Article | Spring 2008
Ecology and Politics with Bruno Latour
by Grace Hong (ISERP)
Why have political processes failed to spur decisive action on global warming? Presenting his distinctive approach to understanding the trials and pitfalls of the environmental movement, Bruno Latour addressed an attentive audience at Columbia University in February 2008. The conference was sponsored by the Alliance Program, the Heyman Center for the Humanities, and ISERP.
A pioneering figure in the field of "science studies," Bruno Latour has spent much of his career drawing on his training in Philosophy and Anthropology to investigate how scientific knowledge is produced and to understand the complex interaction among politics, culture, science, technology, markets, and nature.
Latour brought these long-standing preoccupations to life in his presentation on ecology and politics at Columbia University. On this occasion, he chose to focus on Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger's Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility (2007), a book that lays out a radical vision for tackling monumental problem of global warming.
"I've always been convinced that the key to understanding politics lies in the conception of science and, more precisely, in the way science is gathered," Latour commented.
The "great virtue" of the book, he explained, is that it tries to understand why ecological crises continue to be regarded as a special interest issue rather than a core political concern. It argues that the current model of environmentalism is ill-equipped to address climate change issues for two major reasons. Firstly, the current paradigm is based on the unrealistic idea that it is possible for humans to reverse the trend of human "progress" and withdraw from nature-a view that is both unrealistic and unlikely to garner the kind of mass support needed to address global warming. Secondly, environmental action has undervalued the vital psychosocial dimension of politics. By appealing largely to "indisputable facts" instead of recognizing the mobilizing power of "political emotions," the global warming movement has succeeded in elevating fears but has failed to incite sufficient commitment and action.
"We should stop flagellating ourselves, and take up explicitly and seriously what we have been doing all along at an ever-increasing scale, namely, intervening, acting, wanting, caring," he concluded.
