Volume 9 (2024) Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Climate Crisis: Responses to Dipesh Chakrabrarty's "One Planet, Many Worlds"

This volume brings together essays from eighteen faculty members, across numerous disciplines at the University of San Francisco, in response to the historian Dipesh Chakrabarty’s book, One Planet Many Worlds: The Climate Parallax (Brandeis University Press, 2023).

Chakrabarty’s book unravels the challenges that climate change presents to humans. He claims we must see ourselves from two perspectives at once – the global and the planetary. On the one hand, we have a human-centric global polity driven by the pursuits of endless consumption and competing interests; and, on the other hand, a planet where the same pursuits harm the geobiological systems that support life, including ours.

The wealth of ideas emerging from the responses speaks to the rich, fertile ground that is Chakrabarty’s book. When, in February 2024, we had the chance to directly engage with Prof. Chakrabarty, we were humbled by his intellectual generosity and his ability to address some of our joint concerns. In our conversation, a few ideas acquired special focus: (1) the notion of what modern "freedom" is, (2) the importance of (material) infrastructure in underpinning modernity, (3) the various scales of the planetary, and (4) the political stalemate concerning the environmental crisis. These, among numerous other ideas about the climate crisis from the viewpoint of the global and the planetary, are explored by the authors in this volume.