Metascience (2019) 28:429–434

https://doi.org/10.1007/s11016-019-00432-y

REVIEW ESSAY

Latour on politics, modernity, and climate change

Bruno Latour: Down to earth: Politics in the new climatic regime.
Translated by Catherine Porter. Cambridge: Polity, 2018, x + 128 pp.,
$12.99 PB

Michael Lynch1

Published online: 21 June 2019

© Springer Nature B.V. 2019

This short book or long pamphlet is an urgent call to action in the face of global cli-
mate change. The book’s promise is to present a conceptual map for a novel “third
way” to address the politico-ecological crisis culminating in global climate change—
not the tony “third way” of Blair and Giddens, but one designed to facilitate a shift
away from a modern project foundering in oligarchy, nationalism, and anthropoc-
racy toward a future in which human activity is rooted in non-human earthly ter-
ritory unmarked by artificial borders reinforced by walls. Latour does not present
arguments and evidence to support the reality of anthropogenic climate change or to
debunk climate skepticism. There are plenty of other authoritative sources that do,
and Latour takes as given that climate change is happening and will become ever
more catastrophic unless radical changes are made. Indeed, he argues that the elites,
who benefit, at least in the short term, from the way modernity has been fueled and
driven, already acknowledge that the promised expansion of modernity to lift the
yet-to-be-developed world from backwardness and poverty is now untenable.
Down to Earth presents a history of the troika of climate denial, rising inequal-
ity, and deregulation dating back to approximately 1980 or a bit earlier. Some would
call this the era of neo-liberalism, though Latour does not trade in that idiom. As
he describes it, the fossil-fueled promise of that era was to globally disseminate the
consumer cultures of North America and Western Europe to the rest of the world
(not to speak of the sizeable non-wealthy sectors of the wealthy nations). But, as the
thin organic crust of the planet degraded, the thin upper crust of the human popula-
tion began to abandon the promise of global prosperity and to cordon itself off with
walls, sequester its wealth in tax havens, and retire to exclusive flats constructed
in abandoned missile silos (Osnos 2017)—enclosures for protecting fragments of
human prosperity, much in the way the cages in a zoo house selected remnants of
non-human biodiversity.

* Michael Lynch
mel27@cornell.edu
1
Department of Science and Technology Studies, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA

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430 Metascience (2019) 28:429–434

The book was written in 2017, and according to Latour he was inspired, if that
is the right word, to write it by Donald Trump’s election as President of the USA.
Although originally published in French, the book is largely addressed to an Ameri-
can readership. Already, it seems to have been written long ago, as despair about
political inaction and hostility in the face of climate change has only deepened under
the Trump regime and the trolls he appointed to head federal agencies charged with
maintaining public lands, protecting endangered species, assuring health and safety,
and distributing meager government aid to impoverished individuals and nations.
The past year or so has also seen the ascendency and retrenchment in Brazil, India,
Turkey, Hungary, Australia and several other important nations of leaders, parties,
and movements with overt nationalist and climate-denialist agendas. All this despite
rising measures in atmospheric carbon-dioxide, record-setting temperatures, and
manifestations of the predicted furies of severe storms, floods, and wildfires. Latour
also wrote his book prior to populist movements closer to home, such as the Mou-
vement des gilets jaunes. This movement mobilized against a series of government
actions, one of which was a tax on gasoline initiated in the interest of reducing car-
bon emissions. He also completed the book before a glimmer of hope arrived with
the election of a Democratic majority in the US House of Representatives in 2018,
and the proposals by the left-wing of that party for a “Green New Deal,” a pack-
age of proposals with no immediate hope of becoming legislation. In some respects,
the Green New Deal is congruent with the linkage Latour draws between denials of
anthropogenic climate change, rising income/wealth inequality, migration crises and
pseudocrises, and the relentless deregulation in recent decades.

Progress is our most important problem

The book takes aim at a modernist conception of progress encapsulated by the Gen-
eral Electric slogan of decades ago, “progress is our most important product.” For
Latour, the promise made by ExxonMobil, among other energy companies, to dis-
seminate such progress worldwide, through expanded distribution of its most impor-
tant product, is the source of a problem that confronts any effort to address climate
change. Perhaps the book’s most valuable contribution to current debates is to query
the connection between “progressive” politics and the global corporate conception
of modernization. Latour recognizes that “progressives” on the left of the political
spectrum do not necessarily align with the modernist vision of a “flat world” that is
becoming gradually integrated through communicative technology and lifted toward
a prosperous modernity. Nevertheless, he places progressives on a “modernization
front” along a “vector” that is drawn toward a global “attractor” and away from its
“local” opposite, and then argues that progress has stalled as climate change ulti-
mately blocks the force of the attractor, while leaving no hope or desire for a return
to “local” concerns and communities. Rather than despairing in the face of this lost
hope, Latour treats it as an opportunity to abandon the axis of modernity and make a
ninety-degree turn toward a radically different attractor.

