Earthlings Against Latour!

Abstract

The horizon of this essay could be described as the possibility or otherwise of militant, partisan mobilisation on the basis of an egalitarian commitment extended beyond the form of life we call human. So, let’s start with two slogans. First: ‘We are not defending nature: we are nature defending itself!’ From Paris in 2015 and Brussels in 2016, to the French ZADists and Greta Thunberg’s school strikes, the human activists making this claim are rejecting the hierarchy implied even by the role of guardian and identifying themselves as acting, not on behalf of, but from within a broad ecological continuum. The wager of this identification is well captured in my second slogan, particularly popular during the school strikes: ‘Like the sea level we rise!’ The wager is here compressed into the space of that simile: what would it mean to model protest on the planet’s rising sea levels? Rhetorically, this is so much metaphorical semantic slippage, condensing a purely statistical increase and political insurrection; its identification is also in a way incoherent, inasmuch as the second term – ‘our’ uprising – is effectively opposing the first – rising sea levels – or at least, opposing its causes and hoping thereby to bring it to an end. But are these slogans incoherent in a more fundamental way? Can human climate militants meaningfully claim to be acting like, with, or as, a continuum of non-human and human beings?