Welcome, everyone, to this keynote event that's part of the Feverish World Symposium. I'll say a little bit about that symposium in a moment. I'm Adrian Ivachev, Adrian, many of you know me as. I'm a professor of environmental thought and culture here at the University of Vermont. Most of you have probably never seen me wear a tie in all the years I've been here. What that tells you is that this is a special event. It's a special event because of our honored guest, who I will introduce in a few minutes after I tell you a bit more about the program. But I will tell you that it took us about three years to get of work, to get Bruno Latour to come here and organizing this event, which would be centered around ideas that are relevant to his work. But before I introduce Professor Latour, I just want to tell you that there's a bit of a program tonight, which is wonderful. And there are many people to thank to make this program possible. There are the various collaborators and departments and schools and colleges who signed on to the proposal to make Professor Latour a Burak scholar, and a Burak lecturer here. And they include the environmental program, which I am part of, and the Rubenstein School for Environments and Natural Resources, which I am part of, the College of Education and Social Services, and the Departments of Anthropology, History, and Geography. And then there is the President's Office with the wonderful Susan Davidson, who I've been able to work with beautifully to make this happen. There is the Dan and Carol Burak Fund, which brings Burak scholars, Burak lecturers here. There are the deans of the colleges who are supportive. I see Nancy Matthews, dean of the Rubenstein School here. I'm sure there are others that I should thank individually, but we have a program before us. Among the features of this program, we will have the Poet Laureate of Vermont recite a poem, which I am told bears the same title without knowing it as the talk by Bruno Latour, which is a different title than what's on the poster. So it's one of the beautiful coincidences. The Poet Laureate of Vermont being Chard Dignore. Chard Dignore, I'm trying to say it with the French pronunciation, being Canadian. I should be able to do that. The author of six collections of poetry who teaches poetry at Providence College, lives in Putney, Vermont, Westminster West, to be precise. Following the poem, the reading, we will have our central speaker, Professor Latour. I'll come to him in a couple of moments. After that, we will have a discussion facilitated by Steve Paulson, co-host of the National Public Radio program to the best of our knowledge. Steve and Strain Champs have been with us the last couple of days, facilitating conversations among a wide array of wonderful guests, speakers, artists, musicians, and others. And he will be facilitating a conversation between two respondents, Professor Robert Boschmann from Mount Royal University in Calgary, Alberta. Rob is an eco-critic, a literary critic, author of books, including In the Way of Nature, Found in Alberta, and On Active Grounds, currently working on epigenetic theory and intergenerational trauma. He will talk about experiences with Professor Latour. He has also been the organizer of Under Western Skies, which I think of as a model conference, a biannual twice. Now, once every two years, is that biannual or is that, yes, conference that had four renditions of which Professor Latour and the Gaia Global Circus that he has written an opera for, at least one opera, came to Under Western Skies, a very interdisciplinary environmental conference. And the other respondent and panelist will be Turquase Dyson, who is our other featured speaker later this evening at 7 o'clock here in Ira Allen Chapel. Turquase Dyson is a professor at Yale University, a painter and visual artist of many media who has been also speaking at Fever's World earlier today. And we invite you all to stay for the evening's talk at 7 o'clock. She is here thanks to the Mali Ruprecht Fund for Visual Arts and to the Art and Art History Department. We've had many collaborators working with us to make Fever's World, this three-day event possible, including multiple departments, schools, colleges at the University of Vermont, Champlain College, St. Michael's College, Burlington City Arts, various others, and I know them off by heart, but I don't want to spend the next few minutes talking about that. And following that, we'll open it up to some public Q&A, broader discussion. We do have a book table featuring the latest two books by Professor Latour. One of them just came in, was just released. It's called Down to Earth, the subtitle being something about the new climatic regime. I forget politics in the new climatic regime, I believe. And the previous book being Facing Gaia. We've had a discussion group read that book together here at the university and discuss it. And there will be a Carolina bell performance of the bells here in Ira Allen Chapel ending this part of the evening. The performance by UVM Professor, composer, professor of music, university organist, and Carolonneur, David Nyweem, who has also composed music for Feverish World, which you would have heard on Saturday if you were at our parade downtown. Bells from various churches were heard on the streets of downtown Burlington. Thank you, David, for your work on that. Which brings me to Bruno Latour, who for most of you probably needs no introduction. He's one of the most cited scholars alive today on the planet. I believe I say that because I did a study of that. I analyzed Google Scholar and found out of the last 100 years who are the most frequently cited scholars. But anyway, I won't get into that. But I will say a few more words. He's an anthropologist of science, philosopher of science and technology, and of the contemporary world, of the modern world. The word modern figures prominently in some of his writings, who conducted field studies in Africa and California, field studies in scientific laboratories, including the work that went into an influential book in the field of science and technology studies called Laboratory Life with Steve Wolgar, another book called Science in Action, and a book called The Pasturization of France, as in Pasteur, Louis Pasteur. His 1991 in English translation book, We Have Never Been Modern, had, I would say, a profound influence on some people, including myself. And it was followed by several other books in a vein that tried to analyze some of the, we might call them, dysfunctions of the modern world, or something like that. Perhaps that's too judgmental. Books like The Politics of Nature, Reassembling the Social, On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods, books more specific to specific fields, the making of law, an ethnography of the conseil d'état, rejoicing, or the torments of religious speech, and books that were also exhibitions of art, highly interdisciplinary and huge exhibitions, including atmospheres of democracy, making things public, and iconoclash. I mentioned his writing operas and other integration of arts and scholarship, which features heavily, especially in his more recent writings. I could go on like this for quite some time, but I don't want to burden you with hearing from me. So at this point, I'm going to invite Vermont's poet laureate, Chard Denour, up on stage. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Adrian. It's a great honor and pleasure to be here this evening and to share this stage with Bruno Latour. I'm going to read the second poem in this series of poems called Dispatch from Gaia. And as Adrian said, I had no idea that that was the title that Bruno Latour was also going to use. We had a nice talk about that. So the subtitle for this poem, I read the first one at the opening, simply called Dispatch from Gaia. This poem has the subtitle, I stand beneath the mountain with an illiterate heart. And it has an epigraph by a former poet laureate of Vermont, Galway Cannell. We have to feel our own evolutionary roots and to know that we belong to life in the same way that other animals do in the plants and the stones. The real nature poem will not exclude man and deal only with the animals and plants and stones, but it will reach the connection deeper than personality, a connection that resembles the attachment one animal has for another. I stand beneath the mountain with an illiterate heart and listen to the hermit thrush I cannot see in the brush and try to call back to in my human voice that makes no sense to him. So I hum instead with the valves of my voice, believing in sounds more than words to tell the truth in a musical code that pierces the woods. I stand beneath the mountain with an illiterate heart and watch animals and plants disappear. They are being sucked out through a hole in the sky. We've made ourselves by so much spraying. I'm standing now on the step of the world, waiting to go a year as a day. The reel to reel is wailing. I stand beneath the mountain with an illiterate heart and listen to the wisdom of wind in breezes and blasts. The animals do not bother to say goodbye. Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and knowledge that pass all the argument of the earth. Hazelnut, blackberry, marmot. I stand beneath the mountain with an illiterate heart in my unknowing, which is to say my wonder at the one inherent nature in every living thing. I stand beneath the mountain with an illiterate heart that can only marvel at but never know creation's alphabet despite my genius. The darkness of my sacred ignorance enlightens me where to go and what to do in the face of a face that seeks to place only itself before it. A voice cries out from the mountain summit. Lie down again before the lords of earth and let them creep all over you. Let just one of them speak for all the others the way they do.  Just listen to the voice that's won inside the song of every animal, plant, and stone. It's a chorus called beauty. It's the list we've loved to keep. It's the list we love to keep adding to. Know was it true who cannot see himself in the fly or flee or molecule can speak for any other, although his voice may boom like thunder in a crowded hall, although he may beguile a throng with empty words, although he may be illiterate in the valley of his own thinking. So I do. I begin to squeak then howl at the behest of a toad called golden, at the bidding of a parakeet called Carolina, at the beckoning of a tiger called Tasmanian. One time, our time is short, I bellow, like a buffalo to the wall in Washington. Each letter of earth is so inscrutable, we know we're living forever when we behold them. We know the fields through which we're walking are the fields of heaven also, in which we're tasting and seeing, seeing and tasting. We must do what we must in a hurry, as always, to save them, reinvent, and sacrifice. Today is tomorrow. Thank you. Thank you, Chard Denour. And now I will invite and welcome Professor Emeritus of Sciences Po Paris, fellow of the Center for Media, Media Kunst, Center for Media Arts, honorary doctor from six universities, holder of multiple chairs and professorships, winner of multiple awards, including the Holberg Prize for Outstanding Scholarly Work in the Arts and Humanities, Social Sciences, Law, and Theology, Professor Bruno Latour. As you can imagine, it's very unfair of your organizer to have asked me to speak after a poet, because the tone of poetry is precisely to do in what, two minutes and a half? 10 times more than what I can do. I just want to reassure Denour, the French name, Denour, that the title of my talk is actually taken from him yesterday. So it's not great coincidence. This is an image I took from a plane going to Rob Boschman's event in Calgary two years back. And I looked at the window and I found that the ice in the Baffin's Sea was actually screaming at me.  So I felt that this was a message to me in this sort of munch-like scream coming from the ice pack directly to me. And I was actually going to Calgary to play a few days later the play, Gaia Global Circus, which was finished and ended in Calgary two years ago. The play where we were interested with my team to make the decor, the stage set, actually as active as the actors. And you see that the main characters of this play is actually the canopy moving around, which we try to make and to which we try to give some sort of uncertain agency like we do with puppets. I'm going to talk about Gaia, which is a very interesting concept in my view. And unfortunately, which is not always understood and requires some sort of rethinking precisely to be in the end in a sort of situation comparable to the mood in which Ralph put us a minute ago, which is Gaia is simultaneously a scientific hypothesis and a mythological term. And sometimes people say, well, it's a great defect. It should be called somewhere else. It should have a boring title like Earth System Science. But I think this is wrong. It's because it has this ambiguity that it keeps being, of course, misunderstood, but also productively misunderstood. And I want to show you one of the problems is that it's difficult to face it. And I want just one minute and a half of this little dance. It's a split screen, so on both sides you see exactly the same thing. It's actually a sort of angel of Joe's story where you would have at hand an idea of why it is difficult to face Gaia. She flees. She turns around. And when she turns around, she faces something which is even more terrifying in a way than what she fled from in the first part of the dance movement. And she even is tempted to go backward. Very lightly backward from what she has seen. So this is a problem is that we will do everything to avoid facing Gaia, which is something which we fled and then we turn around and we see this. And this is fairly different from Benjamin Angel of history. The reason is that the problem is we have a representation of a globe which is entirely organized or predicated on some sort of a cartography of this globe we have at school and which has been reinforced, of course, very much when the blue planet image was sent to us by the NASA. But there is a big problem in this view of the Earth as a globe is that most of what is alive, actually everything which is alive, is invisible because of this microscopic size of a life that is of Gaia when you compare it to the masses of a globe and of course the globe is viewed from out of space where no one except a few people in the space stations reside. So the paradox is that we are always talking about nature saving the planet and so on and so forth without any representation of what the planet look like. And that's a problem I tried to understand for many years now since the politic of nature. When we had an idea of a planet as nature, nature was supposed to be what would actually unify us. That is, it was the idea that if we see this planet unified, this was in the 70s, we would have a feeling that we are in the same space, so to speak, that we are in the same common world and that we would politically agree. And what happened exactly the opposite? That is, in fact, nowadays there's nothing more disputable, more divisive, more competitively divisive than the question of nature. If you think about water, if you take about climate, if you look about food, the way you build houses. So in fact, instead of having an increase in unity, political unity, because you appeal to nature, you actually end up with an increase in disputes and controversies. And of course this is very nicely shown by one of the books by, oops, this thing should do it. Oh, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. This is one you want to do, oh, this is one to, when you want to do the manner, more and more division. And you have a very nice book by Michael Mann, who was, I use it because it has the same name dispatch, the hockey stick dispatch from the climate war. And it's important that we think of that, which is that the question of the climate, which in a way, if you think of it five minutes, should have been a great unifying element because we are all in it and we are all part of it and responsible for it, is actually the most divisive of all the issues which we have to deal with nature. And the reason is that the globe is not as a representation as an image, as a picture, as a ideological home, if you want, a very bad rendering of what we live in. So I was very interested in a group of scientists who are calling themselves critical zone scientists using the word critical zone to describe something which is critical in the sense of thermodynamic out of equilibrium, but also in the sense of being fragile and this very film, very thin varnish of film is what I'm interested in trying to represent to you. When we talk about nature with this notion of a globe, we immediately jump to a global image which is the false harmony which is supposed to unify. But when we talk about critical zone, we talk about something different, which is a very small, it's not even the varnish of this luck turn, compared to the size of the earth, it's completely invisible. The few kilometers up and the few kilometer down and yet this is where everything which we have ever experienced, that all life forms have ever experienced is there. Of course, we might find other places, other earth, other planets and many people are trying to find them but so far we have only one. So the thing where we reside, the place where we reside is a thin biofilm on which about with in addition, we don't know that much. So that the scientists I'm following are actually trying to find out how this earth system science function without immediately having to bring in the whole question of nature, the whole question of the universe or the whole question of the inside earth, even though it's interesting, of course to have astronomer and geologist in it, there is a very specific problem with this critical zone and there is a very specific epistemology. The very specific epistemology is that when you work on this very thin layers and of course this is disproportionate here, you actually are always entering into controversies.  