TY - BOOK ID - 15932369 TI - Facing Gaia : eight lectures on the new climatic regime AU - Latour, Bruno AU - Porter, Catherine PY - 2017 SN - 9780745684338 0745684335 9780745684345 0745684343 9780745684376 PB - Cambridge Polity DB - UniCat KW - Gaia hypothesis. KW - Philosophy of nature. KW - Nature in literature. KW - Climatic changes KW - Philosophical anthropology. KW - Nature KW - SCIENCE / Philosophy & Social Aspects. KW - Philosophy. KW - Effect of human beings on. KW - Science / philosophy & social aspects. KW - Philosophy of nature KW - Environmental protection. Environmental technology KW - 551 KW - 504 KW - 504 Environment. Environmental science KW - Environment. Environmental science KW - 551 General geology. Meteorology. Climatology. Historical geology. Stratigraphy.Paleogeography. KW - General geology. Meteorology. Climatology. Historical geology. Stratigraphy.Paleogeography. UR - https://www.unicat.be/uniCat?func=search&query=sysid:15932369 AB - "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 continuously 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"-- ER -