Category Archives: Politics

Books History Politics

Islanders and The Fishers of Men

February 13, 2024 – 7:35 pm

By Yevgeby Zamyatin, translated by Sophie Fuller and Julian Sacchi

from the introduction
p. 10 “Zamyatin saw the world in terms of an eternal struggle between forces of energy and forces of entropy, found in the established and dogmatic. Entropy lulled man into a dangerous complacency. What foundt against entropy was revolution and heretical thought, the energy of an unquenchable life force…. The regulated, restricted life of the respectable English middle classes seemed to Zamyatin to be a perfect example of the horrors of entropy. He depicts a world where everything has its correct place, where the vases displayed in every window on one side of the street are blue and on the other freen. It is a world in which Reverend Dewley plans a set of timetables detailing his every movement. Reverend Dewley dreams of a time when the government will adopt his ideas and everyone will live by time table. This is, of course, exactly what has happened in One State – Zamyatin’s future society in We/ Almost every hour is ruled by the Table of Hourly Commandments… He believed that literature could only be kept alive by constant innovation and revolution. His work is full of imagery and symbolism. Characters are reduced to a pair of worm-like lips or a glittering pince-nez. The lumbering Campbell is a lorry and the rigid Mr Draggs a little iron monument.”

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Books Environmental politics Politics

Notes from Bruno Latour Politics and Nature

February 13, 2024 – 6:18 pm

p. 232 No culture except that of the West has used nature to organise its political life. Traditional societies do not live in harmony with nature; they are unacquainted with it. Thanks to the sociology of the sciences, to the practice of ecologist, to anthropology, we can understand that nature is only one of the two houses of a collective instituted to paralyse democracy. The key question of political ecology can now be formulated: can we find a successor to the collective with two houses: nature and society.?

Once nature has been set aside, another question arises – how to bring the collective together – that is heir to the old nature and the old society. We cannot simply bring objects and subjects together… we have to consider that the collective is made up of humans and nonhumans capable of being seated as citizens, provided that we proceed to the apportionment of capabilities… leaving to be sceptical of all spokesperson – those who represent humans as well as those who represent non-humans. The second apportionment consists in redistributing the capacity to act as a social actor, while considering only associations of humans and non-humans. It is on these associations and not on nature that ecology must focus . This does not means that citizens of the collective belong to language or the social realm since, by the third apportionment, the sectors are also defined by reality and recalcitrance. The three sets of apportionments allows us to define the collective as composed of propositions. P. 233 To convene the collective, we shall thus no longer be interested in nature and society, but only in knowing whether the propositions that compose it are more or less well articulated. The collective as finally convened allows a return to civil peace, by defefining politics as the progressive composition of a good common world.

… It is impossible of course to go back to the old separation between facts and values, for that separation has only disadvantages, even though it seems indispensable to public order. … We restore order to these assemblies if we distinguish two other powers: the power to take into account and the power to put in order. The first power is going to retain from facts the requirement of perplexity and from values the requirements of consultation. The second is going to recuperate from values the requirement of hierarchy and from facts the requirement of institution. In place of the impossible distinction between facts and values we are thus going to have two powers of representations of the collective that are at once distinct and complementary.

p. 235 There are in fact not one but two arrows of time; the first one, modernist, goes towards ever-increasing separation between objectivity and subjectivity; and the other, non-modern, goes towards ever more intricate attachments. Only the second makes it possible to define the collective by its learning curve – provided that we add to the two preceding powers a third power, the power to follow up, which brings up anew the question of the State. The State of political ecology remains to be invented, since it is no longer based on any transcendence but on the qaulity of the follow-up of collective experimentation. It is on this quality, the art of governing without mastery, that civilization capable of putting an end to the state of war depends.”

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Books History Politics

Notes from Bennelong & Phillip: A History Unravelled

January 10, 2024 – 2:33 pm

p. 90 Burke’s prosecution of Hastings was not the anti-imperial stance that some later took it to be. Burke was an advocate of empire his whole life. The loss of Britain’s 13 American colonies in the previous decade had appalled him; he believed they had been lost due to poor management. When Burke heard of similar forms of minmanagement in British India, he leaped to curtail them, insisting that Hastings and “sulliedS and “dishonoured” Britain’s name… Bennelong and Yemmerrawanne attended Hastings’ trail at a particularly interestiung stage. Just one week earlier, on 9 April 1794, Lord Cornwallis, Hasting’s successor in India, had refuted in his testimony all of Burke’s charges, not only defending Hastings but also announcing that Britain’s name was now beloved by Indians. Burke’s case never really recovered. The House of Lords at length aquitted Hastings in favour of Prime Minister William Pitt’s ruling faction.

