“The Anthropocene,” William Connolly writes, “has become the Whirlwind of today, with its implacable flooding of low-lying zones, glacier melts, temperature increases, intense storms, expanding zones of drought, proliferating species extinctions, ocean acidification, threat to monsoons, refugee crises, and potential shifts in the planetary conveyor belt” (p. 7). In short, humankind is “in a pickle” (p. 34). Our predicament is the result of a collision of earth systems and human institutions, organizations, and hubris driven by the imperative of growth and belief in domination. Both human and natural systems are non-linear, i.e., complex, and unpredictable but they are not equally important. Relative to human interests and the survival of civilization virtually all of the vital signs of Earth are moving in the wrong direction. The planet, in other words, is wholly indifferent to Homo sapiens and has its ways of dealing with errant species.

Connolly aims to clarify our predicament and to say what can be done about it. He draws on the language, terms, and analytical paraphernalia of the social sciences, but proposes to join these with earth systems science. This will be a difficult marriage at best because of what he calls “sociocentrism, the well-honed propensity to interpret or explain social processes by reference to other social processes alone . . . and bound to notions of human exceptionalism,” which is the belief that we are above the constraints of entropy, ecology, and a full-fledged morality (pp. 15–16). As a result much of the dialogue of the past century has been “out of touch with human entanglements with a volatile world” (p. 163). In other words, too many social scientists, among others, have spent too much time indoors and are indifferent to the world of nature and to human dependence on biophysical and geological forces that govern earth systems.

Further, we’ve presumed too much, starting with the privileged place assigned to human interests, human intelligence, and human exceptionalism. We are daily discovering that animals and even plants do much of what heretofore we assumed only humans could do. Some animals reason, some use tools, some are self-aware, some exhibit rudimentary foresight, some mourn, some have a sense of humor, and some may have something akin to a spiritual awareness. Even trees have capacities to solve problems, find water and nutrients, and aid other trees in distress. Such discoveries are amazing and humbling. Perhaps Homo sapiens is not the pinnacle of all that is.

The upshot for Connolly is that “we are playing with a wildfire and it is playing with us” (p. 161). The Earth is not a safe haven, but a volatile planet with periodic catastrophes and extinction events. Moreover, humans are not the rational creatures presumed in our myths of “rational economic man,” but are very adept rationalizers in over our heads. The web of life is not populated by dumb creatures and “resources” but shot through with something like sentience that we do not understand. And the ecosphere with its rocks, waters, soils, tectonic plates, materials, and long time spans may be forever beyond our comprehension as well. In other words, we are in Connolly’s word, “entangled” in mystery, complexity, and obligation for which our words, theories, and concepts are inadequate at best and at worst, wrong.

What is to be done? Much to his credit, Connolly has pointed out that, our intellectual pretentions notwithstanding, we are ignorant in the most fundamental sense. Nevertheless, we cling to the belief in progress, now whittled down to the technological kind; salvation by gadgetry. Some like Ray Kurzweil favor the merger of carbon-based intelligence (us) with thinking machines that will likely find us inconvenient and unnecessary. Connolly does not delve into problems posed by the advent of “super-intelligence” or robotics, but he does provide interesting and useful ideas to deal with the more immediate problems.

The pertinent facts are these: Rapid climate change gives us no time for further procrastination. The arc of the moral universe may bend toward justice, but as Bill McKibben notes “the arc of the physical universe is short, and it bends toward heat” (Rolling Stone, December 4, 2017). Second, the political economy of “developed” societies is woefully inadequate to the global situation. Third, culpability is not equally distributed, but confined to a small number of nations and corporations that profited greatly by the combustion of fossil fuels. The consequences were inflicted on others, mostly the poor and future generations. Fourth, had we responded to the warnings that began in earnest in the 1960s, a great deal of suffering could have been avoided. It is still possible to avoid the worst that could happen, but only if we chose to do so and act with a sustained sense of urgency. The barriers to action are neither economic nor technological, but political.

