The Politics Of Planetary Color

Credits

Frederic Hanusch is a Professor of Planetary Change and Politics at Justus Liebig University Giessen in Germany, where he directs the Panel on Planetary Thinking. His work examines what politics would look like if the Earth itself were to participate in it. He is co-author of “Our Planetary Condition: Foundations for a Politics with the Earth,” which is forthcoming with MIT Press.

When the first color photograph of Earth was captured from space in 1968, millions around the globe saw their home in a new way. Rising from darkness above the moon, it could be seen in breathtaking oceanic blue. Unlike the black-and-white Lunar Orbiter 1 frame taken two years earlier, “Earthrise” made the planet’s fragility legible and emotionally graspable. In 1972, “Blue Marble” added new depth, revealing Earth from the Mediterranean Sea to Antarctica in vibrant swirls of blue, brown, green and white.

These familiar sunlit hues fostered a politics of relatability, inviting belonging, and with it, a sense of responsibility for the planet.

An environmental consciousness began to crystallize. As historian Robert Poole notes in “Earthrise: How Man First Saw the Earth,” the Space Age flipped from a narrative of outward conquest to one of inward rediscovery. The first Earth Day was held in 1970, and the popular metaphor “Spaceship Earth” shifted from describing a technical vessel managed by engineers to describing a living, vulnerable biosphere requiring stewardship. Planetary survival became a mass political demand.

If color once taught us to see and value our planet, it now records how we are altering it.

“Black Marble,” a global composite image of the darkened Earth at night in 2012, revealed a web of golden yellow — electric constellations of urbanization and light pollution. More recently, a Nature analysis detected climate-driven trends in color across roughly 40% of the global surface ocean, observing that low-latitude waters are shifting from deep blue toward green as surface ecosystems reorganize. NASA’s PACE (Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud ocean Ecosystem) mission captures this complexity with hyperspectral precision, reading the ocean’s spectral fingerprint to identify exactly which plankton populations could be driving the shift.

Similarly, from Alpine glaciers to the Greenland Ice Sheet, snow can flush red when snow algae bloom, and because those blooms darken the surface and reduce reflectivity, they can amplify melt, rendering a warming cryosphere newly legible. 

Color is not just how Earth shows itself; it can be diagnostic, even a narrative of change, inviting human response through visible nuance. It is a measurement and a mirror of our agency.

The planetary becomes political through color. The hues through which Earth appears in public decide what we notice and act upon. For us to become a planetary society, the colors through which Earth senses and is sensed need to be aligned. It is time to compose a planetary palette.

Colors Make History

Color has long organized politics in the open. The French tricolor cockade turned loyalty into something you could wear in the street. The suffragette palette of purple, white and green made support for women’s right to vote instantly legible across Britain and beyond. The Pan-African colors of red, black and green and the Aboriginal black, red and yellow flag in Australia condensed claims to land and self-determination into vivid emblems.

In Thailand, rival movements quite literally became “red shirts” and “yellow shirts,” with chroma standing in for competing sovereignties. Iran’s Green Movement used a single hue to signal reformist solidarity, just as Ukraine’s Orange Revolution did earlier with orange as a banner of contested legitimacy. These anecdotes are not about taste. They show how colors have repeatedly given politics a public body, allocating attention, rallying coalitions and making claims visible at a glance.

Historian Michael Rossi’s “The Republic of Color” shows how, at the turn of the 20th century, color science and its regulation reorganized modern life: Industrial dyes, standardized color languages and new instruments did not simply tint goods. They reshaped labor, markets and perception, turning the organization of color into a form of managing attention, desire and trust. The institutionalization of standards and techniques for collective perception bestowed color with political force.

Our planetary age echoes the industrial one in that regard. Where the earlier era effectively forged a republic of color for factories and mass media, the planetary age calls for a politics of planetary color.

Choices about how Earth’s processes are rendered — through hue, lightness, contrast, naming and disclosure — organize public perception and coordination, deciding what counts as common evidence and how we act together with Earth. Rossi’s larger point applies: Color infrastructures do not merely decorate an era, they constitute it. If the planetary is to be held in common, it must be legible in color.

“Color is not just how Earth shows itself; it can be diagnostic, even a narrative of change.”

Political theory has language for this. French philosopher Jacques Rancière’s “distribution of the sensible” names how regimes allocate what is perceptible and sayable before any statute is written. Like metrology’s units, calendars’ time zones, cartography’s projections and interface defaults, planetary color is a pre-legal order: a background regime that organizes what appears actionable before any law speaks.