It's not the case if you work on the big bank or if you work on the inside of the earth, no one will come into your lab and say, I disagree with what you say about the iron core of the earth. But if you say anything about the critical zone, anything about the element of our daily life, immediately you will be engaged in some sort of controversy. And of course the climate controversy is one extreme but there are endless numbers of others and which put the scientists I'm working with in a position which is very different from the one which I've been studied before. We are sort of more quiet and say, well I'm just doing science, I'm not entering into any political question. Every time if you say we have passed the 400 PPM of CO2, people would say this is a policy statement and some people would say it's even a Chinese plot against to bring socialism to the United States. So the word fuses, I try to reintroduce the word fuses which is the old Greek terms to talk about nature before we had this idea of nature as a universe but something which is about modification, transformation and it's of course something that resonates very well in a lot of work in poetry and in novels and art. And here I cite especially the book by my friend Richard Paus of a story which is entirely a fuses book about trees and people. And it's all about nature but except nature is all about movement, metamorphosis, transformation in a very beautiful way. So what I'm trying to do is to document those critical zones, try to go as many as I can. And the critical zone is usually actually not very spectacular water catchment and it's equipped by as many instruments that we can bring in and trying to understand the dynamics of water, soil, rocks, atmosphere, not high atmosphere but at the bottom of the atmosphere and of course all the biochemical cycles that go with it. And I'm going to, when I cite this one because one of us here is actually a geochemist working in this same critical zone in, this is North Carolina if I'm not mistaken, or South Carolina, Calhoun and you see a typical problem which is this land has been colonized and then it has been worked out by slaves for a long time for cotton and tobacco and there is no land anymore. Slaves have disappeared and the land has disappeared and it's completely ruined. And it takes a few millenaries to get the soil back. So most people here in the Calhoun critical zone trying to understand how it works and to add to this understanding of geology and soil science, hydrology, also gathering all the information they have on the human, the entropic use of it especially by putting on top of the zone all the information they have about the land tenure. And of course I'll come back to that because the question of land tenure and property is one of the key things in what I'm trying to do. This is another one. You see a llama there, but it's actually in France. It's actually the river. I don't know, I don't remember why the llama was there. This is another one. You see two very big equipment in the middle of nowhere. It's a very strange way of doing science because it's actually transforming a piece of land into a very high tech laboratory at level of precision and instrumentation that they say is often superior to what you get into a lab. But the idea is that to bring, to keep the link between very basic science with highly instrumented, on the bottom you see a gravitometer, and to make that for sciences which so far were not that equipped with basic science instrumentation like soil science or hydrology. But the prize to represent it, and this is a paper I'm very interested in this context to present because it's written by an architect with also an artist, Alexandra Aren, a geochemist, Jerome Gallardet, and myself. And what I ask Alexandra is, okay, can you get us out of a notion of a globe when we talk about life forms? I don't want to see any image associating the question of ecology and nature with the blue planet anymore. No balloon, no circle of any sort, or at least no globes which are coming from the cartography of the 17th century, themselves actually coming from Roman Empire images. You know the idea that the Orbis Terrarum is one circle and that you hold it. So what she did is to try to get, and I'm not sure you see it because it's a bit far, drawing a small, maybe it's better here. But the idea was to say, okay, I'm picking a place on this blue planet that you don't want to hear about and trying to reverse the shape like a globe and then to flip the Earth so that now, I don't have a, well, I have to move then, not as the Earth as a circle, as a globe, but as a cycle. And in this diagram, which is very interesting diagram for me, the idea is that you now have transformed the life, the whole, the infinitely small biofilm that no one could really see when you have a globe view into something which is probably like, you call it a manage, and you call it a manage when you bring kids to school and it turns like this. Mary go around. Okay, imagine a series of Mary go around, except they don't go at the same speed and they're all nested into one another and you move from one to a different speed. In the middle is the atmosphere. That's the nice thing with this diagram is that it's a different view when you are, the idea of the Earth in the globe, when you're on top of it, and then you have a whole universe by you, right? You feel free and superior and then you go, you look at the infinite sort of dome of the universe. And here it's not the case. You're inside and you don't, there's no outside, which is really our situation, but what you get is a cycling and we are not the difficulty of understanding the Earth system is always to transform cycle into circles and in fact it's cycle. We are constantly transforming the geochemistry of these places and what is doing most of the activity and energy is of course the sun. And you see it's an interesting invention made by an architect. At the demand of a geochemist, please give us a better representation on what we are studying. And of course what is interesting here is that the chemist who was doing geochemists were complaining that no one in his laboratory, which I've been studying for several years, take them seriously because they say you are just superficial scientists. You just study the surface of the Earth. And we the geophysicists, we are the serious scientists. We study the deep Earth. And here you see it's exactly the opposite. Now the critical zone has a thickness and the deep Earth is actually thrown in the periphery so to speak. Which is, and the difference is of course the size of the cycle. So it takes a bit of time to get used to it but it has a great advantage. One I'm using which is to reconcile geocentrism and heliocentrism which is an idea that Copernicus never had. And of course to provide space so that we can actually visualize the critical zone with all the thickness that it should have even though it's just a few kilometers wide, it is actually made up of so many important phenomena that we need a place to locate them when you are geochemist or a hydrologist or actually an anthropologist. So of course it's also a way to represent Gaia. I'm obsessed by the discovery made by these two persons and often people say Gaia is Lovlok's idea which is true originally but it's actually Lovlok and Margulis' idea. Lovlok is still alive. We are celebrating 100th anniversary in a few months but Margulis unfortunately died very tragically a few years ago. What is interesting in the connection and I've done a lot of history of science but this one is really original is that both studied the same problem which is what is this critical zone? What is how all of these agents which are modifying the earth surfaces but at two completely different angle? Lovlok started when he was in Pasadena with a fourth experiment imagining how the earth would look if you were on Mars and how do you explain this thermodynamic equilibrium? And Margulis was simultaneously studying something entirely different at a completely different scale which was this extraordinary set of discovery controversial at a time but now completely orthodox which is that we are made of cells which are themselves made of lots of other entities so that the very idea of an organism made of individual cell is actually disappearing and this is why she called it Holobion and it's this mixture of the two and actually there is a very interesting film which I think will be released in January called Symbiotic Earth in case you want to understand better this extraordinary fierce women scientist, Lynn Margulis, which she's 25 and she's attacking the neo Darwinists with an immense energy and when the two together there's very contrarian interesting man, Lovelock, much older than her and this young biologist specialized in long-term history of the earth, the shock is Gaia. So it's important to understand that this Gaia is not unified and that's the key point I want to make and the point which you heard for those of you who had heard the two poems by Ralph it's very important that it is a multiplicity in the two poems every time people mention we mentioned Gaia we immediately bring in the notion of organism as if one we knew what an organism was which is of course itself a disputed things if you follow Margulis and two absolutely absurd when you bring it at the level of a planet. So the interesting thing in Gaia is that it's a name, an alternative name to avoid using nature which is of course the interest it has I'll come back to that in a minute for political reason but it's also immediately kidnapped by the notion of organism and it's attributed to unity a globality which it doesn't have. So the reason why it's important to keep focusing on the argument of Gaia is that it's the only alternative we have to the notion of nature and the notion of nature has lots of defect in order to do politics with it because of course it has inherited a tradition which is precisely the tradition that put us in this trouble in the first place