Review – Bruno Latour Down to Earth: The Politics of the New Climatic Regime (2018).
Bruno Latour’s short book makes an arresting case for a progressive new politics to tackle the gravest problem of our age: the anthropogenic climate change hot housing the Earth. A growing band of scientists believe this development signals the arrival of the Anthropocene or what in social-historical terms Latour defines as the New Climate Regime. As we will discover Latour’s radical renovation of ‘ecological politics’ – all politics – turns on the themes of landing on Earth and redefining social action from the perspective of being-in-the-world itself framed by the Terrestrial. Though not quite the emphatic call to arms of a celebrated manifesto published 170 years before, The Terrestrial Manifesto would make a fitting alternative title for Latour’s tract and though the Terrestrial Party is hardly haunting anyone yet, growing apprehension of common ruin looms though Latour claims our rulers and elites are plotting their own improbable escape by throwing the rest of us overboard.
Latour sardonically notes the ‘collapse of communism’ and the ‘end of history’ three decades ago kickstarted another history: the convergence of globalisation, deregulation and deepening inequality all combined with the first systematic attempts to deny the reality of climate change. Significant sections of the global elite have “decided the earth no longer has room for them and everyone else” and so no longer act as though humanity is travelling towards a common horizon. From the 1980s elites everywhere started to take flight and “shelter themselves from the world” (1).
Climate change denial is front and centre of the New Climatic Regime as the recent extreme weather events in the US show including the super storms and the wild fires which swept through California, Oregon and Washington. In September 2020 Trump travelled to northern California where he falsely blamed poor forest management for the huge wild fires. Trump was accompanied by the Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom and various state and federal officials. When an official suggested the science demonstrated the planet was heating up in response to Trump’s claim the planet would cool down Trump shot back “I don’t think science knows, actually.”
When Trump jettisoned the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement war was declared. This is the central geo-political question of our age Latour argues. A new path beckons: we have to come down to earth while “something like a map” is urgently needed because existing maps are useless (2). The 2015 Paris Climate Agreement indicated a dawning realisation that if business as usual continued we would need several planets. No planet or soil can house the Globe of globalisation. Trump’s ascension has been hugely “clarifying” exposing a retrograde desire for borders and identity while acting as if no one else inhabited the planet. We can continue to seek illusory escapes or leave a liveable planet for our children. Denial versus looking “for a place to land” is the political fault line of the age (3).
Everything must change for humanity to survive. Climate change is devastating lands at the heart of the migrant and refugee crisis like that in Central America. One response has been the Walls and hostile borders favoured by Trump’s supporters who float in dreams and denial and so postpone a landing thereby threatening to push us all into the abyss. For Latour the subject of landing somewhere was slow to emerge. The significance of the Terrestrial eluded the early Modernizers who initiated globalisation with colonialism and violence. The impact of globalisation, the climate crisis, the dwindling of habitable land retrospectively justifies the anti-colonial resistance. The faux universalism of globalisation now retreats before a “wicked universality” as the ground disappears beneath our feet (4).
Populism grips citizens of the global North via identity and the migrant crisis but walls won’t keep the ‘invaders’ out. Latour observes that the apostles of wide open spaces and eternal modernisation propose risks for us while their safety is guaranteed. We lack the golden parachutes and luxury boltholes. Identity and safety are bound together. As Zygmunt Bauman argued politics in the global North gradually shifted from welfare to security and the various ‘threats’ to the citizen. Yet these threats were notional or vanishingly rare like terrorism while real if intangible threats like climate change are scotomised or repressed (5).
Latour views globalisation as consisting of two opposed developments. A move from Local to the Global with its proliferating viewpoints and the universal imposition of a single elite or provincial viewpoint resulting in confusion: accept or fight globalisation? Globalisation-minus denigrates the ‘archaic’ and promotes monochrome ‘progress’ while the ‘arrow of time’ is in the pocket of the modernizers who scorn the ‘reactionaries’ who hanker for the land/soil. Yet Latour defends attachment to the land while insisting opposition to hyper-modernisation means rejecting the suzerainty of another province (Wall St, Brussels or Beijing). Reactionaries dismiss globalisation in toto but defence of some of the old ways is the root of admitting difference. So while repudiating Blut und Boden Latour differentiates between Local-plus comfortable with different ways of life and Local-minus defined by an insular fear of strangers.
