15Animal Studies

Abstract

In light of the extraordinary social and political situation under which we all now labor, I have chosen to take a rather different approach than usual in this year’s essay. To this end, I deploy Bruno Latour’s Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime as both a framing mechanism and a heuristic device in order to focus attention on the compelling question of posthumanist political ecology. While originally published as Où atterrir? Comment s’orienter en politique in 2017, Latour’s short text has only continued to gain relevance consequent on the heavy black pall cast over society first by the Covid-19 pandemic, and then quickly followed by the political hucksterism of the Trump administration in lieu of any reasoned response—as clearly evidenced by the opportunistic refusal by the US to pay dues amounting to millions of dollars to the World Health Organization by way of an inflammatory campaign of lies and blame aimed at denying any and all responsibility for the current woes of the Earth writ large. Whereas to some this might seem to concern animal studies only obliquely, the questions brought to bear by political ecology upon the agitated thickness of geological history are among the most important facing animal studies today.