Planetary Stories Before and After Geoengineering

The cultural politics of climate change has always relied on images, most notably the "hockey stick" graphs of changing global temperature over the last thousand years (Schneider and Nocke 2014). Geoengineering—the proposed, deliberate, large-scale technological intervention into climate processes to counteract global warming—has also developed its own visual aesthetic. Geoengineering is climate promise, hope, absolution; but it is also the weirdest of technologies: one that takes the whole planet as its object, that is impossible to really test before deployment, and that would be wielded not from without but from within (Macnaghten and Szerszynski 2013). It is thus perhaps not surprising that proponents deploy schematic and cutaway graphics that in their very visual style seem to promise objectivity and feasibility (Schrickel 2014).But now we have this book from Design Earth, an architectural research practice founded in 2010 by Rania Ghosn and El Hadi Jazairy, associate professors of architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Michigan respectively. The Planet after Geoengineering was their contribution to the 2021 Venice Architecture Biennale How Will We Live Together, in the section called "As One Planet." The exhibited version took the form of a five-by-five array, in which each of five geoengineering scenarios was represented vertically in a column of five strata leading from the subterranean to outer space, with an accompanying animated version.This graphic novel version combines the familiar aesthetic of geoengineering diagrams with other visual styles, such as early modern engravings, to present their five imagined futures, each of which takes one present-day geoengineering proposal and leads it into often hallucinatory territory. The first, "Petrified Carbon," focuses on plans to extract carbon dioxide from the free atmosphere and sequester it in the deep ocean or in rock. By the end, Design Earth has led us into a fantastic underground city where the extracted carbon is used to make artificial diamonds, which become progressively brighter as atmospheric carbon dioxide rises and nitrogen impurities fall."Arctic Albedo" sees the arctic sown with glass seeds to reflect back sunlight and slow warming. But the thawing arctic becomes home to strange sights: giant globular artificial glaciers capture released methane and use it as a material for biotech; the tundra is rewilded as grassland, grazed by horses, bison, and biotechnologically resurrected mammoths; Indigenous peoples carry out controlled burning; and released methane powers a transmitter that creates a continuous shower of diamonds.In "Sky River," geoengineering is used to counter growing drought. Snow is melted and evaporated to create an aerial river of moist air, which is then tracked and seeded with silver iodide to fall as rain—but then the ensuing silver pollution kills fish. Conflicts over water proliferate—as do new religious myths and rituals to try to understand and control the changing patterns of rainfall."Sulfur Storm" explores a future in which dust is artificially injected into the atmosphere to reflect back sunlight. Atom bombs are used to trigger volcanic explosions; balloons, kites, drones, aircraft, and artillery are deployed to continuously emit sulfur dust into the air, with disastrous effects on the ozone layer and ground-level air quality. Those who can afford it live under domes, and excess sulfur dioxide is extracted from the air for industrial purposes.Finally, "Dust Cloud" imagines an artificial orbiting shell of ground asteroids and smashed artificial satellites; a space-based solar power plant also directs a beam onto the earth. The atmosphere is once again filled with dust, suffocating humans and other animals, and obscuring a starry sky now filled with new constellations depicting extinct animals.Then come three short but powerful pieces of commentary. Kathryn Yusoff situates the contemporary geoengineering imaginary in a longer historical context and rightly praises Design Earth for their contribution to stimulating a broader conversation about geoengineering, in which wider groups of people—and the arts and humanities—can engage in problem definition and the imagining of alternative futures. Importantly, she also suggests that geoengineering can play a useful role as a "provocation at the edges of political possibility."Holly Jean Buck also situates the geoengineering imaginary in the longer cultural politics of the twentieth century, suggesting that we need stories like those offered by Design Earth to make it tractable to the mind. Like Yusoff, she sees their five scenarios as usefully resisting the premature defaulting to conventional questions about feasibility and decision-making processes. She nicely glosses them as stories of caution, myth, conspiracy (and ambiguity), psychology, and terror—and suggests that perhaps the most dangerous thing about geoengineering is the way it is presented as a technical fix separable from the wider "everything-transformation" that the climate crisis demands.In his own essay, Benjamin Bratton contextualizes geoengineering in an even broader way, as a synecdoche for human intelligence in general. This "planetary sapience," he suggests, capable not just of remaking but also of comprehending the planet that gave rise to it, is of cosmic significance—but also ineradicably associated with risk, destructiveness, and the possibility of error, and thus capable of bringing about its own destruction. He takes the standpoint (familiar to sociologists of geoengineering cultures) of the "reluctant geoengineer," one who presents geoengineering as a possibly necessary lesser evil compared with unchecked climate change—but gives this a cosmic twist: if human civilization collapses, or humans even go extinct, planetary sapience is snuffed out, and it may never return. His bottom-line hope—and partial defense of geoengineering—is that if the future really is extinction, better that someone or something will know and remember it.Taken together, Design Earth, Yusoff, Buck, and Bratton present us with a rich set of narrative framings of geoengineering as a possible future—far richer than those control-based narratives favored by most proponents of the technologies (and, it might be argued, than those offered by most opponents). Design Earth has done something very valuable by producing stories "before geoengineering" that provoke such thoughts—five stories that might be told "after geoengineering," by distant-future beings we can only faintly imagine, about the crucial choices made by humanity in the midst of the climate chaos of the twenty-first century.