Inhabiting The Earth

Over the last several decades, scholars and practitioners have progressively acknowledged that we cannot consider cities as the place where nature stops anymore, resulting in urban environments being increasingly appreciated and theorized as hybrids between nature and culture, entities made of socio-ecological processes in constant transformation. Spanning the fields of political ecology, environmental studies, and sociology, this new direction in urban theory emerged in concert with global concern for sustainability and environmental justice. This volume explores the notion that connecting with nature holds the key to a more progressive and liberatory politics.

This work undertakes an analysis of how Heidegger's thought can contribute to environmental ethics and to the more broadly conceived field of environmental philosophy. It looks at the status of nature and related concepts such as earth in his thought.

Since the 'sixties anxiety about the future of mankind has led to a number of major publications on the world's vital problems and the relationship be tween them, the best known being the reports to the Club of Rome. This study of the problems of providing living accommodation for a rapid ly growing world population, taking into account the limits that must be set to this growth, was started in 1973 at the Academy of Architecture and Erasmus University, Rotterdam, and testifies to the same anxiety. Inhabiting the Earth as a Finite World is the impressive result of a study of the consequences of meeting the just demand for good accommodation for all the earth's in habitants, worked out with the aid of a world model and a number of case studies. The value of models, especially very complex ones, is at present debatable. Nevertheless, they can often cast light on complex situations. The simplified form of the real situation, which every model in fact is, allows certain impli cations of decisions to be discerned and taken into account in planning. The comparison of the results of the study with the design process is a clear example of this.

The present ecological mutation has organized the whole political landscape for the last thirty years. This could explain the deadly cocktail of exploding inequalities, massive deregulation, and conversion of the dream of globalization into a nightmare for most people. What holds these three phenomena together is the conviction, shared by some powerful people, that the ecological threat is real and that the only way for them to survive is to abandon any pretense at sharing a common future with the rest of the world. Hence their flight offshore and their massive investment in climate change denial. The Left has been slow to turn its attention to this new situation. It is still organized along an axis that goes from investment in local values to the hope of globalization and just at the time when, everywhere, people dissatisfied with the ideal of modernity are turning back to the protection of national or even ethnic borders. This is why it is urgent to shift sideways and to define politics as what leads toward the Earth and not toward the global or the national. Belonging to a territory is the phenomenon most in need of rethinking and careful redescription; learning new ways to inhabit the Earth is our biggest challenge. Bringing us down to earth is the task of politics today.

Ketchvar III's mission is simple: travel to Planet Earth, inhabit the body of an average teenager, and determine if the human race should be annihilated. And so Ketchvar—who, to human eyes, looks just like a common snail—crawls into the brain of one Tom Filber and attempts to do his analysis. At first glance, Tom appears to be the perfect specimen—fourteen years old, good health, above average intelligence. But it soon becomes apparent that Tom Filber may be a little too average—gawky, awkward, and utterly abhorred by his peers. An alien within an alien's skin, Ketchvar quickly finds himself wrapped up in the daily drama of teenage life—infuriating family members, raging bullies, and undeniably beautiful next-door neighbors. And the more entangled Ketchvar becomes, the harder it is to answer the question he was sent to Earth to resolve: Should the Sandovinians release the Gagnerian Death Ray and erase the human species for good? Or is it possible that Homo sapiens really are worth saving? Wickedly wry and hysterically skewed, David Klass's take on teen life on our fabulously flawed Planet Earth is an engrossing look at true friends, truer enemies, and awkward alien first kisses. Stuck on Earth is a 2011 Bank Street - Best Children's Book of the Year.

In a series of televised interviews broadcast in spring 2022, Bruno Latour explained, in clear and straightforward terms, how humans have changed the planet and why environmental disasters are an intrinsic part of modern life. We have now come to realize that all life depends on a thin skin of our planet that is only few kilometres thick – what scientists call the ‘critical zone’. Our capacity to continue to live on a planet we are transforming is now at risk and if we wish to survive as a species, we must put an end to the mechanisms of destruction, rethink our connection to living beings, and face head-on the confrontation between the extractivists who are exploiting the Earth’s resources and the ecologists. This poignant reflection on the greatest challenge of our time was also an opportunity for Latour to explain the underlying thread that guided his work throughout his career, from his pathbreaking research on the social construction of scientific knowledge to his last writings on the Anthropocene.

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