Serendip is an independent site partnering with faculty at multiple colleges and universities around the world. Happy exploring!

You are here

Latour Agency at the Time of the Anthropocene Response

Calliope's picture

Three Main Points:  

  1. Humans and the earth are interconnected. The earth is tuned and aware of the humans and their actions. However, humans are not as sensitive to the earth which allows things such as climate change to go unnoticed or forgotten.
  2. The earth is alive and can feel everything that the humans are doing. When humans waste all the natural resources by cutting down millions of trees or spilling oil into lakes and rivers, the earth can feel all that damage. “Human action is visible everywhere” (5)
  3. “Words such as symbiosis, harmony, agreement, accord, all those ideals of deep ecology smack of an earlier, less benighted time. Since then everything has taken a turn for the worse. The best we can hope for is to stick to a new sort of jus gentium that would protect us against one another and against what James Lovelock has called “the revenge of Gaia.”” (5). The earth will have its revenge and the idea of an earth without humans. Human history has come to a stop and natural history will continue until the future, until the earth is destroyed. 

A question I have is how can we as students help raise awareness? How can we take responsibility and protect the earth from the damage we are doing? And I am also curious about how the earth will get her revenge in the future if we don’t change our habits now.