Politics for Catastrophic Times: How to Find the Terrestrial

Abstract

The Anthropocene is the geo-epoch in which we find ourselves today, a period of history that is characterized by the transformative impact of human activities on the global scale of geology. In recent years, the body of literature exploring the political consequences of this new historical reality has expanded tremendously. For example, Isabelle Stengers’ essay, “in Catastrophic Times: resisting the coming barbarism” (2015), from which this panel borrows its title, is a lucid examination of what thinking politically in this new geological time requires. Bruno Latour, in both Facing Gaia (2017) and Coming Down to Earth (2018), has announced that politics will from now on happen in a New Climatic Regime. This opens a number of paths for reflection, some of which this panel is interested in investigating further. Latour goes beyond a diagnosis of the tragedy that is unfolding and offers a normative direction to adapt to it without succumbing to ethno-nationalism or epistemological delirium. “It is urgent to shift sideways and define politics as ‘what leads toward the Earth and not toward the global or the national’. Belonging to a territory is the phenomenon most in need of rethinking and careful re-description; learning new ways to inhabit the Earth is our biggest challenge. Bringing us down to earth is the task of politics today’ (Latour, 2018). This move sideways – towards the Earth - is driven by the attraction to “the Terrestrial”. Yet, it remains unclear what this might mean in concrete political terms. In this panel, we have invited contributors who attempt to engage with this exercise. In particular, we have welcomed contributions that go beyond traditional approaches in social sciences by front-staging the Anthropocene as decisive contextual factor and considering “nature” no longer as décor of politics but as political actor in its own right. We have composed a multi-disciplinary panel that grapples with what the terrestrial might mean for politics today and how we might re-design political theories and systems for the Anthropocene. In particular, this panel gathers theoretical contributions which revisit democratic theory to re-imagine politics in the Anthropocene. It also includes a variety of empirical contributions that present cases of movements that prefigure a terrestrial kind of politics. Keywords: climate change, anthropocene, political ecology, political theory, terrestrial, environmental politics

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