GETTING EARTH RIGHT: Global Village, Spaceship Earth and Gaia, etc., Revisited

Accurate mental maps are vital for all practical activity, but humanity’s maps are now profoundly outdated, and urgently need replacing. The explosive expansion of human activity empowered by advancing technology and new scientific knowledge have produced -- and revealed -- a New Earth, marked by multiple perils to civilization and human survival, from nuclear war and climate change to artificial superintelligence. Over the last half century, at least nine boldly new macro-mappings of the overall human situation have been proposed. Each encapsulates important new realities, but each also dangerously hides. And all fail to reflect the uneven historical pathways generating global and planetary Earth and our fractured world order.

 

 

Daniel H. Deudney teaches political science, international relations and political theory at Johns Hopkins University. He holds a BA in political science and philosophy from Yale University, a MPA in science, technology, and public policy from George Washington University, and a PhD in political science from Princeton University.

 

During the late 1970s he served as senior legislative assistant for energy and environment, and legislative director, to Senator John Durkin (D-NH). During the early 1980s he was a Senior Researcher at the Worldwatch Institute in Washington D.C. During 2010-11 he was senior research fellow at the TransAtlantic Academy at the German Marshall Fund in Washington D.C. His areas of research are general international relations theory, international political theory and republicanism, and contemporary global issues (nuclear, outer space, environment, and energy).

 

His publications include RENEWABLE ENERGY (Norton, 1983), co-author; and CONTESTED GROUNDS: Conflict and Security in the New Global Environmental Politics (SUNY, 1998), co-editor. He has also published extensively, often with John Ikenberry, on the end of the Cold War and on the Liberal International Order. His book BOUNDING POWER: Republican Security Theory from the Polis to the Global Village (Princeton University Press, 2007) was co-winner of the Jervis-Schroeder Prize for the best book in international politics and history by the American Political Science Association, and was co-winner of the Book of the Decade award from the International Studies Association. His most recent book is DARK SKIES: Space Expansionism, Planetary Geopolitics and the Ends of Humanity (Oxford University Press, 2020). His current book projects are PAX ATOMICA: Geopolitics, Arms Control and Limited Government; and HOME RULES: Planetary Geopolitics and Terrapolitan Republicanism.

 

In over twenty years of teaching he has received four major teaching awards, most recently the Alumni Distinguished Teaching Award at Johns Hopkins University.