Precis: Bruno Latour's "It's Development, Stupid!" or: How to Modernize Modernization

In Bruno Latour's "It's Development, Stupid!" Or: How to Modernize Modernization, Latour argues that environmentalism is not only the a description of a state of mind that is behind the modern era, but also that it purports to engage and to disperse ideas that are oversimplified and impotent in the face of the real environmental problems we now face. He argues that modern environmentalists should call themselves, though it is not necessarily the best term, is "postenvironmentalists" as they must now identify themselves with a group in favor of real, lasting and immediate environmental benefit that results from the resituating of our own connection to nature.

In many ways, Latour's argument is a rebuke of the engaged, green masses for not having done enough; he's yelling at us for having read Mike Davis and not having signed up for the Peace Corps, for attending Power to the Peaceful and Sea World as a means of global change. In the excerpt's conclusion, Latour writes,

"Environmentalists say: 'From now on we should limit ourselves,' postenvironmentalists exclaim: 'From now on, we should stop flagellating ourselves and take up explicitly and seriously what we have been doing all along at an ever increasing scale, namely, intervening, acting, wanting, caring.'"

While Latour discusses several paradoxes of environmentalism, this is his most effective and move palpable. Environmentalism has failed (think Al Gore in the recent SNL threatening to tape guns to trees) by trusting its own slow success. Latour offers a call to arms, but not merely to act. He asks that we reidentify our own relationship between Science and Nature.

Probably the most objectionable claim in Latour's piece is that man and Nature, or Science and Nature, are becoming more and more entangled rather than separated. Many argue that mankind is the bringer of artifice and Nature is that which lacks man. However, as Latour points out,

"Nature whose laws should remain 'untouched by human values,' needs our constant care, our undivided attention, our costly instruments, our hundreds of thousands of scientists, our huge institutions, our careful funding. We had Nature, we had nurture, but we don’t know what it would mean for Nature itself to be nurtured."

There is a quality of Nature that can no longer exist in Nature. If we are to return to the earliest part of the course, we could say that Latour is essentially arguing the impossibility of a Nature 4 and for the a greater embrace of a Nature 6 that incorporates a certain innate quality of man because man is part of Nature. Nature seems here to be an entity with which we are not only entangled directly as a species, but also cannot extract ourselves from it because we have made it a tabula rasa that each culture, or generation of environmentalists, actively reengineers.

Jen Cowitz