A ‘huge event’ has made modernisation and globalisation impossible to sustain. The planet is too narrow for the globe of modernisation and too large and complex for confinement to the Local adding urgency to humanity’s reorientation. Elites everywhere desert a common humanity while pouring fortunes into climate change denial. This isn’t sincere denial – obliterating the science is all about saving their skins at the expense of billions of lives (their calculation). Latour concedes his polemic sounds like conspiracy theory as he defends his basic thesis while resisting the wilder fringes of impotent fabulation. Yet in the QAnon era perhaps more wary defences against conspiracy theory are required. Of course there are many extraordinary examples of state and corporate betrayal of common humanity. What is the appropriate response to the case of Exxon-Mobil and global warming? The basic facts – hidden for years – are incontrovertible though Exxon-Mobil denied the evidence of their senior scientist James F. Black was as bald as has been suggested. The US oil giant was told CO2 emissions were heating the planet courtesy of their scientists extensive research as early as 1977. Yet by the late 1980s Exxon-Mobil was spending millions spreading misinformation and played a key part in dissuading the US from signing the 1998 Kyoto Protocol (6).
Science is a casualty in the age of post-truth or rather post-politics as “epistemological delirium” reigns. Latour sharply criticises those who have attacked ordinary people embracing Populism and “alternative facts.” For Latour such arguments elide the huge betrayal perpetrated by elites and political classes. Facts “remain robust when they are supported by a common culture” but Latour complains epistemology’s vice is blaming intellectual deficits while deficits in shared practice are overlooked. Ordinary people are “fed a fog of disinformation” by Trump and his political kin. It’s hard to escape the feeling Latour is too lenient toward this demographic – in the US other demographics, blacks and Hispanics for example, know perfectly well Trump’s message is not for them (7).
So the problem – climate change scepticism, clinging to identity – isn’t primarily cognitive but positional for Latour. There are several mutually incompatible worlds but to discover where we are Latour asks we imagine a vector travelling from the Local to the Global and our place on it. The Global qua Globe qua globalisation-plus encompasses science, modernisation, progress. It was expansive (cartography > spatial plus the arrow of time > temporal), pushing outwards, abandoning the Local to modernise though this Local could be remade after the Global’s arrival acquiring new signification as the anti-Global. Romantic revolts, antagonisms aroused by globalising modernity and melancholy for a vanished past conflict with acceleration into the future. There were protestors on the other side: natives, subalterns and excluded. Colonialism and imperialism were brutal but for some the ‘arrow of time’ was going somewhere – toward endless modernisation and development (8).
Latour defines the Local and the Global as opposed attractors. Between the two attractors was a modernisation front dividing what lay behind and ahead. Moderns, whether the left or right, generally saw the age in terms of a conflict between the Local and Global. Latour suggests the attractor of globalisation-plus has degenerated into globalisation-minus as social inequality soars and the conditions of existence for much of the world population are impacted by a variety of stressors including climate change. What follows is a flight to Local-minus encapsulating tradition, protection, security, ethnic or religious identity and borders. Some ‘rump’ territories ‘left behind’ by globalisation opt for reinvention – hence Poland, Brexit Britain and Trump’s US (9).
Modernisation as attractor was effective when everyone imagined they inhabited One space (or contiguous spaces) and were travelling to a common future. Presently a widening gulf separates the globe’s tribes as an occulted force twists modernisation’s temporal arrow. A shadowy third attractor is now disrupting the modernisation front. Trump’s withdrawal of the US from the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement is a reaction to the third attractor and constitutes a dangerous movement built on a fourth attractor of climate change denial which Latour sums up as Out-of-this-World: the horizon of people who no longer belong to the realities of the Earth, who are enmeshed in the omnipotent fantasies of unlimited growth and consumption. This reaction is entirely comprehensible given America’s wealth and power and explains the utter indifference to the New Climatic regime. Latour is persuasive on this point while his analysis foreshadows Trump’s abysmal record on Covid 19: denying the virus’s severity and shockingly failing to protect US citizens (10).
