Book Review: Learning Planetizen Manifesto – Together Tackling the Challenges of the 21st Century

The book is written by Franciois Taddei, who is based in France and who I met during a visit he made to Arizona State University (ASU) to explore collaboration opportunities. He gave me the book as a present by the end of our conversation. The image below presents a brief message he included to summarize our conversation and the insights he got pitched of it:

The twenty-two main takeaways that I got out of this book are presented below:

• The climate crisis is a child rights crisis – children whose parents have produced the least amount of greenhouse gases, i.e. the impoverished, will be the first to suffer major health effects from climate change. This finding is based in part on the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), an organization which has only recently begun and it’s about time to include in is reports outcry from young climate activists to try to add to the sense of urgency, as if to say, “These are the voices ve should really be listening to.”
• In the face of climate change, declining biodiversity, lack of gender parity, persistent racial discrimination, unprecedented economic inequality – the list goes – young people are caught between hope for what could be and frustration with the process. Part of that frustration comes from the fact that minors are voiceless without the franchise, and even if they could vote, global governance isn’t robust enough to guarantee the changes they’re demanding.
• There’s no global governing body to overhaul climate policy. But what if we could make one? What if we could become the first-ever citizens of the planet aka planeti-zens, caring for its natural, cultural and digital commons? For years experts have been sounding the alarm about climate change and the pitfalls of the unfair economic order. Millions of people have spent their lives hard at work trying to combat these ills the best they knew how… How can we kick things into higher gear and get the intergovernmental legislation passed that we so desperately need? This book attempts to answer that question.
• When Francis says “us” in the book, he doesn’t not simply mean you and me and anyone else reading this book. “Us” refers to everyone involved in solving the problems that this book addresses. Some of the problems start in the family, in which case “us” refers to the family. Some of the problems start in our communities, in which “us” refers to the people in our communities. Most challenging of all are the global-scale problems, in which case “us” refers to humanity as a whole…
• The qualifier “Learning” attached both to the title of this book and the name of the research institution that Ftancis founded in Paris with Ariel Lindner, the Learning Planet Institute, refers to embracing challenges as such, not necessarily having the answers at the outset, and finding our way there through a community of support and engagement… As an illustration of what he means, consider the word for “crisis” in Mandarin, which is made up of two ideograms. The first, wei (E), means danger, while the second, ji, is associated with the words for change and opportunity. What if we approached all crises as hidden opportunities for change? And what if that change meant becoming more resilient, or, to use a term popularized by author Nassim Nicholas Taleb, more antifragile? Wikipedia offers a clear definition of the term: “Antifragility is a property of systems that increase in capability to thrive as a result of stressors, shocks, volatility, noise, mistakes, faults, attacks, and failures.” What if we took on crises not with fear but with a desire to correct the issues that got us there in the first place while in the process becoming more resilient to future crises?
• Of course, this book can only scratch the surface of all the possibilities out there. This book is not a plan of action; it’s really anything but that. It’s not a war yawp beneath some banner; too many throughout history have died for a flag.
• The experience of the pandemic has been particularly rife with firsts. For the first time since tourism became an industry, it came to a screeching halt. For the first time in the age of modern education, a billion children didn’t attend school for weeks and, in some cases, months on end. For the first time, the majority of the labor force didn’t go to work. For the first time, love was put on hold for reasons completely unrelated to… well, love. It’s the first time we’ve seen individual liberties, communities, work, and relationships so drastically impacted, and it all happened at once. Crucially, it’s the first time that we’ve had to restrict our face-to-face contact for an extended period of time, regardless of whether it was for a ball game or a funeral, regardless of how much we truly needed to see those people to strengthen the ties that bind.
