Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime

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.

• A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None (Forerunners: Ideas First)
• Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Experimental Futures)
• Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene
• Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime
• The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins
• An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns
• Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything
• The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (Berlin Family Lectures)
• The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture
• Kids These Days: The Making of Millennials