This is the most significant phenomenon of the present century: ‘the intrusion of Gaia’ (Stengers 2015), brusque and abrupt, into the horizon o f human history; the sensation of a definitive return of a form of transcendence that we believed transcended, and which reappears in more formidable form than ever. The transformation of humans into a geological force, that is, into an ‘objective’ phenomenon or ‘natural’ object, is paid back with the intrusion of Gaia in the human world, giving the Earth System the menacing form of a historical subject, a political agent, a moral person (Latour 2013a). In an ironic and deadly (because recursively contradictory) inversion of the relation between figure and ground, the ambiented becomes the ambient (or ‘ambienting’) , and the converse is equally the case. It is effectively the collapse of an ever more ambiguous environment, of which we can no longer say where it is in relation to us, and us to it.
Deborah Danowski and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, The Ends of the World, pg. 14
