“We are lost as a species, harming ourselves and the world around us.” I placed these words into a circle of respect with indigenous leaders, climate justice activists, lawyers, and conservationists deliberating the idea of harmonious co-existence in South Africa. While the planetary clock is against us, dark times clash with hope-based resistance; an inscrutable future of a rapidly heating planet becomes a bit more certain as next-world-making praxis is mapped, shared, and connected on a larger canvas of emancipatory futures-making. Common to these initiatives is the remaking of human-earth relations at different scales—the everyday, the biosphere, and planetary systems. Many exits from harm are being opened as we learn to live on a new earth. There are no victories on this long and perilous journey, just new discoveries (in most instances, of old truths pushed to the margins by shallow Euro-American universals or truths recovered after colonial erasure) of how to sustain, care for, and enhance life as we displace an ecocidal, violent, and oppressive capitalism.

Earth-centric activism and movement conceptions are the new frontier for new mass politics. Transformative movements rising today must appreciate three basic ideas about the politics of knowledge central to socio-ecological transformation. The first is the ontological shift from human-centered to human-in-earth politics. This is happening whether we like it or not. The life-enabling biosphere that the earth supports is no longer static wallpaper on a planet conquered by capitalism. Earth’s response, from the micro ecosystem to the climate system to the harms done, is underway. Paradoxically, it is bringing great suffering but will also work as an ally that will prevail over the supremacy of Anthropocentric humans, imperial power structures, and delusionary ecological modernization, including contemporary forms of ruling class eco-fascism.¹ An agentic earth, with its awesome power, is upending the short age of the Anthropocene and will make current distributions of global power meaningless. It has begun with ecosystem collapses and several climate extremes—floods, droughts, cyclones, and recent heat waves in parts of the Global North and Latin America. In this context, climate and ecological determinism must feature centrally in transformative theories of change to center the acceleration of deep just transitions in communities, workplaces, sectors, and the state to mitigate harms.² Every environmental shock is going to be a moment of tragic loss, fierce rage, and awakening for transformative change.

Second, we have to appreciate the limits of human knowledge on this journey and end the myth of human genius. I am not anti-human, but I am against human supremacy. We do not have the intellectual apparatus to understand the complexity and wonder around us at a subatomic level, at the level of evolutionary biology, and even at a cosmological level. Our knowledge is epistemologically limited, yet we hubristically believe that we are the apex species and can be masters of earth even through geoengineering. In the great expanse of nature, our knowledge is equal to what is spotlighted when we shine a torch. This is an opportunity to also escape dogmas, such as techno-obsession, the growth-driven state-market dyad, or treating nature as an object of exploitation. A great humility must inform and guide us as we democratically aggregate grassroots power.

Third, from Leninism (elite vanguards) to contemporary global crowd politics (mimetic), there has been a failure to appreciate national points of departure. Even though climate shocks refuse to recognize borders, they will be entwined with local complexities. Put differently, local political traditions, cultures, histories, and modes of thought matter and will shape how societies respond. As long as nation-states exist, the role of planetary internationalism should be about “bridge-building” (not wall-building) via strengthening local resistance and amplifying cross border solidarities. Intra-country bridge-building has to engender a politics beyond narrow labor issues, environmental issues, identity issues, and more. Deep convergence on political projects for life-making, regeneration, joy, and care need to crystallize to accelerate the just transition from below and above. We must support local resistance efforts to experiment with new and deep democracy paradigms of power and not securitized as part of elite risk management. Such shifts should be complemented by work towards a post-UN earth commons peer governance architecture.

On the issue of cross-border solidarities, emancipatory feminist analysis brings a crucial analytical and strategic challenge to the fore. In its understanding of contemporary crises, it is not about notions of human endings or apocalyptic end-of-times discourse. Instead, it furnishes us with an analysis of the crisis of everything: the crises of socio-ecological reproduction as the latest crisis of ecocidal capitalism. With climate shocks intensifying, grassroots women everywhere are the shock absorbers and are screaming out for the planetary emergency to be front and center, refusing to be collateral damage. The time has come for movements rising to converge around climate emergency demands. It is time to demand what is necessary to sustain life now and to show the hypocrisy of the Euro-American world by highlighting how Putin is no different from fossil fuel corporations destroying our life worlds. It is not enough for the General Secretary of the United Nations to declare that we are now a “boiling planet” while carbon capital is left off the hook at every turn. COVID-19 locked down global capitalism. It is time for the lockdown of fossil capital, and the following demands need to be considered for cross border solidarities and global citizen action now:

• Prosecute fossil fuel executives in a climate “Nuremberg trial” for the crime of ecocide, the intentional creation of a global gas chamber that is causing the mass-scale destruction of human and non-human life;
• Phase out all fossil fuels rapidly by 2035 or sooner, with no new investments permitted;
• Phase out all combustion-engine-based cars, trucks, and rail systems by 2035 or sooner;
• Ban all fossil-fuel-based air travel, luxury yachts, and container ship movements for the next five years to bring down carbon emissions, except for humanitarian reasons;
• Ban all processed livestock meat products, industrial-scale fishing, and exports for the next five years to bring down greenhouse gas emissions and restore biodiversity;
• Ban the destruction of all remaining rainforests;
• Accelerate deep just transition finance through debt write-off for all poor countries, $100 billion dollar per annum pledges for the climate fund, and the establishment of loss-and-damage funds;
• Place all military conflicts on a ceasefire footing and divert all military spending, resources, and capabilities to the climate emergency.

Raising such climate emergency demands collectively after a 1.5 °C overshoot will be too late.

1. See my essay “The Rise of Eco-Fascism” in Michelle Williams and Vishwas Satgar, eds. Destroying Democracy: Neoliberal Capitalism and the Rise of Authoritarian Politics (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2021). Free online access available here: https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/50256.
2. See Vishwas Satgar, Jane Cherry, and Awande Buthelezi, eds. People’s and Workers Climate Justice Charter Futures – Accelerate the Deep Just Transition Now (Stellenbosch, South Africa: African Sun Media, 2023).