Critical Zones: The Science and Politics of Landing on Earth

by Bruno Latour

Bruno LaTour (Editor) and Peter Weibel (Editor)

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Book cover for Critical Zones

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Artists and writers portray the disorientation of a world facing climate change.

This monumental volume, drawn from a 2020 exhibition at the ZKM Center for Art and Media, portrays the disorientation of life in world facing climate change. It traces this disorientation to the disconnection between two different definitions of the land on which modernizing humans live: the sovereign nation from which they derive their rights, and another one, hidden, from which they gain their wealth—the land they live on, and the land they live from. Charting the land they will inhabit, they find not a globe, not the iconic “blue marble,” but a series of critical zones—patchy, heterogenous, discontinuous.

With short pieces, longer essays, and more than 500 illustrations, the contributors explore the new landscape on which it may be possible for humans to land—what it means to be “on Earth,” whether the critical zone, the Gaia, or the terrestrial. They consider geopolitical conflicts and tools redesigned for the new “geopolitics of life forms.” The “thought exhibition” described in this book can opens a fictional space to explore the new climate regime; the rest of the story is unknown.

Contributors include

Dipesh Chakrabarty, Pierre Charbonnier, Emanuele Coccia, Vinciane Despret, Jerôme Gaillarde, Donna Haraway, Joseph Leo Koerner, Timothy Lenton, Richard Powers, Simon Schaffer, Isabelle Stengers, Bronislaw Szerszynski, Jan A. Zalasiewicz, Siegfried Zielinski

Copublished with ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe

  • ISBN10 0262044455
  • ISBN13 9780262044455
  • Publish Date 13 October 2020
  • Publish Status Active
  • Publish Country US
  • Publisher MIT Press Ltd
  • Imprint MIT Press