There are moments in history when we are called to see the world anew – to lift the veil of familiarity and face a truth so fundamental, so humbling, that it shifts the very ground beneath our feet. Jeremy Rifkin’s Planet Aqua: Rethinking Our Home in the Universe is such a moment.

Imagine, if you will, the disorienting moment of waking in a place that feels utterly foreign, where familiar landmarks have vanished and the very air seems charged with strangeness. This, Rifkin suggests, is precisely where we find ourselves today—not because we've been transported elsewhere, but because we've finally begun to see our home as it truly is.

This is not merely a book. It is a reckoning – a deeply moving, meticulously reasoned call to reimagine our place in the grand weave of existence. Rifkin, one of the world’s leading economic thinkers and the visionary mind behind The Zero Marginal Cost Society, invites us to confront an unsettling, yet vital question: what if the Earth we thought we knew is not what it seems?

The Great Awakening

For centuries, we have viewed our world as a land planet – defined by solid ground, mapped by borders, ruled by economies rooted in soil and stone. But this illusion is crumbling. The Earth’s hydrosphere – the great planetary water system that nourishes every leaf, every creature, every breath we take – is rebelling. From record-breaking floods and heatwaves to droughts, wildfires and raging storms, the Earth is sending a message. It is crying out in anguish as the climate warms and its balance is lost.

Rifkin’s central thesis is both disarming and transformative: we do not live on a land planet – we live on Planet Aqua. More than 70% of our home is covered by water. From space, Earth gleams not as a green world, but a shimmering blue orb – alive with oceans, rivers, clouds and currents. It is this water, not the land, that sustains all life. And yet we have treated it as an afterthought.

Rifkin does not merely chart the catastrophe unfolding around us; he urges us to imagine something radically different. He asks us to rebrand our planet – to give it a new name, “Planet Aqua”, and in doing so, alter the very framework through which we perceive reality. Names carry power. They shape laws, guide behaviours, and write the stories we tell about ourselves. Acknowledging Earth as Planet Aqua would embed water consciousness into every layer of governance, education, economy, and culture.

Planet Aqua: Rethinking Our Home in the Universe By Jeremy Rifkin, source: Wiley

Rifkin’s prose flows with the gravitas of a philosopher and the clarity of a scientist. He shows how this rebranding is not a poetic exercise, but a survival imperative. As the hydrosphere searches for a new equilibrium, it threatens to pull humanity into a sixth mass extinction – unless we adapt. We must begin to readapt to the waters of life, rethinking everything from how we govern society to how we teach our children. He calls for a shift in how we orient ourselves in time and space – not as rulers of nature, but as participants in a great aquatic symphony.

The Wisdom of Water

There is something deeply humbling about recognising that we are, quite literally, beings of water. Our bodies are roughly 60% water, our brains even more so. Every thought, every emotion, every moment of creativity or connection flows through pathways that are fundamentally aquatic. We are not visitors to this water world—we are expressions of it, temporary arrangements of its substance, brief eddies in its eternal current.

This understanding changes everything. It asks us to reconsider not just how we relate to our environment, but how we understand consciousness itself, community, governance, and our place in the larger story of life on Earth.

The book’s emotional force lies in its return to something ancient and sacred – a memory held in our cells, in our stories, in the lullaby of waves and rain. We are creatures of the waters. Every heartbeat echoes the rhythms of the tides. Every drop in our bodies once flowed through rivers and skies. To remember this is to come home.

A New Journey Beckons

Planet Aqua also points to a brighter future. Rifkin draws on his work with the European Union, China, and U.S. leaders to chart a vision of a Third Industrial Revolution, where sustainability and ecological empathy define progress. This is not naive idealism, but a blueprint grounded in decades of policy and systems thinking.

In 2021, the European Space Agency adopted the term “Planet Aqua”, echoed by NASA’s assertion that “we live on a water planet”. These are not symbolic gestures – they are the beginnings of a planetary shift in identity.

As you turn the pages of this powerful book, you may feel sorrow for the damage done. But more importantly, you will feel wonder, hope, and a renewed sense of purpose. Rifkin reminds us that the story of Planet Aqua is still being written – and we are its authors.

The waters that flow through you have been flowing since the beginning of time. They have nourished countless generations, witnessed the rise and fall of civilisations, and carried forward the dreams and hopes of all who came before. Now they flow through you, carrying the possibility of a future where humanity finally learns to dance in rhythm with the tides of life itself.

Let this book be your compass. Let it guide you back to the waters – to humility, to awe, to responsibility. Because to save the Earth, we must first learn to see it as it truly is. Not as a patch of land floating in space, but as a living, breathing water-world – our only home, our Planet Aqua.