ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with Bruno Latour’s Facing Gaia and, to a lesser extent, with his views on Christian religion which are complementary to the political solution to our current ecological problems. The chapter offers a summary of the book as it came out in English last summer only and a critique on two grounds, an economic one and an ecological one. First, the institutional solution offered by Latour is only a particular case of the Coase theorem, a bargaining among all the parties to an externality and, therefore, not new. Second, Latour characterizes the scale of an ecological phenomenon by the number of connections it maintains with other ones. This does not seem sufficient to characterize the spatio-temporal properties of a scale which come up as soon as a measurement regime is introduced. Moreover, the structure of these connections and their direction matters as structure characterizes the degree of interdependence or causal properties of the connections. A comparison with a constructivist approach to hierarchical systems is offered. Latour characterizes religion as a truth-generator like science and art, capable of renewing ecological consciousness as long as it does not try to provide information, but a fragile one which deserves careful implementation.
