For Latour, President Donald Trump’s announced intention to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement (which in fact can only take place on the day after the inauguration of the president following the next US presidential election), proved that ‘the climate question is at the heart of all geopolitical issues, and that it is directly tied to questions of injustice and inequality’. Trump’s supporters see him as the great wall-builder, the man who will shelter America from a fast-changing and increasingly threatening world. Yet, Trump adds to the very threats that Americans and others must face. His ongoing efforts to undermine the Paris Agreement include recent measures aimed at dismantling Obama-era regulations on old coal-fired plants, which are likely to prove the most impactful of his actions yet in allowing CO2 concentrations to spiral upwards. How many walls will be needed to hold back the melting glaciers, advancing deserts, and rising seas that the additional CO2 will trigger?

The issues of refugees and climate change are inextricably interwoven. Latour brings a unique focus to the subject, looking at border-crossers from the perspective of tourism as well as migrants. As he says, the wealthy can afford to fly to developing countries for holidays, but the inhabitants of these nations cannot visit the homes of the wealthy they host. When they do try to reach wealthy nations, the poor find walls, fences, and prisons barring their way. Latour makes us see that migration is fundamentally an economic issue: the rich wish to protect their privilege and are willing to use racism, xenophobia, and the nation state to achieve their ends.

Latour understands that many of those most adamantly opposed to migrants are not economically privileged. Their insecurities, which are based on genuine concerns, are used by the ultra-wealthy to protect their own interests. If we are ever to break the hold of the ultra-wealthy on the economically insecure, Latour argues that we need to build protections for those who feel threatened by migrants, and indeed for those under assault from a changing climate. The alternative is to let the wealthy continue to use the media they own to co-opt the poor with populist politics. This is a critical point. Yet just what protections we might offer is not spelled out in any detail by Latour.

A line of Syrian refugees crossing the border of Hungary and Austria on their way to Germany, 2015 (photo by Mstyslav Chernov/Wiki Commons)

There is no doubt that increasing globalisation is causing political stresses. But so is technological change. The very idea of political representation is itself becoming obsolete as the 24-hour news cycle and the real-time reactions to events take hold. It seems inevitable that the next step in the evolution of democracy will involve some form of decision-making by an informed public, perhaps through the use of citizen juries. But the current world of politics is not that sort of place: it’s a world of left and hard-right ideologists seeking election, and that is the milieu into which Latour launches his ideas.

Latour thinks that, if we are to move into a better future, two things need to happen simultaneously: we become re-attached to the soil that supports us (and thus become truly local); and, at the same time, we become attached to the world. In effect, it’s an elegant re-statement of the old axiom ‘think global, act local’. As we attempt to do this, the reality of our situation means that we will have to compromise. The inhabitants of carefully planned and regulated cities will somehow either have to find ways of accepting ever more migrants from a bourgeoning population (Africa’s population alone will reach four billion by 2100), or they will have to pay for measures that eliminate the factors making life so intolerable for many in the developing world.

Bruno LatourLatour is the master of the bon mot. Sentences like, ‘Ignorance on the part of the public is such a precious commodity that it justifies immense investments’, make Down to Earth an entertaining read. But it is far more than that. At its most profound, it is a manifesto for a new kind of politics, and indeed a new way of being in this age of climate disruption. Occasionally, however, the pithy summaries can get in the way of comprehension. ‘The absence of a common world we can share is driving us crazy’, is delivered on page two, but it is only far later that it is unpacked enough to make sense.

In attempting to find a starting place from which to build a better future, Latour goes back to the dying days of the reign of Louis XVI when, between January and May 1789, the king’s functionaries drew up a ‘ledger of complaints’ in which ‘all the villages in France, all the cities, all the corporations, not to mention the three estates, managed to describe fairly precisely their living environments, regulation after regulation, plot of ground after plot of ground, privilege after privilege, tax after tax’. Latour sees this great geography of grievances as one of the triumphs of France’s revolutionary era. Perhaps, if the work had been done earlier, and actions had been taken to redress the grievances, the outcome of the French Revolution might have been different.

The period we are now emerging into is, in Latour’s view, no less dangerous than those endured by the French in the 1790s. A great, global geography of grievances could catalyse actions that could begin to slow the flow of migrants. It could also slow climate change itself. Yet, after twenty-one years of negotiations wasted in the lead-up to the Paris climate agreement, we are coming to the problem very late in the day.