Review of "Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime"

Is it possible to hate a book and love (or at least like) it at the same time? This one makes some really important points about the sense of dispossession and displacement that underlies some of the popular support for the new right, and about the vaccuity of the project of modernisation and globalisation that has been the principal objective of both liberalism and neo-liberalism. This is important, and he makes the distinction between "good" internationalism of accepting that we all live on one planet with one atmosphere, and that refugees (especially climate refugees, of which there will be many) are people like us, displaced - and the "bad" internationalism of saying that we can't fight the deregulatory race to the bottom and outsourcing.

And it's something that I not only understand, but feel - I'm aware that I now feel like an ex-Londoner, because London doesn't want people like me and my family any more, but I don't really feel like I belong in small-town Gloucestershire either; many of my friends are also people who moved here from somewhere else, and some of the locals feel aggrieved that I'm part of the trend that makes their town no longer affordable for their kids, and I can see their point. There are great bits about that in the book, and I was delighted to learn about Zadists.

But it's written in the most abstruse, complicated language - and with incomprehensible diagrams that are supposed to illuminate the argument but really really don't. I've had this experience before with Bruno Latour, when I read his stuff about science and the labour process, and later about the embedded social relations of technology like caravels. He's got really important things to say, but it's absolutely not accessible to a lay audience, at least not one of English-language heritage. I wonder whether he's let down by bad translation, but I don't think it's that. It's more that the English and French intellectual traditions are so alien from each other, that even though this book appears to be in English, it isn't. Which rather speaks to his point, if you think about it.