Absolutely. Here is a book prospectus for Developing Planetary Intelligence as the founding publication of the Institute.
Developing Planetary Intelligence
AI, Earth Systems, and the Future of Civilization
One-paragraph overview
Developing Planetary Intelligence argues that humanity has entered a civilizational threshold: our collective power is now planetary, but our intelligence remains fragmented, short-term, and dangerously misaligned with the biosphere. Drawing on Gaia theory, Earth system science, Buckminster Fuller’s whole-Earth design vision, recent astrobiology work defining “planetary intelligence” as collective knowledge integrated into coupled planetary systems, and contemporary debates over AI and governance, the book proposes a new framework for civilizational maturity. It defines planetary intelligence as the marriage of planetary intel—the capacity to sense and understand Earth’s condition—and wise stewardship—the ethical, institutional, and practical capacity to act on that knowledge in service to life. The book positions this concept not as abstraction, but as a field of inquiry and action, with direct implications for AI, bioregional governance, epistemic integrity, and the design of institutions fit for a living planet. Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis and later Novacene speculation, Fuller’s World Game, and the recent planetary-intelligence framework advanced by Adam Frank, David Grinspoon, and Sara Walker provide key intellectual anchors. (Cambridge University Press & Assessment)
Two-to-three-page overview
Human beings now influence the atmosphere, oceans, forests, ice, soils, nitrogen cycle, biodiversity, and even the future trajectory of intelligence itself. We possess satellites, global sensor networks, machine learning systems, climate models, genomic tools, and digital infrastructures that allow us, for the first time, to perceive many dimensions of the Earth as an integrated whole. Yet our institutions remain fractured, our incentives remain extractive, and our political imagination remains largely trapped within national, market, and disciplinary silos. We have achieved planetary power without planetary wisdom.
This book begins from the claim that the next great civilizational challenge is not simply decarbonization, biodiversity protection, AI safety, or democratic renewal taken separately, important though all of these are. It is the development of a distributed capacity to sense, interpret, remember, deliberate, coordinate, and care at Earth scale. That capacity is what this book calls planetary intelligence.
The phrase has emerged recently in astrobiology and Earth-system thought. In their 2022 paper “Intelligence as a Planetary Scale Process,” Adam Frank, David Grinspoon, and Sara Walker define planetary intelligence as the acquisition and application of collective knowledge operating at planetary scale and integrated into the function of coupled planetary systems. Their framework is both scientific and civilizational: it asks what it would mean for an inhabited world to develop intelligence adequate to its own long-term flourishing. (Cambridge University Press & Assessment)
But the roots of this idea run deeper. James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis transformed the modern understanding of Earth by showing that life does not merely adapt to planetary conditions; it helps create them. Gaia theory reframed the biosphere, atmosphere, oceans, and soils as dynamically entangled, with self-regulating feedbacks emerging from distributed living processes. Lovelock’s later book Novacene extended this vision into speculation about electronic or hybrid forms of intelligence that may follow humanity, while Buckminster Fuller’s World Game anticipated the need for whole-Earth accounting, shared information, and design science aimed at making the world work for all life. Together, these traditions provide the deep background for planetary intelligence as a serious intellectual and practical project. (MIT Press)
Developing Planetary Intelligence will synthesize these traditions and extend them into a new framework for the age of AI, ecological overshoot, and institutional fragility. It will argue that planetary intelligence is neither technocracy nor mysticism. It is not centralized command over the Earth. Nor is it a vague invocation of planetary consciousness. Rather, it is a distributed, multi-scalar capacity grounded in accurate sensing, shared epistemic infrastructure, democratic legitimacy, ecological literacy, and life-centered design.
The book introduces a simple formulation:
planetary intelligence = planetary intel + wise stewardship
“Planetary intel” refers to the growing ability to know how the planet is doing: through Earth observation, ecological indicators, climate science, public-interest data systems, bioregional monitoring, indigenous and local knowledge, historical memory, and AI-assisted modeling. “Wise stewardship” refers to the capacity to use that knowledge responsibly: through institutions, ethics, governance, legitimacy, care, restraint, justice, and a willingness to design with the Earth rather than merely upon it.
