Facing Gaia

Author: Bruno Latour
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0745684351
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 300

Book Description
The emergence of modern sciences in the seventeenth century profoundly renewed our understanding of nature. For the last three centuries new ideas of nature have been continually developed by theology, politics, economics, and science, especially the sciences of the material world. The situation is even more unstable today, now that we have entered an ecological mutation of unprecedented scale. Some call it the Anthropocene, but it is best described as a new climatic regime. And a new regime it certainly is, since the many unexpected connections between human activity and the natural world oblige every one of us to reopen the earlier notions of nature and redistribute what had been packed inside. So the question now arises: what will replace the old ways of looking at nature? This book explores a potential candidate proposed by James Lovelock when he chose the name 'Gaia' for the fragile, complex system through which living phenomena modify the Earth. The fact that he was immediately misunderstood proves simply that his readers have tried to fit this new notion into an older frame, transforming Gaia into a single organism, a kind of giant thermostat, some sort of New Age goddess, or even divine Providence. In this series of lectures on 'natural religion,' Bruno Latour argues that the complex and ambiguous figure of Gaia offers, on the contrary, an ideal way to disentangle the ethical, political, theological, and scientific aspects of the now obsolete notion of nature. He lays the groundwork for a future collaboration among scientists, theologians, activists, and artists as they, and we, begin to adjust to the new climatic regime.

Down to Earth

Author: Bruno Latour
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1509530592
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 140

Book Description
The present ecological mutation has organized the whole political landscape for the last thirty years. This could explain the deadly cocktail of exploding inequalities, massive deregulation, and conversion of the dream of globalization into a nightmare for most people. What holds these three phenomena together is the conviction, shared by some powerful people, that the ecological threat is real and that the only way for them to survive is to abandon any pretense at sharing a common future with the rest of the world. Hence their flight offshore and their massive investment in climate change denial. The Left has been slow to turn its attention to this new situation. It is still organized along an axis that goes from investment in local values to the hope of globalization and just at the time when, everywhere, people dissatisfied with the ideal of modernity are turning back to the protection of national or even ethnic borders. This is why it is urgent to shift sideways and to 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 redescription; learning new ways to inhabit the Earth is our biggest challenge. Bringing us down to earth is the task of politics today.

Slanted Truths

Author: Lynn Margulis
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 1461222842
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 372

Book Description
"Lynn Margulis is one of the most successful synthetic thinkers in modern biology. This collection of her work, enhanced by essays co-authored with Dorion Sagan, is a welcome introduction to the full breadth of her many contributions." EDWARD O. WILSON, AUTHOR OF THE DIVERSITY OF LIFE "An important contribution to the history of the 20th century. Read it and you will taste the flavor of real science." JAMES LOVELOCK, AUTHOR OF GAIA: A NEW LOOK AT LIFE ON EARTH "Truly inspirational and of fundamental importance. This thoughtful series of essays on some of the largest questions concerning the nature of life on earth deserves careful study."PETER RAVEN, MISSOURI BOTANICAL GARDEN

The Case for a Maximum Wage

Author: Sam Pizzigati
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1509524959
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 140

Book Description
Modern societies set limits, on everything from how fast motorists can drive to how much waste factory owners can dump in our rivers. But incomes in our deeply unequal world have no limits. Could capping top incomes tackle rising inequality more effectively than conventional approaches? In this engaging book, leading analyst Sam Pizzigati details how egalitarians worldwide are demonstrating that a “maximum wage” could be both economically viable and politically practical. He shows how, building on local initiatives, governments could use their tax systems to enforce fair income ratios across the board. The ultimate goal? That ought to be, Pizzigati argues, a world without a super rich. He explains why we need to create that world — and how we could speed its creation.

Gaia and Climate Change

Author: Anne Primavesi
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134029586
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 167

Book Description
James Lovelock’s Gaia theory revolutionized the understanding of our place and role in the global environment. It is now accepted that our activities over the past two hundred years have contributed to and accelerated the extreme weather events associated with climate change. The fact that those activities materialized, for the most part, from within Western Christian communities makes it imperative to assess and to change their theological climate: one characterized by routine use of violent, imperialist images of God. The basis for change explored here is that of gift events, particularly as evidenced in Jesus’s life and sayings. Its legacy of love of enemies and forgiveness offers a basis for nonviolent theological and practical approaches to our situatedness within the community of life. These are also Gaian responses, as they include foregoing a perception of ourselves as belonging to an elect group given power by God over earth’s life-support systems and over all those dependent on them, whether human or more-than-human. The degree to which we change this self-perception will determine how we affect, for good or ill, not only the givenness of the climate in future but the givenness of all future life on earth.

