We anticipate that with the ongoing convergence of planetary-scale computation with ecological governance, alternative jurisdictional forms will come to augment national domains and may, in crucial ways, have greater importance for those who live within those domains and circumstances than national identity. The alternative sovereignties that they bequeath (or rent ) may simply matter more to important outcomes, but the appearance of any such geographies requires new frames, procedural alliances, and counterintuitive techniques. Like species that fill a new niche after an ecological shift, new ecojurisdictions and their unorthodox spaces and organs are more likely to appear in direct response to an emergency situation than through any parliamentary deliberation. The latter may retroactively codify the former, but is unlikely to first introduce them. According to Schmitt, the state of emergency provides the generative exception (and sometimes vice versa), and as it draws eccentric lines, it forces positions to be taken in relation to them. But these “ emergencies ” should be understood in both senses of the word: first as a crisis for which conventional understandings and instruments are inadequate and therefore require or justify unconventional measures, and second as moments of the emergence of something that was genuinely and qualitatively not there before. For ecojurisdictions, these emerge around both the production of energy and the effects of that production. We see this already in the divided constituencies and alliances represented at the IPCC climate talks. Large oil- and gas-producing countries share certain interests in ecological governance, or in its prevention, that cut across ideology and continental location, whereas countries whose landscapes serve as important carbon sinks also seek common cause, as do those whose circumstance puts them at shared risks for particular kinds of disaster. Shared ecogeographic interests can matter more than party lines when the transversal economic solidarities of energy production, and its consequences, come to outweigh cartographic, historical, or ethnic proximity.
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Earth Layer