Planet Aqua: Rethinking Our Home in the Universe
We are waking up to the reality that we live on a water planet and it changes everything. Europe and Asia are leading the world with the introduction of a “Blue Economy” to accompany the “Green Economy,”and now the United States needs to catch up.
Jeremy Rifkin’s new book Planet Aqua: Rethinking Our Home in the Universe will be published simultaneously in all the principal world languages in September 2024.
What would happen if we suddenly realized that the planet we live on appeared eerily alien, as if we’d been teleported to some other distant world? That frightening prospect is now. Our planetary hydrosphere, which animates all life on Earth, is rebelling in the wake of a global warming climate, unleashing blockbuster winter snows, biblical spring floods, devastating summer droughts, heatwaves and wildfires and deadly autumn hurricanes, wreaking havoc on ecosystems, infrastructure, and society. While fossil fuels lit the fuse, it’s the hydrosphere that’s ringing the death knell.
In Planet Aqua, Jeremy Rifkin argues that we have misjudged the very nature of our existence and to what we owe our lifeline. We have long believed that we live on a land planet when in reality we live on a water planet, and now the Earth’s hydrosphere is taking us into a mass extinction as it searches for a new normal.
Rifkin asks us to imagine the incredible hubris of believing that our species could sequester, pacify, propertize, commodify, and hold dominion over all the waters of the planet for our exclusive utilitarian uses. Yet, that’s exactly what we set out to do six thousand years ago with the rise of urban hydraulic civilizations around the world. And now we find ourselves trapped in a massive commercial juggernaut of hydropower superdams, artificial lakes, reservoirs, and ubiquitous water infrastructure that’s collapsing in the throes of a rewilding hydrosphere.
The great reset, says Rifkin, is rethinking the waters as a “life source” rather than a “resource” and learning how to adapt to the hydrosphere rather than adapting the hydrosphere to us.
Rifkin takes us into a new future where we will need to reassess every aspect of the way we live – how we engage nature, pursue science, govern society, conceptualize economic life, educate our children, and even orient ourselves in time and space on our water planet. The next stage in the human saga is to ‘rebrand’ our home Planet Aqua and usher in a Blue Economy to accompany the Green Economy.
The big conversation taking place in Europe over the past 6 months is the call for a ‘Blue Deal’ to accompany the ‘Green Deal’ as the next leap forward in the European Union (see enclosed articles). The ‘Blue Economy’ agenda is also emerging in China and Korea as a centerpiece for rethinking life on Planet Aqua and is going to migrate to North America, the UK, and other nations around the world as well in the coming months.
The European Economic and Social Committee, the European Committee of the Regions, critical industries, trade associations, the farming community, government, academia, and civil society are all coalescing around a storyline and game plan to address a dramatic change in the climate brought on by a rewilding hydrosphere that’s killing off our fellow creatures and endangering our own species on a scale unprecedented in history – and everywhere, humanity is frightened and looking for answers.
The call for a massive ‘Blue Deal’ to go hand-in-hand with the current ‘Green Deal’ will be the centerpiece of the new expanded agenda of the European Union. The conversation is focusing on a number of critical themes including demolishing outmoded superdams and artificial reservoirs, the construction of new resilient water infrastructure, the introduction of omnipresent distributed water internets and water microgrids, portable desalination devices and water purification systems, sponge cities, ephemeral pop-up 3D printed communities, water calendars and safe climate corridors, alongside extending legal rights to rivers to run free, deploying green hydrogen infrastructure, stewarding lakes, rivers, and streams as shared commons, addressing the dire threat of groundwater depletion, repurposing the water-energy-food nexus, pursuing paradigmic shifts in science and technology on a water planet, and developing new approaches to pedagogy, curricula, clinical learning, and incubator projects at the universities and secondary school level.
This fundamental turning point in the way the human family relates to water on Planet Aqua will underwrite a rethink in the deployment of policies and practices going forward, putting the ‘Blue Economy’ alongside the ‘Green Economy’ at the top of the agenda for nations around the world. Planet Aqua provides the narrative and worldview for rethinking life on our water planet as well as a robust agenda across every aspect of society in making this transformation in our species’ future.
Underpinned by robust research, this major new work by one of the world’s leading public intellectuals aims to redefine the very core of our existence on Planet Aqua.
We are coming to grips with the reality that we live on a water planet
Jeremy Rifkin is the best-selling author of twenty-three books translated into thirty-five languages. He is a principal architect of the European Union’s and China’s economic plans for transitioning into a Third Industrial Revolution to address climate change and he served as an advisor to Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer on the U.S. infrastructure plan. He is listed among the top ten most influential economic thinkers in The Huffington Post’s global survey of “The World’s Most Influential Voices.”
Jeremy Rifkin “Planet Aqua: Rethinking Our Home in the Universe”
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