Although Hunter was now formally responsible for the Wangal visitors, Phillip seems to have been the driver behind their attendance at the trial. Phillip probably sided with the government’s defence of Hastings; as we’ve seen, he showed deep loyalty to Pitt’s increasingly reactionary government Benelong and Temmerrawanne could have visited the trial at any point during the previous year but only now it was turning in Pitt’s favour did they do so. As earlier events will show, Phillip was keen to demonstrate to the Indigenous guests the operation of British power at its most decisive, irrestitible and legally rationalised

p. 104-6 The most remarkable outing for Bennelong and Yemmerrawanne in October was to the Parkinson Museum in London’s Blackfriars rotunda. … Phillip probably accompanied them, knowing that Banks had deposited in the museum some of the things he’d been sending back from NSW. He may have been anxious to see eaxactly which things they were…. a teenaged medical student called Robert Jameson who happened to be visiting at the same time… He noted in his diary”… They seemed to affect a kind of cheerfulness which was far from being real. Was it the taxidermy that worried Bennelong? He had seen British officers pack off the skins of local fauna to Berewal for years,but only in slated form, not engorged with cotton and wire… Possibly it was the black club that disturned. The Yiyura believed that some objjects were imbued with special powers and could only beond to and be seen by certain people… There is a third reason… The eventual catalogue of sale indicated that the collection also contained human remains. IT listed six human foetuses, two human hands, two human skulls, an arm, a tonghue and an ear. Given the Yiyura’s known aversion to the uncovered dead body, these items alone would have turned the visitors’ stomachs. If Bennelong and Temmerrawanne suspected that these remains came from their own people, they would have felt more than wretched. .. Researcher Matthew Fishburn has recently argued that Phillip brough at least 3 Aboriginal skulls to Britain on his voyage home… in August 1793, just before this visit to the museum, Banks wrote to two of his peers in Europe that he was relived at long last to send to each of them a “Cranium of a male native of New Holand”… Fishburn is concinved that a third skulls went to the London-based anatomist John Hunter … were there more skulls… if so, they would also have gone to Banks, that powerful adviser to government … In turn, he may have deposited them in the Parkinson Museum for the public’s so-called edification.”.. the British practice of collecting human heads was not, even at the time, uncontroversial. Banks and Parkinson were on one end of an ethical spectrum; both had heard contemporaries tell them directly that the practice was in fact “the greatest of crimes”.

p. 109 “In September 1793 when Bennelong and Yemmerrawanne took the initiative to perform a song at the Mayfair residence. The only evidence we have of this recital is a single sheet of music recording the notes and words of the men’s song. They were written down by the Welsh folklorist Edward Jones… also a musician in the royal household.”

p. 112 “Phillip… was a diligent student of Britain’s history of interaction with Indigenous people and knew that since the 1600s colonial officials had been bringing Indigenous envoys from elsewhere to Briatin … the aim was to forge formal alliances with peoples who might otherwise side with Britain’s imperial competitors, such as France … suggests he thought Bennelong might serve one day, too, as a negotiator for a treaty. The question was by no means resolved for Phillip in 1793, depite many then and later thinking that it was. Philip knew from Britain’s prior experiences that treaties had to be offered to peoples who showed signs of land cultivation, or of permanent construction, or fo sustained social reason… Phillip hadn’t yet figures out that in the absence of European competition for New South Wales, those same bosses would now never be challenged on the issue.”

p. 116 Bennelong never did meet King George III. Without strong backing from the Home Affairs Office that administered the colonies, Phillip failed to secure the meeting he’d always assumed would happen.. This failure may have felt minor at the time, especially for a governor who was clearly mobing on from his colonial experience… encapsulated a momentous shift in British imperial policy … without direct threats from fellow Europeans – and also with a fresh determination to regaim all that had been lost in the American Revolution – it could set a new legal precedent regarding prior occupants of the lands it desired.”

