Fear of a Dead White Planet

by More Worlds Collective, Joseph Masco, Timothy K Choy, Jake Kosek, M Murphy

Overview

Fear of a Dead White Planet asks: How does one study when the planet is on fire? The More Worlds Collective challenges the contemporary rush to planetary technofixes for environmental emergency. Instead, it tracks how such planetary-science frames are enmeshed in the longstanding projects of White Supremacy, settler colonialism, and epistemological violence. Calling for unlearning and joined-up study, the collective reclaims terraforming from off-earth engineering schemes to think through how our more modest efforts to study differently are also world-making and world-breaking. In orienting its work toward terra and formation, the collective commits to a place-based, non universal study scaled at levels both intimate and massive. Through its serious but unruly methods, Fear of a Dead White Planet invites readers to recognize and conjure alternate worlds in and around the university.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781478028840
Publisher:	Duke University Press
Publication date:	07/31/2025
Pages:	200
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.56(d)

About the Author

Joseph Masco is Samuel N. Harper Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago.

Tim Choy is Professor of Science and Technology Studies and of Anthropology at the University of California, Davis.

Jake Kosek is Associate Professor of Geography at the University of California, Berkeley.

M. Murphy is Professor and Canada Research Chair in Environmental Data Justice and Science and Technology Studies at the University of Toronto.

Table of Contents

Part O. Invitation  1
Part 1. Against the One World, For Conditions  4
1.1  What Is a Planet?  4
1.2  What Is an Intergalactic Bummer Train?  11
1.3  What Is Environment?  15
1.4  Who, Where, What?  29
1.5  What Is a Core / What Are Worlds?  39
1.6  What Is a Species / What Is a Loss?  48
Part 2. Who’s Afraid of a Dead White Planet?  55
2.1  Situated Premise—Fear of a Dead White Planet  55
2.2  Some Propositions  78
Part 3. Middles  87
3.1  What Is a Middle?  87
3.2  What Is Land?  88
3.3  What Is a Lung?  95
3.4  What Is a Virus?  99
3.5  What Is Thinking?  106
Part 4. Terraformatics  115
4.1  Resolve  115
4.2  Impossible Methods for Terraformatics Research Studies  124
Part 5. Conclusion and Future Assessment  138
5.1  Welcome to the End  138
5.2  Gleaning Group III.5, Work Log 21220401, Tamalpais Archipelgo, RSVTERRA9  139
Acknowledgments / Work History  143
References  157
Index  181

Editorial Reviews

What can you break? What can you block? Jump on the Intergalactic Bummer Train (formerly known as planet Earth); they’re killing us, so throw words out the window and dance with rage. Fear of a Dead White Planet offers a sharp wit and sharper words: Land matters, and anything that doesn’t fix it is truly the problem.”—Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, coauthor of Field Guide to the Patchy Anthropocene: The New Nature

"Fear of a Dead White Planet is a compelling manifesto and blueprint for figuring out collective approaches to politics, life, and inquiry on matters of shared concern. Humanists, social scientists, and others working within and against the university will find it to be welcome reading. Think of this book as a kind of polymorphously pessimistic version of R. Buckminster Fuller's Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, in which the urge toward 'charismatic mega-concepts' is undone, to be replaced with calls for attention to how One World systems are often totalitarian—a fact that demands inquiry into their conditions of possibility and therefore the conditions under which some version of the  we  may dismantle them."—Stefan Helmreich, author of A Book of Waves

From the Publisher

What can you break? What can you block? Jump on the Intergalactic Bummer Train (formerly known as planet Earth); they’re killing us, so throw words out the window and dance with rage. Fear of a Dead White Planet offers a sharp wit and sharper words: Land matters, and anything that doesn’t fix it is truly the problem.

Field Guide to the Patchy Anthropocene: The New Nature - Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing

Fear of a Dead White Planet is a compelling manifesto and blueprint for figuring out collective approaches to politics, life, and inquiry on matters of shared concern. Humanists, social scientists, and others working within and against the university will find it to be welcome reading. Think of this book as a kind of polymorphously pessimistic version of R. Buckminster Fuller’s Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, in which the urge toward ‘Charismatic Mega-Concepts’ is undone, to be replaced with calls for attention to how One World systems are often totalitarian—a fact that demands inquiry into their conditions of possibility and therefore the conditions under which some version of the we may dismantle them.

A Book of Waves - Stefan Helmreich