this is the theme of much of my work and not only mine. So it's important not to consider Gaia as a god at least not as a god of totality. It might be a divinity but if you look at the archeology of Gaia that is the mythology of the characters in Greece she is actually or it is actually not a motherly figure whatsoever it's actually a terrifying figure, terrifying force which antedate all the gods all the Olympian gods are actually much later and it's fierceness of this character which is actually mythologically important to understand strange enough its scientific strength. So it's very important to keep the two together it is a very striking innovation in science and a striking innovation in mythology. That's why we need to keep the two together without immediately saying oh I know what Gaia is it's the idea that the earth is an organism. No it's exactly the opposite. For a reason which is well known in a series of paper we published recently with Tim Lenton who is a real, the contrary to me a real scientist from Earth Systems Science in Exeter in England and it's simplified in this diagram that he showed in his most recent paper is that depending on the scale and depending on the time you have completely different mechanism. So Gaia is not one, we are organism we have four or five different systems for feedback just of the feedback of our temperature because we are somewhere down there small organism and of course submitted to natural selection but you cannot apply this system to the rest to the other phenomenon that are running without correnting in Earth Systems Science. So the two things important in this diagram one of them is that the discovery of Lovelock and Margulis is that scale and duration, time and space if you want are the invention of the organism themselves. They produced the condition of existence, the atmosphere, the environment in which we are. They are not in an environment. Organism, life forms are not in space and time they make it and if they last and if they expand it's because they do the job. So this is a very interesting philosophical conundrum which is badly understood by philosophy of biology when you consider one organism but when you consider the organism as having produced their space and time lasted three million years and a half and expanded on the whole planet it's a completely different philosophy which is needed and that for me I have no time to get into the detail the discovery which is proper to the Lovelock Margulis. A discovery which, strangely enough, is not very well acknowledged by scientists even though everyone knows the consequence of that discovery is that we have to keep the Earth in a certain balance. It's a great paradox of history of science here. When you ask people do you believe that the Earth is a regulated somewhat regulated system? They say no, no, no, no. And if you have read the IPCC report of two weeks ago they say yes it's very important we have to keep the Earth into 1.5 degrees it's exactly the same argument. One is more legal and political but it's exactly the same argument. The Earth is a regulated system of some sort it has all of its mechanism, it's not unified, no but it has some sort of regulation and we have put it out of work. So it's a case which is in my view in the history of science quite unique is to have a theory which is spread everywhere it's basically built in the politics of climate completely and yet the origin of this argument and the scientific basis for it is unknown or at least it has not spread. People say vaguely yes there is a link between environment and life, atmosphere, rocks and life but it's a weak connection. It depends on the side of course but it's not a weak connection it's the same thing. And of course as Lenton said the two slides next are coming from Lenton is that if you look at the Earth in thermodynamic terms Gaia is invisible. The whole of life forms in billions of years have managed to capture only a tiny, tiny, tiny part of what the sun is sending. But if you look at the unbalance which is the famous diagram which is at the origin of discovery of Lovelock of course the imbalance between a biotic and an abiotic Earth is complete. If you look on the left side this is what the balance of chemical in the atmosphere look like and on the other side is without life. So Gaia is complicated to understand. Why? Because there is only one. It's an apex. You cannot compare hundreds of Gaia. So people are surprised and say why didn't Lovelock explain himself more clearly quickly but it's a great discovery. It's a novelty. You have to make, you have to work. What it is, this novelty. There's only one copy and all of this character are strange. It doesn't look like an organism except organism have produced it in billions of years. The market is like to say in the film I recommend you to look. Basically the whole affair is a question of bacteria. We are little things added to the bacteria. It's really the bacteria who made this imbalance into the chemical of the atmosphere. Okay, well, what's the consequence of that argument in political term? And I want to do the last 10 minutes of this talk around this question and it's the object of this little book which is out really today in America. Well, the argument is this. Very well known that there is no relation between the territory we occupy and the mass expand of the territory we profit from. Some people show this diagram I think two days ago here in Feverish world. There is very simple to understand set of things. One of the many is that there is no correspondence between the sources of our prosperity and the extent of the territory that we can actually visualize and feel and for which we have legal dimension. And it's of course an old question which dates all the way from the occupation of America by Europe and then the use of coal and the use of oil and all of this thing which are of course very well known. They are very well known but they are never related to the question of the climate transformation and what I call the new political regime. But now, thanks to the president of the United States of America whose name I don't want to pronounce, we know why the president, this president made a great clarification in the ecological question when he abandoned the Paris Agreement. Of course it was a catastrophe, especially viewed from a French who were very proud of having had this great diplomatic success but one has to recognize that it was clearly saying the question of climate change is the political question. You, the other country, you might have a land which is submitted to this transformation but not us, okay? So it was a clear declaration of war in some sort of sense saying from now on the United States of America is no longer on the same land, on the same earth, on the same territory, on the same ground than the rest of other nations who are still sticking to this agreement we disagree with. So it transformed what was a sort of slightly wishy washy idea about agreement and harmony into geopolitics in the most classical sense of the word.   So that's a great clarification because it means that now we sort of have a vague idea that the global horizon, this is an image taken from a little book, the global horizon toward which people nonetheless were moving when they modernized themselves is gone, basically. This is the classical idea that we modernize. We leave aside this modernizing front all the attachment to the local, to the past, to things which are archaic and we move forward to this horizon, which of course in the US has been associated for many years, many decades with the notion of frontier. Of course no one would really see that as a frontier anymore but still it's there as a sort of idea. But it's gone. It's gone because of a new climate, there is no earth corresponding to the idea of a global. So we now have a new situation which allows us to differentiate two completely different notion of global which we're confused before. A notion of globalization in the sort of 18 on 20th century idea that you extend your view, you multiply your experience, you have multicultural and multi-scientific view and another one completely different which is that globalization is submitting the old earth to a very provincial and narrow definition of some people interest. And the two are very different. When you say I'm against globalization, it's not the same if you are for what I call globalization plus on the left or globalization minus on the right. But that allows us to reorient ourselves and I think of course Feverish World is a good place to begin to situate where we might land when we abandon globalization as a horizon. So my argument is that when we do the present situation is entirely organized by the denial of climate transformation. And I think many people here would agree with that. And the question of inequality and deregulation which all started by the way exactly in the same period in the Reagan time are the same thing plus migration. So there are four things which we have to keep into focus. Migration, deregulation, explosion of inequality and denial of climate. It's one and single phenomenon which is basically that the earth toward which we were moving attractor to on this image global is basically deeply abandoned. People at least the elite in this country and in Europe and probably also in China although it's slightly less sure know