Trump’s polysemous MAGA slogan promises Local-minus to the white masses like a John Ford wagon train that winds ‘back’ to a white ethnic past that only ever existed on celluloid. Yet huge profits and eye watering tax windfalls for the very wealthiest materially deprive those same masses. Burying truth at Boot Hill is strategically necessary if the drilling is to continue and coming back down to earth evaded. Latour is wistfully aware the US has the technology and resources to lead the world to the third attractor but spurns the opportunity (11).
At this point having outlined the dangerous Out-of-this-World dash for the abyss brazenly championed by Trumpism, Latour describes the third attractor, the Terrestrial as offering a radical alternative to the other three attractors and an escape from suspension between rejecting and accepting modernisation. Latour argues the Terrestrial should neither be understood as the Earth or Gaia (with both definitions having acquired onerous baggage). The Terrestrial is considered a new political actor, both a reaction and a growing factor in public life, illustrating the redundancy of separating the social and nature and simply treating nature as passive arena of human action (12).
The Terrestrial signifies the earth and soil are no longer a stable framework for human action (now mingling with other actions). If the Terrestrial is an unknown quantity the stability of ten millennia of civilisation and the Holocene is gone. Moderns will have to land on earth and learn to live with other inhabitants – those supposedly archaic ‘survivals’ (a designation redolent of the ante chamber to oblivion). The minor ‘fluctuations’ or relative steady state of the Holocene “earth system”, are being supplanted by violent upheavals of the Anthropocene generally dated from the start of the Industrial Revolution. Previously human action modified the surrounding world like a stage hand rearranging the scenery but the “earth system’s” reaction sees the scenery moving itself about stage. This “unprecedented” reality is too painful for many to face. Many abide in fantasy and apocalyptic, redemptive dramas that narcissistically provide the satisfactions of cathexis (think the alt-right militias or evangelical Christianity). Reflecting on the failures of the rump Green parties Latour claims political ecology is imprisoned on the Local to Global vector where it tried to chart a middle course between the left and the right. If the question of left/right divide is redundant in the age of the Terrestrial and the “earth system” striking back, the question of social equality remains central (13).
Latour stands by the label ‘progressive’ (‘radical’ is considered too compromised) and insists on some continuity between the old and new politics. But ways must be found to win over those who currently look to either the Local or Global, to the alternative attractor of the Terrestrial, finding allies among progressives and reactionaries by means of hitherto unrealised political opportunities presented by the Terrestrial. For Latour politics was always orientated towards stakes and situations and this is no less true of the Terrestrial today. Energies have to be diverted from the old attractors like those feeling betrayed by the political class and desiring the security of the Local and identity. Reactionary political positions must be challenged and absorbed though landing on earth isn’t to be confused with lebensraum. Attachment, isn’t reactionary per se as the fundamental infant-care giver connection shows. If the Local differentiates by closing itself off, the Terrestrial does so in opening up – a potential point of entry for those attracted to the Global (14).
The Terrestrial relates to the earth but Latour defines it as a ‘way of worlding’ aligning with no borders and no particular identity. In contrast the other attractors are illusory and incoherent. The Terrestrial can rejuvenate politics and aid comprehension of a world that politics is presently trailing so badly. Another articulation of a radical Terrestrial vision is the proposal for a political relay between social and ecological struggles that goes deeper than the Red-Green rapprochement of the 1970s and 1980s when ecology embraced social justice and vice versa. Then each pole retained its own identity having failed to politically absorb its opposite. Following Communism’s historical defeat socialism, ecology and feminism have submitted to the markets Great Acceleration. In terms of the continued appeal of social justice, the language of social class, the idea of history as regression/progression and the continuing relevance of material interests to politics – we all remain Marxists to a certain degree or so Latour claims. Though Latour is not claiming Marxism offers a viable social-historical project his point is contentious and we think too generous on Marxism’s relevance even if it’s only confined to elucidating the realities of social class (15).
