A bit convoluted and pretentiously written but the message is less complicated than it seems and I think it’s an important one: basically we need to stop pretending we live in a limitless world of endless progress and economic growth and turn back towards the reality we actually live in. Latour calls this “the terrestrial”. This sounds very vague but I think there are many examples of communities in which this is the case (and the book would have been less vague and also less Eurocentric and white if Latour had acknowledged this). As for his conclusion, I agree that Europe needs to take some sort of responsibility going forward, but his take was a bit too romantic. To this day, European policies perpetuate the very progress/globalization-minus he critiques and I think he glossed over that a bit too quickly.

I recommend Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer for a more approachable example of what I would consider “the terrestrial”.