Connolly offers no magic solution to a crisis that is global, immediate, and potentially lethal. The long list of questions he poses has to do with “renegotiating complex entanglements” previously overlooked in our rush to domination (p. 172). So, he asks: “Who will be the priests, rabbis, poets visionaries, singers, philosophers, activists, and preachers who will help us to do that work?” (p. 119). Conspicuously missing from this list are the members of his own tribe and social scientists more generally. Rather, for illumination he turns to figures like mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead and Pope Francis.

As for strategy, Connolly proposes what he calls “the politics of swarming,” patterned on Thomas Seeley’s book Honeybee Democracy. He admits that it is the best of a bad lot of options. In short, swarming means that “several constituencies may plumb affinities of spirituality that range across regions, creeds, and social circumstances. The creedal differences now become objects of debate and reflection, which the spiritual affinities feed enlarged assemblages of action. An accumulation of political protests across fronts and regions could culminate in cross-regional general strikes to target states, corporations, churches, media, university trustees, neoliberal ideology, the ethos of human exceptionalism, investment priorities, and established infrastructures of consumption that together resist, defer, obscure or delay affirmative responses to the current planetary condition” (p. 120 [or p. 144]). Connolly further describes swarming as the convergence of “a variety of forces” leading to an extended “we” consisting of “diverse constituencies” and “multiple force fields entangled with human beings without being strongly predisposed to their mastery” (p. 121).

If I understand it correctly, swarming means that lots of people in lots of places are working on lots of issues and are generally raising hell with the powers that be. It will be, he adds, “wise to scale back utopian images of human perfection while simultaneously upping the ante of militancy against extractive capitalism” (p. 122). The era is “replete with neofascist potential” making it “extremely difficult to address a broad time horizon in politics, to express cultural attachment to the earth, or to address the Anthropocene within the grid of intelligibility electoral politics makes possible” (p. 123).

What then? For Connolly the goal of swarming is a “militant, cross-regional pluralist assemblage in which the next disturbing event encourages large minorities in a variety of subject positions to organize cross-regional strikes . . . [to] impinge upon the economic and moral life of states, churches, corporations, universities and so on [leading to] withdrawal from work and travel joined to mass reductions of consumption . . . [further leading to] a rapid shift in the eco-priorities of numerous non-state institutions, radical state and local projects to reorganize the power grid” (p. 144–45). But such a movement, he notes, “may take too long” given the “accelerating burn of climate change.” We live, he writes, “in a world of tragic possibility” (p. 149).

William Connolly grew up in Flint, Michigan and witnessed the decline and fall of a once large and prosperous city. As a prominent political theorist he has experienced the chasm between our learned chatter that “to varying degrees all have been out of touch with human entanglement [in] a volatile world that increasingly makes things fragile” (p. 163). It is not surprising, then, that he worries about the onset of nihilism, “the sense that all meaning has been subtracted from the world.” If allowed to go too far, nihilism morphs into the aggressive form evident on FOX news, the white supremacists movement, and the bizarre narcissism of Donald Trump. “It is a dangerous and volatile time,” Connolly writes, but adds that he is “one old guy” who still believes that “there is time to make a real difference and to avoid the worst” (p. 173) Beyond the courage to resist, imagine, and act he asks us to act on a fuller understanding of our implicatedness in the world.

Facing the Planetary is a timely book. It underscores what is daily becoming ever more obvious. The future of the human experiment is in dire jeopardy not for want of technology, science, or money, but for lack of leadership—a massive dereliction particularly in governments here and elsewhere that failed to act decades ago when the stakes were clear and the costs of action much less.

There have been other and even more timely books in this vein by political scientists. Lynton Caldwell’s Environment: a Challenge to Modern Society was worth considerably more careful attention than it received when published in 1970. William Ophuls’ Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity (1977) is another. These and other writers did not shift the agenda of mainstream political science mostly, I suspect, because they did not fit the presumptions, convenience, and “pre-analytic assumptions” that were and are still dominant in the discipline. Connolly calls this “sociocentrism” a kind of professional attention deficit disorder for which there is a very large and growing cost.