Fear of a Dead White Planet
Fear of a Dead White Planet, by the More Worlds Collective, Joseph Masco, Tim Choy, Jake Kosek, M. Murphy (Duke University Press 2025)
Fear of a Dead White Planet asks: How does one study when the planet is on fire? The More Worlds Collective challenges the contemporary rush to planetary technofixes for environmental emergency. Instead, it tracks how such planetary-science frames are enmeshed in the longstanding projects of White Supremacy, settler colonialism, and epistemological violence. Calling for unlearning and joined-up study, the collective reclaims terraforming from off-earth engineering schemes to think through how our more modest efforts to study differently are also world-making and world-breaking. In orienting its work toward terra and formation, the collective commits to a place-based, non universal study scaled at levels both intimate and massive. Through its serious but unruly methods, Fear of a Dead White Planet invites readers to recognize and conjure alternate worlds in and around the university.
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More worlds, more covers
We can’t have just one cover! Or just one collective name!
Invitations
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Invitation
How do we study when the planet is on fire? This question could go many ways. One could take it as a practical question. Which methods, tools, and concepts might help to solve the imminent problem of planetary emergency? One could hear it rhetorically: When so much is going wrong materially in the world, how could one possibly turn to studying as a course of action? Either of these could be followed in turn by interrogations of principles: What is solving? Who is the we? What is an emergency and for whom?
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Book Launch
Join us at the Seattle Society for the Social Studies of Science Conference for our launch, a roundtable moderated by Cori Hayden.
Wednesday, September 3, 2025
3:40 PM - 5:30 PMJefferson B
Union Street Tower, 4th Floor
Sheraton Grand Seattle -
Book Party
It’s a joined-up book party—a More Books Collective! Join us to celebrate Vivian Choi’s Disaster Nationalism, Nicholas Shapiro’s Homesick, Emily Yates-Doerr’s Mal-Nutrition, and FDWP. Bring a friend!
Thursday, September 4, 2025
7 to 11The Pine Box
1600 Melrose Ave
Seattle WA, 98122 -
Joined-up Thinking
This book came out of a decade long project of co-thinking and friendship, including courses with scores of brilliant graduate students taught across four universities, two conferences, and a workshop. While the authors wrote this book together, we could not have thought these thoughts without these larger relations.
Read about our process in the acknowledgements
Read an Excerpt
Who’s Afraid of a Dead White Planet?
Liberal and Illiberal Terraforming
What is the Environment?
Impossible Methods
What is an X?
Terraformatics
Our Collective
Who are we?
The More Worlds Collective, also known as: Alterboiz, Engineered Worlds, or Murmurgraph. We have had many names!
We did not join up to write a book — far from it, in fact. We came together because the North American corporate-captured university did not feel right.
Each of us was unhappy with conventions and habits that dominate studies of environment, environmental violence, and technoscience. We also worried about the states of our worlds and how our universities worked against them.
While we had no plan for an outcome, we did know a few things we wanted. We knew we wanted ways to meet, so we could think together even though we live far apart. We knew we wanted to build something shared with each other and with students. We also knew that we think differently from each other; we know and gravitate toward different kinds of things, with often divergent sensibilities and commitments.
Our hope was that feeling our way toward intellectual friendship and joined-up study might be a good way to unlearn and learn things differently.