Down to Earth - Politics in the New Climatic Regime

Bruno Latour

Polity Press

2018

140 páginas

4h 40m

ISBN-10: B07L8QV7PW

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.

Resenhas (1)

5 (Perfeito)

A great book about the contemporary politics of the world

Bruno Latour is a great author, philosopher, anthropologist, and sociologist. In this book, for me that have read some of the others books of Latour, I think that in this he summarize him conception of the non humans like actors. But, in this time he expand it to politics. The ?Terrestrial? is now one new actor: new because the events that we are seeing doesn?t happened before (the Brexit, the migrations, etc), but this remember the ancient concept of ?nature?, as a process. The expression of Gaia, by James Lovelock, is summarized in this book, be ause this new vector (or actor), the Terrestiral, simbolize the actions that land makes that comes to politics. The book is more than I could express in this little space, but it certain a very magnificent point of view from our new situation: we need to land in somewhere, without the binary ?Global? or ?Local?, but, instead, knowing that we are in one land and the other actors, the non humans, is too in politics. Please, reed this book!