• Confucius famously said, “We have two lives, and the second one begins when we realize we have only one.” The same can be said for our planet, for ourselves, our institutions, and our societies. Prior to the pandemic, many of us were already grimly aware of the precariousness of our planet and biodiversity. Australian environmental philosopher Glenn Albrecht even came up with a new term, “solastalgia,” to describe the distress and nostalgia we feel for how things were before the Anthropocene. Longing for bygone forests now trampled under the tread tracks of bulldozers or burnt to ashes, bygone glaciers now shrunk by climate change, beaches now buried under heaps of detritus, rivers now ferrying only urban waste; this feeling of longing goes beyond simple nostalgia. It’s solastalgia.
• It’s a little easier to understand Trump’s behavior when observing primates. Among many primate species, alpha males only remain alphas until they show signs of weakness. In a way, Trump’s behavior, insisting he’s the winner against even the hardest of evidence, is biologically ingrained in all of us. But as the great American-Dutch primatologist Frans de Waal points out, it’s typically not enough simply to appear to be an alpha male. Most alphas are large and strong, but some can be rather physically less impressive, and many times strong females are best suited to assume the role of the alpha. How do they remain in power? They successfully keep the peace among the group and provide for the well-being of even its weakest members. Like in politics, the alpha males and females need to be astute strategists who know how to build coali-tions. If all the alphas do is strut about and enforce domi-hance through terror, they’ll soon enough lack loyalty and be challenged at the first sign of weakness.
• As a species, we’re biologically programmed to protect our young. It starts during pregnancy when mother and child are one. Later on during feeding, the bond grows even stronger. And let’s not forget the fact that our species undergoes the longest period of incubation and development in the entire animal kingdom. In civil society, it takes 18 years for a child to reach independent adulthood. In those 18 years, we learn how to be independent from the example of those around us. In tribal societies, it’s the small tribal community that imparts wisdom onto its sons and daughters. In civil societies, it’s the education system… Ancient Egypt established formal education as early as the first millennium B.C.E. Teaching methods were a rather brutal by our standards, with teachers encouraged to hit students when they failed to answer questions correctly. This is perhaps where the idea of “teaching someone a lesson” comes from, as the Egyptian hieroglyph for “reach” can also be translated as “beat with the right hand!” Teachers could also hit students with sticks.
• The two things most unique to our species are consciousness and our capacity for socializing and cooperation. A gorilla is stronger than a human, but one hundred gorillas are not stronger than one hundred humans because humans are better at communicating, planning, and executing. Getting increasingly large populations to cooperate with one another has been key to the survival and proliferation of our species… Our knack for communication grew out of evolutionary imperative, something we learned the true meaning of during those early, stringent lockdowns before masks, testing, hand sanitizer, and vaccines were widely avail-able. Deprived of the precious freedom of movement and face-to-face socializing we’d come to take for granted, we showed unprecedented creativity coming up with alternatives for maintaining and strengthening social bonds.
• If finding the ikigai is an individual search of purpose, let’s term “we-kigai” a collective search for purpose. Where do all our disparate needs converge to create a common sense of fulfillment? Typically, when we try to bring our disparate needs together, it only creates disputes. How can we “conscientize” or raise general awareness about where we’re headed and how close that is to where we want to be? Can we give people the time and means to find their ikigai?… Once we’ve each found our ikigai and work toward establishing a we-kigai, can we then move toward a search for an “iki-Gaia”? Gaia is the personification of the Earth in Greek mythology, thus the iki-Gaia would be the ikigai of every living organism on the planet. Can we look past our own species to ensure every organism has a home here on Homeland Earth?
• With a more comprehensive understanding of our long evolutionary history, we can start to see our common destiny a little clearer. For the first time in history— and that means broad-scale, 13-billion-year-old history – we have the means to genetically modify living organisms, build artificial intelligence, and create new forms of life. We have the means to irrevocably change the future of the planet, and even the future of life itself. We are the first-ever species with the means to consciously choose how we want to evolve, something Australian systems theorist John Stewart calls “intentional evolution.”