that this global has abandoned basically the rest of the world. It's no longer for the rest of the world to modernize. And that's happened actually there was a very interesting piece in the New York time a few weeks or months back by a call called Emmanuel or Nathaniel Rich who studied the sort of genealogy of the climate denial in the Reagan time and it's very interesting to see that immediately as soon as the 1980s people began to be sure of a climate transformation. People began to deny it immediately. So the two things are exactly that. It's not that they don't know. They know and this is of course a little bit of a plot not maybe a conspiracy theory of my part but something which has the character of a conscious decision. We believe those facts. It means that the common world to which we were claiming to go in the modernist period is not for everybody. So let's get rid of everybody deregulation. Let's keep us as far as possible from the consequence explosion of inequality which has never been seen before. And of course let's organize very efficiently and very efficiently the denial of science being produced. So now the thing is clear because we now sort of have a third attractor number three there which is in a way my rendering of everything people do when they talk about feverish word, ecology, transformation of a land, a different metrics to understand the local and the global, the whole transformation of energy and food and so on which is in fact another land, another pole, another horizon which is neither the number two, nor the global which is gone basically. I mean no one believes that the nine billion people will modernize at the level of American way of life. We know that calculation have been made, it requires five planets and when you do the very strange experiment which is to decide which day the American actually using the earth more than the earth gives them. I think it's something in February. I think it's March so we are over shooting the situation. So the global is gone and what happens now as you well know in this country but also in Europe everywhere is that then people decide to go back to the first attractor that is to the protection of a nation state. So the tragedy of the present day is that we know people who are moving to the global but know that it's suspended and disappear. Then they turn around and say well at least let's give us back the solidity and safety of the local, the nation state. It's true in Poland, it's true in Hungary, it's true now in Italy, probably Sunday in Brazil, everywhere and of course Brexit is a powerful case of that and here too. But of course in the meantime, the land, the soil, the earth, the place where we actually can rearticulate the question of where is our abundance coming from and where is our politics coming from is invisible. So I think all of these things we do here, all of these art forms that we developed theater, painting, activism, all of these things are actually trying to push and turn people, this is the two arrows there that you see, toward the terrestrial and say wait, it's the global is gone, the local is gone, the terrestrial is arriving, what is it shaped? How do we live there? What are the conditions of existence? What is the law there? What is the organization and with what sort of entity are we going from now on to survive? A set of questions which were associated in part with the left, when the left was actually trying simultaneously to move toward modernization and to avoid its defect, but which are new for them, new for the left as well, as everyone was done, things in ecology, they know how difficult it is to re-interest and re-mobilize people coming from the left because it's raised again the question, the two huge difficult question of people and land, which is the two basic anthropological question which are of course very tricky because often they have been associated with the right actually. And I finished just because I'm, sorry, one more minute, can I, one more minute? Anyway, I can't stop here. I'm trying to complicate my diagram because full point, oh, I forgot to say, there is an attractor full which is a very interesting attractor which is, I'm afraid to say, the out of this world but I don't think I need a long description, go to hell, which is of course, unfortunately very popular in this country. So I think a way to dramatize, now I want to dramatize a bit to finish this situation is that we don't live on the same planet. Remember in the old days people were saying, well, probably you don't live on the same planet but it was just an image, a sort of metaphor. And now it's literal, we don't live on the same planet and I've tried to calculate seven planet. I won't go into that because it's too late. But I found that in a book called The Climate Leviton, which is quite a striking image which is that it's New York City the day 2011, the hurricane Sunday, I think was the name. And only, everything is dark except the bank, Goldman Sachs. So Goldman Sachs is really in the same Manhattan space, completely different, completely different planet. It lives, it has electricity. It's ready for lift off. It looks a bit like Cape Canaveral, it's quite funny. This guy, where does he live? Musk, it's another planet sending a car in space and saying it's fun and silly. This is another planet. It's the planet of acceleration, it's the planet, will anyone goes to Mars? Yes, maybe, but not nine billion. So it has not the same space as the one in which the modernization was heading when I was a young man, you know, Melancholia, of course. Okay, well, this is it. I think we live in seven planets and just a bit of publicity next Friday in New York in case some of you are there. I will play in a play called Inside, which is about this topic. Thank you very much. At this point, we'll just take a minute to reset the stage for our discussion. Can you hear me? Yes, we are ready to go to the next part of our event after this incredibly invigorating and inspiring talk and we have a couple of respondents who will make comments after Bruno Latour's talk and then we are going to open it up to a conversation among the four of us and so we're gonna start with Rob Boschman, then we will go to Torquassee Dyson and Rob, why don't we start with you? Thank you, my name is Robert Boschman. I'm from Mount Royal University in Calgary, Alberta. And in 2008, I took it upon myself to gather colleagues and faculty members, administration members, students at Mount Royal University to begin thinking about convening a new kind of conference, sort of like Fever's World in many ways and Fever's World is a great example of the kind of idea we had in mind 10 years ago. And we planned for two years to try to, I think my original idea was to try to speak to some of the concerns and anxieties that I sensed as a teacher were coming out in the classroom. I teach eco-criticism, I teach literature in English from an environmental perspective. I've been doing that for my entire professional career. By 2008, I was also a parent and really sensing that I needed to bring a practical and activist mobilization to some of the thinking and writing and research that I've been doing. So the first Under Western Skies conference was in 2010 and then there were three more after that. And the last one in 2016, after several years' effort, I persuaded Bruno Le Tour and his actor, troupe, dramatic group from Paris, Guy of Global Circus to come to Mount Royal. And I think I just decided, let's do the whole thing. Let's have Bruno, but let's have Guy of Global Circus too. And that was a wonderful, life-changing and formative event. And really, having Bruno come and talk was one thing, but having the play performed as well was another thing. But then after that, Bruno approached me and said, I would like to do something while I'm here. And most people, when they come to Alberta, want to go see bounce. They want to see the mountains. They want to go to the beautiful national parks that we offer. Some people want to go to the oil sands and see that because that is quite the spectacle and has aroused global focus as well. But Bruno said no to either of those things. And I said, well, you know, we could go east to the Badlands of Alberta where we can visit the KT boundary and touch the Cretaceous lair and visit the Terrell Museum of Paleontology. And Bruno said, yeah, let's do that. So we went on a day trip together. We were day trippers. And this story ends with seeing Bruno in the antechamber to the Terrell Museum where there was a great globe. And as you spin this globe in the Terrell Museum, you move through all the paleontological eras of the Earth's history. And I think he was at the Devonian period when a little girl on the other side of the globe decided she was gonna spin it the other way. And there was an interesting moment where Bruno Latour was on one side of the globe and this tiny little girl was on the other side of the globe and they each had their hands out and were looking at each other across that globe. And finally mom came along and swept her away and Gaia, I guess, Gaia's not a globe but was able to continue to spin through its history so I'll, I guess I'll respond to the talk that we've just all experienced with that story and maybe add a little bit of further detail later. Hello, my name is Torquace Dyson and I'm a painter. And my interest in listening and the