This distinction matters because modern civilization is already awash in data. The bottleneck is not sensing alone. It is the conversion of sensing into trustworthy shared understanding and life-serving action. A civilization can be extraordinarily “smart” in narrow, instrumental ways while remaining systemically foolish. It can optimize logistics, advertising, and extraction while undermining the biosphere that makes all optimization possible. The core problem of the twenty-first century is not only a lack of information, but a failure of integration.
That is where AI enters the story. Artificial intelligence can increase humanity’s capacity to monitor ecosystems, synthesize research, model scenarios, support translation and deliberation, and coordinate complex responses across scales. But AI can also intensify surveillance, propaganda, extraction, militarization, and concentration of power. The question is not whether AI will matter. It already does. The question is whether AI will be developed as part of a broader architecture of planetary intelligence, aligned with biospheric flourishing and democratic accountability, or whether it will become the leading edge of a competitive technosphere that deepens fragmentation and ecological harm. Recent Earth-system scholarship has also emphasized that digital and AI infrastructures themselves carry ecological impacts, even as they are increasingly used in environmental monitoring and management. (Royal Society Publishing)
The book’s distinctive contribution is that it will bridge several domains usually treated separately:
- Gaia theory and Earth-system science
- astrobiological work on planetary intelligence
- Buckminster Fuller’s whole-Earth design tradition
- AI and epistemic-integrity infrastructure
- bioregional intelligence and nested governance
- regenerative development and civic participation
- institutional design for life-centered futures
The book will also serve a second purpose beyond argument: it will function as the founding text of the Institute for Planetary Intelligence. As such, it will not only define the field but also make the case for an institution dedicated to convening research, prototypes, standards, pilots, education, and public conversation around this emerging civilizational task.
In spirit, Developing Planetary Intelligence belongs to a lineage of works that reframe the human relationship to Earth and technology for a general audience. Ferris Jabr’s Becoming Earth develops a vivid account of how life has remade the planet. James Bridle’s Ways of Being expands the notion of intelligence beyond the human and into ecological and more-than-human relations. Mustafa Suleyman’s The Coming Wave centers the governance challenge posed by rapidly advancing AI. And Fuller’s World Game remains a precursor to efforts at comprehensive, participatory, whole-Earth coordination. This book will sit adjacent to those works, but its argument is different: it is about the need to consciously develop a field, an ethic, and an institutional architecture adequate to intelligence at planetary scale. (Penguin Random House Retail)
The tone will be serious, accessible, morally grounded, and interdisciplinary. It will combine scientific insight, civilizational diagnosis, conceptual synthesis, practical proposals, and a clear invitation to participation. Its aim is not merely to describe a crisis or celebrate a technology, but to help articulate the emergence of a new vocation: learning how to become a civilization worthy of a living planet.
Why this book now
The planetary-intelligence framework has gained visibility in recent years through astrobiology, including public essays and interviews by Adam Frank and colleagues, while Lovelock’s Novacene and newer work on living-Earth perspectives have renewed interest in how life, technology, and planetary systems co-evolve. At the same time, AI has moved from a specialized technical field to a world-shaping force, intensifying the urgency of questions about intelligence, alignment, governance, and biospheric responsibility. The timing is therefore unusually strong for a foundational trade book that gathers these threads and offers a coherent public framework. (NOEMA)
Intended audience
This book is for:
- educated general readers concerned with the future of civilization
- systems thinkers, environmentalists, and regenerative practitioners
- AI researchers, designers, and governance specialists
- funders and institutional leaders seeking a larger frame for ecological and technological transition
- scholars and students in Earth-system science, futures studies, environmental humanities, and complex systems
- civic leaders working at local, bioregional, and global scales
It is written for readers who are looking for a new synthesis: one that connects Earth systems, intelligence, governance, technology, and moral imagination without collapsing into either techno-utopianism or despair.
What is distinctive about this book
Many books address climate, AI, systems collapse, or the living Earth. Few bring them together under a single conceptual and practical framework. Fewer still attempt to define a new field and a program of work around it.
