Modernità o capitalismo? Tornare davvero sulla terra

In Down to Earth. Politics in the New Climatic Regime, Bruno Latour takes issue with globalization and its élites vis-à-vis the ecological crisis. The former, he claims, is the result of modernity’s universalistic aspiration, for actualizing which the planet is not big enough. The latter have decided that, faced with ever-more worrisome ecological threats, there is room for protecting and supporting only few. The task, then, is to circumvent the contrast between local and global pointing towards an emergent “terrestrial” attractor, which entails the reciprocal recognition of different ways of living entertaining a constitutive relation with places and soils. To this purpose, the dominance in science of a Galileian “view from nowhere” is to be rejected, as conducive to a productivist approach, in favour or a generative one, capable of valorizing a variety of outlooks and concerns. Compared with Latour’s earlier takes on the ecological crisis, such as Politics of Nature, the book expresses a sense of urgency at odds with diplomacy and negotiation. Many of its claims can be subscribed. However, Latour depicts the relationship with the terrestrial attractor in terms of dependence, rather than friendship, which hardly signals a change in the instrumental approach that is at the grounds of the crisis. Moreover, he carefully avoids to even mention what is arguably the main responsible of the latter, which is not modernity but capitalism, preventing himself from a more credible diagnosis of elites’ strategy. Moreover, the novelty of the case for the terrestrial attractor scales down once framed in the context of burgeoning claims about the overarching power of geological forces, of which it shares the ambiguity (plea for humility on one side; call for constant experimentation, on which neoliberalism thrives, on the other). Overall, the book represents the cutting-edge of a moderately progressive intelligentsia, who is aware that the situation requires radical interventions yet persists in believing that the world in which it has prospered can be salvaged in its basic coordinates.