Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime by Bruno Latour (review)

Bruno Latour, Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime. Cambridge: Polity, 2018. 140 pp.

Famous for his challenging methodological and epistemological innovations and his many creative efforts to rewrite, question, and decenter standard, simplistic narratives of modernity, Bruno Latour has for years now focused his attention on the implications of the Anthropocene shift and the climate crisis. Adopting James Lovelock's Gaia metaphor, drawing on his own previous critiques of "the modern constitution," and engaging with anthropologists who study indigenous cosmologies (some of whom are associated with "the ontological turn"), he has over the last decade produced a series of hybrid texts—not solely social theory, philosophy of knowledge, political pamphleteering, or empirical work, but with elements of all. His most recent contribution is a concise book with a definite emphasis on the political, written with a sense of urgency, frustration, and a glimmer of hope. This, in other words, is not a book to be read as a social science treatise, but as an intervention into the ongoing intellectual debate about the future of politics and the planet. It is nevertheless pertinent, in the context of massive environmental destruction and global climate change, to ask whether there are insights in this book that could serve as useful tools or sources of inspiration for anthropologists.

At the outset, Latour describes three converging and interrelated processes that have led to the current situation: massive deregulation, increased inequalities, and a perversion of globalization into a mere marketplace. Since climate change and environmental destruction are recognized as real by the rich and powerful (with a few glaring exceptions), they flee from their social responsibilities, creating secluded worlds severed from a broader social context. In this situation, Latour argues, it is necessary to posit alternatives and to act politically.

Distinguishing between four possible positions within the framework of the modernization paradigm, Latour talks of "globalization plus" (which enhances diversity) and the currently dominant game in town, which is "globalization minus" (entailing flattening and homogenization), the "local plus" (which builds on solidarity with other, differently constituted local worlds) and the "local minus" (withdrawal, walls, and antagonistic identity politics). These useful distinctions enable differentiating between cosmopolitanism and corporate greed, as well as distinguishing protection against the onslaught of predatory capitalism from xenophobic resentment. Latour argues that these positions are not sufficient to comprehend and act upon the current planetary predicament, based as they are on an obsolete modernization project and antiquated notions of left and right in politics.

Using simple diagrams to illustrate the argument, Latour adds an intersecting dimension, which transcends the modern/not-yet-modern and the globalist/localist binaries by positing an "out-of-this-world" attractor (which denies the science of climate change or pretends to do so) and one that he calls the Terrestrial. The latter can be said to represent a universality founded in a shared recognition of the gravity and ubiquity of climate change and the recognition that solutions, or at least effective courses of action, need to be grounded in an ecological perspective which transcends anthropocentrism and narratives of modernization.

This may initially sound familiar to anyone who has followed debates about climate change and politics. However, Latour posits the Terrestrial not just as an ideal, but as a "new political actor" (40, italics in original). The current upheavals, he adds, are "mobilizing the earth system itself" (43). In other words, he applies his own concept of agency originating in actor-network theory (ANT) to climate change by regarding the "earth system" as an actor to whom people must pay deference and relate in their activities.

Regarded as a political identity, the Terrestrial orientation must not be conflated with "what the Local has added to it: ethnic homogeneity, a focus on patrimony, historicism, nostalgia, inauthentic authenticity" (53). At the same time, climate change has shown that there is no longer "an earth corresponding to the horizon of the Global" (60).

Latour is vague as to the actual...