talk that was just given was a real particular entry point around epistemology, scale, and ideas of magnitude. And because I was trained as a painter and trained in the conversation of sculpture, image making, the history of image making towards ideas of humanism and how we sort of operate in our relationship to the planet is always hierarchical, right? So in this conversation around what it means to think about film and surface, what it means to think about positionality and understanding those things that aren't historically in particular, I'm interested in those disruptions. I'm interested in rethinking how the history of visualization of what we are sometimes calling nature in relationship to power, geography, not only climate change but environmental liberation and justice. So to think about or to rethink our capabilities around understanding how to position magnitude as a place of study instead of concentrating always on direction left and right, right? How to place the idea of abstraction and really grapple with different tears of abstraction and how that works and how things are sometimes visible and invisible and how we take those different systems now as a visual artist and say, hey, how do these questions of magnitude, scale, abstraction, visibility play into our understanding of contemporary painting and sculpture? Particularly thinking about someone like Richard Sarah or particularly thinking about someone like Nancy Holt who were using these sort of abstractions, shape language, surface to kind of introduce a new, I'll say further and question what it is to make image and believe in images. So I think that there's an interesting conversation to be had around this notion of Gaia as power, sometimes indifferent, but an absolute understanding of magnitude instead of surface and direction and exactitude that sometimes images perpetuate. So that's what I have to say. I'm new to everyone. So that's my entryway into this layer of philosophy, science, absolutely abstraction in the ways in which these things are embodied over time and how we perceive them now within this shift of, within these conditions of climate change but also the history of human rights abuse. So let's open this up to a conversation among the four of us. And it seems that there are a number of threads that we're trying to pull together here. One has to do with obviously the politics of Gaia and what we make of science in that response and what might be the role of artists in confronting the challenge that we're facing right now. And I'd like to back up for a moment, just talk about how we think about the role of science in our society right now, because obviously one of our great challenges is not only to understand the new science of Gaia that you were talking about Bruno, but how to confront the climate skeptics out there. And the question is, why is there so much resistance to the science that is at hand? And I guess, so let me sort of throw out a big question here. Is this a science problem? Is it ultimately a political problem that we're having so much resistance in the face of all the research that's out there? Is it a failure of the imagination that we can't wrap our heads around this scope of this problem? Bruno? Well, this is a thing of multi answers question. There is obviously a strong political aspect in the building of indifference to the question, which is what I try to articulate here. We know, it's a denial, it's not ignorant. We know it's true, but the consequence of that is so terrible for us that you will pay the price, not us. I mean, I think this is not a conspiracy theory. It is fairly reasonable in a way. You're saying there's active denial.  It's not ignorant. Actually, now, climate denial is getting down very much because of the indifference to the consequences of the action is exactly as strong. Actually, not only in this country, I mean, even in Europe, which tries itself on being on the good side, is actually not doing much.  And that's true of France as well. But I'd like to come back to this question of what the art is doing. Because one, which is quite complicated to understand is that the whole crisis is coming from the knowledge we have from the sciences. None of us would actually notice that the increase in temperature. I mean, my family would have because now we got a great one month earlier than before. I mean, it would have been. We should just make a point that you come from a wine growing family. So you understand the. No, but we would have just said, well, it's a fluke. I mean, it's something which no one would actually see that as a crime. So all of the thing, and if you take about, if we talk about disappearance of species, it's entirely thanks to a scientist and the activists associated with it that we know about it. So that's the first point. The second point that I think what you said is very important is that the chance in the connection with the artist and the scientist that before it was more scientist asking to help in popularizing the science. But now it's not the situation. The situation is we don't know how to represent the science to ourselves. And can you help? So it's a much more interesting type of demand, so to speak, coming from the scientists and trying to get the artist. And the reason, the third point is to answer your question that where the art is so important is that it's precisely because it's not a cognitive question at all.  And you produce some of this information in your radio station. So we have plenty. But we don't have a feel. We don't have the attitude which would allow us to use and metabolize this information. And that's why we need the poet, we need the painter, we need the theater people precisely not to give us another way of having the information. You talk about figuration, it's not about figuration. It can be as formalized as a tract as we want. But we need it to give us the set of attitude which allows us to metabolize what we hear. And I don't think people are actually cognitively deficient because they don't believe in all these things. It's fairly reasonable. When you hear this news, all this news, actually we are all climatic skeptics in practice. I came here by plane. I would love to follow up on that, the role of the artist in all of this. Why we need playwrights and painters and visual artists and how they can help us to, what you're saying, it's not a cognitive problem. So I don't know if reconceptualize is even the right word for it. How to feel this issue. I mean, what can these artists do to help us grasp the magnitude of climate change? And I throw that out to everyone on the panel here. I'm just remembering something I heard the environmental historian Richard White say. He said that when the Colombian exchange took place, there's controversy about what was known and what wasn't known at the time. And the controversy continues today. Who knew what? And when did they know it? Today's transition environmentally is great, if not greater than the Colombian exchange, but now we know. We all know. So that is, he argues, the major difference between the Colombian exchange, which was an environmental catastrophe for North America, at least, if all of the Americas and perhaps the globe. And the other thing that White said that stuck with me was that the history of recent human activity is in the air. It's all there in the air. Climate change is the history of recent human activity in the atmosphere around us, and it's all there. And then the third thing he said that was really shocking, I think shocking to the audience at the time, this was in 2010, was that climate change would create winners and losers and that everybody in the room and everybody in this room would likely be winners. But there would be many, many, many more losers. I want to push back a little bit and say that art is a hugely cognitive practice. It has with it and is indelibly tied to a history of science, technology, agenda, ambition, violent placement and displacement simultaneously. And I also want to push back against the idea that artists or art has these, has a sort of capability alone of being a kind of forward, through these solutions. And to say that, and I would not talk about figuration in that way. I'm not a figurative artist, but I understand the sort of dichotomy between figuration and abstraction is outdated, right? So that there's something in between the strategy of using aesthetics, didactics, abstraction, logic, and again, epistemology, towards a new kind of amalgamation of disciplines, right? So when we're in the room, when I'm in the room with a scientist and that could be someone who's interested in oceanography, it could be a radical engineer, it could be an architect. The condition is not who is first, right?  