2.4 The PW perspective on change models

The planetary well-being perspective draws particular attention to paradigms of human-centeredness and individuality, and to a human-centered hierarchy of values that sees nature as only instrumentally valuable as a contributor to human well-being – although there is a growing awareness of the fundamental link between human well-being and the state of rest of the nature. The centrality of people and individuals in the worldview of many cultures (especially in the West) is so self-evident that it is often not even acknowledged. From the point of view of planetary well-being, the current set of societies, with their structures and rules, is a morally unsustainable, human-centered construct, since, for example, beings of other species have no rights or agency.

This human-centeredness is also reflected in the mainstream research on sustainable development and the sustainability transition. There, non-human nature is the object of human activity and current exploitation and damage falling on it are problems because they undermine the potential for human well-being, not because of non-human nature itself. It is only recently that sustainability studies, among others, have begun to talk about multispecies sustainability and sustainability transition studies have begun to examine the well-being and agency of non-human creatures. Similarly, in urban planning research, attention has begun to be paid to cities as multi-species living environments, not just as places where people live.

If we think about the systems to be changed from the planetary well-being perspective, perhaps the most radical ideas relate to the morally weighty consequences of the idea that we cohabit the biosphere with all other morally worthy living systems, which also brings forward expanded spatial and temporal scales to consider. Non-human-centered moral reasoning implies that non-human life forms have an equal right to live life in all its richness and in the ways that are typical of them. This raises the question of how much and for what purposes it is acceptable for humanity to use of the Earth's usable surface area. Land use has mainly been considered from an instrumental and process perspective in systems research, for example, in terms of GHG emissions and the preservation of habitats critical for endangered or threatened species. However, the underlying assumption is quite often a human-centered, unspoken one: human land use is acceptable as long as its side effects do not materialize as unstable living conditions or outright extinctions. Planetary well-being invites us to think more broadly about land use and to consider the right of other life forms to share and inhabit our collective living environments.

In humans, care and concern is often (as if by default) directed towards individual creatures. Planetary well-being calls for attention and care to be directed also to systems and processes beyond the individual level, which operate in vastly different spaces and timescales. At the same time, however, they are so intertwined that the boundaries between systems and processes are intended mainly to support our own ability to perceive and structure the world, rather than to describe how the world actually works. For example, soil processes that are critical for planetary well-being (e.g. processes of nutrient and water cycling and decomposition) are spread across all continents without any absolute boundaries, just as atmospheric processes affect the atmosphere of the entire planet.

At the same time, soil illustrates the richness of biodiversity that is largely invisible to the human eye but critical for planetary well-being: for example, a gram of soil contains millions of microbial cells and up to kilometers of mycelia, and a square meter of forest soil can contain, depending on the soil, millions of protists and nematodes, hundreds of thousands of soil mites, tens of thousands of springtails and other entognatha, and hundreds or tens of millipedes, earthworms and spiders. The human scale is only one scale of life on this planet, and the pursuit of a more sustainable future requires the ability to look at the world at very different levels and scales. We need a broad set of maps to explore so that we can begin to map out pathways to planetary well-being.