As the politics of social class wane new maps are needed to navigate the “struggles of the geo-social loci”: firstly, what are the real interests involved? Secondly, who do we – radical Terrestrials – make alliances with and against whom? If the C19th was age of the social struggle then the C21st is the age of the geo-social struggle and the parties and social movements of the left must catch up with the new reality. Socialists are not exempt from rethinking the scientific ‘materialism’ that ‘inadvertently’ allowed the planet heat up and reach the threshold of the sixth extinction in the name of progress. Radical terrestrials must be more materialist. Science – targeted by climate change deniers – is important in the battle against anthropogenic climate change. Latour cautions against ditching scientific rationality for allegedly deeper relations with nature. Science has a positive role though we shouldn’t forget the infirmities of the ‘dismal science.’ Economics was blind to resource finitude and allied to industrial capitalism treated the Earth as an inexhaustible source of raw materials and an infinite ‘carbon sink’. It failed to anticipate the reaction of the “terraqueous globe” to human action. Such forecasting failures might mean our children are left an uninhabitable planet and so restoring science’s credibility means undertaking a turn to the Terrestrial (16).
In remarkable passages Latour further explores the dominant optic since the Enlightenment on our terrestrial home. In the ‘disinterested’ scientific perspective the Globe is ‘seen’ from far away, an orb in the dark of space from some indeterminate, imaginary point in contrast to the Terrestrial perspective which sees the Earth close up. The former is the Galilean perspective where the Earth is just one object among an infinite multitude of similar objects. Latour maintains conceptualising the Earth as a Galilean object seen from distance was a barrier to the Terrestrial perspective. We aren’t simply observers, we are in the world while the view of the universe adopted by science is the view from nowhere. Viewing the Earth from a notional Sirius – a double distancing – is wrench from, or violent break with the Terrestrial (17).
The Global horizon of modernity viewing the world from the distance rested on a “brutal” division of inside/outside. Nature was an external object while progress and modernisation meant tearing oneself away from the “primordial soil” and striking out for the Great Outside. The detachment of the New Climatic Regime is inherently alien to the Terrestrial orientation. Efforts to politically mobilise in coming geo-social conflicts while assuming the Earth is a Galilean object would doom resistance or mitigation to failure. The ecological party must be located here not on Sirius while the renovation of science via the Terrestrial entails replacing a nature-as-universe perspective with a nature-as-process perspective instead. Nature’s object-beings are actors and not simply inert factors of production indifferent to human goals (18).
Ethnography has uncovered ways of seeing or being in nature untouched by notions like ‘production’, ‘accumulation’ or ‘resources.’ Formerly these ‘philosophies’ were intellectual curiosities or archaic optics pulverised by modernisation but now potentially offer models for survival (suitably transformed). Similarly Rene Girard laconically observed consumer society (an object universe with built in obsolescence) nudged its denizens towards an awareness of the superfluity of many of the ‘needs’ generated by the market and the emptiness of endless consumption awakening the ‘mystic’ within. Latour’s thinking also shares many common themes with Cornelius Castoriadis and if he rejects the overly rational provenance of Earth as distant Galilean object for Gaia or Terrestrial object, this chimes with certain themes of late period Castoriadis who as Suzi Adams relates made a second ontological turn in the late 1970s/1980s in reinterpreting physis (Nature) as a trans-regional domain of creative, active nature. To clarify, Castoriadis’s first ontological turn in the 1970s presented a social-historical ontology of creative being that foregrounded the power of the imagination. Crucially Castoriadis’s first ontological turn was a revolt against social science’s dominant currents which could only think social being as determined and never really determining. Having turned to the post-transcendental phenomenological tradition, Castoriadis presented an anthropic conception of self creating social beings radicalising conceptions of the imagination first tentatively presented by Kant in his Third Critique (implicitly cutting against Kant’s first two critiques of reason). Castoriadis’s ontology of creative being defined the nomos with its various regional modes of self-creation. Nomos was presented as a realm of autonomy but implicitly situated in the context of the trans-regional domain of physis possessing its own efficacy separate from human action. Castoriadis defined physis/phusis as “…the push, the endogenous and spontaneous growth of things that nevertheless is also generative of an order.” In the Aristotelian sense Nature moves itself (the finality of “endogenous and spontaneous growth”), as beings positing themselves as their own ends (teleonomy). Both physis/phusis/Nature and nomos were characterised by self creation but nomos as the field of human social action or autonomy was distinct Castoriadis argued in being explicit self creation (19).
