Bruno Latour (the infamous sociologist of science, …or famed political ecologist and anthropologist of the moderns) is delivering the Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh. Above is his first lecture, “Once Out of Nature: Natural Religion as a Pleonasm.” In these lectures, Latour is attempting to prepare us (we moderns? we humans?) to meet the terrible face of Gaia. To do so, he first has to compose us, that is, to concresce us as a political fiction, a people, the people, of Earth.
No longer content to remain the storehouse and dumpster for modernity’s noisy industrial parade, Tellus is returning to tell us of her 4.5-billion year “geostorical adventure.” From primeval fireball in the Hadean, to bacterial superorganism in the Archean, to a lush, oxygenated animal habitat in the Proterozoic; now, at the height of the Anthropocene, just as her wild vitality appears to be succumbing to the technoöspheric control of the “perfectly” self-regulating global market, she is showing non-natural signs of shape-shifting.
Climatologists–the people of Gaia if there are any–are attacked by other scientists for being a lobby. The climatologists have a choice, according to Latour: they can respond by saying “No, no, we are not a lobby, we are just scientists!” (But who are the scientists? They are just people with no specific boundaries or biases, which is literally “everybody.’) Or, the climatologists can accept themselves as a people trying to articulate the face of the earth.
A people is not ‘everybody,’ since that would be no one in particular. A people is not composed by the autonomous rational subject of the moderns, it is composed by the earthly ‘commonplace’ norms to which we each belong.
Footnotes2Plato 
What do you think?