This book’s distinctive claims are:
- planetary intelligence is a useful and necessary civilizational frame
- it should be defined as more than data or computation
- AI must be understood within Earth systems, not apart from them
- planetary intelligence must be rooted in bioregional intelligence and nested, polycentric governance
- trustworthy knowledge systems and epistemic integrity are foundational
- the task ahead is institutional, ethical, and cultural, not merely technical
Comparable titles
These are not perfect analogues, but they help position the book:
Ferris Jabr, Becoming Earth
Strong overlap in presenting Earth as shaped by life rather than merely hosting it. This book would overlap with Jabr’s living-Earth sensibility, but move further into governance, intelligence, AI, and institutional design. (Penguin Random House Retail)
James Bridle, Ways of Being
Relevant for its expansion of intelligence beyond narrow human-centered models and its integration of ecology, computation, and more-than-human relations. This book would be more explicitly civilizational, institutional, and policy-facing. (Macmillan Publishers)
Mustafa Suleyman, The Coming Wave
Relevant for AI’s governance challenge and the question of powerful technology outrunning institutions. This book would be less centered on containment and more on alignment with life and planetary stewardship. (PenguinRandomhouse.com)
James Lovelock, Novacene
A key antecedent for the speculative discussion of posthuman or electronic intelligence and humanity’s transitional role. This book would take Lovelock seriously while placing his argument in a broader, more grounded framework of Earth systems and stewardship. (MIT Press)
Buckminster Fuller / World Game tradition
Important precedent for whole-Earth information, design science, and global coordination. This book would carry that vision into the age of AI, regenerative design, and epistemic infrastructure. (OverDrive)
Authorial angle
This book’s perspective is distinctive because it does not arise from only one disciplinary lane. It emerges from the intersection of ecological thought, regenerative design, systems change, finance and institutional strategy, bioregionalism, and AI-in-service-to-life inquiry. It is written not as detached theory, but as an attempt to help seed a real field of practice.
Chapter-by-chapter summary
Introduction. The Need for Planetary Intelligence
Humanity has become a planetary force without becoming a planetary civilization. This introduction frames the central mismatch of our time: planetary power, fragmented intelligence.
Part I. The Planetary Predicament
1. A Planet in Human Hands
The Earth system is under intensifying pressure from climate disruption, biodiversity loss, pollution, war, technological acceleration, and institutional lag.
2. Why Intelligence Matters Now
Why intelligence is the right frame: not IQ, but sensing, learning, memory, adaptation, anticipation, coordination, and care.
3. Fragmented Minds, Fragmented Systems
Why modern civilization knows so much and acts so foolishly: silos, incentives, national fragmentation, disinformation, and short-termism.
Part II. What Planetary Intelligence Is
4. Gaia and the Living Earth
Lovelock and Margulis showed that life creates the conditions for life. Gaia reframes the Earth as a living, self-modulating system. (Penguin Random House Retail)
5. From Gaia to Planetary Intelligence
Building from Gaia to the recent astrobiological framing of planetary intelligence as collective knowledge integrated into planetary systems. (Cambridge University Press & Assessment)
6. Whole-Earth Knowing: Fuller and the World Game
Fuller’s World Game as a precursor to comprehensive Earth observation, shared accounting, and design science for all life. (OverDrive)
7. Planetary Intel and Wise Stewardship
The book’s central formulation. Why sensing and knowing are insufficient without ethics, institutions, legitimacy, and care.
Part III. How It Can Be Developed
8. The Architecture of Planetary Intelligence
A framework of sensing, interpretation, memory, modeling, deliberation, coordination, action, feedback, and learning.
9. The Role of AI: Promise, Peril, and Alignment
AI as amplifier of planetary sensing and coordination, but also of surveillance, concentration, and ecological harm.
10. Epistemic Integrity and the Infrastructure of Trust
Why provenance, transparency, uncertainty, and shared reality are prerequisites for planetary intelligence.
11. Scales of Intelligence: Personal, Local, Bioregional, Planetary
Planetary intelligence must be nested and multi-scalar, not merely global or top-down.
Part IV. Institutions, Practices, and Pathways
12. Bioregional Intelligence as the Ground of Planetary Intelligence
Planetary intelligence becomes tangible when rooted in watersheds, foodsheds, ecosystems, cultures, and places of stewardship.
13. Designing Institutions for a Living Planet
Polycentric governance, commons-based systems, civic platforms, and the institutional role of the Institute.
