Green parties emerged in the 1970s and 1980s as the main institutional manifestation of political ecology. Having determined that ecology was political, their descent into the institutions was a logical next step. Green politics challenged the existing compass of European social democracies from the outset.

Unlike the socialist tradition, they were not convinced that we should treat the world as a resource to be seized. Unleashing and harnessing the forces of production was no answer humanity’s problems faced with mounting environmental degradation. Unlike conservatives, they saw many of society’s institutions as more in need of upheaval than preservation. Struggling to place themselves politically, some reached for the fairly vapid slogan “not left, not right, but forward”. For Bruno Latour, this was a third misstep.

Latour, particularly in his later work, grappled intensely with the question of what ecology means for politics. In Down to Earth, he called for society to overcome its doomed effort to cleave itself from the earth, reading political convulsions from Trump to Brexit as signs of the yearning for an ejector seat in the era and indeed condition he dubbed the “New Climatic Regime”. In this call for us to come “down to earth”, to “land”, he pointed to how green parties could land also.

For Latour, rather than being awkward guests at a stranger’s party, the Greens (as well as the climate deniers of course) had recognised early that politics always had been about ecology. But not convinced that even they had realised what their politics were really about, he pushed the Greens to overcome the gulf between their globalist pleas for an abstract planet and the Blood and Soil siren song of their reactionary opponents. The challenge for the Greens – the force that should aspire to lead the “new ecological class” he referred to his last major work – was to map and understand the new terrain of struggle, today at once social and environmental, so as to finally base their politics on representing people living in places and the things on which they depend.

In the pages of Le Grand Continent¸ Bruno Latour’s final writings crystallised his reflections on Europe’s place in the New Climatic Regime. At once a territorial war and a climate war, the Russian invasion of Ukraine had painfully demonstrated that Europe’s struggles to find its feet amid ecological conflict are in fact the moment when Europe, and Europe as a people and place rather than institutions, are finally taking form.

Bruno Latour’s influence reaches far beyond politics, extending across science, philosophy and the arts. A train of thought that is never easy to follow, reading his work requires navigating contradictions, traps, and exclamations. At times infuriating, it is always worthwhile. For political ecology, it will remain an enduring, much appreciated guide for the difficult years ahead.

 This selection of articles explores his legacy and vital contributions to political ecologist thought in Europe.