Certain humans are now changing Earth so rapidly that we can call this period the “Kinocene” to reflect the rapid geological circulation of planetary materials. It no longer makes sense to think of humans as transient occupants moving on a relatively static Earth: humans are geological and atmospheric agents entangled in Earth’s cycles and processes.

Capitalist globalisation has expanded migration networks on an unprecedented scale. With each passing decade, migrants make up an ever-larger share of the population. There are more than 1 billion regional and international migrants, and by 2050, demographers expect 2 billion more people to migrate to global urban centres. More than ever, people must migrate because of environmental, economic and political instability caused by globalisation. The war in Syria created more than 6 million migrants, the war in Ukraine created 7 million, the war in Iran created 3 million, and the numbers keep rising. The climate crisis may double international migration over the next 40 years. Millions of people in countries such as China, Turkey and the Philippines are internally displaced every year by climate-related extreme weather events. Even in the US, between two and three million Americans relocate annually because of intensified wildfires, hurricanes and coastal flooding. We are living in an age of great migration.

This age has also witnessed an exponential expansion of bordering techniques for managing and circulating human movement. Since the mid-1990s, but particularly since 9/11, countless new borders have emerged around the world – miles of new razor-wire fences; tonnes of new concrete security walls; numerous offshore detention centres; biometric passport databases; ubiquitous CCTV; and security checkpoints of all kinds in schools, airports and along various motorways across the world. These all attest to the increased anxiety about controlling excessive social motion. Meanwhile, extractive machineries of deforestation, mining, urbanisation, wildlife markets and factory farming are increasing the spread, intensity and frequency of new infectious diseases from H1N1 in 2009, Ebola in 2014, MERS in 2015, Zika in 2015 and Covid-19. Borders are symptomatic of global kinetic excess, redirecting it without stopping it.

More materials now circulate in our atmosphere and in orbit than ever in planetary history. Through burning fossil fuels, raising domesticated stock and plants, overproducing nitrogen fertilisers and removing forests, certain human groups are increasing the movement of net carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and nitrogen into the oceans ten times faster than at any time in the last 50,000 years. Rising carbon dioxide levels lift average global temperatures, causing heat waves that increase ocean evaporation, which returns record-breaking winter snowstorms and other extreme weather patterns.

As Earth is warming, flora and fauna are migrating north, throwing tens of thousands of species into motion. Today, half of all species on Earth are on the move, including insects, diseases and microbes. Even glaciers are on the move: with time-lapse photography, we can now see them flow and recede like roaring rivers in a matter of minutes, lifting sea levels faster today than they have in the previous 2,700 years, putting millions of people and other animals at risk. We used to talk about “geological time” as if it were a process so slow as to be imperceptible, but today we are witnessing the Earth sinking into the sea and forests transforming into deserts. We are witnessing the creation of entirely new geological strata made of plastic, and other refuse that could remain in the fossil record and affect geological formations for thousands of years. When we look around today, we see and feel the epoch-defining speed and scale of this unique global mobility.

02 THE PLANETARY AGE OF MOTION

And yet, beneath this surface commotion lies a second and concurrent age of movement: a shadow-truth, or planetary doppelgänger of the first age. For all this apparent global movement, the net motion of energy on Earth has actually been slowing down. How can this be? The first point to appreciate is that hominid life, and most other life on Earth for the last two million years, has been significantly more migratory, tied to glacial cycles and annual seasons, than Holocene humans. Overall, Holocene humanity has been relatively sedentary compared to its Pleistocene ancestors. Since the late Neolithic period, urban humanity has come to think of migration as the exception rather than the rule of society. The great irony is that rising human sedentarism made the age of global motion possible.

To understand the impact of human sedentarism, we must step back from the scale of human history and its global mobilities and consider a wider timescale of events. Scientists have known since the 1970s that the so-called “Great Ice Age” or Pleistocene Epoch (between 2.6 million years and 11,700 years ago) was not a single unbroken period of cold, but cyclical periods of cool and warmth. Then, about one million years ago, this pattern lengthened and stabilised into interglacial warm periods between 10,000 and 30,000 years long. Homo erectus lived through between 15 and 20 interglacial periods; Homo sapiens lived through two or three. The Holocene is just the most recent one. These 100,000-year cycles have been the “seasons” of our planet for at least the last million years, regulated, according to paleoclimatologists, by variations in the Earth’s orbit of the sun, its wobble and its axial tilt.

These macrocosmic seasons are iterated in microcosm in our annual solar seasons. At both glacial and annual scales, the ice sheets covering the Northern Hemisphere expanded from the poles toward the equator in winter, killing vegetation and forcing some animals and humans toward the equator. Then, during spring, the glaciers receded to the poles, bringing plants, animals and humans to feed on the newly watered and fertilised soils. During these cycles, the northern steppe and seasons of the southern desert acted as planetary lungs expanding and contracting living populations over tens of thousands of years. In every interglacial period, the planet blooms with trillions of trees and myriad new carbon life forms, which then die back.

The transition to the Holocene brought a unique climatic hiccup. Around 12,000 years ago, temperatures suddenly dropped to glacial levels and then rapidly rebounded, devastating the “seasonal” rhythms of the Northern Hemisphere, and leading to an apocalyptic extinction of most large mammals, plants and humans. The Eurasian Steppe and tundra were nearly gone. In their place was a warmer world filled with many more plants and smaller animals. Agriculture was a response to this apocalypse. Cross-indexing regional climatic changes over a 7,000 year period beginning about 10,000 years ago, against increased storage techniques reveals a strong correlation: only the most seasonally affected hunter-gatherer groups were forced to store food to survive. The development of global agriculture marked the beginning of a long-term rise in ecological destruction and deforestation. Of course, farming does not necessarily lead to global capitalism and extractivism, but it was and remains the necessary condition for it.

This larger framing of cosmic and planetary motion is crucial because it exposes a core assumption at the heart of most Holocene civilisations. Those who could not continue hunting and gathering turned to agriculture to survive in a post-apocalyptic world. But there is no escape from the cosmic or annual seasons of the planet. Our interglacial summertime, like a flower in bloom, cannot and will not last forever. Although fittingly, climate change may be prolonging it somewhat – though one recent climate model shows that climate change may actually be hastening an ice age. Either way, sedentary agriculture and the civilisations it makes possible cannot survive a prolonged hotter interglacial “summertime”, AMOC collapse or another ice age. Perhaps Holocene agricultural civilisations will have been as anomalous as the climate hiccup that occasioned them in the first place. On a larger timescale, what seems more likely is that some remaining humans will return to the only proven method of long-term survival and flourishing on Earth: seasonally migratory hunting, gathering and fishing.

Instead of fighting its spiralled cycles and rejecting the cosmic order of entropy, we can still participate in sustaining its metastable cycles of reciprocity and contribute to the collective dissipation of the universe. We can also reaffirm our cosmic vocation, helping the Earth and the universe into the cool. We can make the most entropically of our interglacial summertime by rewilding the ecosystems and species that were harmed, returning the land to its ancestral caretakers, ending capitalism, abolishing fossil fuels, and heeding the long-ignored warnings and advice of the world’s Indigenous peoples.

We can also take more transitional steps toward these ends, including cooperative economics, agroecology, legal protections for nature and others recently summarised in Jeremy Lent’s Ecocivilization (2026). There is hardly a shortage of degrowth transition ideas that are better than the present, and nearly all are antithetical to capitalism and the global 1%. If the “age of movement” means anything today, it is as a threshold where our age of motion can encounter its planetary shadow and return to its cosmic vocation. .