14. Possible Futures: Symbiosis, Technosphere, Novacene, Collapse
Contrasting future scenarios, including Lovelock’s speculative posthuman horizon.
15. A Practical Agenda for Developing Planetary Intelligence
An applied agenda: public-interest AI, bioregional pilots, open knowledge systems, periodic state-of-the-field reviews, standards, fellowships, and demonstration projects.
Conclusion. Toward a Civilization Worthy of a Living Planet
A closing invitation to help build the distributed intelligence, wisdom, and stewardship that a living Earth now requires.
Sample introduction
We live at a moment when the human species can observe the whole Earth and yet cannot reliably govern itself. We can watch storms form from space, measure the chemistry of the atmosphere, track the retreat of glaciers, model the spread of fire, monitor the bleaching of coral reefs, and now ask machines to synthesize immense bodies of knowledge in seconds. We possess tools of extraordinary reach. And still, as a civilization, we behave as though the planet were background scenery for an economic drama whose main characters are nations, markets, and firms.
This is the central paradox of our time. Humanity has become a planetary force without becoming a planetary civilization.
We alter the climate, acidify the oceans, fragment habitats, move species, reshape rivers, mine the crust, fill the air with novel compounds, and increasingly mediate social reality through digital systems that themselves now circle the globe in real time. We have entered the feedback loops of the Earth system not as minor participants but as major agents. Yet our institutions remain too fragmented to match the scale of our effects. Our politics is short-term. Our economies reward extraction. Our media systems fracture shared reality. Our technologies accelerate faster than our wisdom.
What name should we give to the capacity we now lack?
I propose we call it planetary intelligence.
By this I do not mean a single planetary mind, nor a centralized supercomputer, nor a technocratic authority empowered to manage the Earth from above. I mean something both humbler and more demanding: a distributed civilizational capacity to sense, interpret, remember, deliberate, coordinate, and care at the scale of a living planet.
The phrase has scientific roots. Recent work in astrobiology has used “planetary intelligence” to describe the acquisition and application of collective knowledge operating at planetary scale and integrated into the function of coupled planetary systems. That formulation matters because it suggests a threshold in the development of worlds: not merely life, not merely intelligence in isolated organisms, but intelligence that becomes functionally embedded in the regulation of a planet’s future. (Cambridge University Press & Assessment)
Yet the idea also has older intellectual ancestors. James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis taught us to see that life does not simply inhabit the Earth. Life helps create the conditions for life. The atmosphere itself bears the mark of living processes. The biosphere, atmosphere, oceans, and soils are dynamically entangled. Buckminster Fuller, from another direction, argued that once the whole Earth becomes visible as a single field of consequence, design must also become whole-Earth in scope. And now artificial intelligence raises the stakes again, because it expands humanity’s capacity to sense and model the world even as it threatens to intensify surveillance, concentration of power, and ecological burden. (MIT Press)
So the issue before us is not simply whether we will become more intelligent in a technical sense. We already have. The issue is whether we can develop a form of intelligence adequate to living responsibly within a living Earth.
This book argues that planetary intelligence begins with planetary intel: learning how the planet is doing, through science, observation, history, local and indigenous knowledge, and new tools of synthesis. But it does not end there. Data alone is not wisdom. Information alone does not confer legitimacy. Prediction alone does not tell us what ought to be protected, repaired, restrained, or shared. Planetary intelligence therefore also requires wise stewardship: ethical orientation, institutional design, epistemic integrity, democratic participation, and a practical commitment to the flourishing of life.
That is the wager of this book: that the next stage of civilizational maturity will not be defined only by more powerful technologies, but by whether intelligence itself can be re-situated within the larger living systems that made it possible.
How this supports the Institute
As a founding publication, this book would do four jobs for the Institute:
It would define the field. It would position the Institute as a convener, not merely an advocate. It would open a research and action agenda across AI, Earth systems, governance, and bioregional practice. And it would provide a flagship text around which programs, essays, salons, courses, fellows, and partnerships could be organized.
Recommended next move
The cleanest next step is to turn this into a publisher-facing proposal package with:
- a 1-page overview
- a 3-5 page proposal narrative
- annotated comparable titles
- author bio and platform
- chapter summaries in proposal style
- a polished 10-15 page sample chapter
I can draft that next.