Down to Earth

Politics in the New Climatic Regime

Bruno Latour | 2018, Polity

Ecological mutation has organized the political landscape for the last thirty years. This could explain the deadly cocktail of exploding inequalities, massive deregulation, and the conversion of the dream of globalization into a nightmare for most people.

What connects these three phenomena is the conviction, shared by some influential people, that the ecological threat is accurate and that the only way for them to survive is to abandon any pretence of sharing a common future with the rest of the world. Hence, their flight offshore and their massive investment in climate change denial.

The Left has been slow to turn its attention to this new situation. It is still organized along an axis that goes from investment in local values to the hope of globalization, just as people dissatisfied with the ideal of modernity are returning to protecting national or even ethnic borders everywhere.

This is why it is urgent to shift sideways and define politics as leading toward the Earth rather than toward the global or national. Belonging to a territory is the phenomenon most needing rethinking and careful redescription; learning new ways to inhabit the Earth is our biggest challenge. Bringing us down to earth is the task of politics today.

Table of Contents

1. 1. A hypothesis as political fiction: the explosion of inequalities and the denial of climate change are one and the same phenomenon.
   2. Thanks to America’s abandonment of the climate agreement, we now know clearly what war has been declared.
   3. The question of migrations now concerns everyone, offering a new and very wicked universality: finding oneself deprived of ground.
   4. One must take care not to confuse globalization-plus with globalization-minus.
   5. How the globalist ruling classes have decided to abandon all the burdens of solidarity, little by little.
   6. The abandonment of a common world leads to epistemological delirium.
   7. The appearance of a third pole undoes the classical organization of modernity torn between the first two poles, the Local and the Global.
   8. The invention of “Trumpism” makes it possible to identify a fourth attractor, the Out-of-This-World.
   9. In identifying the attractor we can call Terrestrial, we identify a new geopolitical organization.
   10. Why the successes of political ecology have never been commensurate with the stakes.
   11. Why political ecology has had so much trouble breaking away from the Right/Left opposition.
   12. How to ensure the relay between social struggles and ecological struggles.
   13. The class struggle becomes a struggle among geosocial positions.
   14. The detour by way of history makes it possible to understand how a certain notion of “nature” has immobilized political positions.
   15. We must succeed in breaking the spell of “nature” as it has been pinned down by the modern vision of the Left/Right opposition.
   16. A world composed of objects does not have the same type of resistance as a world composed of agents.
   17. The sciences of the Critical Zone do not have the same political functions as those of the other natural sciences.
   18. The contradiction between the system of production and the system of engendering is heating up.
   19. A new attempt at describing dwelling places in France’s ledgers of complaints as a possible model.
   20. A personal defense of the Old Continent.

Acknowledgements, Figures, Notes

Bibliography

Latour, B. (2018) Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime. Camebridge, UK: Polity.