Apples and Grapes: Thoreau, Latour, and the Land

After decades of studying technoscience as practiced across many disciplines, Bruno Latour turned his attention late in his career almost exclusively to the articulation of critical zones and politics during what he calls the “New Climactic Regime.” Using the same tools he honed throughout his career, the works from Facing Gaia onward try to lay out in clear terms the politics of climate change along with brief forays into possible forms of action. In his last books he presses the specific problem of how to live and attempt to know a specific geographical region without succumbing to isolationism and xenophobia. Many years previous, another irascible and humorous thinker worked similar soils. While Latour’s family has long labored in the Louis Latour vineyards, on the other side of the Atlantic, Henry David Thoreau was seeking wild apples for the long walk home. This essay examines how both thinkers produce a particular vision of a local understanding of place without the oversimplifications of the local/global binary.