That land isn't innocent. That concrete isn't innocent. So I would try to create a row of simultaneity so that artists have expectations on our own selves to be critical, right? We're not innocent. But to say that a push forward in relationship to climate change and really doing some work to I think reverse and or heal from the kind of art conditions that have perpetuated a kind of modernism that continues to colonize, recolonize and extract. So I just want to say that as a way to think through the ways in which this idea of figuration versus abstraction, surface versus depth, direction again versus magnitude is all I think, and I want to bring it up again, this condition of scale, right? So if we're doing these things and I think this idea of the reverse of globalization can also be a performance, right? I'm not sure that I believe this president when he says, wait, no, it's your problem. I think what he's replacing this with, and I think clearly with the November elections coming up, this sort of reintroduction as capital is God, right? Because the way in which he's dealing with the Middle East alone is fact less. So he's even lending himself to an abstraction and belief that is completely against and completely for a kind of globalization that goes to, and I would argue, the East African slave trade, right? So it's not, I think, moving away from, and I have to think about this more, but I am interested in the false presence of this administration pretending and selectively thinking about who's gonna be responsible for climate change and who's gonna deal with the realities of rising seawaters, right?  So I think it's, I'm interested in that, not creating, yeah, so that's what I'll say. Well let me follow up with you. As artists. Sure, yeah, well Bruno, you were the one who made the case that we need the artists, we can't just rely on the scientists. Can you expand on that? Well again, I think because the situation is new. I mean, there's no precedent of people who had literally, not figuratively, to take care of the earth because reacting to their own action. I mean, of course, the whole symbolic system of every culture we know were, of course, built on this thing between politics and cosmos. But it was symbolic. Now it's literal. And we have enormous prior, there's no precedent. So if we don't have the artist, I mean, the artist have always been those who invented the figurative and representational language and the affective language of a new situation. This is what happened during the Colombian exchange in Europe and we are now in the same situation. In the 16th century, it was a new earth, a new earth, emptied of its inhabitant. And now it's still a new earth, except it's not a new earth in addition. It's a new earth beneath our feet, so to speak, and which is moving. But I alluded in the lecture to other story by Richard Powell, but I think it's a good example of what you can do with a novel which has no political lesson explicitly. I mean, even though it's about ecoterrorists and basically all of the characters in the novel are actually failure, failed ecoterrorists. But what it does is that it builds the possibility of feeling in a very strange way, the weight, duration, rhythm of tweets in the history of humans. And of course there must be painting equivalent of that. They are theater equivalent of that. They are, of course, musical equivalent of that. But we need the whole gamut. We are dense, of course, equivalent of that. We need the whole gamut because we enter a situation where we have to metabolize all this information coming from science, which is also a new thing. So we have two things coming, information coming from science, it's new and we don't have a mental and affective equipment, what I call the aesthetics, the free aesthetics of science instrument, the aesthetics of politics, representation, and the aesthetic of yarn. And the free together, we can begin not to solve the question, but to open the possibility of raising the question. And that is a sort of antecedent problem. We have to build the possibility of just asking the question. And I just want to put in another plug for all of you in the audience, the novel that Bruno was just mentioning, The Overstory by Richard Powers, which is one of the most remarkable novels I have read in years. And it is, it's all about trees and the people, the scientists and the activists whose lives have been changed by trees. And one of the most remarkable things about this novel is you almost get the sense that you are seeing the world from the perspective of the trees themselves. And it sounds like you're saying that's... Without anthropomorphism. Yes. Without anthropomorphism. Which is an extraordinary success. But it's not the trees of eyes. I mean, it's not like in the world of trees. So Bruno, I want to take you back a little bit in your own personal history because there's a fascinating story here.  Because you were saying that we should be a little leery of some of the truth claims of scientists, of what is called a scientific fact. And you were saying that we need to understand the social dimensions of how science is produced. And your critics, many of whom were scientists said, you were saying that, oh, science is relativistic. There's no such thing as absolute science. And then several decades later, you are one of the most prominent, one of the most outspoken intellectuals in the world sounding the alarm about climate change, which is all based on science. And I do the same thing. You do the same thing. Just that the situation has come. Well, you're saying that your same critique of how science is produced, you're doing the same thing now as you talked about decades ago. The study I'm doing now in critical zone, exactly the sort of thing I did 40 years ago in laboratory life. Except 40 years ago, scientists believed they were protected by the authority of science, which no one believes in anymore. And now they turn to me and say, please help us to defend science because you talk about things which we never know how to talk about. Institution, money, media, peer review, all sorts of a material condition which we took before as a critique, but now we understand it's actually a protection. You need a civilization to have a science. And we are not, this is why I have another view of the fake news and all of that. It's because you need a common world in order to be able to believe and have respect the authority of science. But if you have people who say, no, no, we are not in America. America is no longer in the common world. Ecology is just happening to us. I mean, crisis is not happening to us. How could you be interested in anything like facts?  They have abandoned their ways. It's, they are manipulated by Fox News et cetera, but I think it's because we don't have a common world because precisely the decision has been to abandon to say, we will go on until when? I don't know, but we will go on without the rest of the world. And then we would, I certainly believe that science isn't completely attached to its condition of existence. Exactly what I said 40 years ago. So do you find it ironic that now the scientists are coming to you and saying, help us make the case for climate change? Yeah, I'd love to. I had a climate scientist a few years back who came to me and in a cocktail party and said, we know you need your help. And I said, well, it's a bit late. You should have defended me before because we were saying the same thing. You need an institution to have a science which is very obvious. But in the inverse 40 years ago, there was still this idea that science was something coming from heaven and I'd know it was just in the head and that they needed no support of any sort. And when they were smashed by the climate skeptic themselves, often scientists, they realized that it was a completely wrong defense. So I do the same thing by the time I stand and the authority of science has to be reinserted. When we stated, it's the irony of being older. I do want to have a chance to throw it to the audience for a question or two. Before I do that, just one question, and again, I'll direct this to you, Bruno. Are you hopeful? Are you pessimistic about the state of the world that we've been talking about? Is sort of the politics of Gaia and what we're facing in terms of climate change? Well, first time from born in Burgundy, which is not a place for pessimists, people. We have very good wine, although we don't know if we will have wine of both two degrees, which is a problem. But my solution, which is sort of a, is Günther Anders' solution is that you have to be absolutely in despair to be in the good position. So he says it's a, yes, it's, Günther Anders was basically taking the same question, but during the atomic Holocaust it was called at the time. And he was trying to understand how can you live? And if you say hope, in France we have hope and espérance, we have two words. Hope, no, espérance, yes, but hope means that, well, maybe we can get by. This is hope is, if it's the sort of thing you, when you prepare an exam and you hope you are not going to be interrogated in the thing you have not rehearsed, espérance is something else, you know. It's a religious situation. You know it's desperate. Apocalyptic, they say. So I don't believe you can get into the psychological question without the religious aspect of the apocalyptic reasoning. You have to be in apocalyptic. Then you can work. Günther Anders had a very nice sentence, but I forgot it now, it's in the book on facing guy. Let's go to the audience, yes, right there, and just shout it out. Let me repeat the question. What is the attitude we need? Is it an attitude of despair to take in the fact of climate change? Well, it's not despair, but it's obvious that in this question, whenever you talk with people who are indifferent to the question, they say you have an apocalyptic reasoning. Immediately a few minutes, this is apocalyptic reasoning. My solution is to say yes. It is an apocalyptic reasoning. Then we'd better