ABSTRACT
This chapter considers how the citizens of the planet might imagine a more equitable future and also work to minimise future carbon pollution and other damaging, irreversible changes to global systems, both physical and cultural. New ideas of the global emerge when the discourse of the environmental humanities begins from off-centre, in extreme environments like Sweden and Australia. The chapter discusses how a planetary vision demands negotiation with geological time, not just the short time frames of human economies, and then point to the value of peripheral vision in understanding the global scales of the Anthropocene. In 2001, the Australian National University hosted a new initiative in the ecological humanities, an interdisciplinary rapprochement between nature and culture, and between science and the humanities, at a time of 'environmental crisis'. The National strategy explicitly included protection of biodiversity and ecosystem processes, which has since been widely enshrined in Australian environmental law.
