Quotations from: Latour, Bruno. Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climate Regime. Medford: Polity Press, 2017.

“It doesn’t stop; every morning it begins all over again. One day, it’s rising water levels; the next, it’s soil erosion; by evening, it’s the glaciers melting faster and faster; on the 8 p.m. news, between two reports on war crimes, we learn that thousands of species are about to disappear before they have even been properly identified. Every month, the measurements of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are even worse than the unemployment statistics. Every year we are told that it is the hottest since the first weather recording stations were set up; sea levels keep on rising; the coastline is increasingly threatened by spring storms; as for the ocean, every new study finds it more acidic than before. This is what the press calls living in the era of an ‘ecological crisis’.

Alas, talking about a ‘crisis’ would be just another way of reassuring ourselves, saying that ‘this too will pass,’ the crisis ‘will soon be behind us.’ If only it were just a crisis!” (7)

“But here we are: what could have been just a passing crisis has turned into a profound alteration of our relation to the world. It seems as though we have become the people who could have acted thirty or forty years ago — and who did nothing, or far too little.” (9)

“Just imagine: hidden behind the profusion of world wars, colonial wars, and nuclear threats, there was, in the twentieth century, that ‘classic century of war,’ another war, also worldwide, also total also colonial, that we lived through without experiencing it.” (9) (See Scranton’s “slow violence”)

“We can’t say that we didn’t know. It’s just that there are many ways of knowing and not knowing at the same time.” (9)

“This view is much more widespread in the world at large, however, in the form of a low-level madness that can be characterized as quietist, with reference to a religious tradition in which the faithful trusted in God to take care of their salvation. Climate quietists, like the others, live in a parallel universe, but, because they have disconnected all the alarms, no strident announcement forces them up from the soft pillow of doubt: We’ll wait and see. The climate has always varied. Humanity has always come through. We have other things to worry about. The important thing is to wait, and above all not to panic.’ A strange diagnosis: these people are crazy by dint of staying calm! Some of them don’t even hesitate to stand up in a political meeting and invoke the covenant in Genisis where God promises Noah that He will send no more floods…” (11)

“There is no cure for the condition of belonging to the world” (13)

(to be continued)