Editorial: Habitability in the new climatic regime

Abstract

The articles in this issue reflect the need to renew politics around the question of the habitability of the planet. Within a perspective in which the generality and particularity of interests are redefined in a way that is radically different from the past. Indeed, the need to consider the implications of every decision, for example on the temperature of the atmosphere, changes the idea and practice of what is “general interest” and “special interest”. The general interest can no longer be that of Rousseau, which is an interest that becomes general by disregarding particular constraints and entering into a perspective that is general insofar as it is free and abstract from any particularity. At most, nature could enter modern politics as “concern for the environment” and its specific problems – protection, emergencies – but it made no sense to address the conditions of existence of life forms – the highest degree of generality – as a political matter.
Although they are of such a magnitude as to go beyond the scope of politics, the conditions of existence of life forms were considered to be external to society and to the life forms themselves, indifferent to the decisions and conflicts of people in society. But today we see that this is not the case and that, as Michel Serres was one of the first to point out, nature reacts and responds to anthropic action. This fact has, like a domino effect, numerous and fundamental consequences on the composition of the modern political cosmology, which ordered dichotomously different realities and ontologies such as nature/society and human/non-human.
Having entered, malgré nous, the era of the inadequacy of the modern political cosmos, we could find in the rethinking of the concept of habitability a useful tool for guiding thought and action. Planetary habitability, as conceived by the moderns, had as its specific characteristic the becoming favourable to life of an environment other than life itself, as an external framework for life, as a preliminary and necessary balance of elements for the appearance and development of life. A balance that had to be maintained and, today, restored in order for life to continue. Habitability in the New Climatic Regime has profoundly different characteristics, beginning with the recent understanding that it is the activity of life forms themselves that creates their own environment. If living beings themselves make the world habitable, then the problem of the conditions of existence of life forms becomes the central political issue, regardless of the distinction between humans and non-humans, because the survival of the former cannot be at the expense of the latter.

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