As part of the CSER seminar series, we are hosting a seminar with the author and Executive Vice President of the Berggruen Institute, Nils Gilman.
Nils will be talking about his new book co-authored with Jonathan S. Blake, Children of a Modest Star: Planetary Thinking for an Age of Crises.
Nils Gilman and his co-author Jonathan S Blake wrote the editorial 'Governing for the planet' for Aeon about the themes in the book.
About the book:
Deadly viruses, climate-changing carbon molecules, and harmful pollutants cross the globe unimpeded by national borders. While the consequences of these flows range across scales, from the planetary to the local, the authority and resources to manage them are concentrated mainly at one level: the nation-state. This profound mismatch between the scale of planetary challenges and the institutions tasked with governing them is leading to cascading systemic failures.
In the groundbreaking Children of a Modest Star, Jonathan S. Blake and Nils Gilman not only challenge dominant ways of thinking about humanity's relationship to the planet and the political forms that presently govern it, but also present a new, innovative framework that corresponds to our inherently planetary condition. Drawing on intellectual history, political philosophy, and the holistic findings of Earth system science, Blake and Gilman argue that it is essential to reimagine our governing institutions in light of the fact that we can only thrive if the multi-species ecosystems we inhabit are also flourishing.
Aware of the interlocking challenges we face, it is no longer adequate merely to critique our existing systems or the modernist assumptions that helped create them. Blake and Gilman propose a bold, original architecture for global governance—what they call planetary subsidiarity—designed to enable the enduring habitability of the Earth for humans and non-humans alike. Children of a Modest Star offers a clear-eyed and urgent vision for constructing a system capable of stabilizing a planet in crisis.
About Nils Gilman:
Nils Gilman is the Chief Operating Officer and Executive Vice President at the Berggruen Institute, in which capacity he directs the day-to-day activities of the Institute, leads its research program, and serves as Deputy Editor of Noema Magazine. He has previously worked as Associate Chancellor at the University of California, Berkeley, as Research Director and scenario planner at the Monitor Group and Global Business Network, and at various enterprise software companies including Salesforce.com. He is the author of Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America (2004), Deviant Globalization: Black Market Economy in the 21st Century (2011), and Children of a Modest Star: Planetary Thinking for an Age of Crises (2024). He holds a Bachelors, Masters, and Doctorate in History from U.C. Berkeley.
