Cultures of Energy

Dominic and Cymene are beaming to you this week from a European Cup-addled Berlin. They share a few reflections on their time in Cape Town and then ruminate on why it is it doesn’t seem possible to hate anyone from California. Is it the sunshine? As if to underscore this point about the essential good of Californians, we welcome to the podcast (15:55) two brilliant residents of the Golden State, Berggruen Institute based political philosophers Jonathan Blake and Nils Gilman to talk about their new book, Children of a Modest Star: Planetary Thinking for an Age of Crises (Stanford UP, 2024). We start with the concept of subsidiarity and why they view it as crucial to creating new kinds of political institutions capable of managing planetary challenges like climate change and health crises. They explain why it’s problematic that so much sovereignty is bound to the nation-state when the scale of planetary challenges exceeds nation-states. Similarly, we talk about how that disables multilateral institutions like the United Nations from engaging planetary challenges effectively too. From there we turn to the need for new supranational institutions to reign in corporate power, why they are not calling for a world government, the importance of planetary sapience and remote sensing and close with a discussion of why they emphasize the importance of multispecies flourishing in the project. Please listen, read and share!! ps Special shout out to Alex Gardels from Berggruen for engineering the recording of this week’s interview.