“Gaia is an injunction to rematerialize our belonging to the world”

Bruno Latour’s Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime (2017) emerges from a sustained attempt to think through the implications of climate change not simply as an environmental problem, but as a transformation in the very conditions under which knowledge, politics, and collective life are possible. Closely linked to the concept of the Anthropocene, Latour names this transformation the “New Climatic Regime,” emphasizing that it is neither temporary nor external to human societies and radically destabilizes historical notions of nature as an inert backdrop for human action. Throughout Facing Gaia, Latour approaches this problem holistically, weaving together art, science, theology, and political theory to show that these domains are all complicit in the co-construction of a cosmology that has historically privileged human concerns while deanimating the natural world. He argues for a new cosmology that recognizes a fully animated nature and proposes recasting the mythical earth goddess Gaia as a purely secular figure to represent the paralyzing existential threat posed by an Earth System pushed past multiple climate tipping points. Running throughout Facing Gaia is a persistent and unresolved question: what is the role of the scientist once the climate itself has become an active historical agent?

This question has been particularly clarifying for my own research on glaciers and ice mass loss in the Arctic. Latour offers a way to understand why contemporary climate science no longer functions comfortably as a neutral description, and why scientific work increasingly finds itself drawn into political conflict. The destabilization experienced by scientists today is not, in Latour’s account, a failure of objectivity, but the consequence of rigorous objectivity revealing a world that no longer conforms to the assumptions under which modern science was formed.

Latour locates the origins of this problem in the nature–culture divide that emerged from the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century. Following Descartes and his successors, nature was redefined as a domain governed by universal laws, stripped of agency, intentionality, and history (Latour 85). Although science appears to break decisively with Christian theology, Latour argues that it retains a deeply Christian structure: nature was deanimated and rendered mute, while humans alone acted within historical time. Nature became a neutral background against which social and political drama unfolded, available for measurement, prediction, and exploitation without moral or political consequence. This conception allowed scientific knowledge to expand rapidly while simultaneously justifying environmental transformation as fundamentally apolitical.

In recent decades, this view has become increasingly improbable for those working in Earth System science. The origins of this rupture can be traced back to a seminal paper developed by James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis, titled The Gaia Hypothesis. The association with Greek mythology aside, the theory does not describe the Earth as a harmonious superorganism or a providential deity, but as a self-regulating system in which living organisms actively modify their environments in ways that feed back into their own conditions of survival. One of the most striking examples they cite is the Great Oxygenation Event of the early Proterozoic, approximately 2.5 billion years ago, when photosynthetic organisms transformed Earth’s atmosphere, producing oxygen in quantities toxic to much existing life while enabling entirely new forms to emerge. Latour emphasizes the conceptual consequences of this inversion. “Organisms…do not develop ‘in’ an environment; rather, each one bends the environment around itself, as it were, the better to develop.” (98) This self-regulating behavior of organisms to modify their surroundings is not limited to the atmosphere or ocean but extends to other organisms in which “Each agency modifies its neighbors, however slightly, so as to make its own survival slightly less improbable.” (98) Moreover, to account for the system of feedback, checks, and balances in the global Earth system, the number of agents involved must extend to non-sentient material systems, such as watersheds, volcanoes, or ice sheets. 

Research on Greenland glaciers has shown that coastal ice flows are governed by complex feedback loops involving surface albedo, ice velocity, meltwater production, atmospheric temperature, and oceanic currents. They modify geomorphology and ocean conditions across vast spatial and temporal scales, affecting the habitats of many living organisms and, crucially, human civilizations by contributing to global sea level rise.

Gaia thus names a planet understood not as a stable system tending toward equilibrium, but as a volatile, reactive assemblage of human and nonhuman agents. It is “a creature no more of chance than necessity,” Latour insists, one that reacts, resists, and transforms in response to the actions of other agents, including humans (107). Gaia is neither benevolent nor balanced, and certainly not moral. It is indifferent to human intentions, capable of abrupt shifts that exceed planning and control.

Our contemporary understanding of climate change is indebted to science, despite pernicious dogmas, and not revealed through a single discipline or a unifying theoretical framework comparable to those of classical physics. Instead, it emerged through the gradual assembly of heterogeneous observations across geology, atmospheric science, oceanography, glaciology, and paleontology. Climate knowledge is therefore distributed and collective, produced through what Latour describes as the convergence of partial perspectives rather than deductive certainty. He makes a comparison to the loops one must trace to define a sphere, or the orbits of satellites, which “takes on more and more verisimilitude as the number of circles with which it can be surrounded gradually increases” (139), underscoring the extent to which climate science depends on networks of instruments, space observations, models, and international collaboration.

This is illustrated well by the variety of research I assembled to provide evidence of ice mass loss at Greenland outlet glaciers. Data were analyzed from multiple, imperfect proxies: radar measurements of ice thickness; satellite imagery tracking ice velocity, calving front positions, and iceberg production; and seismic detections of glacial earthquakes associated with large calving events. No single dataset provides a complete picture. Taken together, however, they reveal a coherent pattern of accelerating ice loss driven by atmospheric and oceanic warming, contributing directly to global sea-level rise. The authority of this science lies not in absolute certainty, but in the consistency produced through accumulation.

Latour is acutely aware that the results of climate research are often alarming, and he takes seriously the destabilizing psychological and political consequences they imply for the entrenched powers of corporations and nation-states. Once scientific descriptions imply prescriptive action, science ceases to function as a neutral party in the unfolding geopolitical power struggle. 

In this context, the expectation that scientists maintain political neutrality becomes untenable in the face of climate denialists manufacturing doubt and framing well-established findings as matters of ongoing controversy.  Scientists are drawn into pseudo-debates over facts that have been established for decades, while being accused of activism whenever they step outside narrow norms of objectivity. Scientists are at a disadvantage when they continue to behave as though they are engaged in a polite debate with reasonable adversaries who already understand the situation as a form of war. 

In the final lectures of Facing Gaia, Latour argues for the necessity of a new cosmology adequate to the Anthropocene. “Gaia is no more scientific in the old style than it is an ersatz pagan of the Creation” (289). To face Gaia is to abandon the fantasy of an external vantage point from which the planet can be objectively surveyed and managed. It is to recognize that humans are Earthbound, entangled within the very processes they seek to understand.

This shift has profound implications for scientific practice. Earthbound scientists must acknowledge that their work participates in a broader political negotiation among human and nonhuman agents. “Earthbound scientists are embodied creatures. They form a people. They have enemies” (252). They form a territory that is neither purely local nor purely global, but defined by the reach of scientific infrastructures that make planetary processes perceptible. Latour argues that fear, far from undermining scientific rigor, can sharpen it. To be affected by one’s findings is not a failure of objectivity, but a recognition of involvement.

In this sense, the scientist occupies a distinctive role in the New Climatic Regime. Through global networks of observation and measurement, scientists articulate the actions of agents—organisms, oceans or ice sheets—that cannot otherwise speak within political discourse. Facing Gaia does not offer a programmatic solution to the climate crisis but rather conceptual clarity to account for why neutrality has become impossible, why scientific knowledge is now politically consequential, and why facing Gaia is ultimately a question of how, and whether, humans will continue to inhabit the Earth.

Dev Harlan, 2025
HUMAUN2000, Core As Praxis/Fieldwork
Prof. Zachary Levine

Works Cited

Latour, Bruno. Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime. Translated by Catherine Porter, Polity Press, 2017.