p. 142-3 The Yiyura’s mostly intermixed world meant that all the connections Bennelong forced with the British in these years were enacted with or at least beside Indigenous women. Conversely, Britain’s custom of deparate gender sphere meant that when Phillip attempted to engage with the Yiyura he was surrounded almost entirely by men. True, there were fewer women in Phillip’s colony than men – averaging overall around 20% – but none of them exercised much power compared to men, so featured even less than might be expected… Bennelong’s wife Barangaroo died- “David Collins observed many of the events related to her death as Bennelong’s invited guest .. Bennelong had decided not to bury his wife, as was the common custom, but instead to cremate her – an honour someimtes awarded to more senior people. He invited Phillip and the surgeon John White, as well as Collins, to witness the occasion. … The next day , the same three prominent colonists were brought back to the pyre to watch Bennelong rake Barangaroo’s ashes together. Bennelong clearly wanted them to learn something about the Yiyura through this ritual, perhaps compassion. And Collins, for one, was indeed moved by the cermony, describing how Bennelong “proeced us in a sort of solemn silence, speaking to no one until he had paid Ba-rang-a-roo the last duties of a husband”… The most pressing problem for Bennelong now was how to manage his baby girl, Dilboong. The infent was still nursing. Bennelong raised the problem directly with Phillip, suggesting that he find a wetnurse for her among the convict women. No doubt bennelong could have found one among the Yiyura, which makes his act of reaching across the racial barrier significant…. We don’t know if Phillip secured… What we know more conclusively is that Phillip agreed to be the Yiyura equivalent of a British godfather to Dilboong… Bennelong attempted to cement even further the non-violent connections between peoples at the harbour. But before year’s end, Dilboon… was dead.”(1791)

p/. 157 “Phillip’s spearing in September 1790 … commentators on Bennelong … entertain the idea that rather than a random act, the spearing was the outcome of a plan by Bennelong himself. They suggest that he orchestrated it as an elaborate paycak, either for his own brutal kidnapping by Phillip in 1789 or for general incursions into Yiyura life over the three years prior. They go on to argue that this attack was why the detente could then proceed, because the slate had been wiped clean for Phillip and Bennelong.”

p. 163 – arrival of second fleet”Phillip … felt compelled to explain to the new Home Affairs Minister William Grenville that this was what happened when state-run empires contracted out their tasks to unscrupulous companies … “it was occasioned by the contractors having crowded too many on board those ships, and from their being too confined during the passage.”

p. 212 Phillip spied in pre-revolutionary France on two separate occasions. In 1786 he was paid £160 to travel to the Med town of Hyeres, close to the naval port of Toulon. This wsa a follow-up mission. A year earlier, he’d been paid £150 to travel directly to Toulon to investigate the state of French maritime rearnmament. Both times he was an employee of Evan Nepean, the under-secretary to Lord Sydney at Home Affairs.”

p. 218 Captain Cook’s Arrival “there is evidence that the observing Gweagal understood the vessel to be at least modelled on their own kind of watercraft, just in outsized proportions. As current knowledge-holder Uncle Shayne Williams discusses, the local population fomr all the way south in Dharawal Country sent smoke signals and used message sticks to convey news of the boatt’s passage; they were warning of strange people in strange vessels; they were not panicking about inexplicable spirits in fantastical creatures …. a long and powerful tradition in Western history-writing which assumed that all Indigenous people understood encounters through mythology… What Bennelong the child may instead have heard in the various tellings of Cook’s landing in 1770 was the following: On the last day, the massive nuwi sailed off up the coast, taking its 80-odd men with it. The Yiyura who watched it depart probably felt less a sense of peril or impending change and more an uneasiness about rituals undone or conventions flouted. No formal welcome had been acknowledged; so no meaningful engagement had occurrred. Materially, they had gained a swag of trinkers which did not appear to have any perceivable use… What angered the Gweagal, though, was the crew’s giant haul of fish and rays.”

p. 228 “Most of the women’s childcare responsibilities went unnoticed by the British. All did, however, remark on the women’s guiadnace of the practice that initiated female babies into girlhood. This involved tying a kangaroo sinew around the bottom joint of the baby’s lefthand little finger. After a few days of interrupted blood ciorculation, the digit shrivelled and fell off. To a man, the colonists were aghast at this procedure and most never came to any understanding of why it was gone… But all societies enact rituals to mark growth and belonging. In the colonists’ society these included circumcision, corset-drawingk trouser-lengthening and beard-trimming.”

p/ Given Phillip’s later certainty that his family coat-of-arms was the tri-camel crest of Claude-Ambrouse Philippe, Jacon could convincingly have been a descendant of Hugenot refugees wgho had once fled Catholic France to a German-speaking town and then fled again to an even staunched Protestant state. Britain experienced a particularly large influx of Germanic Protestant refugees in 1709. The British government, keen to poppulate its new territories in North America, had advertised its commitment to settling any loyal Protestant in the New World. All the same, it was not prepared for the 13,000 or so refugees who consequently flooded into London. British officials managed to send only half that number to their colonial sites; the rest stayed in London.”

