending, sharing, blurring. The river that flows between states or countries contains and shares shards from each bank, blends them, redeposits them regardless of the designated boundary. The atmosphere is intimately entangled with plant life, humanity’s offal and pollutants, with lightening, wildfires, volcanoes, winds, water, minute particulate matter, and gobbling chemicals. There are no boundaries to some of humanity’s arrogance: it touches everything, and, in Karen Barad’s words, ‘[t]ouch is never pure or innocent’ (Barad Reference Barad2012: 215).

One great good the Montreal Protocol and the literature on the planetary boundaries have wrought is redirecting attention from the divisiveness of the ‘global’, the discourse of borders, nationstates, competition, and multi-nationalism. As Dipesh Chakrabarty so convincingly argues, a global mindset is incapable of resolving the planetary crisis of climate change – that is, a global focus, born from the same the epistemological and ontological foundations as colonialism, bakes in anthropocentrism and competition (Chakrabarty Reference Chakrabarty2021). Without detracting from the good of the planetary boundaries project, my argument here is similar to Chakrabarty’s, that the threats to planetary thriving cannot be resolved solely from within the philosophy from which they arose. Importantly a decolonial planetary vision faces towards multi-species multi-elemental flourishing in their/its own right.

I am suggesting an anticolonial planetary (non)boundary for ozone requires a relational ethic in which duties and responsibilities are to the relationships that inhere to ozone. That, as Max Liboiron says, any level of pollution breaks the bonds of relationality and thus the responsibility between human and the planetary system: it is colonial. The subject of planetary justice is not simply humanity, not simply the sensate or living being, it extends to all matter. Anticolonial planetary boundary scholarship and policymaking require development of and engagement with relational epistemologies and ontologies. Anticolonial planetary studies decentre the human and Western thinking patterns, epistemologies, and ontologies, and include all living beings, the elemental, and geophysical. In an anticolonial boundary-less planetary vision there are no polluting property rights. An anticolonial planetary justice proposes a planet on which a life-sustaining planetary net of overlapping (local) relationships are the subjects of justice.