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Carregando... Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime (2015)de Bruno Latour
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We cannot hide from the fact that there is a fundamental misunderstanding about Gaia. We think we are using the name of this mythological figure to designate the quite common time-honored idea that the Earth is a living organism. Lovelock is renowned, they say, simply because he recast in cybernetic language the ancient idea that the Earth is finely tuned. The words “regulation” and “feedback” replace the antique idea of “natural balance” or even providence. Now, the scientific hypothesis developed by Lovelock in the 1960s, and then a few years later in collaboration with another equally controversial researcher, Lynn Margulis (1938–2011), has, in my opinion, nothing to do with any natural “balance” or “harmony.” “Gaia” — since this is the name he gave to this hypothesis — is neither a big thermostat nor a superorganism, a sort of successor to the Mother Earth (or the stepmother) who features in so many mythologies. Facing up to her, as I say in Facing Gaia, means accepting another way of defining living things in their relations to the Earth, which is quite foreign to the way a superior and predetermined natural order is invoked.
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. Não foram encontradas descrições de bibliotecas. |
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