The politics of planetary color therefore operates where aesthetic order becomes epistemic order. It is an arrangement of seeing and sensing that quietly conditions what can be argued, trusted and coordinated as our shared world.

Planetary Colors

Some planetary colors are physical, spectral and stubborn. Neptune’s saturated blue is methane subtracting red. The aurora’s iconic green is oxygen’s 557.7-nanometer emission. These are not metaphors but signifiers for materials; naming them as such helps ratify the processes that produce them. “Neptune Blue” or “Aurora Green” could easily link colors to our cosmic existence.

Other planetary colors are (re)made by cameras, algorithms and conventions. “True color” Earth images are engineered reconstructions. NASA’s “Blue Marble 2002” was stitched from months of satellite observations into a seamless “true color” mosaic, underscoring that many “true color” Earth views are composited reconstructions, unlike Apollo 17’s 1972 “Blue Marble” photograph.

“False color” composites and infrared-to-visible mappings from the Hubble Space Telescope to the James Webb Space Telescope are deliberate translation schemes that reveal what can be seen by choosing certain palettes.

An infrared view of the Pillars of Creation peered through interstellar dust unveils newly formed stars that are obscured in ordinary visible light. Here, color constitutes a designed translation of data instead of a mere passive recording of optical cues. Similarly, architect Laura Kurgan argues in “Close Up at a Distance” that satellite sensing and its visual languages translate dispersed Earth processes into legible — and political — images, a reminder that how we render planetary signals is already a choice about how we understand our world.

Within these regimes of visibility, what one might call “artificial color” — the deliberate abstraction that translates non-visible wavelengths and signals into visible hues — is a crucial epistemic step. By encoding data like infrared signals or chemical compositions into color, these images create knowledge rather than just recording it. That is authorship of planetary color.

Not only in satellite images and space telescopes can we experience this, but also in everyday life. Planetary colors pass through soft- and hardware, each imposing its own technical biases. The same image can look vivid on a phone and muted on an older laptop because device gamuts and color-management defaults differ. Regardless of the device, just as “Earthrise” and “Blue Marble” did for the modern environmental movement, planetary color operationalizes knowledge: It renders information actionable.

The Human Factor

Color carries ideas because it travels through perception. Three mechanisms are especially relevant. Color constancy is the brain’s habit of making an object’s color appear the same under different lighting: A blue shirt at noon still looks blue at dusk. Helpful in daily life, this can hide real differences in images unless a palette also signals illumination, which can reveal changes we would otherwise miss.

Pre-attentive salience describes the effect that some color differences jump out before we consciously decide to look for them. This is why rainbow gradients can mislead us by overemphasizing small changes, whereas scales where equal data steps are perceived as equal color steps and are detectable to color-blind viewers support honest detection.

Affective priming describes the psychological mechanisms behind color’s ability to nudge mood and behavior. In achievement tasks, brief exposure to red can tilt people toward avoidance, which shows that color can shape judgment even when we believe we are acting autonomously.

Considered together, this affective palette of colors explains why the way we perceive the planet — be it through the hues of volcanoes and ice sheets, forests and rivers, or space weather and meteor showers — quietly changes what becomes noticeable, thinkable and actionable. 

If color is part of a yet-to-emerge planetary literacy, it must be multilingual, as the perception of color is not merely neurophysiological, but deeply influenced by culture. The World Color Survey extended linguists Brent Berlin and Paul Kay’s classic thesis that languages name colors in a predictable, universal sequence (the so-called “basic color terms”), revealing both recurrent patterns and striking partitions, such as “grue” categories that merge green and blue.

These partitions travel with power: Art historian John Gage’s archaeology of Western color and artist David Batchelor’s account of “chromophobia” show how empires, religions and modernist canons scripted the meanings of, and the values attributed to, different hues.

“For us to become a planetary society, the colors through which Earth senses and is sensed need to be aligned.”

A planetary color is therefore less a single key than an interoperable set of keys: Process-based names, such as a “Saharan Dust Ochre,” can meet local lexicons so colors carry physics and culture at once.

The Earth Factor

Not only do we see Earth through color, Earth, in a real way, senses through color. Sunlight arrives as a spectrum, and the planet sorts it: Oceans swallow reds and return deep blues; clouds and ice throw broad light back to space; dark soot on snow shifts whiteness to gray and, at the same time, influences the planet’s temperature. In the air, color steers chemistry: Aerosol-laden skies redden, changing how quickly sunlight breaks apart molecules and how much energy the lower atmosphere keeps.

Living organisms are also optical instruments. Leaves are tuned to red and blue, using chlorophyll to absorb and harvest daylight; plant phytochromes register the color of light at dusk to tell seasons apart; phytoplankton ride the green-blue gradient to time their blooms; some marine microbes even run retinal-like photochemistry that taps the green bands of the sea.

