We keep talking about the climate as if it were a subject. A field. Like education, transportation, security.
There is a government minister, a chapter in the report, a heading on the website. The environment, we say. As if it were outside.
But what if this entire distinction, between humans and nature, between a political decision and a flood, between policy and a carbon particle, is no longer relevant? A French thinker named Bruno Latour proposed looking at reality in an entirely different way. In his view, reality is not built of fields but of a network, and in this network, everything acts on everything.
Every object is an actor. The government and the ocean, the river and the cloud, the oil and the screen on which you are reading these words right now. For him this is an Actor-Network: a network in which people, ideas, trees, laws, fuels, sensors, winds, passwords and technologies are all actors.
They are not all equal in size or in power, but they all act. Each one pulls, pushes, delays or accelerates.
And once you understand this, you understand that the climate crisis is not a problem of "emissions." It is not a graph. It is not a 1.5-degree target.
It is an entire scene of reciprocal, entangled movement among actors: a government decision in Germany affects deforestation in Brazil, commodity prices in China change heating habits in Poland, and an undersea gas pipeline is a participant in the same struggle as a local charity in Africa. And the melting ice in Greenland? It is not merely a result.
It is an actor, because it changes atmospheric pressure, diverts currents, brings down infrastructure. In other words, the climate no longer merely responds to reality; it is part of it. We are not facing an "environmental crisis."
We are immersed in a network in which nature is not outside but inside: acting, participating, pressing, responding. There is no outside. There is no inside.
There is no "us" versus "the planet." There is only an accumulation of mutual influences that we must learn to read.
This is where interpretation comes in. Not more dry reports or apocalyptic visions, but a new language that recognizes every actor, including the one that cannot be seen.
A way of thinking that seeks to identify whoever has been left out of the discussion and call them onto the stage. The climate crisis, Latour says, is not a call for more science, but for more democracy of connections. For a discussion in which a river, a drilling site, a farmer and a data cloud all sit at the table.
Not in order to judge, but in order to ask: what does each of them do? What does it act on? Once you understand this, you understand that the climate crisis will not be changed by a single "decision." It will begin to change when we learn to see the entire system anew, including the actors that assembled it without our noticing.
Because as long as we keep imagining that reality is made of people alone, we will miss the real story.