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Books Environmental politics Feminism History Science Women's history

Notes from Meeting with Moths

November 29, 2023 – 8:00 pm

p. 34-6 “The Six-spot Burnet is Britain’s most widespread burnet moth … Their bodies are packed with poisons that deter even the hungriest of predators. These poisons are accumulated by the caterpillars… munch on leaves of trefoils, they not only get the essential nutrients for growing, they also swallow the chemicals, in this case cyanides, which the plant produces to protect itself. The caterpillars themselves have evolved ways to deal with the plant’s poisons… cunningly store the dangerous chemicals in small pounches just under the skin. This prevents the toxins from interfering with their own body functioning and also allows them to be exuded through the skin as foul-tasting droplets for any predator follish enough to investigate too closely… As adults, females use cyanides as part of their alluring perfume to help attract males, and mating males transfer varying amounts to the female in little packages with their sperm. A toxic male is the most attractive and desirable.”

p. 54 “In 29021, Butterfly Conservation estimated that the work undertaken by volunteers to protect both butterflies and moths, would cost £18 million if valued commercially.”

p. 76 Family of micromoths known as Tineidae. … most feed on organic waste… recycling nutrients back into the environment. Some… specialise in digesting the protein found in animal hair, skin, feathers, claws and horns. As they nibble, they slowly do their bit to break the tough material down … Two species have become rather well know… The Webbing Clothes Moth and the Case-making Clothes Moth are problem pests worldwide… in the dark corners of warm houses they will happily breed all year round…. each female will lay about 50 tiny eggs on suitable substrates, which in turn hatch into the fabric-destroying caterpillers.”

p. 86 Herald (Scoliopteryn libatrix) emerging … “a race against time for the moth, for if the wings are not given the space they need, they might dry in a stunted or twisted position and effective flight is never realised”

p. 88 Maria Sibylla Merian, born in Frankfut in 1647 to a family of artists and printmakers … in 1679 she published her first book on caterpillars… showing the real-life relationship between insects and plants was groundbreaking. The concept of ecology, the interactions between animals, plants and the environment now so fundamental to our understanding of the natural world, was barely considered at the time.”

p. 90 “the book for which she would later receive most acclaium. Metamorphosis Insectorum was publsihed in 1705 with 60 large copper-plate engravings illustrating the stages of development of many different insects arranged around the plants she had found them on…. Her work was circulated, discussed and admired by the scientific elite of the Royal Society of London. Tsar Peter the Great acquired a large collection of her work. Later George III bought a first edition of her Surinam book for the Royal Collection. Carl Linnaeus used her illustrations to help him describe species of plants and animals. At least nine animals now bear her name. Sadly, after her death some of her findings were disputed. Inaccurate copies of her books had been made and when these errors were spotted her work became widely criticised. Genuine observations such as a large spider capturing a bird were dismissed as fanciful female imagination. Only 150 years later, when the explorer Henry Bates proved her bird-eating spider was accurate, was the record finally set straight; but her books and their legacy were soon forgotten.”

p. 101 In most moth species it is the female that releases a sex pheronome, a behaviour referred to as ‘calling’, when she is ready to mate… Males are usually better endowed than females in the antennal department… a greater surface area and therefore more space for special scent receptors.”

p. 102 “There are reports of some species attracting a suitor from over 10 km away”

p. 113 “The very first moths, flying around 200 million years ago, had chewing moutparts and probably fed on fern spores and pollen from primitive conifers in their prehistoric swampland homes. To keep hydrated they might have sipped on dew .. and it is thought this gradiually led to the development of more specialised sucking moutnparts to better deal with these food sources. Once flowering plants made an appearance… things started to change more rapidly… There are still tiny moths that eat fern spores and pollen grains, using a special cavity in the mouth to process these granular foostuffs, But most others have moved on, with the evolution of a long tubular moutnpart called the proboscis”

p. 135 “Moths with ears were flying around their prehistoric worlds at least 28 million years before echolocating bats were on the scene … must once have been used for something other than bat avoidance, probably to hear other approaching predators but perhaps also for communicating with each other”.

