Frederic Hanusch
Frederic Hanusch is Professor of Planetary Change and Politics at Justus Liebig University Giessen, where his research focuses on the humanities and social sciences' exploration of planetary change and the analysis and design of planetary politics. He is the co-founder of the university's Panel on Planetary Thinking and the author of the forthcoming Our Planetary Condition (MIT Press, 2026).
Essay
Astronomer Harlow Shapley, director of the Harvard College Observatory, proclaimed in 1929 in The New York Times: “We are made of the same stuff as the stars, so when we study astronomy we are in a way only investigating our remote ancestry and our place in the universe of star stuff.”
It was not by coincidence that Shapley formulated that basic truth about our bodily composition at a moment when the presumed special position of humans in the cosmos was again under revision. The work of Nicolaus Copernicus in the 16th century triggered a scientific revolution that modeled the Sun, not Earth, as the center of the solar system. In 1924, Edwin Hubble’s observations further decentered humans, documenting that the Milky Way, until then believed to be the only galaxy of a continuous universe, was only one of an unfathomable number of others. Shapley’s comment further underlined that era’s dramatic reorientation of humans’ emplacement in the cosmos.
Another anthropocentrism is ripe for replacement: that we live on a planet. This configuration relies on the interpretation of the planet as a globe, perhaps best illustrated by the table globe, upon whose surface humans have scribbled national boundaries from a god-like perspective. This positioning has roots in religious dogmas to tame the Earth (dominium terrae, Genesis 1, 28): “God blessed them and said to [Adam and Eve], ‘Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the Earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.’” God mandated that humans, in their superior ontological status, control and manipulate the planet he made them on.
To treat the planet as a stable background condition serving human flourishing is to neglect Earth’s changeable character. This is particularly visible in infrastructures that are designed to last decades and centuries but fall apart against intensified anthropogenic planetary change. The presiding economic order, globalization, assumes human domination through mechanisms of the nation-state, whose borders are stamped on the globe. Globalization describes the exchange of human-made goods, material as well as ideational, that bolster human development. Even the presiding global position addressing development allegedly in line with the environment, defined in the United Nations’ influential Brundtland Report from 1987 focuses implicitly on one species, humans. Sustainable development should “meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” Modern concepts of globalization and sustainability circumscribed to the anthropocentric position can never facilitate planetary flourishing.
Shapley’s cosmic perspective dislodges us from the anthropocentrism that results from being on a planet. If we are made of star stuff, we are in a planet.
Being in rather than on a planet is a subtle lexical distinction with enormous conceptual consequences. This shift in perspective—understanding humans as part of planet Earth—foregrounds our undeniable connectedness to other-than-humans, all the way through the planetary scale. Being on a planet implies a separation between subjects and humans’ detachment from the Earth, as if we are guests in a foreign land who could easily relocate to another planet. Conversely, being in a planet signals our immersion and deeply rooted entanglement with Earth and other beings—without which, we would not be human at all. We are not separate entities but integral components of more-than-human interactions in Earth, including the planet’s solar radiation, gravity, and weather. Being in a planet dethrones humans from our special position without releasing us from responsibility to others. It integrates humans with, rather than maintaining dominance over, more-than-human agencies.
Physicist and theorist Karen Barad’s concept of intra-action describes radical relations between disparate entities: Intra-action, rather than interaction, “recognizes that distinct agencies do not precede, but rather emerge through, their intra-action.” For Barad, a physicist’s measurement of a particle is the experiment; there is no external human subject cleaved from observation. It is the same with humans—like manganese nodules, lichens, and the geomagnetic field—in the planet. “Star stuffs,” form us and we compose Earth. We co-shape the other in perpetuity. The human condition is within the planetary condition.
Harlow Shapley noted that we are not just composed of elements created in stars. Conversely, as parts in a planet, we also contribute to the composition of the universe at large. “We are living as a coordinated part of a wonderful universe,” as he was quoted in the New York Times, “even though a small part, on a minute planet sustained by the radiant energy of a petty sun.” It is up to us to apply Shapley’s scientific insight to human mechanisms of politics. Guiding political documents, like constitutions, cannot be designed and enacted by humans alone. A constitution for multispecies claims that politics is not, never has been, nor ever will be, the domain of humans alone. The vast array of more-than-human agents of and beyond planet Earth—star stuff all—must contribute to new institutions, new modes of politics, and indeed, new ways of being in our precious planet.
Footnotes
H. Gordon Garbedian, “The Star Stuff That Is Man,” The New York Times, August 11, 1929. Shapley was not the first or the last to explicate that we are made of star stuff from distant places, a phrase most prominently associated with the late Carl Sagan and his The Cosmic Connection: An Extraterrestrial Perspective (New York: Doubleday, 1973). The carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and some heavy elements atoms within our bodies formed in stars over 4.5 billion years ago with hydrogen and helium even originating from the Big Bang.
“FINDS SPIRAL NEBULAE ARE STELLAR SYSTEMS; Dr. Hubbell Confirms View That They Are ‘Island Universes’ Similar to Our Own,” The New York Times, November 23, 1924.
Learning how planets work is a prerequisite to understand human presence and human futures. Nigel Clark and Bronislaw Szerszynski’s concepts—planetary multiplicity, the different planets Earth was and will be during its existence, and earthly multitudes, the manifold ways human societies connect to an ever-changing Earth—should inspire humans to think of ourselves with an ever-changing planet. Nigel Clark and Bronislaw Szerszynski, Planetary Social Thought: The Anthropocene Challenge to the Social Sciences (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2020).
The World Commission on Environment and Development, Our Common Future (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 16.
Not to be confused with the interior of the Earth as in Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth (London: Ward, Lock, & Co., Ltd., 1871).
Many non-Western knowledge frameworks buried by modernity have always held this to be the case, cf. Marisol de la Cadena and Mario Blaser, eds., A World of Many Worlds (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018).
Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 33.
Garbedian, “Star Stuff,” 28.