• To take things even further into our evolutionary history, it’s worth it to take a brief look at the work of American microbiologist Carl Woese. In the late 1970s, he was a pioneer in analysis of ribonucleic acids or RNA, a molecule that has entered dinner-table conversation in every household since the emergence of “messenger RNA” Covid-19 vaccines. Woese and his collaborators set out to find the most recent organism from which all organisms we now see on Earth sprang, i.e. what in science is termed a Last Universal Common Ancestor, or LUCA. And they found it. LUCA is thought to have lived three billion years ago, but it was far from being the first-ever living organism. It’s actually a rather sophisticated, later-stage organism resulting from genetic combinations of earlier organisms… Regardless, it is, in a way, the “parent” organism we all have in common, and by “we” – the three families of todays living organisms: bacteria, archaea (singleceled organisms without a nucleus), and eucarya – with humans belonging to this last tree line, along with all animals, fungi, and plants.
• Another institution where you see these ideas in action is Arizona State University, home of the Sun Devils. Twenty years ago, they were a regional school totally under the radar if you lived outside the US, but in that time their student body has doubled and their research funding quintupled with 40 ASU-affiliated interdisciplinary research centers now in existence. Ask them the key to their success, they say it “rests on the belief that inclusivity and excellence are not mutually exclu-sive. The university is rebranding itself as a 21st century public research university. It’s become a leader in seizing partnership opportunities that tackle challenges both local and global for the mutual benefit of students and community. With their more than 200 EdTech partnerships, they can develop digital education tools to modernize the learning environment and improve student outcomes (student drop-out rates have been cut by a third in 20 years). And their digital prowess doesn’t stop there. Relying heavily on digital has allowed them to establish institutional relationships internationally, and the US News & World Report even named them the US’s most innovative university for the past seven years in a row (personal note: it is nine by now).
• What has allowed our species to develop more brain power than any other species is our ability not to transmit knowledge, as all animals do, but to do it on a massive scale and on an infinite number of topics. The internet has shown us the true meaning of the word “infinite” in this regard, but in the early days of our species we learned so slowly that the growth process was almost impercep-tible. Mastering the use of a few rudimentary tools took millions of years. From there, mastering agriculture took a few thousand years. We got from the Industrial Revolution to the Information Revolution at relatively breakneck speed, and in the snap of a finger we’ve gone from the Information Revolution to decoding the human genome… Language and writing have played a decisive role in our evolution because these were the biological “technologies” for sharing ideas. Oral language allowed us to share our ideas with those around us, then written language allowed us to spread that information not only across geographic distance but through time as well with old texts being passed down over generations. Digital technology has not reinvented the wheel as it were, only amplifying the power of the old technologies of speech and writing, but this it has done by leaps and bounds… The real revolution of the Digital Age was democratizing ultra-powerful technology and putting it within reach of every person on the planet… In the absence of a top-down model, how can we use the internet to grow our knowledge when everyone is both a teacher and a student at the same time? In the current climate it takes on an unprecedented urgency: everyone needs to be given the tools to think critically. How do we go about this?
• Western democracies and capitalism are the fruit of the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution. In theory, both systems are founded on the belief that freedom is a prerequisite for a harmonious society. The freedom of the vote makes it possible to establish balance in the divergent interests across a population, and the free exchange of goods and services ensures provision of those goods and services wherever they are needed. Democracy is nothing to take for granted, and regulation is required in order to maintain it. There’s the rub. In order to maintain freedom, we have to put one thousand and one constraints on it. In the French democratic motto Liberté, égalité, fraternité, (liberty, equality, and brotherhood), each one of these democratic virtues hinders the other… The history of democracy everywhere has been beset by periods of decline, moral or economic, followed quickly by periods of progress. The setbacks have at times been unspeakably horrifying, as in the rise of the Nazis, but painting in broad brush strokes, the arc of the moral universe has bent toward justice in the democratic world, to paraphrase Martin Luther King, Jr. This is in large part thanks to improvements in quality of life through education and technology, but technology is now progressing beyond our cognitive capacities, and as a result the delicate balance of democracy is once again threatened. The universe of alternative facts on the internet undermines the voting process, reason no longer has the upper hand over emotion, and unbridled consumerism threatens our planet. While emotion is not something merely to be subjugated but rather channeled creatively, it’s becoming more and more difficult to “know and profit from one’s full rights and understand and assume one’s obligations” in democratic societies, to quote Condorcet… Some thinkers, Harari among others, even go so far as to say it’s futile to attempt rationally informed decisions when computers know more about us than we do and are designed to distort the decision-making process. We saw this in the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data scandal… Many accuse political-consulting group Cambridge Analytica with interfering heavily in the Brexit referendum and Donald Trump’s presidential victory in 2016.