Latour’s Terrestrial ontology departs from viewing the atmosphere as part of the bio-film as a container for the air animate beings breath. Rather there is a complex interaction or co-production that suggests to Latour a widening and redistribution of agencies belonging to the Terrestrial. James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis was an important milestone in formulating the idea life or biota were active participants in all the physical, biochemical, geochemical processes forming the environment including the planet’s atmosphere. As Latour summarises Lovelock’s innovation as a refusal to de-animate the planet by erasing agents/actors as participants in the causal chains constituting the ‘earth system’ (to use the nomenclature which has subsequently given rise to an interdisciplinary field encompassing biology, chemistry, geology, physics and mathematics). Latour detects many actors imbricated in different casual chains, a view that allows an explicit political reorientation compared to the Lovelockian perspective which arguably closed down possible collective remedial exits from the consequences of anthropogenic climate change. In one universe Galilean objects are an exploitable resource while in another Lovelockian objects are agents. Latour boldly dismisses the naivety of thinking such objects will remain inert whatever pressure is exerted on them. One camp simply cannot comprehend that suffering nature can react – ignorance not simply confined to climate change sceptics. Latour contextualises the coming geo-social conflicts asserting they are not simply confined to the thin bio-film humanity inhabits. Instead all Terrestrial processes are part of the Critical Zone while scientific debates concerning this zone are anything but pedagogical (20).
The science of the Terrestrial isn’t as ‘disinterested’ as the science of nature as universe itself claims to be. Latour paints a picture of conflicting interests framed either by nature as universe/Galilean object or nature as process/Lovelockian object. The Terrestrial is a sheet anchor of resistance and emancipation through ploughing and digging in opposition to the “weightlessness” of the Galilean Globe. The Terrestrial orientation also promises a new epoch of discovery but not by recapitulating the arc of “hyper neo-modernity.” Instead the Terrestrial could be a cathartic kick start to the collective endeavour of tackling the ‘climate emergency’. So Latour contrasts two radically different regulative principles: system of production <> system of engendering and argues a shift from the former to latter is necessary. The former represents ‘freedom’ and situates humanity at the centre of existence while the latter signifies the co-dependency of distributed agents. The system of production encapsulates humanity’s separation from, and intensive exploitation of Nature while the system of engendering is an arena of actors, animate beings or engendering terrestrials (not only humans), sharing a capacity for reacting and influencing the wider environment. The two systems, based on divergent regulative principles, inevitably clash. The system of production also entailed the utopia of modernisation and globalisation-plus but no planet qua Critical Zone could encompass them indefinitely (21).