p. 144 “Parasitoids… are a crucial part of ecosystems and have an important role in regulating the size of moth populations without eliminating them… reghular fluctuation of moth numbers over the course of years, tracked by a fluctuation in abundance of its parasitoids.”

p. 170 “migrating moths are naive; they’ve never done the journey before and will never do it again… they rely entirely on instinct to know when and where to go. Environmental cues of temperature, other weather patterns and day length interact with the moths’ genetics to make this work.”

p. 185 The most extreme cold conditions, as low as minus 70C, are endured by the Arctic Wolly Bear moth… most northerly breeding species of moth, eking out a remarkable life in the icy realms of Canada and Greenland… termperatures only become warm enough for activity on sunny afternoons in midsummer, so it takes on average seven years, a severely punctuated seven years, for the caterpillar to complete its development.”

p. 199 Alice Blanche Balfour (1850-1936) grew up with a love of natural history… her most significant finds happened during her 60s and 70s… bequathed her impressive collection of pinned specimens, notebooks and equipment to the National Museum of Scotland.”

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Books History Politics

Notes from Anti-System Politics: The Crisis of Market Liberalism in Rich Democracies

October 26, 2023 – 3:42 pm

p. 255 “Public choice theory, a key theoretical aspiration for redesigning economic institutions from the 1970s on, was quite explicit about its goal to strip elected politicians of the power to regulate, control or suppress markets, often seeing government as an unfortunate necessity that ndded to be constrained at all costs. … robbed government of the ability to intervene in the public interest when markets failed, which is precisely the scenario that unfolded after 2007… the burden of fixing the market meltdown fell on central bankers not directly accountable to voters, with the consequence that policy prioritized stabilizing the banking system rather than addressing the broader social and economic damaged caused by the crisis.”

p. 256 “The loss of political influence and organizational capacity of trade unions undermined progressive politics by isolating workers from each other and limiting the ability of broad social interests to mobilise and pressure business and government. Strikes became a rarity, and governments in many countries abandoned systemic consultation with unions over social and economic policy, while business interests maintained a direct line to decision0makers.”

“As a result of these deep structural changes to the political economy, deviating from the neoliberal playbook became increasingly difficult for elected politicians, lacking as they do the political and economic clout to resist market pressure and business lobbying. The experiences of anti-system politicians reaching government demonstrated in a short time just how difficult it is toimplement serious change, when so many of the policy instruments that would be needed are lacking.”

“The collapse of the neoliberal economic model and the political actors that sustained it make continued mass opposition to the status quo the most likely scenario, expecially in the countries worst hit by the financial crisis. Anti-system politics will not go away while the ‘system’ is perceived by a growing share of the population to have failed. The job of politicians is to develop a diagnosis of this failure, and a set of proposals for fundamental change, that make sense and resonate with voters.”

p. 257 “The idea that markets can resolve most social problems, and that government should simply provide the basic institutions to allow this to happen has run out of political capital. Whatever new paradigmm emerges must facilitate meaningful mass participation in political decision-making over whatever matters society thinks are important. In other words, what most people understand by the word “democracy”.

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Books Environmental politics Politics

Notes from Bruno Latour’s Down To Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime

October 21, 2023 – 4:06 pm

Written after the election of Trump

p. 36 For the first time, a large-scale movement no longer claims to address geopolitical realities seriously, but purports to put itself explicitly outside of all worldly constraints, literally offshore, like a tax haven.What counts above all for the elites behind this movement is no longer having to share with the others a world that they know will never again be a common world. They do all this while maintaining the American ideal of the Frontier … It is quite remarkable, morever, that his invention comes from a real estate developer who has been constantinly in debt, racing from failed deal to failed deal, and who became famous by way of reality television, another form of unreality and escapism”

p. 37 It is quite useless to become outraged on the pretext that Trump voters “don’t believe in facts”. They are not stupid. It is because the overall geopolitical situation between advance and retreat had to be taken into account … defines the first government totally orienttated towards the ecological question, but negatives, through rejection! … Accountants are quite familiar with entrepeneurs who defraud investors: the innovation of Trumpism is to have the greatest nation in the world take that step: Trump as the country’s Madoff?”

p. 70 “If the planet has ended up moving away from the Terrestrial, it is because everything has happened as though nature seen from the universe had begun to replace, bit by bit – to cover, over, to chase away – nature seen from the Earth, the nature that grasped, that could have grasped, that should have continued to include, all the phenomena of genesis.

