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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
The present ecological mutation has organized the whole political landscape for the last thirty years. This could explain the deadly cocktail of exploding inequalities, massive deregulation, and conversion of the dream of globalization into a nightmare for most people. What holds these three phenomena together is the conviction, shared by some powerful people, that the ecological threat is real and that the only way for them to survive is to abandon any pretense at 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 and just at the time when, everywhere, people dissatisfied with the ideal of modernity are turning back to the protection of national or even ethnic borders. This is why it is urgent to shift sideways and to define politics as what leads toward the Earth and not toward the global or the national. Belonging to a territory is the phenomenon most in need of 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.
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Seitenzahl: 172
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018
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Contents
Cover
Copyright
Acknowledgments
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 geo-social 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 – France’s ledgers of complaints as a possible model
20. A personal defense of the Old Continent
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Down to Earth
Politics in the New Climatic Regime
Bruno Latour
Translated by Catherine Porter
polity
First published in French as Où atterir? Comment s’orienter en politique © Éditions La Découverte, Paris, 2017
This English edition copyright © Bruno Latour, 2018
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press101 Station LandingSuite 300Medford, MA 02155, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-3059-5
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataNames: Latour, Bruno, author.Title: Down to earth : politics in the new climatic regime / Bruno Latour.Other titles: O?u atterrir? EnglishDescription: English edition. | Cambridge, UK ; Medford, MA : Polity Press, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references and index.Identifiers: LCCN 2018009277 (print) | LCCN 2018025558 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509530595 (Epub) | ISBN 9781509530564 | ISBN 9781509530571 (pb)Subjects: LCSH: Globalization--Political aspects. | Climatic changes--Political aspects. | Equality.Classification: LCC JZ1318 (ebook) | LCC JZ1318 .L38413 2018 (print) | DDC 320.58--dc23LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018009277
Cover illustration: Illustration originale créée par duofluo – design graphique pour l’exposition « Globes. Architecture et sciences explorent le monde » présentée à la Cité de l’architecture et du patrimoine du 10 novembre 2017 au 26 mars 2018, Paris.— Droite: Coupe sur le Géorama au carré Ledoyen du jardin des Champs-Élysées. Dessin paru dans « L’Illustration », 1846.— Gauche: Brevet d’invention et de perfectionnement de 10 ans déposé le 03.02.1825 par Charles-François-Paul Delanglard pour une machine appelée géorama, propre à l’étude de la géographie. Coupe sur le Géorama © Institut national de la propriété industrielle (INPI) / 1 BA1647_8
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
Acknowledgments
A first version of this text benefited from commentary, often quite detailed, offered by Alexandra Arènes (to whom I owe the figures), Pierre Charbonnier, Deborah Danowski, Gérard de Vries, Maylis Dupont, Jean-Michel Frodon, François Gemenne, Jacques Grinevald, Émilie Hache, Graham Harman, Chantal Latour, Anne Le Strat, Baptiste Morizot, Dominique Pestre, Nikolaj Schultz, Clara Soudan, and Isabelle Stengers. I have tried to take all their comments into account.
Certain sections of this text are reproduced in “L’Europe seule. Seule l’Europe,” in Benoît Hamon, Yannick Jadot, and Michel Wieworka, eds., La politique est à nous (Paris: Robert Laffont, 2017), pp. 269–76, and in “L’Europe refuge,” in Heinrich Geiselberger, ed., The Great Regression (Cambridge: Polity, 2017), pp. 78–87, as well as in journal articles: “Propositions pour recaler nos GPS politiques,” Libération, February 3, 2016, and “Comment ne pas se tromper sur Trump,” Le Monde, December 13, 2016.
Some of my research was carried out thanks to the project “Politiques de la terre à l’époque de l’anthropocène,” USPP-Sciences Po.
We’ve read enough books. Jared Kushner1
1.
This essay uses the occasion of Donald Trump’s election on November 8, 2016, to bring together three phenomena that commentators have already noted but without always seeing their connection. Thus, they fail to see the immense political energy that could be generated by drawing them together.
In the early 1990s, right after the victory over Communism symbolized by the fall of the Berlin Wall, just as some observers were claiming that history had run its course,2 another history was surreptitiously getting under way.
This history was initially marked by what is called “deregulation,” a term that has given the word “globalization” an increasingly pejorative cast. The same period witnessed, everywhere at once, the start of an increasingly vertiginous explosion of inequalities. These two phenomena coincided with a third that is less often stressed: the beginning of a systematic effort to deny the existence of climate change – “climate” in the broad sense of the relations between human beings and the material conditions of their lives.