Latour notes the politics of ‘climate emergency’ prompts consideration of how ‘deep’ the ecological response should be to begin exiting the Anthropocene – assuming, strictly speaking, such an exit is possible in terms of what Timothy Lenton calls strong mitigation measures. Lenton says one important conclusion of ‘earth system’ models and their projections is CO2 emissions will eventually have to be reduced to zero in the atmosphere to prevent continuing rises. Yet stabilizing CO2 emissions into the atmosphere to match oceanic CO2 levels (10 per cent of atmospheric levels) would leave the CO2 atmospheric level at 560ppm – twice the pre-industrial level. Existing international carbon emission goals are more ambitious. Scenarios proposing limiting global warming rises to 2 degrees centigrade would require global society to begin deliberately removing CO2 from the atmosphere by the end of this century. Lenton notes finite carbon reserves should provide a notional ceiling to CO2 emissions but reserves remain significant while extractive technology constantly improves though the ‘economics’ of extraction and use and the shift to alternative energy sources would be expected to make carbon increasingly less viable. Crucially avoiding warming by staying on or under 2 degrees centigrade, rests on drastic cuts in using remaining carbon reserves. Most carbon reserves need to be ‘left in the ground’ as the estimated 5,000 billion tonnes of reserves could add an additional 10 degrees centigrade to average global temperatures (22).
Would humanity remain at the centre? Our question is neither meant to imply a humanist or anti-humanist stance but address the form or composition of the human. The New Climatic Regime raises the question of humanity’s fate and if this is modified, then the definition of humanity’s interests is also modified. The climate crisis is destroying the old framework exposing humanity <> nature dichotomy to be an illusion because humanity is not above or outside Nature. Latour paraphrases Pascal to the effect the centre is everywhere and the circumference nowhere to encapsulate the frame of being-in-the-world which needs to be inserted into the terrestrial. Ultimately humans are terrestrials even as we unconsciously repress this reality. Castoriadis pointed to how humans as big brained primates always-already entangled in the social-historical and symbolic, had become constitutionally maladapted to surviving in Nature. In this context humans were both more intelligent than animals and less rational. This apprehension is allergic to the Galilean Globe and the view from Sirius which also implies – if not a separation – then at least a profound rift based on the dominant system of production (23)?
So a system of engendering means radically multiplying the number of agents and therefore redefining objects as animate object-beings or agents. These terrestrials have to discover a way to cohabitate and find their place among many other actors/beings. Moderns might see the past not as a passage to the present/future but as surpassing the archaic implying a concept of transition where little by way of tradition or culture is actually transmitted in contrast to a system of engendering. Yet there is a major problem – though many actors/beings can protest or react against climate change, if humanity is integrated into the system of production (and perhaps domesticated as Jacques Camatte maintained) then it will be extremely difficult to comprehend protest. In Camatte’s terms integration into the circuits of capital and consumer society must also function to scotomise the painful implications of climate change especially given the deficit of praxis Latour alluded to. The deficits in praxis are also reflected in a generalised atrophying of social praxis. Alain Touraine pointed to a transition from doing with capitalism’s rise to being in late modernity or the ‘post-industrial society’ implying the proliferation of ‘supernumerary’ demographics and also raising the issue of the continuing efficacy of social action in the contemporary period which Castoriadis characterised as the dilemma of insignificance in his late writings on democracy and autonomy (24).
Latour insists the reactions are real – a system of engendering implies proliferating points of life and proliferating points of revolt throwing up potential allies for different groups of Terrestrials. So changing views on geo-social struggles and geo-politics cannot rest on “philosophical decisions” alone. Here Latour is advancing a huge claim that his preliminary analysis is well founded and based on something stirring into life. A conflict is dramatized between modern humans who believe they are alone in the Holocene in flight towards the Global (or exodus to the Local) and those terrestrials who understand the Anthropocene has arrived and will cohabit with other terrestrials under the authority of a power they don’t yet possess. Presently Latour’s hypothesis poses the question: what should we do? (25).
Humanity must escape the ‘economic’ or as Polyani described it the secular religion of the market which is not of this world. As Latour observes: “…it’s materialism is an idealism that the climate mutation had made even more immaterial.” If the political goal is to disavow Local and Global utopia’s and land on earth, we are still trapped in a phony war and second guessing the coming politics of the Terrestrial. The “great displacement” has taken place but those supporting the traditional political parties are largely unaware of this. At this point Latour’s efforts to conjure the elusive world turned upside down patina of the coming Terrestrial politics is suggestive but lacks detail. We need to attach ourselves to the soil and so become attached to the world. Various political strategies are suggested including collective projects but also minoritarian exits from the system of production like off grid eco communes. The Terrestrial as attractor links the soil and the world but the soil is not the Local and the world is not globalisation. Humans belong to the soil/earth/dust but not in any regressive ideological sense (26).