After Lockdown

Author: Bruno Latour
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1509550038
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 180

Book Description
After the harrowing experience of the pandemic and lockdown, both states and individuals have been searching for ways to exit the crisis, many hoping to return as soon as possible to ‘the world as it was before the pandemic’. But there is another way to learn the lessons of this ordeal: as inhabitants of the earth, we may not be able to exit lockdown so easily after all, since the global health crisis is embedded in another larger and more serious crisis – that brought about by the New Climate Regime. Learning to live in lockdown might be an opportunity to be seized: a dress-rehearsal for the climate mutation, an opportunity to understand at last where we – inhabitants of the earth – live, what kind of place ‘earth’ is and how we will be able to orient ourselves and exist in this world in the years to come. We might finally be able to explore the land in which we live, together with all other living beings, begin to understand the true nature of the climate mutation we are living through and discover what kind of freedom is possible – a freedom differently situated and differently understood. In this sequel to his bestselling book Down to Earth, Bruno Latour provides a compass for this necessary re-orientation of our lives, outlining the metaphysics of confinement and deconfinement with which we will all be obliged to come to terms by the strange times in which we are living.

Jabari Jumps

Author: Gaia Cornwall
Publisher: Candlewick Press
ISBN: 1536220671
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 32

Book Description
Working up the courage to take a big, important leap is hard, but Jabari is almost absolutely ready to make a giant splash. Jabari is definitely ready to jump off the diving board. He’s finished his swimming lessons and passed his swim test, and he’s a great jumper, so he’s not scared at all. “Looks easy,” says Jabari, watching the other kids take their turns. But when his dad squeezes his hand, Jabari squeezes back. He needs to figure out what kind of special jump to do anyway, and he should probably do some stretches before climbing up onto the diving board. In a sweetly appealing tale of overcoming your fears, newcomer Gaia Cornwall captures a moment between a patient and encouraging father and a determined little boy you can’t help but root for.

Gaia, an Atlas of Planet Management

Author: Norman Myers
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN:
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 276

Book Description
For the first time since its publication in l984, a completely updated and revised edition of this best-selling atlas which brings it into the 1990s, incorporating the new events, issues, and statistics of the past decade.

Critical Zones

Author: Bruno Latour
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262044455
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 473

Book Description
Artists and writers portray the disorientation of a world facing climate change. This monumental volume, drawn from a 2020 exhibition at the ZKM Center for Art and Media, portrays the disorientation of life in world facing climate change. It traces this disorientation to the disconnection between two different definitions of the land on which modernizing humans live: the sovereign nation from which they derive their rights, and another one, hidden, from which they gain their wealth—the land they live on, and the land they live from. Charting the land they will inhabit, they find not a globe, not the iconic “blue marble,” but a series of critical zones—patchy, heterogenous, discontinuous. With short pieces, longer essays, and more than 500 illustrations, the contributors explore the new landscape on which it may be possible for humans to land—what it means to be “on Earth,” whether the critical zone, the Gaia, or the terrestrial. They consider geopolitical conflicts and tools redesigned for the new “geopolitics of life forms.” The “thought exhibition” described in this book can opens a fictional space to explore the new climate regime; the rest of the story is unknown. Contributors include Dipesh Chakrabarty, Pierre Charbonnier, Emanuele Coccia, Vinciane Despret, Jerôme Gaillarde, Donna Haraway, Joseph Leo Koerner, Timothy Lenton, Richard Powers, Simon Schaffer, Isabelle Stengers, Bronislaw Szerszynski, Jan A. Zalasiewicz, Siegfried Zielinski Copublished with ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe

The Revenge of Gaia

Author: James Lovelock
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 0465008666
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 206

Book Description
In The Revenge of Gaia , bestselling author James Lovelock- father of climate studies and originator of the influential Gaia theory which views the entire earth as a living meta-organism-provides a definitive look at our imminent global crisis. In this disturbing new book, Lovelock guides us toward a hard reality: soon, we may not be able to alter the oncoming climate crisis. Lovelock's influential Gaia theory, one of the building blocks of modern climate science, conceives of the Earth, including the atmosphere, oceans, biosphere and upper layers of rock, as a single living super-organism, regulating its internal environment much as an animal regulates its body temperature and chemical balance. But now, says Lovelock, that organism is sick. It is running a fever born of the combination of a sun whose intensity is slowly growing over millions of years, and an atmosphere whose greenhouse gases have recently spiked due to human activity. Earth will adjust to these stresses, but on time scales measured in the hundreds of millennia. It is already too late, Lovelock says, to prevent the global climate from "flipping" into an entirely new equilibrium state that will leave the tropics uninhabitable, and force migration to the poles. The Revenge of Gaia explains the stress the planetary system is under and how humans are contributing to it, what the consequences will be, and what humanity must do to rescue itself.