During America's first-ever national lockdown, thousands of unelected bureaucrats, as well as federal and state governments, assumed enormous powers not usually accorded to them.
During Americaâs first-ever national lockdown, thousands of unelected bureaucrats, as well as federal and state governments, assumed enormous powers not usually accorded to them.
They picked and chose which businesses could stay open without much rationale. They sent the infected into nursing homes occupied by the weak and vulnerable.
Their rules for prosecuting those who violated social distancing, sheltering in place, mask wearing or violent protesting often hinged on political grounds. Their spending measures on âinfrastructureâ and âhealth careâ were excuses to lard up redistributive entitlements.
Conservatives moaned that left-wing agendas were at work beneath the pretenses of saving us from the pandemic. And the giddy left bragged that it was true.
Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, eds.
Let’s take as a starting point that “the Earth is moving yet again.” It is shifting, unstable, reactive; it’s different one year, or minute, to the next. In an age of rising seas and mass extinctions, the point hardly needs proving.
The quote comes from the introduction to
Critical Zones: The Science and Politics of Landing on Earth, a tome-sized catalog published in 2020 to accompany an exhibition at the Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, Germany. The philosopher Bruno Latour and the artist/curator Peter Weibel are its organizer and editors. For them, and for a growing cadre of scientists and theorists, “critical zones” are a new framework for understanding the world not as a globe, nor exactly as a serene, self-healing Gaia, but as the thin, contested skin of the Earth on which we actually live: soil and rocks, air and water, plants and trees, animals, and all the marks of humanity physical ones, of course, but also art, pol