Over the past weeks, a plethora of articles explored the relations between the COVID-19 crisis and the climate catastrophe by framing the former as an opportunity to learn lessons for tackling the latter. Among the articles was an essay by Bruno Latour, inviting us to address the current pandemic as a “dress rehearsal” that incites us to prepare for climate change. Elsewhere, Latour argued that the pandemic had “actually proven that it is possible, in a few weeks, to put an economic system on hold everywhere in the world and at the same time, a system that we were told it was impossible to slow down or redirect.” Yet, despite the fact that both events constitute globally shared “collective” experiences, immediate societal responses to them vary greatly. While both events have their causes and effects entwined, their different spatio-temporal scales and socio-ecological implications make socio-political responses to them difficult to compare. Of course, this is not to say that links between the two events do not exist. The outbreak of the zoonotic COVID-19 is entangled with multiple and often interacting “threats to ecosystems and wildlife, including habitat loss, illegal trade, pollution, invasive species and, increasingly, climate change.”
Citizen Sensing and Ontopolitics in the Anthropocene
Berti Suman A
2020
Abstract
Over the past weeks, a plethora of articles explored the relations between the COVID-19 crisis and the climate catastrophe by framing the former as an opportunity to learn lessons for tackling the latter. Among the articles was an essay by Bruno Latour, inviting us to address the current pandemic as a “dress rehearsal” that incites us to prepare for climate change. Elsewhere, Latour argued that the pandemic had “actually proven that it is possible, in a few weeks, to put an economic system on hold everywhere in the world and at the same time, a system that we were told it was impossible to slow down or redirect.” Yet, despite the fact that both events constitute globally shared “collective” experiences, immediate societal responses to them vary greatly. While both events have their causes and effects entwined, their different spatio-temporal scales and socio-ecological implications make socio-political responses to them difficult to compare. Of course, this is not to say that links between the two events do not exist. The outbreak of the zoonotic COVID-19 is entangled with multiple and often interacting “threats to ecosystems and wildlife, including habitat loss, illegal trade, pollution, invasive species and, increasingly, climate change.”
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