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Earthy abstractions

Much of the material in Down to Earth is not very “down to earth,” nor is “earth”
a reference to the planet depicted famously on the cover of the first edition of the
Whole Earth Catalog in 1967. Instead, the word is a reference to the earthy, and
watery, “skin” of the planet that is inhabited and constituted by countless life-
forms, a growing number of which are under threat by the encarbonization of the
planet’s atmosphere and acidification of its waters. It has become publicly sensi-
ble to say that the singular life of this earth is under threat.
The main argument in the book makes use of an analytical device from for-
mal semiotics, variants of which Latour and his colleague Michel Callon had
used for decades. The device involves a series of moves. First, it sets up a con-
ceptual opposition inscribed on a binary axis; second, it treats that opposition
as a conventional, largely unquestioned, assumption or presumption; and, third,
it crosses that axis with another axis that introduces a distinct and independent
binary. Perhaps the best-known use of this device in his previous writings was
the double axis of symmetry. The first axis of symmetry was a proposal made
by Bloor (1976) to give the same general form of social explanation for true, or
successful, and false, or unsuccessful, “beliefs.” Stated negatively, symmetry
refuses to reserve social explanations only for myths, superstitions, political ide-
ologies, religious doctrines, and other beliefs that vary culturally and lack objec-
tive scientific foundation. Stated positively, it is part of a proposal to expand the
sociology of knowledge to explain even the most robust instances of scientific
and mathematical knowledge. The sociology of scientific knowledge that took its
point of departure from the symmetry principle was widely criticized for bypass-
ing the importance of objective nature, factual evidence, and rational argument,
and for reducing knowledge to belief. Latour and Callon also criticized the one-
sided emphasis on social explanation, but unlike critics who reverted to the tried-
and-true idioms of a materialistic or naturalistic philosophy, they introduced a
second axis of symmetry that treated nature and society symmetrically, so that
both human and non-human entities were treated equivalently as agencies (Callon
and Latour 1992, 353). In contrast with materialism, their theory treated agency
rather than inert matter as the fungible currency linking and integrating heteroge-
neous networks.
In the present case, Latour’s first axis encompasses a political binary of left,
progressive-global, and right, conservative-local, political orientations. The sec-
ond axis, instigated by the specter of global climate change brought about by fos-
sil-fueled “progress” toward global modernity, consists of the polar attractions of
other-worldly fantasy epitomized by Trump, Brexit, and other phony nationalist
retrenchments at one end, and of “territory” on the other. This conception of terri-
tory is akin to the concept of terroir, minus the intellectual property rights or brand-
ing, rather than of national territory and the state-sponsored terror that maintains it.
Latour’s notion of territory has a family resemblance with more familiar concep-
tions of ecology and biodiversity, though in a companion volume to this one Latour
(2017) favors the onto-theological imagery of James Lovelock’s Gaia.

