In his penultimate book, After Lockdown: A Metamorphosis (2021), the philosopher and ecological thinker Bruno Latour, who has died aged 75, argued that humans should emulate termites – even though they live in mounds made from masticated earth and faecal matter.
Termites should be our role models, Latour argued, because they do not lay waste to the Earth, nor are any of them insect Elon Musks who seek to relocate to another planet. “That is escapist,” Latour said. “But when you think in terms of a critical zone, you are locked in, you cannot escape.” By that key term, “critical zone”, he meant a space between two and three kilometres thick “above and below the surface of the Earth. But all discovered life is within it.”