Corals fluoresce, using color as both a shield and a stress signal, while the “vegetation red edge” — the sharp spectral jump between plants absorbing red light and reflecting near-infrared — is both a planetary fingerprint and a byproduct of how plants detect and manage light.

Color is not only an appearance but an interface: a surface upon which energy becomes information and the planet’s materials, organisms and spheres register, store and respond. Designing the planetary color palette, then, is not just designing what we see, it is learning to handle color in the wavelengths Earth already uses to sense its way forward.

To do so, we can refer to Abelardo Gil-Fournier and Jussi Parikka’s “Living Surfaces,” in which they unveil how Earth is made of “living surfaces”: interfaces where plant and photographic surfaces fold into one another, and where light functions at once as metabolized signal, registered through photosynthesis, and as measurable inscription, captured and processed into images. In this account, the two surfaces converge through a cultural technique that builds surfaces from measured light.

Approaching planetary color means working within these medianatures. It requires engaging cultural techniques such as calibration, mapping and ground-truthing that actively format Earth’s surface into data. These are the tools that translate raw biological life into the images we see.

In the planetary age, this means that color as experienced by humans is only one narrow slice of a wider spectral life. As Ed Yong reveals in “An Immense World,” the more-than-human world can parse wavelengths that we cannot, ranging from ultraviolet and infrared to the polarization of light.

The pre-legal order constituted by planetary palettes — colormaps, legends, thresholds, names and so forth — must be framed as a situated human translation: explicit about its vantage, inclusive of color-vision diversity and capable of turning non-visible spectra into shared, contestable public signals.

Color As Infrastructure

Artworks such as James Turrell’s immersive Ganzfeld installations, which dissolve depth perception in edgeless fields of pure colored light, and Olafur Eliasson’s “The Weather Project,” which suspended a giant, mist-shrouded artificial sun inside the Tate Modern art gallery to gather crowds in a shared amber glow, demonstrate how color fields can retune attention and assemble a public.

Hélio Oiticica’s “Parangolés,” wearable capes of saturated color first activated with the Mangueira samba community in Rio, turned hues into a collective act in the street, where color was not only seen but engaged with, danced with and debated as a public form. Color here is not a matter of mere aesthetics: These are political arguments in color.

Angela Snæfellsjökuls Rawlings stages a deliberative assembly as a participatory performance in the artistic-activist project “Motion to Change Colour Names to Reflect Planetary Boundary Tipping Points.” By framing the renaming of colors in response to climate crises as a socio-legal innovation, Rawlings treats the palette not merely as a visual code, but as a parliamentary act.

In a similar vein, entrepreneur Luke Iseman and designer Andrew Song have tested sulfur-dioxide balloon releases with their startup Make Sunsets, a geoengineering gambit that asks: If aerosols cool the planet, how red would (or should) our sunsets become? These discussions showcase the widespread awareness of the fact that any large-scale change in the planet’s color — be it our skies, oceans or land cover — could deeply affect humans’ relationship to their planet.

“Colors have repeatedly given politics a public body, allocating attention, rallying coalitions and making claims visible at a glance.”

Most often, color slips into planetary politics quietly, as the mood of a map, the warning of a dashboard, the tint of a season, the hue of a banner. Large parts of everyday coordination already turn on this quiet code.

In Europe, the purchase of a new appliance entails reading a green-to-red efficiency bar. In France, the vigilance weather map organizes municipal and household responses to dangerous weather events from heatwaves to floods through a four-color logic. And Mexico City’s Hoy No Circula program turns color into choreography at urban scale: Cars carry colored hologram stickers linked to plate numbers — yellow, pink, red, green, blue — which determine no-drive days and restrictions during pollution episodes.

Do these color schemes help societies think of and relate to the planetary?

In many countries, air pollution is communicated through a color-coded air quality index (AQI): In the U.S., the AQI runs from green (“good”) through red (“unhealthy”) to maroon (“hazardous”).  Across Europe, comparable indices pair color bands with explicit health advice for the general public and sensitive groups on when to modify outdoor activity.  

However, as architect Nerea Calvillo argues in “Aeropolis,” air and air pollution are not a homogeneous “outside.” They are co-produced by bodies and atmospheres, as well as by sensors, indices, visualizations, infrastructures and the regulatory and economic logics that often perpetuate exclusion and inequity.

That means that color-coded atmospheric representations are not neutral readouts but part of the apparatus through which uneven exposures become publicly legible and actionable: useful for collective response, yet always at risk of flattening differences among pollutants, places and vulnerabilities.

