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There is a widespread recognition that the prospects for contemporary civilization and humanity are shadowed by a range of catastrophic and existential threats, a major subset of which are anthropogenic and technogenic in character. (In the simplest terms these threats arise from the collision between scientific-technological modernity and the geography of the planet Earth.) At the same time, the two most powerful institutional complexes on the planet (market capitalism and the war state system) are committed to further rapidly advancing technology for power and plenty, and anticipate further great elevations of the human estate. Over the last long century, a great debate has emerged, across many disciplines, on the ‘terrapolitan question’(TQ): given the new and prospective material contexts for human agency, what world orders are needed to assure human survival, prosperity and freedom? Practical agency responsive to the new horizon of threat and benefit depends upon getting an adequate answer to this question. Any theory capable of illuminating these realities and choices, and answering the TQ, must be significantly materialist in character. Explicitly materialist theories are very old, and very diverse, and material factors appear in virtually every body of thought, yet are still significantly underdeveloped in contemporary international and world order theory.