This essay proposes to take these three phenomena as symptoms of a single historical situation: it is as though a significant segment of the ruling classes (known today rather too loosely as “the elites”) had concluded that the earth no longer had room enough for them and for everyone else.
Consequently, they decided that it was pointless to act as though history were going to continue to move toward a common horizon, toward a world in which all humans could prosper equally. From the 1980s on, the ruling classes stopped purporting to lead and began instead to shelter themselves from the world. We are experiencing all the consequences of this flight, of which Donald Trump is merely a symbol, one among others. The absence of a common world we can share is driving us crazy.
The hypothesis is that we can understand nothing about the politics of the last 50 years if we do not put the question of climate change and its denial front and center. Without the idea that we have entered into a New Climatic Regime,3 we cannot understand the explosion of inequalities, the scope of deregulation, the critique of globalization, or, most importantly, the panicky desire to return to the old protections of the nation-state – a desire that is identified, quite inaccurately, with the “rise of populism.”
To resist this loss of a common orientation, we shall have to come down to earth; we shall have to land somewhere. So, we shall have to learn how to get our bearings, how to orient ourselves. And to do this we need something like a map of the positions imposed by the new landscape within which not only the affects of public life but also its stakes are being redefined.
The reflections that follow, written with deliberate bluntness, explore the possibility that certain political affects might be channeled toward new objectives.
Since the author lacks any authority in political science, he can only offer his readers the opportunity to disprove this hypothesis and look for better ones.
2.
Donald Trump’s supporters should be thanked for having considerably clarified these questions by pressing him to announce, on June 1, 2017, America’s withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accord.
What the militancy of millions of ecologists, the warnings of thousands of scientists, the actions of hundreds of industrialists, even the efforts of Pope Francis,4 have not managed to do, Trump succeeded in doing: everyone now knows that the climate question is at the heart of all geopolitical issues and that it is directly tied to questions of injustice and inequality.5
By pulling out of the Paris Accord, Trump explicitly triggered, if not a world war, at least a war over what constitutes the theater of operations. “We Americans don’t belong to the same earth as you. Yours may be threatened; ours won’t be!”
The political consequences, and presumably the military consequences – or in any case the existential consequences – of what the first President Bush had predicted in 1992, in Rio, have thus been spelled out: “Our way of life is not negotiable!” There we have it. At least things are clear: no longer is there an ideal of a world common to what used to be called “the West.”
A first historic event: Brexit. The country that had invented the wide-open space of the market on the sea as well as on land; the country that had ceaselessly pushed the European Union to be nothing but a huge shop; this very country, facing the sudden arrival of thousands of refugees, decided on impulse to stop playing the game of globalization. In search of an empire that had long since vanished, it is trying to pry itself away from Europe (at the price of increasingly inextricable difficulties).
A second historic event: Trump’s election. The country that had violently imposed its own quite particular form of globalization on the world, the country that had defined itself by immigration while eliminating its first inhabitants, that very country has entrusted its fate to someone who promises to isolate it inside a fortress, to stop letting in refugees, to stop going to the aid of any cause that is not on its own soil, even as it continues to intervene everywhere in the world with its customary careless blundering.
The new affinity for borders among people who had advocated their systematic dismantling is already confirming the end of one concept of globalization. Two of the greatest countries of the old “free world” are saying to the others: “Our history will no longer have anything to do with yours; you can go to hell!”
A third historic event: the resumption, extension, and amplification of migrations. At the very moment when every country is experiencing the multiple threats of globalization, many are having to figure out how to welcome onto their soil millions of people – perhaps tens of millions!6 – who are driven by the cumulative action of wars, failed attempts at economic development, and climate change, to search for territory they and their children can inhabit.
Some will claim that this is a very old problem. But no: these three phenomena are simply different aspects of one and the same metamorphosis: the very notion of soil is changing. The soil of globalization’s dreams is beginning to slip away. This is the truly new aspect of what is discreetly called the “migratory crisis.”
If the anguish runs so deep, it is because each of us is beginning to feel the ground slip away beneath our feet. We are discovering, more or less obscurely, that we are all in migration toward territories yet to be rediscovered and reoccupied.
This is because of a fourth historic event, the most important and the least discussed. It took place on December 12, 2015, in Paris, just as agreement about the climate was being reached, at the end of the conference called COP21.
