Down to Earth
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Bruno Latour Down to Earth Politics in the New Climatic Regime Translated by Catherine Porter polity First published in French as Otl atterir? Comment s'orienter en po/itique ©Editions La Decouverte, Paris, 20I7 Reprinted: 2018 (twice) This English edition copyright© Bruno Latour, 20I8 Polity Press 6 5 Bridge Street Cambridge CB2 rUR, UK Contents Po lity Press ror Station Landing Suite 300 Medfo rd , MA o2I55, USA Reprinted 2018 (three times) All rights reserved . Except fo r the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be re produced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any fo rm or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-3056-4 ISBN-I3: 978-I-5095-3057-I (pb) A catalogue record fo r this book is available from the British Library. Acknowledgments Vlll Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Latour, Bruno, author. Title: Down to earth : politics in the new climatic regime I Bruno Latour. I . A hypothesis as political fiction: the explosion Other titles: O?u atterrir? English Description: English edition. I Cambridge, UK ; Medford, MA : Polity Press, of inequalities and the denial of climate [2or8]l Includes bibli ographical references and index. Identi fi ers: LCCN 2or8oo9277 (print) I LCCN 20I8025558 (ebook) I ISBN change are one and the same phenomenon I 978 I509530595 (Epub) I ISBN 9781509530564 1 ISBN 978t509530571 (pb) Subjects: LCSH: Globali zation--Political aspects. I Climatic 2. Thanks to America's abandonment of the changes--Political aspects. I Equality. Classification: LCC j Zr3 r8 (ebook) I LCC j ZI3 r8 .L38 4r3 2or8 (print) I DOC climate agreement, we now know clearly 320. 58--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.govhor8oo9277 what war has been declared 3 Typeset in I r on 14 pt Sa bon by 3. The question of migrations now concerns Servis Filmserring Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire Printed and bound in the United States by LSC Communica tions everyone, offering a new and very wicked Cover illustrati on: Illustration originate creee par duoflu o - design graphique pour universality: finding oneself deprived of I' exposition " Globes. Architecture et sciences explorent le monde » presentee a Ia Cite de !'architecture et du patrimoine du ro novembre 2017 au 26 mars 2or8, Paris. ground 7 - Droite: Coupe sur le Georama au carre Ledoyen du jardin des Champs- Eiysees . Dessin paru dans • L'IIIustration », r 846. 4· One must take care not to confuse - Gauche: Brevet d'invention et de perfectionnement de IO ans depose le 03.02.1825 globalization-plus with globalization- par C h a rles -Fra n~o i s - Pa ul Delanglard pour une machine appelee georama, propre a l'etude de Ia geographie. Coupe sur le Georama © Insti tut national de Ia propnere I 2 indusrrie lle (INPI) I I BAr647_8 minus 5. How the globalist ruling classes have decided The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external we bsites referred to in this book are correct and active at the rime of going to press. to abandon all the burdens of solidarity, little However, the publisher has no responsibility fo r the websires and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate. by little I 7 Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been 6. The abandonment of a common world leads inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary cred its in any subsequent reprint or edition. to epistemological delirium 2I For fu rther information on Polity, visit our website: polirybooks.com v 7. The appearance of a third pole undoes the r8. The contradiction between the system of classical organization of modernity torn production and the system of engendering is between the first two poles, the Local and the heating up Global r9. A new attempt at describing dwelling places 8. The invention of "Trumpism" makes it -France's ledgers of complaints as a possible 90 possible to identify a fourth attractor, the model 20. personal defense of the Old Continent 99 Out-of-This-World 33 A 9· In identifying the attractor we can call ro8 Terrestrial, we identify a new geopolitical Figures IIO organization Notes ro. Why the successes of political ecology have never been commensurate with the stakes 45 I r. Why political ecology has had so much trouble breaking away from the Right/Left opposition 48 I 2. How to ensure the relay between social struggles and ecological struggles 56 r 3. The class struggle becomes a struggle among geo-social positions 58 r4. The detour by way of history makes it possible to understand how a certain notion of "nature" has immobilized political positions 64 I 5. We must succeed in breaking the spell of "nature" as it has been pinned down by the modern vision of the Left/Right opposition 70 r6. A world composed of objects does not have the same type of resistance as a world composed of agents 7 4 I7. The sciences of the Critical Zone do not have the same political functions as those of the other natural sciences 78 VI Vll r I. This essay uses the occasion of Donald Trump's election on November 8, 20I6, to bring together three phenom ena 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 I990s, 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/ another history was surreptitiously get ting under way. We've read enough books. This history was initially marked by what is called Jared Kushner1 "deregulation," a term that has given the word "glo balization" 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 I98os on, X I the ruling classes stopped purporting to lead and began 2. instead to shelter themselves from the world. We are experiencing all the consequences of this flight, of which Donald Trump's supporters should be thanked for Donald Trump is merely a symbol, one among others. having considerably clarified these questions by pressing The absence of a common world we can share is driving him to announce, on June r, 2017, America's with us crazy. drawal from the Paris Climate Accord. The hypothesis is that we can understand nothing What the militancy of millions of ecologists, the about the politics of the last 50 years if we do not put warnings of thousands of scientists, the actions of hun the question of climate change and its denial front and dreds of industrialiSts, even the efforts of Pope Francis,4 center. Without the idea that we have entered into a New have not managed to do, Trump succeeded in doing: Climatic Regime,3 we cannot understand the explosion everyone now knows that the_climate question is at the of inequalities, the scope of deregulation, the critique of heart of all geopolitical issues and that lt lS a1rectl~ e0 globalization, or, most importantly, the panicky desire to questions of iniusttce ana meguahtyL to return to the old protections of the nation-state - a By pulling out of the Paris Accord, Trump explicitly desire that is identified, quite inaccurately, with the "rise triggered, if not a world war, at least a war over what of populism." constitutes the theater of operations. "We Americans To resist this loss of a common orientation, we 'don't belong to the same earth as you. Yours may be shall have to come down to earth; we shall have to --t h reatene ; ours won ' t e.,, land somewhere. So, we shall have to learn how to The political consequences, and presumably the mili get our bearings, how to orient ourselves. And to do tary consequences - or in any case the existential this we need something like a map of the positions consequences- of what the first President Bush had pre imposed by the new landscape within which not only dicted in 1992, in Rio, have thus been spelled out: "Our t!:_e affects of public life but also its stakes are being_, way of life is not negotiable!" There we have it. At least redefined. things are clear: no longer is there an ideal of a world I he reflEtions that follow, written with deliberate common to what used to be called "the West." bluntness, explore the possibility that certain political A first historic event: Brexit. The country that had1 affects might be channeled toward new objectives.