Nature's Evil [calibre 5.27.0]

Bruno Latour took Lovelock’s ideas even further. Latour makes mighty, horrifying Gaia a symbol of nature which rises up against humankind. The philosopher insists on Gaia’s singularity and physicality but rejects the anthropomorphic idea that she has a soul or a plan. Made up of people and nature, Gaia is a single entity encompassing contradictory elements. She is both nurturing mother and castrator. She used to be both alluring and scary, but nowadays she shows us only her terrible aspect. The catastrophe that threatens us on a global scale is not a war of all against all, of people against people, but a hybrid battle of many natural forces, including human ones, for their very existence. Such a battle cannot be stopped by local Leviathans, no matter how terrible they might be. Faced with global Gaia, these giants look like midgets. The new image of power is not male but female, not political but ecological, not national but universal – but, as before, it is sublime and terrifying. Monstrous Gaia, the mother of Time, is threatening the panic-stricken world with castration – this is the philosopher’s warning to our archaic era.

Latour makes frequent and critical references to Hobbes. 4 What he is seeking is a suitable replacement for Leviathan, and he finds it in the image of Gaia. Leviathan was the idea of coercive power in the mercantile state. Dramatic but calculating, this male monster stops the war of all against all, but only on the land he has already occupied. Hobbes lived in a century of war and revolution, and he knew that, while domestic peace was possible and highly desirable, the war of all against all – a state of nature – would endure between countries. His only hope was that the sovereign could call a halt to civil war on a self-contained island. Composed of the people, Leviathan can prevent violence only within himself – within the state – but he cannot solve global problems. In the world war with nature, every state has its own interest, which usually consists of continuing the war. No single state is capable of preventing climate catastrophe or a pandemic. This can only be achieved by a new monster, the size of the planet and female. She terrifies the sovereigns just as they terrify the individual members of their societies. Gaia is needed to end the battle of them all, sovereigns and their subjects, against nature.

This is Latour’s myth, and I think there is some truth in it, and some falsehood as well. Gaia is real but not entire. She is as multitudinous as humanity, as pluralist as society. The natural history of evil has been endlessly various. Resources are all different because each and every one of them involved a particular interaction between people and nature. Each natural resource has its own political characteristics. Along with people who extract, process and trade it, each resource is a social institution which works according to the rules set by nature. To unite people and nature would entail granting rights of citizenship to natural phenomena and integrating their tales along with human voices in a comprehensive plebiscite. This is a distant utopia, but we will get there, if we survive. In the meantime we are travelling in the opposite direction, down a blind alley.