Abstract
The past year has been a depressing one for the growing number of people who are deeply concerned about humanity’s lackadaisical response to climate change. In October 2018, one month before Bruno Latour’s Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime was published in English, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report stated that we have roughly 12 years to keep temperature increases at or below 1.5 degrees Celsius. Upon receiving Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime, I was hesitant to dive into Latour’s analysis of politics in an era of climate change, fearing it would only further remind me of our collective failure to make decisive changes to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
But this is not your typical sociological analysis of what’s wrong with the world. Latour’s book is organized into 20 eloquent and engaging chapters. Taken together, they offer a compelling and insightful diagnosis of the socio-ecological challenge we face and advance a unique approach to addressing the problems that confront humanity.
The diagnosis? Latour suggests that globalization, inequality, and climate change are crises that we often discuss without acknowledging their connections and common origins. These three phenomena are connected: growing awareness that the freedom and prosperity promised by advocates for globalization were distributed only to a small number of elites has led to a rejection of globalization. This rejection was partly spurred by the dizzying expansion of inequalities and the awareness that an “open,” globalized world is only on offer to a global elite (and certainly not to migrants seeking refuge in the United States and many European countries). These shifts are taking place as a handful of powerful actors denies the overwhelming evidence of global climate change, which is also driving inequality and migration. The common origin of these issues, Latour suggests, is that humanity has lost a shared horizon toward which we are oriented.
Three “attractors” compete to act as a shared horizon: the Global, the Local, and the Out-of-This-World. Inspired by the enthusiasm of modernists, we were once attracted to the notion of a Global future promising wealth, freedom, and leisure. But in the face of rampant inequality and ecological devastation tied to endless waves of deregulation, many are now attracted to a Local horizon that is nostalgic and anachronistic, promoting nationalism and xenophobia. Complicating the push-pull between the Global and the Local is the emergence of the Out-of-This-World. We see the Out-of-This-World attractor drawing in Brexiters and Trump supporters. This is a world where fortresses and limitless material resources can protect the livelihoods of the few while keeping out the “other.” Latour observes that these attractors are influenced by power dynamics. Elites once pushed for the Global and are now a driving force behind the Out-of-This-World attractor. They live beyond material constraints, have abandoned the pretense of calling for a common future, and actively try to misinform the public about climate change.
Latour invites us to consider an alternative attractor: the Terrestrial. The Terrestrial is an orientation where humans are distributed rather than central and where the driving principle is dependency rather than freedom. The term “terrestrials” captures all species that have a place on the planet. Actions that threaten terrestrials would be out of sync with the intrinsic “system of engendering” (p. 82) central to the Terrestrial orientation. Latour geographically refines the scope of the Terrestrial to the Critical Zone—a few vertical kilometres of habitable space located between our atmosphere and the bedrock of our planet. This refinement demands that we cease looking at the Earth from space and instead look at the Terrestrial from our vantage point in the Critical Zone. The Terrestrial is not equivalent to “nature,” since nature is just as intangible a concept as Global or Local and is one that bolsters the belief in human exceptionalism and separation from other terrestrials. Our only way out of our current predicament is to discover together what land we want to inhabit and with whom we want to share it.
But how do you reorient those who are attracted either to the Local or to the Global and draw them toward the Terrestrial? Can’t we simply educate those poor fools who have been led to doubt the overwhelming evidence of climate change by powerful climate skeptics? As Latour writes, “It is not a matter of learning how to repair cognitive deficiencies, but rather of how to live in the same world, share the same culture, face up to the same stakes, perceive a landscape that can be explored in concert” (p. 25). In other words, we need to demonstrate the appeal of having a patch of soil that we share with others and defend against destruction. For those who have been left behind the globalization front and are attracted to the Local, Latour suggests appealing to their sense of the “necessity of belonging to a land” (p. 53). To those oriented to the Global, there is a rather vague enticement—that of seeing how the Terrestrial itself offers a world with no borders and a multitude of identities.
Latour concludes his book by addressing what he calls, “the Achilles’ heel of any text that purports to channel political affects toward new stakes” (p. 90)—what is to be done about it all? His response is to propose a series of steps to orient humanity toward the Terrestrial and then to offer an autobiographical account of where he wishes to land and with whom he wishes to share the land. This exercise culminates in a call to arms for Europe to lead a move to the Terrestrial.
In a moment where we are faced with a pronounced lack of movement on the part of the world’s powers to act decisively to redress climate change and inequality, Latour’s book provides an antidote to the despair that many of us experience. Can we reorient humanity toward the Terrestrial? In contrast to the hollow promises of attaining prosperity through globalization and the rancorous xenophobia and sexism of calls to “Make America Great Again,” there is a decided appeal in the prospect of coming down to Earth.