Latour's swan songs: Grappling with the ecological crisis By Bruno Latour and Nikolaj Schulz. On the emergence of an ecological class: A memo. Translated by Julie Rose, London: Polity Press. 2022. pp. 92. US$12.99 (pbk). ISBN 9781509555062By Bruno Latour. How to inhabit the earth: Interviews with Nicolas Truong. Translated by Julie Rose, London: Polity Press. 2024. pp. 103. US$16.95 (pbk). ISBN 9781505559473

Abstract

Bruno Latour, a prolific philosopher, anthropologist, sociologist, and science and technology studies scholar, entered the debate on the global ecological crisis with the publication of The Politics of Nature (Harvard University Press, 2004). He became a fellow at the ecomodernist Breakthrough Institute, penning a frequently cited 2011 article in its journal calling for humanity to love its technological monsters like we love our children instead of rejecting them. He called for management of the environment rather than seeking to keep it in a pristine state. In his Distinguished Lecture at the American Anthropological Association annual meeting in December 2014, he asserted that geologists had presented anthropologists with a gift by positioning the anthropos centre stage in the guise of the Anthropocene as the main geological force, thus superseding the Holocene. Latour went on to publish Facing Gaia (Polity, 2017) and Down to Earth (Polity, 2018), followed by On the Emergence of an Ecological Class (2022) (co-authored with Nikolaj Schultz), and How to Inhabit the Earth (2024), which is based on interviews that he had with Nicolas Truong. These last two books before his death in October 2022 are the subjects of my review essay.

On the Emergence of an Ecological Class consists of 10 chapters; there is also a postface in the English edition. Latour and Schultz resist reliance on the notion of class struggle in seeking to delineate the role of a global ecological class, which they do not define as such. Instead, they seek to outline the tasks that the ecological class needs to undertake, noting that the ‘ecological class is still afraid of not knowing how to position itself in its relationship to the struggles of the past two centuries’ (p. 8), because it fears that it is not sufficiently left-wing. In seeking to provide guidance on which direction the ecological class should pursue, they delineate a broad and diffuse litany of recommendations. These include: (1) defining the direction of its own history (p. 10); defining itself in ‘relation to the material conditions of its existence’ (p. 11); furnishing ‘equipment to change direction’ (p. 19) in light of the grim reality that the Anthropocene and Great Acceleration that entailed the ‘rapid acceleration of systems of production destabilised Earth systems and climate systems’ (p. 13); adding to the ‘relations of production engendering practices that have always defined the exterior of human activity’ (p. 23); persuading sectors of old classes, including the working class, to ‘form alliances with it in a bid to find other ways of promoting their interests’ (p. 28); and critically examining the role of the state in supporting an ‘international order based on development and globalisation’ (p. 69).

Contrasting it with a declining union movement, Latour and Schultz maintain that the ecological class is presently experiencing a greater number of assassinations around the world for its subversive efforts in challenging global production processes. They maintain that the ecological class constitutes a broad church which includes young people who have revolted because they feel betrayed, and even Christians who ‘now sense in ecology a call that could reset their dogmas’ (p. 51), including on the part of Pope Francis. Latour and Schultz argue that such battles are ‘now all about the occupation, nature, usage and maintenance of territories and subsistence conditions’ (p. 57). They argue that the ecological class needs to renew the humanities by relying on media and many other formats to conceptualise a vision for a new and revitalised Earth. Conversely, new Earth sciences, including the biological sciences, need to be ‘part and parcel of exploring the conditions of the planet's behaviour’ (p. 59).

However, Latour and Schultz adopt an explicitly Eurocentric stance in their assertion that a united Europe—no longer so united given the UK's departure from the European Union—despite its flaws, constitutes an ‘exemplar of a truly life-size experiment in which the redistribution of the inside and outside of states prime the ecological class for its future pivotal as a class capable of dragging other classes alongside it’ (p. 73). However, Europe, along with other sectors of the Global North, continues to be a heartland of the capitalist world system which relies on scarce resources and cheap labour from the Global South and China, the largest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions. The latter serves not only as the factory of the world but the primary source of rare metals necessary for a global program of ecological modernisation.

Latour and Schultz recognise that the ecological class faces a daunting task in the face of rising authoritarianism around much of the world, including in Europe. The ecological class is reportedly serving as a harbinger of a ‘cosmological shift’ (p. 77) that is presently under way. They assert that the development of a cosmological shift needs to rely on even more fundamental research, much of which will need to occur within universities. What Latour and Schultz fail to acknowledge is that universities around the world, particularly in the Global North, are being increasingly corporatised, responding to the dictates of capital rather than critical thinking. Thus, it is essential that the ecological class helps to revolutionise universities so that they become more egalitarian, democratic, and environmentally sustainable institutions than they were in the past and presently are.