go to the source of this apocalyptic reasoning, which has nothing to do with catastrophism. It's just a very classic religious position, which is to say, well, it's the end, okay. Good, now we can start to act. But if you have decided that we will get by, all people will have always found a solution. It's not my problem. Maybe someone else will find a solution, you don't act. So there is something deeply important into the realization of, to be in a position of absolute despair, which is slightly exaggerated because it, I mean, the apocalyptic reasoning, and then things open up. Because of course, the idea that this is especially important in America, there is a deeply religious reason why people are indifferent in this country to the question. Because they believe they have been saved. The Americans believe that nothing can happen to them anymore. They are in America. They have already passed the apocalyptic situation. So it's a very strange position. People say why you should not get into the religious question, because it's ecological question. Why would you bring the religion? But religion is in it. If you have been saved and absolutely untitled to modernization, you cannot say it's going again. It's a problem. You say, no, no, we are entitled to modernization in America. Modernization is our lot. So why would you witch and? I think, I don't say it's the only reason of the indifference here, but it adds up to the question of capitalism and all the others one. And it's funny because in all this question in my friends in the history of environment and ecologists, et cetera, they never want to hear any theology, anything religious. And I think it's a deep mistake. And facing Gaia is in part, it was a Gifford lecture after all. Facing Gaia is in part, okay, let's take Seussly. You accuse me of being apocalyptic. I answer, yes. Now let's see what it means, precisely. I think it's very important. Turcasse, you were going to say something. I was going to say, under the rubric of human geography and thinking about how modernism has affected people, different people, different ways, right? So there's what's been produced as just a different demography, right? So if we were to think about the global West, America in particular, as sort of absorbing different kinds of conditions of the body of space and of power under modernism, then people will have to come to ideas of climate change very differently. So in some circles, we don't use climate change because climate change is a production or thinking about a sort of, to some extent, measurable human activity that has to do with extraction technology in a kind of mechanistic moment. But if we were to think about modernism in its different kind of historicities around globalization, then we understand that a kind of coming to terms with where we are now had everything to do with how people became American, right? So I think it's, I would caution us to really reintroduce ourselves to systems of epistemology, how do we understand, and particularly with global warming and climate change because our understanding of the history of Gaia in this sort of interconnectedness of the earth has been, you know, for a large part erased, right? So the idea of how do we look at, understand, and connect to the planet in relationship to geography and language, and I'll say, I won't say language, I'll say vocabulary isn't a real critical condition that I hope, that I hope we don't look for a single catastrophic event or a single kind of condition of solution or a single way of looking at frontality itself, right? And I think that when we talk about artists, I think that one of our capabilities is introspection. And another capability is to say, how do we not only visualize what is invisible but take to task simultaneously science industry vocabulary and language, right? So art registers at very different dimensions all around just like this idea of the circle and the cycle. I completely agree, one of the most sort of horrific representations of the organisms that we live on is that picture of the globe either flat or round, flat or round. And that's very violent. That would be better. Flat would be better. Round is over. But that kind of, that kind of essentialization is very, very violent and continues to be. Rob, did you want to add something? I'm an Americanist, so I was just thinking about how the concept of Gaia might play out in the United States of America with its history, with its Christian, long Christian history going back 400 years. And I was also thinking about the notes I made while Bruno was talking about what Gaia is not and wondering how America would respond to what Gaia is not. Not a blue dot, no space view, not an outside, not a globe, not an organism, not a machine, not a mother, not a god, not a unity, not a whole, it has no precedent, and it isn't nature. Instead, it's an envelope. That's one of the very few metaphors that Bruno seems willing to use. And even that. So how will America, with its deeply entrenched partially unconscious ideas about the human condition in the world and who we are as humans in the world, under a transcendent, omnipotent, all-knowing God, how will this idea of Gaia play out? I'm just wondering, and I don't know the answer. I don't know the answer. Maybe you know the answer, I'm a Canadian. I have many more questions. I'm guessing you have many more questions. We have no more time and we have another artistic experience in store for us, and thank you so much to our panelists. Thank you, Bruno Latour.


It has been long, I missed you all, I missed you all, I missed you all, it has been long that we spoke, it has been long that we gathered together, it has been long that we spoke.  I took time to plan for the ministry in Nigeria and I'm glad that we are up and running and glad to announce to you that we are now the fastest growing ministry in Nigeria within a space of one year, that is power, it can only be power. I also took time to gain ground because politics is very dangerous game, as you know that when you decide to fight for the people you must make sure that you are standing very strong from your root, it's not easy. I remember the last time I did politics, the last time I fought the PF government, it was terrible because I was fighting from another person's land, I was fighting from South Africa and it was so big. I can tell you many times that they came to assassinate me, many times they used people to try to assassinate me in the church, at my home and so on, so politics is a very strong thing that you need to prepare yourself and we have prepared ourselves, we are back, we are ready to fight again. I took time, usually I'm not somebody that just wake up and start fighting, you can see that before I fight I give several warnings and I give opportunity for amendment because I prepare myself, in the course of this preparation a lot of things go on, I spend most of the time under the sun, under the rain, so that's why you can see me, but it is okay, it is well, it is worth it, when the battle is won we are going to be okay, we are going to go back to the aircon. Just like I said, I'm back, this time it's going to be tough, this time it's going to be brutal, the reason why it's going to be brutal is that I have discovered that in Africa we have problems, our heads of states we keep electing people that are not supposed to be elected, we keep bringing criminals into power to come and destroy things, we are bringing people that are liars, we are bringing people that don't have anything good for Africa, they come into power and they don't want to have anything to do with Africa, I am coming there, this is brutal, this is just an example, like many people were saying, see I want lost popularity, see I want cannot do anything, I am here, I am 10 minutes online and there is already over, it's getting to 5,000 people that are watching now and there are people who say, see I want, see I want is gone, see I want will not do anything, I am going to do something and when I do it, it will be worth, when I do it, people will regret and people are going to cry and people will know, people will understand politics, usually in time like this, when things have not started being bad, when you take over power as an African president, when you take over power, you disconnect yourself from reality I was having a chat with one of the opposition leader who is going to be the next president of Zambia in the next few years and I was telling him to say, the problem with you guys is that before election you are humble, anyone can talk to you, anyone can speak to you, anyone you can hey you go, you take picture with people that are selling maize, you take picture with people that are selling on the street everywhere you are so humble, but once you take over power you become stupid I was telling him, the problem we have in Africa is that by the time it is campaign period they don't understand that there are people that they need to work with they don't understand their friends, they look for the poor and the youth are victims that is why this time around we must wake up


Where you have some main New York City factory footage take away at every factory New York City factory footage without Disney building across the street time-lapse sunrise crane view Pink pink pink pink wake up New York wake up a little crane. You're vaccinated. Time to crane. Yeah