The grandiose Galilean invention has come to take up all the space by making people forget that seeing the earth from Sirius is only a tiny part – even if the infinite universe is involved – of what we have the right to know positively.”..

If we recall all the bizarre things that earthbound beings, over the last three or four centuries, have imagined they discerned on the red planet before noticing their errors, we shall not be surprised by all the errors committed, over the last three or four centuries, regarding the fate of the terrestrial civilisations as seen from Sirius!

“The ideals of rationality, like the accusations of irrationality brought against the Earth and the earthbound. So many pipe dreams, so many moons made of green cheese, so many canals on Mars…

p. 71 “It is on this point that the two meanings, positive and negative, of the word “Global” turn out to divurge entirely.

The subjective side begins to be associated with the archaic and the outdated; the objective side with the modern and the progressive. Seeing things from the inside comes to have no value other than being traditional, intimate, archaic. Seeing things from the outside, on the contrary, becomes the only way to grasp the reality that counts, and, above all, the only way to orient oneself towards the future.

It is this brutal division that was to give consistency, as it were, to the illusion of the Global as the horizon of modernity. From this point on it was necessary, even if one stayed in place, to shift one’s position virtually, bag and baggage, away from the subjective and sensitive positions towards exclusively objective positions, finally freed of all sensitivity – or rather of sentimentality.

This is where, by contrast with the Global, the necessarily reactive, reflexive, nostalgic figure of the Local comes in

Losing one’s sensitivity to nature as process – according to the old sense of the term “nature” – was becoming the only way to gain access to nature as an infinite universe – according to the new definition. To progress in modernity was to tear oneself away from the primordial soil and set out for the Great Outside, to become, if not natural, at least naturalist.

p. 72 Through a strange perversion of metaphors of giving birth, no longer depending on those old forms of genesis was what would allow us to “be born at last to modernity”.

As feminists have shown by analyzing witchcraft trails, hatred of a large number of values traditionally associated with women would come from this tragic metamophosis, rendering grotesque all forms of attachment to the old soils. The effort to resist the attraction of any form of grounding was a way of saying – as the hypocrite priest Tartuffe said to his host’s daughter “Cover that bosom, girl.” From then on, objectivity became gendered.

This great displacement – the only real ‘Great Replacement’ – will then be imposed on the entire world, which becomes the landscape of globaization-minus as the last vestiges of adherence to the old nature-as-process are durably eradicated.

This is the meaing of the expression that is now out of fashion, but whose echoes are still heard whenever anyone speaks of progress, development and the future: “We are going to modernize the planet, which is in the process of unification.”

p. 73 No progress will be made towards a “politics of nature” as long as the same term is used to designate, for example, research into terrestrial magnetism…. the role of earthworms in soil aeration, the reaction of shepherds in the Pyrenees to the reintroduction of bears, or the reaction of bacteria in our intestines to our latest gastronomic overindulgence. That nature is a real catch-all.

There is no point in looking any further for the slow pace of mobilizations in favour of nature-as-universe. It is completely incapable of churning anything political… Trying to mobilize that nature in class conflicts is like getting ready to go out on a protest march by stepping into concrete.”

p. 74 “To be knowledgeable in scientific terms, it does not help to be beamed up to Sirius. It is not necessary, either, to shun rationality in order to add feelings to cold knowledge. It is essential to acquire as much cold-blooded knowledge as possible about the heated activity of an Earth finally grasped from up close.

… as early as the 17th century, when economists began to take “nature” into account, they took it as a mere “factor of production”, a resource that was precisely external, indifferent to our actions, grasped from afar, as if by foreigners pursuing goals that were indifferent to the Earth.

In what we call systems of production, it was known how to identify human agents – workers, capitalists – as well as artificial infrastructure – machines, factories, cities, agrobusiness – but it was impossible to take the beings that had in the meantime become “natural” (seen from Sirius) as agents, actors, animated, acting entities of the same caliber…

p. 75 One could of course go rummaging in the archives of other peoples to discover attitudes, myths and rituals that were absolutely untouched by any notion of “resource” or “production” but these findings were taken, at the time, as mere vestiges of old forms of subjectivity, of archaic cultures irreversibly outstripped by the modernization front. The testimony was mobing, to be sure, but appropriate for ethnographic museums.