• Learning Planetizen Manifesto – We were all taught to be good citizens but were never asked to reflect on the historical and geographical limitations of the idea of citizenship. Compared to suffering under tyranny, citizenship is clear progress that has enabled access to education, arts, science, open debate and democracy, but citizenship has always been an exclusive notion. City walls separated insiders from outsiders. Furthermore, of those living within the walls, only those able to defend the city commons from external threats were eligible for citizen status, i.e. no slaves, women, or children. Nature was also outside of the walls and had to be exploited to create sustenance for the citizen population and make them wealthier… During the Enlightenment, nation states devised a new citizenship, yet it remained exclusive. Once more, foreigners, the poor, slaves, women, and children were not considered citizens and thus could not vote and decide on the laws imposed on them. Citizens of imperial states competed to exploit nature and colonize other parts of the world to maximize their wealth. This engendered the slavery, war, and overexploitation of natural resources that ushered in our current age of democratic, economic, health, climate, and biodiversity crises, none of which stop at the walls of any city. If the citywide and statewide levels are the appropriate scales for coming to democratic decisions on local and national issues, then in order to solve borderless crises, a larger planetary scale is needed, thus in addition to being local citizens, we all need to learn to become ethical, inclusive, and respectful planetizens.
• Planetizens of all ages are learning planetizens because we can always continue to learn to (i) care for themselves, others, and the planet, (ii) work together to overcome personal, local, and global challenges (including the UN’s SDGs) by mobilizing collective intelligence and technologies that can help us to become more sustainable, (iii) recognize our global interde-pendence, the limits of our planet, the vulnerability of our societies, and the complexity of our world, (iv) reflect on our past, present, and future, (v) be good ancestors to the generations to come, (vi) “planetize the movement,” in the words of Martin Luther King, Jr., as well as our thinking, actions, rights, institutions, cele-brations, and ability to decide together how on Earth we’re going to live together.
• Planetizens are to the planet what citizens are to the city-state. In their discourse, the democratic revolutions of the 18th through the 20th centuries sought to establish universal rights, but in practice these were reiterations of old citizenship exclusive to one people and not another and only actionable across a limited territory. The issue of stateless persons we tend to associate with the late 19th and early-20th century Europe-Marx, Nietzche, Hitler, and Einstein, all had stateless status at some point in their lives-but according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, at least 10 million people in the world today are currently stateless. Typically, these are people born to the wrong ethnic groups in the wrong state. Such is the effect of citizenship. In its very nature, it only applies to some, not all. It’s high time we got beyond the limited scope of citizenship to something more universal.
• Meet planetizenship. With planetizenship, there are no wrong ethnic groups. With planetizenship, rather than granting community rights in exchange for defense against an external enemy, we can forget the notion of defense and war entirely to turn to peaceful endeavors such as global efforts to feed people, improve education and quality of life, clean up our ecosys-tems, and bolster biodiversity.
• The overall purpose of this book is to add to the discussion already underway. That discussion must open up to the whole world: What are our “What If” questions? How would we planetize under the planet eyes? What can wr add to what’s already been discussed here?… What if we could create a way to do together what’s impossible to do on our own, but which we know is the best way not only to avoid the grim future we’re currently headed for but to allow youths find the hope they need to steer us toward a new future?… What if we could live our lives the way we dream them?