Planetary Compendium

As the world rapidly shifts away from long-standing assumptions, a new recognition is taking shape: human life is inseparable from the biogeochemical forces of an ever-changing planet. To map and make sense of this transformation, the Berggruen Institute and Dark Matter Labs created the Planetary Compendium, an evolving wunderkammer of planetary governance.

The Planetary Compendium responds to this moment of flux by offering a civic, artistic, and intellectual tool that highlights innovative approaches to living within our planetary condition. It is an archive of short essays and artifacts that maps the shifting architectures, imaginaries, and experiments shaping how life on Earth may be organized, sustained, and represented. Through text, design, and sound, the Compendium presents and explores emerging pathways toward flourishing lives on a habitable planet, inviting visitors to pursue their own visions of collective thriving among humans and non-humans.

Jonathan S. Blake, Director of the Planetary program at the Berggruen Institute, reflects: “In this moment of crises for politics, governance, and the planet, we are all seeking something new, something inspirational, something that suggests new ways of living together. The Planetary Compendium does just that. It charts alternative paths that we hope will spark new ideas, new visions for how we can co-exist on and with Planet Earth.”

Designed as a civic, artistic, and intellectual tool, the Compendium highlights stories of innovative approaches to living with our planetary condition. The Berggruen Institute and Dark Matter Labs partnered with leading thinkers, practitioners, and designers to create case studies of specific instances of planetary governance. Each case study is a window into the infrastructures that shape our collective future.

Zehra Zaidi, Mission Lead for Planetary Civics at Dark Matter Labs remarks: “The Planetary Compendium serves to entangle not only what the Planetary could be but how it is already manifesting regionally and disciplinarily. The multimedia format allows the reader to join us on a journey of deep discovery, showcasing ideas as they move from ideation to policy change to place-based experimentation.”

Together, cases trace the slow emergence of a planetary civics, an unfinished language for governing a living planet that is fully embedded, incorporates the more-than-human, and remains ethically conscious of our entanglements.

Explore, immerse yourself, and discover governtheplanet.org to reimagine communities and practices in a planetary era.