The book I would like to share is by the recently deceased philosopher Bruno Latour, titled “Down to Earth: Politics in the new climatic regime”, which he wrote, in French, in 2018.
I particularly like how Latour unpacks two of the major discourses of our age, to paraphrase badly, one is ‘localism’ and the ‘globalism’.
The discourse of localism is the nationalistic and nostalgic call for a yesterday when things (and people) were simpler (read ‘purer’), and a view of tradition and culture as relatively fixed and static ‘ideals’. In binary opposition to localism is the discourse of globalism, and this is the promise of modernity for endless technological and financial growth and gain, including the unfettered mobility of people and things.
Latours’ argument is that both discourses are inaccurate and dangerous, ultimately posing an existential threat to humanity and the ecosystems on which we depend. He calls on people wedded to one or both of the above discourses to instead engage with local spaces as complex spaces, including recognising the complexity, limits and uncertainties of socio-ecological systems. That is particularly interesting to me, as an educator working in Europe, where far-right nationalism is on the rise.
As Latour points out in this book Trumpism, and other associated contemporary far-right movements promise both localism and globalism in the face of all evidence to the contrary. I am interested in how to build understandings of locality and belonging, which reflect complexity and a concern for socio-ecological justice.
R B