Victor M. Toledo
H
one of them ceased to exist the greatest French philosophers of modern times.
Bruno Latour (1947-2022) is gone and all the batteries of his impressive thought, all his ability to analyze contemporary reality like a highly skilled surgeon, has ended up focusing on political ecology, a trend that other of his most renowned colleagues have embraced like André Gorz, Michel Onfray and Michael Löwy (ecosocialism). As we have reiterated, the first step to situate oneself in the acute and subversive angle of political ecology is to adopt a species look
and this is just what Latour has done in his latest book, where to land , barely 165 pages long, but written as a small treatise to courageously face today’s reality, without any anesthesia (https://bit.ly/3D2aBnV).
In this book, Latour has deciphered the collapse of modernity’s worldview, the result of having wronged humanity more than ever. Mother Nature
. The climatic emergency has come to disrupt the future horizon promised by modern civilizers; the modernization that they announced is no longer possible. His main metaphor today humanity is flying in an airplane whose destination has disappeared and it is also impossible to return to the airport of departure; therefore, it is urgent to find where to land before the fuel runs out
not only causes deep anguish in the reader, but according to Latour it is today the main human existential concern.
“All political positions are marked by the anguish that nature causes us… Before, the anguish came from the fact that we were too small and nature was immense. Now we are the same size, we influence how the earth behaves. And it is disorienting, for example, for young people who demonstrate [contra el cambio climático]. From the extreme left to the extreme right, all political positions are marked by this anguish… So some go to Mars, others return to the national planet, which is also abstract, and in the middle we are the unhappy ones who think that, in a time or another, we will have to land: reconcile the economy, the law, the identity with the real world on which we depend”
For Latour, the emergence of the climate emergency has radically changed politics because what is at stake is the survival of the species. “The hypothesis is that the political positions assumed for 50 years are incomprehensible to us if the climate issue and its denial are not given a central place. Without the idea that we have entered a ‘new climate regime’, one cannot understand the explosion of inequalities, the scope of deregulation or the criticism of globalization, nor, above all, the fear that gives rise to the desire to to return to the old protections of the national State –what has been very unjustifiably called the ‘rise of populism’–.
“To resist this loss of common orientation it will be necessary to ‘land’ somewhere. Hence the importance of knowing how to orient oneself. And, consequently, to draw something like a map of the positions imposed by this new landscape”. And here Latour offers a scheme where the departure and arrival airports are local (or traditional) and global (or modern), which becomes complicated and complex when possible alternatives appear. At the same time, Latour offers a first signal to land: he introduces the notion of territory, the floor that sustains us: “If nature has become territory, it no longer makes sense to speak of ‘ecological crisis’, of ‘environmental problems ‘, of ‘biosphere’ to recover, to repair, to protect. It is about something much more vital, existential and also much more understandable because it is much more direct… What they are uprooting from us has to do with roots, ways of life, the soil and the properties that we see collapsing. And this restlessness mortifies everyone equally: the former colonizers and the former colonized”.
Where to land? Latour’s work offers no answer, partly because no one has it and partly because it was not intended to be. And we must accept that although there are already numerous and ascending eco-social movements both in the south and in the north (Via Campesina, Territories of Life, Kurdistan, political agroecology, solidarity economy cooperatives, cco-villages, Local Futures, Extinction Rebellion), the question is still up in the air. Because human insanity continues to pave the way to collapse, the landing problem remains unsolved. Latour’s great contribution is to have made it visible, to have put it in the sight of everyone.
