A Short Read of Latour’s Facing Gaia

1. Lovelock on life on Mars:
“Such is Lovelock’s reasoning: if I can decide, from Pasedena, incontrovertibly, that Mars is s dead star, since its atmosphere is in chemical equilibrium, then, similarly, if I were a little green man, I could conclude with certainty that the Earth is a living star, since its atmosphere is in chemical disequilibrium”.

[… life, love, learning, and luck – good and bad - happen on the edge of chaos].


2. v Galileo
“While Galileo, raising his eyes fro the horizon to the sky, reinforced the similarity between the Earth and all the other bodies in free fall, Lovelock, lowering his eyes from Mars in our direction, in effect diminished the similarity between all the other planets and this so peculiar Earth that it was ours. … Because it [the Earth] held – alone? – the privilege of being in disequilibrium … also meant that it possessed a certain way of being corruptible … or animated. … “

3. Accounting practices
“The Blue Planet suddenly looks like a long string of historical events: random, specific, contingent events, as though it were the temporary, fragile result of a geohistory. … Three and a half centuries [after Galileo] Lovelock had taken into account certain features of the Earth that Galileo could not take into account if he were going to consider it as simply a body in free fall amidst al the others”.

4. Metamorphic zones and ecological mutations [not ‘developments’, or even ‘evolution’ and ‘devolution’]
“The metamorphic zone [refers to the pending cul-de-sac that ‘modernism’ has blithely created, en passant], in which all human activities turn out to be transformed, in part, into geological forms; everything that we used to call bedrock is beginning to be humanized … human civilization now ‘runs’ … at 17 terawatts, 24/7, which ends up making it comparable to the expenditure of energy of volcanoes and tsunami … certain calculations even end up comparing the power of human transformation to that of plate tectonics. …[and] … if we all lived in the American manner, it would be 90 terawatts”.

5. History and Nature (137+, 140+)
"Geohistory can never be conceptualized in the form of a Sphere whose encompassing form has been discovered once and for all. This is why it is a history, and not a ‘nature’. … What is at stake in the Anthropocene is this order of understanding. … We have to slip into, envelop ourselves within, a large number of loops, so that, gradually, step by step, knowledge of the place in which we live and of the requirements of our atmospheric condition can gain pertinence and be experienced as urgent. … this is what is mean by “being of this Earth”. … we all have to learn this for ourselves, anew each time. And it has nothing to do with being a human-in-nature or a human-on-the-globe. It is rather a slow, gradual fusion of cognitive, emotional and aesthetic virtues thanks to which the loops are made more and more visible. After each passage through a loop, we become more sensitive and more reactive to the fragile envelope that we inhabit".

"There is another … ultimate reason why we should be extremely suspicious of any global vision: Gaia is not a sphere at all. [It] occupies only a small membrane, hardly more than a few kilometers thick, the delicate envelope of the critical zones. … [It] is not a cybernetic machine controlled by feedback loops but a series of historical events, each of which extends itself a little further – or not. … The global, the natural, the universal operate like so many dangerous poisons that obscure the difficulty of putting in place the networks of equipment by means of which the consequences of action would become visible to all the agencies".

p. 141
"Nature, the Nature of yesteryear, may well have been indifferent, dominating, a cruel stepmother, but She surely wasn’t touchy. … Gaia on the other hand, seems to be excessively sensitive to our actions, and it seems to react extremely rapidly to what it feels and detects. No immunology … is possible unless we learn to become sensitive in turn to these mutually entangled loops. Those who are not capable of “detecting and responding to small changes” are doomed".

p. 142
"With the concept of the Anthropocene, the two great unifying principles – Nature and Human – become more and more implausible. And it is not the intrusion of Gaia that is going to pull together and unify what is coming apart before our eyes. … Gaia is not a kindly figure of unification. It is Nature that was universal, stratified, incontrovertible, systematic, deanimated, global and indifferent to our fate. But not Gaia, which is only the name proposed for all the intermingled and unpredictable consequences of the agents, each of which is pursuing its own interests by manipulating its own environment".

"… Don’t count on an encompassing, preordained system of retroaction to call them back to order. It is impossible to appeal to the “equilibrium of nature” or to the “wisdom of Gaia”. … All dreams of the deep ecologists of seeing humans cured of their political quarrels solely through the conversion of their care for Nature, have flown away. For better or for worse, we have entered the postnatural period".


p. 238
"Such is the tipping point between unified, indifferent, impartial, ‘global’ nature whose law are determined in advance by the principle of causality, and Gaia, which is not unified, whose feedback loops have to be discovered one by one …."