On cosmic injustices: Critical thinking, outer space, green values, and capitalist ideologies in a planetary age

Abstract

It may seem obvious that the interests of social justice should always align with environmental justice on a limited planet Earth. Unfortunately, this is far from the case in practice, even in the Anthropocene. This essay provides a new cognitive mapping of how ideologically charged discourse splits the interests of people and planet. It offers a pragmatic, semantic, and spatial analysis of how arguments for planetary protection can infelicitously turn into justifications for broadening social inequalities (and the inverse). As such, it presents an implicit critique of holist theories. In striving to demonstrate the fundamental unity of society and the environemnt risk, holistic thinking leaves critics with an impoverished critical toolbox incapable of differentiating between transparently fraudulent greenwashing and scientifically supportable, but ideologically charged, claims. This text is focused on the spatial dimension of Anthropocene ideology. It places a particular focus on the growing place and rhetorical function of outer space within the Anthropocene economy. It illustrates that the promise of extraterrestrial growth, at least when this growth is contextualized against a zoned extraterrestrial space, has emerged as a potent means of justifying inequality in the name of planetary well-being, and so also of justifying the gospel of growth despite our increasing awareness of the limits of our planet.

The Outer Space Inside Us: Ordinary Language and the Care for the Extraterrestrial Commons

“…This should be heard as a historical, political, and cultural question about the state of the global Space Age, not as metaphysical or cosmological question regarding whether life comes from stardust. It is a question being asked in an astrographically localized way: as bearing on those extraterrestrial zones which, thanks to the extension of our technosphere, we have meaningful and ongoing contact and impact (Tabas, 2023). It is being asked in this way because it is relations between us and what lies beyond the planet that are most pertinent to thinking about ongoing debates regarding the status of the extraterrestrial as a common.…”