For too long we have misjudged the very nature of our existence and to what we owe our lifeline. We have come to believe that we live on a land planet when the reality is that we live on a water planet, and now the Earth’s hydrosphere is rewilding in the throes of a changing climate, taking our species and our fellow creatures into a mass extinction event as it searches for a new equilibrium.
Jeremy Rifkin calls on us to rethink our place in the universe and realize that we live on Planet Aqua. He takes us on a new journey into the future where we will need to reassess every aspect of the way we live - how we engage nature, govern society, conceptualize economic life, educate our children, and even orient ourselves in time and space. The next stage in the human journey is to rebrand our home Planet Aqua and learn how to readapt to the waters of life.
Underpinned by robust research, this major new work by one of the world’s leading public intellectuals aims to redefine the very core of our existence on Planet Aqua.
Table of Contents
Detailed Contents vii
Acknowledgments x
Introduction
Part I The Imminent Collapse of Hydraulic Civilization
1 First There Was the Waters
2 The Earth Be Dammed: The Dawn of Hydraulic Civilization
3 Gender Wars: The Struggle Between Terra Firma and Planet Aqua
4 The Paradigmatic Transformation from Capitalism to Hydroism
Part II The Canary in the Mine: How the Mediterranean Eco-Region Became Day Zero on a Warming Earth and a Bellwether of the Second Coming of Life
5 The Near Death and Rebirth of the Mediterranean
6 Location, Location, Location: The Eurasian Pangaea
Part III We Live on Planet Aqua and That Changes Everything
7 Freeing the Waters
8 The Great Migration and the Rise of Ephemeral Society
9 Rethinking Attachment to Place: Where We’ve Come from and Where We’re Heading
10 Bringing High-Tech Agriculture Indoors
11 The Eclipse of Sovereign Nation States and the Gestation of Bioregional Governance
Part IV Sublime Waters and a New Ontology of Life on Earth
12 Two Ways to Listen to the Waters
13 Swallowed by the Metaverse or Buoyed by the Aquaverse
Notes
Index