Abstract

How to live at multiple scales? Immersed in infrastructure, economics and politics functioning at a scale beyond our immediate experience, our capacities for reason and abstraction have led to the geological era of the Anthropocene. Yet it is also these capacities that mean we are the singular planetary species with any chance of developing systems that can assure less rather than more devastation as a result of these planetary shifts. This essay explores the ways in which we can use our capacity for reason, abstraction, to design what a future ought to be: open to regular revision in response to our practical behaviours given the persistent contingency of the conditions in which we are immersed.