What counts as a measure of the event’s real impact is not what the delegates decided; it is not even whether or not the agreement is carried out (the climate change deniers will do their utmost to eviscerate it); no, the crucial fact is that, on that December day all the signatory countries, even as they were applauding the success of the improbable agreement, realized with alarm that, if they all went ahead according to the terms of their respective modernization plans, there would be no planet compatible with their hopes for development.7 They would need several planets; they have only one.
Now if there is no planet, no earth, no soil, no territory to house the Globe of globalization toward which all these countries claim to be headed, then there is no longer an assured “homeland,” as it were, for anyone.
Each of us thus faces the following question: Do we continue to nourish dreams of escaping, or do we start seeking a territory that we and our children can inhabit?
Either we deny the existence of the problem, or else we look for a place to land. From now on, this is what divides us all, much more than our positions on the right or the left side of the political spectrum.
And this is just as true for the old inhabitants of the wealthy countries as it is for their future inhabitants. The first, because they understand that there is no planet suited for globalization and that they will have to change their ways of life completely; the second, because they have had to leave their old devastated lands: they, too, have to change their ways of life completely and learn new ones.
In other words, the migratory crisis has been generalized.
To the migrants from outside who have to cross borders and leave their countries behind at the price of immense tragedies, we must from now on add the migrants from inside who, while remaining in place, are experiencing the drama of seeing themselves left behind by their own countries. What makes the migratory crisis so difficult to conceptualize is that it is the symptom, to more or less excruciating degrees, of an ordeal common to all: the ordeal of finding oneself deprived of land.
This ordeal accounts for the relative indifference to the urgency of the situation, and it explains why we are all climate quietists when we hope, while doing nothing about it, that “everything will be all right in the end.” It is hard not to wonder what effect the news we hear every day about the state of the planet has on our mental state. How can we not feel inwardly undone by the anxiety of not knowing how to respond?
It is this unease, at once personal and collective, that gives Trump’s election its full importance; without that, we would merely be reading the script of an exceedingly mediocre TV series.
The United States had two choices: by acknowledging the extent of climate change and the immensity of its responsibility, it could finally become realistic and lead the “free world” away from the abyss, or it could plunge further into denial. Those who conceal themselves behind Trump have decided to keep America floating in dreamland a few years longer, so as to postpone coming down to earth, while leading the rest of the world into the abyss – perhaps for good.
3.
The question of landing somewhere did not occur earlier to the peoples who had decided to “modernize” the planet. It arose – ever so painfully – only for those who for four centuries had been subjected to the impact of the “great discoveries,” of empires, modernization, development, and finally globalization. They knew perfectly well what it meant to find oneself deprived of land. And they even knew quite well what it meant to be chased out of one’s land. They had no choice but to become experts on the question of how to survive conquest, extermination, land grabs.
The great novelty for the modernizing peoples is that this territorial question is now addressed to them as well as to the others. It is less bloody, less brutal, less detectable, perhaps, but it is indeed a matter of an extremely violent attack destined to take away the territories of those who had up to now possessed land – most often because they had taken it away from others during wars of conquest.8
Here is something that adds an unexpected meaning to the term “postcolonial,” as though there were a family resemblance between two feelings of loss: “You have lost your territory? We have taken it from you? Well, you should know that we are in the process of losing it in turn …” And thus, bizarrely, in the absence of a sense of fraternity that would be indecent, something like a new bond is displacing the classic conflict: “How have you managed to resist and survive? It would be good if we too could learn this from you.”9 Following the questions comes a muffled, ironic response: “Welcome to the club!”
In other words, the sense of vertigo, almost of panic, that traverses all contemporary politics arises owing to the fact that the ground is giving way beneath everyone’s feet at once, as if we all felt attacked everywhere, in our habits and in our possessions.
Have you noticed that the emotions involved are not the same when you’re asked to defend nature – you yawn, you’re bored – as when you’re asked to defend your territory – now you’re wide awake, suddenly mobilized?
If nature has become territory, it makes little sense to talk about an “ecological crisis,” “environmental problems,” or a “biosphere” to be rediscovered, spared, or protected. The challenge is much more vital, more existential than that – and also much more comprehensible, because it is much more direct. When the rug is pulled out from under your feet, you understand at once that you are going to have to be concerned with the floor …
It is a question of attachment, of lifestyle, that’s being pulled out from under us, a question of land, of property giving way beneath us, and this uneasiness gnaws at everyone equally, the former colonizers and the formerly colonized alike. But actually, no, it upsets the former colonizers much more, as they are less accustomed to the situation than are the formerly colonized. What is certain is that all find themselves facing a universal lack of shareable space and inhabitable land.