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Left, right, and future

There is reason to believe that concerns about climate change need not be aligned
with the political left, while right-wing parties and their corporate sponsors deny and
ignore the problem. Historical support can be found in the fact that such concerns
were raised decades ago by research conducted by Exxon among other public and
private organizations, and for a short time the late 1970s efforts to initiate changes in
energy policy to stave off global warming attracted bipartisan political support (Rich
2018). However, despite the fact that European Green parties remain partially inde-
pendent of the left–right political spectrum, the hardening of the left–right division
in the USA has reinforced the association of climate change with the left, and par-
ticularly the left-wing of the Democratic Party. Aside from the retrenchment against
climate policy in the Republican Party, the political calculations of the Democratic
National Committee (DNC) continue to place climate change policy at a relatively
low level of priority, no doubt reflecting wariness about the priorities of the voting
public and a small subset of that public that makes major contributions to the party
coffers. The DNC seems to be sticking to the Clintonite slogan, “it’s the economy,
stupid,” ignoring what may be a more apt slogan for the twenty-first century, “it’s
the stupidity, stupid.” The current problem is not that concern about climate change
remains aligned with “the extreme left,” but that it is not deemed a salient enough
“mainstream” concern in current political calculations. Would an effort to wrest
such concern from alignment along a linear left–right spectrum raise its salience?
Perhaps, but how that could be done remains unclear.
Sadly, reading the book left me with little hope that its conceptual innova-
tions will make much difference as the trends it confronts continue to unfold. One
problem, which is characteristic of much of the academic writing that confronts,
and even celebrates, “our” present condition, is that the book addresses a second-
person plural, an “us” or “we,” that is both indefinitely and narrowly cast. As a
reader, I understand that “we” already have a decisive conviction on the ques-
tion of anthropogenic climate change, and that “we” see climate change as having
overwhelming salience in the short- as well as long-term future. It goes without
saying that “we” are highly educated politically savvy global citizens. The oth-
ers—the vast numbers of indifferent fossil-fuel consumers and the small but pow-
erful number of active deniers—are simply blocking the way to a transformation
that “we” find imperative, and that “they” should as well. Latour devotes little
attention to such denial, opposition, and indifference, and I would argue that he
underplays the resilience of the deniers and their denials. Part of that resilience
arises from a sliding scale of arguments and back-up positions used serially or in
an ad hoc way to reinforce commitment to the carbon economy:

(1) Denial that the climate is systematically changing.

(2) Acceptance of warming trends paired with denial that fossil fuel consumption
has anything to do with those trends.
(3) Acceptance of climate change, and of the argument that human fossil fuel con-
sumption has something to do with it, paired with denial that it can be reversed

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by national and/or international policy. Associated with this argument is the idea
that necessary policy changes would be more devastating than the problems they
would remedy, and that climate change would have contingent benefits as well,
such as opening up the Arctic Ocean for transport and fossil fuel exploration.
Imagine the cost–benefit analysis: beach hotels on Baffin Island to compensate
for the loss of submerged tropical Islands.

The third set of arguments encourages resigned complacency, which is more

daunting than the more direct forms of denial. Even many of “us” who acknowl-
edge being convinced of a looming catastrophe appear ready to postpone the day
of reckoning in the face of more immediate concerns. Some of “us” may hope that
a technological fix will emerge to take care of the problem before it becomes cata-
strophic, or short of such a fix, that the prophesized catastrophe will turn out to be
a mere inconvenience for those of “us” who can afford to move to higher ground
and erect walls to restrain the rising seas and restrict mass immigration. “We” can
even invoke the mantra of science and technology studies—that scientific truth is
uncertain and contingent—and imagine that an uncertain and contingent future will,
for better or worse, provide us with an unforeseen climax in a future narrative of the
twenty-first century. Perhaps I am overly pessimistic, but current trends convince me
that no conceptual innovation, however clever, will rein in the juggernaut of fossil
fuel production and consumption. Instead, it will take a series of catastrophes much
worse than what we have seen in recent years to spur even half-assed national and
international efforts to mitigate the worst of what is in store for those of “us” who
are still on earth several decades from now.

Conclusion

Latour concludes the book with a desperate turn to Europe as the hope for the future.
Again, the book was written more than a year ago, and in the meantime reverse
salients have emerged along the front as networks of green power try to advance
through Europe (Hughes 1983). Nevertheless, to paraphrase a typical line from
phone calls to suicide-prevention centers: “we” have nowhere else to turn (Sacks
1967)—where else besides old Europe can we find an example, or various exam-
ples, of how to create or restore a territory in which humans can continue to live on
earth alongside other beings? Costa Rica, perhaps, or maybe New Zealand? Mean-
while, the elephants in the room—China, the USA, Russia, India—are exhaling their
industrial vapors at a record pace.

References
Bloor, David. 1976. Knowledge and social imagery. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Callon, Michel, and Bruno Latour. 1992. Don’t throw the baby out with the Bath school! A reply to Col-
lins and Yearley. In Science as practice and culture, ed. A. Pickering, 343–368. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press.

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Hughes, Thomas P. 1983. Networks of power: Electrification in western society, 1880–1930. Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press.
Latour, Bruno. 2017. Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime, trans. Catherine Porter.
Cambridge: Polity.
Osnos, Evan. 2017. Survival of the richest. The New Yorker 92 (47): 36–45.
Rich, Nathaniel. 2018. Losing earth: The decade we almost stopped climate change. A tragedy in two
acts. The New York Times Magazine (August 5).
Sacks, Harvey. 1967. The search for help. No one to turn to. In Essays in self destruction, ed. E.S. Schnei-
dman, 203–223. Science House: New York, NY.

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