Down to Earth

Politics in the New Climatic Regime

Bruno Latour

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781509530595
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filosofía
• Subtopic: Filosofía política

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.

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 pric...