Insisting on its inherently progressive nature Latour separates the Terrestrial from borders, identity, the regional and so on, and claims it subverts these stultifying forms but given the present indistinct shape of the Terrestrial he doesn’t really address the difficulty the third attractor could be more politically ambiguous and messy than he allows. For example, it is clear eco-fascism is a growing force in North America and Europe in line with renascent nationalism and neo-fascism globally. Some forms of eco-fascism have no problem embracing borders while advocating a social Darwinian winnowing of black and brown humanity that would involve bunkering down, erecting borders and allowing climate change to rip. This in extremis is simply an exterminatory version of a ‘program’ likely to grow in strength as the ‘climate emergency’ is disclosed to growing numbers especially in the developed world – an admission of the need to adapt allied to a presumption that accumulated wealth and resilience will ‘insulate’ the developed world from the gravest aspects of climate change. Obviously such presumption derives from observing climate changes differential impact thus far but also any number of narcissistic assumptions that are likely to unravel if climate change unfolds in the absence of concerted global action. Differential reactions of the ‘earth system’ may continue but no one could live on a planet ten degrees centigrade warmer than it is today. Fatalism and the ‘omnipotence of thought’ as well as a sociopathic totalitarianism are concealed in the ‘realism’ of such a heartless adaptionist stance.
Conscious geo-social struggles will emerge but Latour thinks a preparatory task consists in outlining “alternative descriptions” and undertaking investigations to formulate a putative Terrestrial politics for departing globalisation-minus and its dominant system of production. For Latour this work of description is for all animate beings. People are lost but the Terrestrial attractor can provide alternative meaning and political direction and help land on earth. Does Latour succumb to catastrophism? He argues a disaster far greater in scope than the two world wars of the C20th looms and the world shouldn’t bet on aid from the US even assuming ‘normalcy’ could be restored after Joe Biden’s election. Also what was established as ‘normal’ is the very thing which has brought us to the threshold of climate oblivion in the first place (27).
Latour believes Europe has a special role to play at the centre of Terrestrial politics. The nation-state (the Local) is not a habitable future (Britain faces real problems exiting Europe) but Europe’s provincialization effectively saved the continent allowing it to transition into a club of nations who gave up empire (Peter Sloterdijk). Europe points the way to a new relationship with the Earth after the rediscovery of “habitable ground” and Latour is convinced Europe has lessons it can teach other parts of the world because it invented the Globe in the first place (cartography, circumnavigation, trade and the eventually creation of a world economy or global system of production), including elaborating the first representations of a common world as an unintended by-product of voraciously plundering the world and its non-European inhabitants (27).
The Globe slipped through Europe’s fingers in becoming global but now globalisation-minus (development, modernisation and so on) must be abandoned and Europe can pioneer a new trail despite its past crimes. Repudiating its colonial and martial past a united Europe having drawn closer together can redefine sovereignty. Yet “smallness” or being liberally provincial is not an answer either. Perhaps Latour has in mind the problem posed by the rise of authoritarian powers who would remake globalisation and modernisation by subtracting democracy from economic liberalism and markets. Europe offers a model of ‘reflexive modernisation’ at odds with the siren voices who want to build Fortress Europe. Instead Europe is called upon to give home to millions of “displaced persons” (migrants, refugees). So Latour makes a case for Europe’s leading role in a global political reorientation toward the Terrestrial minus the old imperial hubris. Yet this advocacy raises questions – if we acquit him of ethnocentrism (as we do unequivocally) there are alternative readings of Europe’s fate. For example many today argue the ‘locomotive of history’ has shifted to the other zones of the globe such as South East Asia and countries like China and India (28).