In the postface to the English edition of their Memo, Latour and Schultz, while admitting that the ‘idea of the ecological class seems remote’ (p. 85) at the present time, argue that the COVID-19 pandemic ‘demonstrated how quickly whole nations could react to a new threat’ (p. 86). Conversely, they downplay that despite noble efforts to combat COVID-19, its variants continue to linger, generally circulating around the world due to air travel, the elephant in the sky when it comes to greenhouse gas emissions which the powers that be have resisted to reduce in mitigating climate change. Despite the many flights to 28 UN Congress of the Parties (COPs) conferences, many of them in corporate private jets, in the name of curtailing emissions, the emissions continue to rise despite much fanfare surrounding the goals of the 2015 Paris Agreement to keep global warming below 2°, preferably 1.5°.

Latour and Shultz go on to praise Europe for responding to the Russian attack on Ukraine by protecting European sovereignty in shifting away ‘from carbon-based fuel that activists had long been clamouring for without budging European states from out of their complacency’ (87). While indeed Putin's war in Ukraine is a tragedy on many counts, what they do not acknowledge is the role that the expansion of NATO played in provoking Putin to instigate a war with no end in sight. The ecological class needs to emphasise demilitarisation and denuclearisation and call attention to the fact that militarism is one of the overlooked sources of emissions, including on the part of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

While indeed the ecological class is still in its ascendancy, John Bellamy Foster in Capitalism in the Anthropocene (Monthly Review Press, 2022) refers to the formation of an ‘emerging environmental proletariat’ in response to unbridled capitalist globalisation and accumulation. He argues that the prospect of a new environmental proletariat is foreshadowed by various movements and struggles throughout the world, such as the Landless Workers' Movement (MST) in Brazil; the international peasants alliance La Viva Campesina; Venezuela's nascent, albeit besieged, communal state; Cuba's revolutionary ecology and epidemiology; the natural resource nationalist, anti-extractive, and post-colonial movements in Africa; student-led climate strikes; campaigns for a just transition and environmental justice; Black Lives Matter struggles; and the resurgence of global Indigenous environmental campaigns. Perhaps what is needed is a conflation of an emerging ecological class and an environmental proletariat to move beyond Atlantic and Eurocentric efforts to address the ecological and climate crises.

In his introduction to his interviews with Latour which constitute the bulk of How to Inhabit the Earth, Trunog refers to his interlocutor as having been an iconoclastic and frequently misunderstood figure who inspired a ‘new generation of intellectuals, artists, and activists to do something about the ecological disaster’ (p. 3). He observes that Latour thought in groups and reflected in teams in settings such as Sciences Po and Terra Forma, a project designed to connect the ‘issue of the landscape to territory policy’ (p. 7). Truong contends that Latour came to ecology indirectly, not by being a naturalist or being captivated by wild spaces per se, but through his interactions with scholars interested in ecological issues, such as some of his students at Sciences Po who co-piloted the Citizens' Council for the Climate.

In the interview on ‘changing worlds’, Latour asserts that humanity is emerging from a ‘world of adaptable sciences, a world of the wealth and comfort provided by the system of production’ (p. 22) into one where humans as living beings are surrounded by other living beings, such as viruses, as was the case during the pandemic, the effects of which are still playing themselves out around the globe. What he fails to recognise is that COVID-19 most probably originated at a local hub, specifically Wuhan, within the distribution network of wild foods. It then disseminated through individuals travelling via planes, trains, and ships to various regions in China and worldwide. Other factors contributing to the spread of the virus are social inequality and urbanisation in which one finds large concentrations of poor people, particularly in the Global South, living in cramped quarters.

In the interview on ‘the end of modernity’, Latour observes that while the world system had been accelerating in the wake of World War II, after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, it went in a ‘moment of maximum acceleration, maximum extractivism, and maximum denial’ (p. 29), one that continues and is highlighted by the increasing concentration of wealth, the grim reality that 2023 was the hottest recorded year globally, and wars in Ukraine and Gaza. Latour maintains that 1989 marks the ‘beginning of all the big conferences in Tokyo, Rio, on ecology’ (p. 29). However, it is important to add that while the UN has convened 28 COPs climate change conferences, greenhouse gas emissions and global temperatures continue to rise.

In the interview on ‘Gaia puts us on notice’, Latour observes that the Gaia concept initially formulated by James Lovelock and Lyn Margulis allows us to understand that the ‘environment is made by living things and not, as we believed before, that living beings occupy and environment they adapt to’ (p. 39). He points with approval to the ‘notion of the Anthropocene which allows our friends who are working on it to count the influence of industrialized humans on the rest of the planet’ (p. 38). However, a growing number of critical scholars argue that the Anthropocene concept does not adequately account for gross differential responsibility for the ecological crisis, which might be better described as a socioecological crisis, prompting them to propose the concept of the Capitalocene.

