“On the Emergence of an Ecological Class: A Memo” By Bruno Latour & Nikolaj Schultz
The climate crisis and the loss of biodiversity have been widely discussed for years. Yet for many people, these issues still feel distant and unrelated to their own lives. Written by a science anthropologist who has studied the activities of nonhuman beings and a young sociologist, this book presents 76 proposals for accepting environmental issues not as someone else’s concern, but as matters deeply connected to ourselves. The reviewer was particularly moved by the authors’ idea of “self-description.”
The authors ask: What do you depend on in order to live? What threatens those dependencies? They encourage readers to write down, one by one, the places where they live, the food they eat, the air they breathe, and the relationships they maintain with the living beings and material things that sustain them. Modern people often speak about the world through abstract generalizations, but self-description is an intensely concrete and personal practice. Who am I? What kind of land do I stand on? What kind of era am I living through? By confronting these questions, ecological thinking can finally pass through our own bodies with a sense of reality.
What matters is the recognition that there are as many different descriptions as there are people who write them. There is no single correct answer. Precisely because of this, each individual must identify the challenges of transformation that belong to them. This is a book for reconnecting ourselves with the planet. Translated by Kumiko Kawamura. (Price: 2,420 yen)
