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The concept of our planet being misnamed “Earth,” when in fact 75% of its surface is covered by water, is not original. Robinson Jeffers, in his mid-century poem “The Eye,” likens human conflicts on the Pacific’s “Eye of the earth” spanning “half the planet” to “a speck of dust on the great scale-pan.” However, Jeremy Rifkin, in his new book Planet Aqua: Rethinking Our Home in the Universe (Polity, 2024), takes this concept to an existential level, claiming that the very survival of humanity requires us to change how we live on “Aqua.”
Rifkin’s book is a comprehensive and vociferous critique of civilization and progress resting on his fundamental challenge to the development of hydraulic infrastructure which is now destroying our biosphere. Marshalling ripped-from-the-headlines findings from every field of research, Rifkin describes our current climate crisis as sourced in a deep and general alienation between humanity and a “rewilding” planetary hydrosphere. The proximate cause of this alienation is our urban/hydraulic civilization — comprising “much of what we’ve come to regard as the historical footprint of human history” — which is now “collapsing in real time” and must be replaced by a “neo-animism” more attenuated to our aquatic home. To extend the metaphor, humankind built a mansion that is structurally unsound and falling down, and we need to replace it with a more stable (if not more comfortable) tent.
Reading Rifkin is a rush. At times, I felt like I was taking in 1,000 magazine articles all at once. I would compare his style to a strenuously delivered TED Talk or a futurist’s manifesto. His research spans our species’ first handprints on cave walls to the latest version of AI. There are times when Rifkin’s riffs are near-Emersonian in metaphysical finality: “Hydraulic civilization’s apotheosis came with modernity. The Age of Progress is tautologically tied to the sequestering of the hydrosphere of the planet.” The book is structured symphonically, with two major sections laying out the problem and possible solutions surrounded by an introduction, conclusion, and intermezzo on the Mediterranean-Eurasian region.
Rifkin is no stranger to big ideas. He reintroduces from his previous book The Empathic Civilization the four progressive extensions of humanity’s “empathic consciousness” — animist, religious, ideological, biophilic — and the “empathy/entropy paradox” where societies are achieving mutual empathy just as we overtax the world’s resources. Similarly, he points to the planet’s own hydrosphere as the driving force of its three other spheres, the lithosphere, atmosphere, and biosphere. He then translates water’s influence directly into politics, economics, and biology, contrasting capitalism with “hydroism” (which, while illuminating, would be better presented in a table) and suggesting humanity’s genetic inheritance of adaptability may save us.
Hearkening to literary and philosophical roots of Romanticism, Rifkin advocates an approach to climate change by way of the sublime, a structured sense of being overwhelmed by nature, leading not to its rational subjection but instead to an “engaged biophilic attachment” to the hydrosphere which is “the animating force of the story of life on the planet.” This leads, inevitably, to questionable or overly broad claims which require critical reflection. Rifkin often anthropomorphizes the hydrosphere as “freeing itself” from civilization’s constraints. Similarly, he describes human civilization and progress as identical to our endeavors to control water, creating what he himself calls a “tautology,” or self-definition, that one could also describe as overdetermination. When Rifkin concludes that our hydrological systems have a “dismal record of false hopes and calamitous consequences across history'” or even that “[t]he entire human-built environment is now a stranded asset,” the reader wonders if his examples lead inevitably to such conclusions.
Rifkin’s greatest challenge — one he takes on energetically — is to face an imminent dystopian future with hope, ingenuity, and innovation borne of our species’ adaptability. As he describes it, the current refugee camps filled with the stateless, unsettled poor are the ephemeral cities of humanity’s future. We don’t get to go to Mars with Elon Musk, but we will remain in our hydrosphere made angry by our past and current sedentary activities. Our only hope is to intentionally re-adapt to our only home:
The workings of Planet Aqua need to be embedded into the heart of our educational system, our cultural lore, our ways of governance, our approach to the economy, our sense of selfhood, and the way we experience life itself. We are of Planet Aqua — it defines us, yet we are largely clueless of this force that animates all of our life.
I’m not quite convinced that the data, when tied together, adds up to Rifkin’s thesis that a new ephemeral society must rise from the ashes (or floodscape) of hydraulic civilization. The new mode of self-understanding characterized by “Planet Aqua” may not necessarily result in a new civilization but instead a better one, perhaps not built on ruins as much as on renovations and remedies.