In the interview on ‘where do we land?’, Latour seeks to redefine territory as not a site of ‘geographical coordinates’ (p. 41), but as one upon what humans depend on for their livelihood. In his earlier book Down to Earth, Latour (Polity, 2018) adopts a Eurocentric take on territory which he does not highlight in the interview in question. He admits that Europe is wealthy in part because it colonised and exploited other regions of the world and caused massive ecological damage. Latour argues that Europe needs to come down to Earth by deglobalising and redefining national sovereignties, presumably within the contours of the European Union. He appears to be calling for a form of European autarky, one in which Europe distances itself from the United States. However, Latour overlooks that European multinational corporations are major players within the parameters of the capitalist world system and engage in trade with other countries, not only the United States but also China, a trend likely to expand further through China's Belt and Road Initiative. Nevertheless, in this interview he indirectly suggests that any ambition of European autarky is a chimera in that the ‘Covid crisis showed that this pretty small, spluttering virus managed to take over the whole globe in just three weeks’ (p. 46).

The interview on the ‘new ecological class’ essentially summarises observations that Latour made in On the Emergence of the Ecological Class, and thus does not need to be restated here. In the interview on ‘inventing collective apparatuses’, he discusses some of the interdisciplinary exhibitions and projects, such as ‘Iconoclash’ at the Karlsruhe Centre for Art and Media in 2002 and the School of the Arts of Politics at Sciences Po, in which he partook. He maintains that universities need to move beyond the Humboldtian concept of the university as a site for fundamental research and engage with a ‘public, who find themselves in a disarray at least equal to that of the researchers’ (p. 60). However, Latour neglects to address the profound impact of the corporatisation of universities globally, especially in English-speaking nations, on their limited engagement with the public. Rather than critically confronting the socioecological crisis, they often function primarily as training centres focused on sustaining industrial and commercial activities, hindering their ability to do so.

In the interview on ‘the truth of the religious’, Latour asserts that ‘for theologians, the ecology movement has indubitably had the effect of reopening a space and an obligation to engage in interpretation’ (p. 65). He laments that many believers, including priests and cardinals, have resisted Pope Francis's reference to the planet as ‘our sister, Mother Earth’ (p. 66). He maintains that humanity became civilised with modernity, although poorly, but we can now ‘re-civilize ourselves through the issue of ecology’ (p. 67). However, despite the best of intentions, the institution that Francis oversees is an economic powerhouse that is part and parcel of global capitalism as the overall driver of the socioecological crisis.

In the ‘science in action’ interview, Latour, known for highlighting the social construction of science in laboratory and field settings, claims that climate scientists, especially those involved in the IPCC process, initially anticipated that climate action would ensue following their discoveries in the early 1980s regarding the impact of CO₂ on temperature rise. However, they later realised that their findings had either been disregarded or minimised. This should not be surprising given that the IPCC is embedded in a structure that is committed to continual economic growth on a global scale and very few climate scientists, apart from a few exceptions such as Kevin Anderson, have had the temerity to challenge the basic premises of the growth paradigm which the United Nations by and large accepts, illustrated within its Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Ironically, airplanes have been a lynchpin for global capitalism by transporting people and cargo around the planet, spewing emissions in the process as well as being the main disseminator of the COVID-19 virus.

In the interview on ‘the circle of politics’, Latour asserts that ‘digital and online social networks’ (p. 88) have been ‘destroying or shredding’ (p. 88) other modes of communication, in the process playing a strong role in shaping political discourse, perhaps best exemplified by Donald Trump's reliance on Tweets, both while as president and during his efforts to recapture the US presidency. He maintains that the proposition that humanity seek new worlds on Mars or elsewhere in outer space is ‘finally being ridiculed’ (p. 90). However, his prognostication may be premature given the growing prominence of digital magnates such Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, exemplified by the publicity given to their promotion of propelling wealthy customers on joyrides in outer space.

In the interview on ‘philosophy is beautiful’, Latour argues that philosophy is ‘very important, vital in the moment we're going through, because it's the thing that will allow us to stop the various modes destroying one another’ (p. 97). In the final interview, Latour composes a ‘letter to Lilo’, his grandson who was 1 year old at the time. He believes that the next 20 years will prove to be a touch patch for humanity but contends ‘that in the twenty years after that we'll have found a way to resume the civilizing process that was interrupted in the period that we are now’ (p. 101). I hope that Latour is right, but I personally lament that during the latter decades of his illustrious career in which he grappled with the ecological crisis he never explored in depth alternative visions for the future embedded in eco-socialist, eco-anarchist, degrowth, and Indigenous perspectives.

While one may quibble with many of the arguments that Latour, along with Schultz, makes in On the Emergence of the Ecological Class, and that he makes in his interviews with Truong in How to Inhabit the Earth, he proved to be an erudite and enigmatic scholar who possessed the rare ability to transcend disciplinary boundaries. When translated into English, many of his ideas appear to be turgidly expressed but perhaps something has been lost in the translation. Politically, on some issues Latour was quite progressive but on others he was conservative in a Eurocentric vein. Like other French intellectuals such as Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu, Latour will continue to be a provocative interdisciplinary thinker for anthropologists and other scholars around the world.