In each case, color is not decoration around the facts. It is part of how the facts enter public life. Just as the way we color-code the planet influences what we know about it, this is an epistemic and political practice. A poorly designed thermal map might hide extremes, whereas a well-designed one can reveal patterns at first glance.

Planetary Palette

Right now, what passes for a planetary palette is mostly an accident of defaults: device settings, stock colormaps, ad-hoc choices. Making the implicit explicit means surfacing that palette and recomposing it with Earth. The intentional making of such a palette calls for at least four moves.

First, open a conversation and reframe. The palette might be treated as a public invitation — not décor, but a shared claim tested with Earth. Rather than green branding and device defaults, Earth’s own signals would meet human ways of seeing: chlorophyll greens, auroral oxygen’s green, aerosol-red sunsets. In this register, color would work as a relay. Measurements would become proposed hues, scales would aim to make equal changes look like equal changes for aging, color-blind and standard eyes alike and color names would carry causes.

The palette would also point to possibility, not only alarms: cool corridors of “Canopy Jade” and “Breeze Sapphire” for walking and schooling; “Nocturne Blue” nights that would restore a shared sky; “Pulse Cyan” river rises that would coordinate fisheries, ferries and floodplain planting. The aim would be co-creation: open, revisable and applicable to how the planet already speaks in color.

Second, convene to formulate principles and compose first prototypes. A planetary color convention could seat Earth-observation scientists, artists, designers, accessibility experts, linguists, anthropologists, educators, journalists and policymakers, so palettes are co-sensed, legible and usable where decisions happen.

A few prototypes could focus on specific processes, such as Breeze & Shade (urban cool corridors from canopy transpiration and wind pathways) and Night-Sky Commons (dark-sky windows from cloud aerosol and light-pollution data), developed under agreed principles such as:

Start from the planet, not moods: Tie hues to earthly processes. Make it beautiful: Compose for dignity and delight. Design for adaptation: Establish a shared backbone with room for local adjustments. Make it accessible and fair: Use color-vision inclusivity and strong contrast. Be transparent: Indicate what was sensed and why each hue was selected, and visually signal data uncertainty. Build for learning and evolution: Test with real people and devices, allowing new uses and meanings to develop over time.

Third, give this work an institutional home. Rather than a single bureaucratic body, this could take the form of a distributed observatory run by a consortium of science agencies, design labs and museums. Here, satellite and field streams would be translated into images accompanied by concise color briefs in the form of accessible guides explaining the data source and usage rules for each hue.

“Most often, color slips into planetary politics quietly, as the mood of a map, the warning of a dashboard, the tint of a season, the hue of a banner. ”

Simultaneously, the observatory would run design and legibility trials, co-creating and testing new maps with diverse communities to ensure they are understood and welcomed before release. A living lexicon would record process-bearing names, and palette hearings would be held when colors might steer broader public action. Crucially, an ethics log and version history would track why visual choices were made, ensuring that changes in the planet’s appearance are traceable decisions rather than hidden defaults.

In partnership with city agencies, researchers, artists and frontline communities, the observatory would commission experimental pilots, such as public light installations or interactive urban dashboards, and publish open-source resources, like accessible colormap plugins for mapping software.

Fourth, evaluate and refine the palette based on evidence. The prototypes should be treated as civic infrastructure and assessed across a set of dimensions. Do they read quickly and correctly? Do they steer inspiration to reshape human-planet relations? Do they prompt the right actions, and are they accessible regardless of visual ability or device? Small pilots and before-and-after rollouts would inform a public log of what changed when a color band flipped, and a regular review cadence would adjust the scheme. The goal is a shortening loop between planetary signal, legible appearance and coordinated response.

Rossi shows how the industrial age wired color into institutions so thoroughly that perception itself became a site of politics. The planetary age inherits this lesson at a different scale: Ocean color trends now register ecological reorganization; hyperspectral satellites are built to track it; cross-cultural surveys reveal that our vocabularies for color are learned, mobile and contested; and contemporary art keeps demonstrating that color can gather strangers into a public around a shared field of sensation.

More than a single palette, the planetary colors would be a set of tested, explained and teachable mappings to help people sense earthly processes together. If the 19th-century “republic of color” standardized perception for an industrial order, the 21st-century equivalent might standardize disagreement with shared references — enough coherence of planetary colors to argue about the same world.

This is planetary politics in practice: a palette co-authored by Earth’s own signals and by human institutions that translate spectra into public reasons. If colors are integral to planetary politics, then designing the palette is not a cosmetic but a constitutional practice.

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