Down to Earth Quotes

“Few people will campaign for an alternative vision of black holes or magnetic inversion, but we know from experience that about soils, vaccines, earthworms, bears, wolves, neurotransmitters, mushrooms, water circulation, or the composition of air, the smallest study will immediately be plunged into a full-scale battle of interpretations. The Critical Zone is not a classroom; the relationship between researchers and the public is anything but purely pedagogical.
If we still had any doubts on this point, the pseudocontroversy over the climate suffices to dispel them. There is no evidence that any major corporation has spent a penny to produce ignorance about the detection of the Higgs boson. But denying the climatic mutation is another matter entirely: financing floods in. Ignorance on the part of the public is such a precious commodity that it justifies immense investments.”
― Bruno Latour, Où atterrir ?

“Facts remain robust only when they are supported by a common culture, by institutions that can be trusted, by a more or less decent public life, by more or less reliable media.”
― Bruno Latour, Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime

“The new universality consists in feeling that the ground is in the process of giving way.”
― Bruno Latour, Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime

“To the migrants from outside who have to cross borders and leave their countries behind at the price of immense tragedies, we must from now on add the migrants from inside who, while remaining in place, are experiencing the drama of seeing themselves left behind by their own countries.”
― Bruno Latour, Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime

“epistemological disaster”
― Bruno Latour, Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime

“Saying “We are earthbound, we are terrestrials amid terrestrials,” does not lead to the same politics as saying “We are humans in nature.” The two are not made of the same cloth – or rather of the same mud.”
― Bruno Latour, Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime

“And yet, it is true that the third attractor doesn’t look very attractive. It requires too much care, too much attention, too much time, too much diplomacy. Even today it is the Global that shines, that liberates, that arouses enthusiasm, that makes it possible to remain so unaware, that emancipates, that gives the impression of eternal youth. Only it does not exist. It is the Local that reassures, that calms, that offers an identity. But it does not exist either.”
― Bruno Latour, Où atterrir ?

“there is no Earth corresponding to the infinite horizon of the Global, but at the same time the Local is much too narrow, too shrunken, to accommodate the multiplicity of beings belonging to the terrestrial world.”
― Bruno Latour, Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime

“But then is no one at home any longer?” No, as a matter of fact. Neither state sovereignty nor inviolable borders can take the place of politics any longer.”
― Bruno Latour, Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime

“sinister or radiant, it hardly matters –”
― Bruno Latour, Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime

“The absence of a common world we can share is driving us crazy.”
― Bruno Latour, Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime

“Man macht sich gar nicht klar genug, dass die gesamte Politik der Gegenwart auf das Problem der Klimaleugnung fokussiert ist.”
― Bruno Latour, Das terrestrische Manifest

“Readers may recall that Empire, a book by Michael Hardt and Tony Negri ended curiously by praising St. Francis.”
― Bruno Latour, Où atterrir ?