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A Globe of One's Own: In Praise of the Flat Earth

Today’s questions of climate and climate ethics, with attendant concerns for the sustainability and viability of this life of ours on earth, present a new imaginary for political questions. It was only in the late twentieth century, with the advent of picturing the earth from space, with the possibility of nuclear annihilation of earthly life, and the speed of new media allowing for global audiences (such as the entire world viewing 9/11), that the problem of a global ethos would emerge. If there had always been a silent presupposed “we” 1 in any ethical theory, then this virtual universalism would always struggle alongside moral valorizations of specified communities. 2 How do we, from the particular world we inhabit, begin to think of life as such? It is the present sense of the planet as a whole—as a fragile bounded globe—that might present us, finally, with the opportunity and imperative to think a genuine ethos. Now that we have a notion of climate that seems to break with the etymology of this specific inclination or latitude of the earth, and does so by gesturing to something like a sense of the earth as a region or inclination in itself, this may open a new imaginary of the globe. We might think of ethos as no longer bound to a territory within the planet; instead there might be the ethos of this globe itself, which has no other region against which we might define ourselves or towards which we might direct our fantasies of another future. If there is something like climate change, perhaps it takes this form: not only a mutation of this climate (warming, depleting, becoming more volatile) but an alteration of what we take climate to be. One might want to suggest that as long as we think of climate in its traditional sense—as our specific milieu—we will perhaps lose sight of climate change, or the degree to which human life is now implicated in timelines and rhythms beyond that of its own borders. The figure of the globe appears to offer two ethical trajectories: on the one hand, an attention to global interconnections and networks would expand responsibility and awareness beyond the figure of the isolated moral subject. Ethics may have to be considered beyond discursive, human and political modes (especially if one defines politics as the practice of a polity). On the other hand, the figure of the globe—considered as a figure—is intertwined with a tropology of interconnectedness, renewal,