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A review by kothesakis
Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime by Bruno Latour
2.0
Oftentimes incoherent. Was assigned this book at Sciences Po for a fantastic political ecology course.
Latour clearly has an idea for this new global political realignment based on the demands of climate change, but he never clearly enunciates that idea. He beats around the bush a lot, uses esoteric symbols and relational graphs to further complicate his argument, and by the end of the book I was no more certain of what Latour was prescribing than when I started.
He also writes with this Western European-centric worldview that's alienating even to a coastal American; he seems to believe the panacea to global ecological collapse is EU-style bureaucracy and honest politics. That may be his earnest belief, but after spending the time to wade through his esoteric nonsense ideology I expected a more coherent and actionable political schema. His opinions regarding Trump's rise to power also sound patently false. Latour envisions an American electorate that makes these subconscious political calculations regarding America's place in the world and its industrial capacity and how that relates to the threat environmental regulation poses to that, and so they vote for Trump who promises to ignore that data. However I don't think that's an actual machination in any person's head but Latour's; Americans think far less often about political ecology than Latour would like to believe.
Would actively recommend against reading this book unless you're a die-hard fan of Latour.
Latour clearly has an idea for this new global political realignment based on the demands of climate change, but he never clearly enunciates that idea. He beats around the bush a lot, uses esoteric symbols and relational graphs to further complicate his argument, and by the end of the book I was no more certain of what Latour was prescribing than when I started.
He also writes with this Western European-centric worldview that's alienating even to a coastal American; he seems to believe the panacea to global ecological collapse is EU-style bureaucracy and honest politics. That may be his earnest belief, but after spending the time to wade through his esoteric nonsense ideology I expected a more coherent and actionable political schema. His opinions regarding Trump's rise to power also sound patently false. Latour envisions an American electorate that makes these subconscious political calculations regarding America's place in the world and its industrial capacity and how that relates to the threat environmental regulation poses to that, and so they vote for Trump who promises to ignore that data. However I don't think that's an actual machination in any person's head but Latour's; Americans think far less often about political ecology than Latour would like to believe.
Would actively recommend against reading this book unless you're a die-hard fan of Latour.