So Latour maintains three great questions of the day converge on Europe: how can we escape globalisation-minus? How should we respond to the earth system’s reactions? How can we organise to welcome refugees? Others will also do this but Europe’s history demands that a cosmopolitan, democratic Europe adopts this goal and faces the stern challenges involved. To repeat Latour’s argument invites criticism – Achille Mbembe for example maintains European democracy rested on violence, exclusion and colonialism even in the present. Latour acknowledges this destructive history and Europe’s central culpability for the climate crisis as global capitalism’s natal crucible (29).
Europe retains its welfare states (if reduced) and it hasn’t been intoxicated by the system of production it helped to generalise around the world. Latour claims Europeans have produced subtle antidotes to the poisons of modernity and considers talk of Europe’s decadence hollow where it emanates from aggressively authoritarian quarters. If Europe almost committed suicide via world wars but survived to recuperate under the US umbrella (now folded up), it can find its feet again. We should add a Biden victory in 2020 will not entirely erase the incalculable damage Trump delivered to US’s international alliances in his four years in office. There is the question as to what the Trump interregnum indicated about the US: permanent US decline? Irreversible degeneration of the GOP with all the implications for the destruction of bipartisanship, the Republic’s stability and relations with the rest of the world? The ‘experiment’ or ‘accident’ of Trump can’t simply be dismissed as a blip while more pertinently opposition to rigorous action to tackle climate change in the US is likely to remain.
Latour argues this is the moment for Europe to re-enter history minus the narcissism Europe will dominate history. The new Terrestrial direction Latour suggests Europe could pioneer might only be a provincial experiment but the Old World would be receiving a “second chance” after its baleful historical role. Europe could be a homeland for all those looking for “ground”. Clearly the ‘ecological question’ will only become more prominent globally but whether the Terrestrial as it’s defined by Latour is a viable frame for renovating or galvanising ecological politics remains to be seen (29).
Jules Etjim
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NOTES
(1) Bruno Latour Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime (2018) pp.1-2.
(2) Op. cit. p.2.
(3) Op. cit. pp.3-5.
(4) Op. cit. pp.7-8.
(5) Zygmunt Bauman Liquid Times (2000). On Populism also see Joseph Aylmer’s excellent post A rough beast: Populism as repression and displacement on this blog from 2019.
(6) Shannon Hall article ‘Exxon Knew About Climate Change almost 40 Years Ago’ in Scientific American October 26 2015.
(7) Op. cit. pp.20-25.
(8) Op. cit. pp.25-27.
(9) Op. cit. pp.28-30.
(10) Op. cit. pp.31-36.
(11) Op. cit. pp.37-38.
(12) Op. cit. pp.39-41.
(13) Op. cit. pp.42-48.
(14) Op. cit. pp.49-54.
(15) Op. cit. pp.55-62.
(16) Op. cit. pp.63-66.
(17) Op. cit. pp.67-70.
(18) Op. cit. pp.71-74.
(19) Rene Girard’s observation about consumers becoming “mystics” (or consuming the New Age) can be found in Evolution and Conversion: Dialogues on the Origins of Culture (2017) pp.58-59. See Suzi Adams Castoriadis’s Ontology: Being and Creation (2011), see pp.1-15 and pp.145-62. Adams also points to the significance of Castoriadis’s late essay ‘Phusis and Autonomy’ collected in World in Fragments (1997) edited by David Ames Curtis pp.331-41.
(20) Op. cit. pp.75-79. The interdisciplinary discipline of ‘earth system science’ was strongly inspired by James Lovelock. A very useful brief summary is provided by Timothy Lenton Earth System Science (2016).
(21) Op. cit. pp.80-83.
(22) Lenton (2016) pp.95-97.
(23) Op. cit. pp.85-86.
(24) See Jacques Camatte ‘Against Domestication’ in This World We Must Leave and Other Essays (1995) pp.91-135.
(25) Op. cit. pp.87-88.
(26) Op. cit. pp.89-90.
(27) Op. cit. pp.92-95.
(28) Op. cit. pp.99-100.
(29) Op. cit. pp.101-106.