It is only today that all these practices have become previous models for learning how to survive in the future.

p. 76 The simplification introduced by Lovelock is the comprehension of terrestrial phenomena is not that he added “life” to the Earth, or that he made the Earth a “living organism”, but, quite to the contrary, that he stopped denying that living beings were active participants in biochemical and geochemical phenomena. His reductionist argument is the exact opposite of vitalism. He refuses to de-animate the planet by removing most of the actors that intervene all along a causal chain.”

p. 77 The conflict can be summarized simply: there are those who continue to look at things from the vantage point of Sirius and simply do not see that the earth system reacts to human action, or do not believe it possible… they do not believe that there is life on Earth capable of suffering and reacting. And there are those who seek, while keeping a firm grip on the science, to understand what is meant by distributing action, animation, the power to act, all along the causal chains in which they find themselves entangled. The former are climate skeptics (through a taste for distance if not through active corruption); the latter consent to face up to an enigma concerning the number and nature of the agents at work.

P. 86 It is perhaps time… to stop speaking about humans and to refer instead to terrestrials (the Earthbound), thus insisting on humus and, yes, the compost included in the etymology of the word “human”. (“Terrestrial” has the advantage of not specifying species.)

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 the same mud.”

p. 87 Terrestrials in fact have the very delicate problem of discovering how many other beings they need in order to subsist. It is ny making this list that they sketch out their dwelling places (the expression allows us to shift away from the word “territory”, a word too often limited to the simple administrative grid of a state.”

In a system of engendering, all the agents, all the animated beings, raise questions about descendants and forebears; in short, the question of how to recognize and inset oneself into lineages that will manage to last.”

p. 95 To definte a dwelling place, for a terrestrial, is to list what it needs for its subsistence, and, consequently, what it is ready to defend, with its own life if need be. This holds as true for a wolf as a bacterium, for a business enterprise as for a forest, for a divinity as for a family. What must be documented are the property of a terrestrial – in all senses of the word property – by which it is possessed and on which it depends, to the extent that if it were deprived of them, it would disappear.”

p. 96 “One episode of Frenh history… might give a sense of the undertaking: the constructuion of a ledger of complaints, from January to May 1789, becfore the revolutionary term … before all the descriptions were aggregated to produce the classic conception of Politics as a totalizing question. This same view of Politics faces us again today, in the immense and paralyzing question of how to replace capitalism by some other regime.

In a few short months, at the request of a king with his back to the wall, in a situation of financial disaster and climatic tension, all the villages of France, all the cities, all the corporations, not to mention the three estates, managed to describe fairly precisely their living environments, rgulation after regulation, plot of ground after plot of ground, privilege after privilege, tax after tax… This episode offers a template for trying to start again, from the bottom up… is it possible that politics has never done another accounting of its material stakes, at this level of detail, since … Could we be less capable than out predecessors of defining our interests, our demands, our grievances?”

p. 103 “If the first united Europe was created to give a common home to millions of ‘displaced persons’, as was said at the end of the last war, then the second will also be made by and for the displaced persons of today … Europe’s wiseacres are indignant: How can so many people think they can cross Europe’s border, settle impudently “in our space” and “make themselves at home”? The anti-immigrationists ought to have thought about his ahead of time, before the “great discoveries”, before colonization, before decolonization. Any group that is afraid of the Great Replacement shouldn’t have begun by going off to replace ‘virgin lands’ with its own way of life… There is no way out of this. Europe has invaded all peoples; all peoples are coming to Europe in their turn. .. Europe has made a pact with the other terrestrials, who are also setting out to invade its borders, the water of the seas, dried-up or overflowing rivers, forests obliged to migrate as fast as possible so as not to be overtaken by climate change, microbes and parasites, all these, too, aspire to a great replacement. We came to you uninvited; you are now coming to us uninvited. We have benefited from every resource; now these resources have become actors in their own right, have set out, like the Birnam Wood, to recover what belongs to them.”

p. 106 There is nothing like an Old Continent for taking up on a new basis what is common, while observing, with anguish, that the universal condition today entails living in the ruins of modernization, groping for a dwelling place… when those who constituted the old “West” have abandoned the very idea of building a world order – isn’t this actually a much more positive version of its age-old history. The Earth that Europe had wanted to grasp as a Globe is offering itself anew as the Terrestrial, offering Europe a second chance that it in no way deserved. This is quite fitting for the region of the world that has the greatest responsibility in the history of the ecological upheaval.”

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