Latour on Tyrell and Gaia

I previously wrote about Toby Tyrell's book On Gaia and Clive Hamilton's references to it at the AIME colloquium. Bruno Latour himself has recently written/spoken about this book at an event in Rio. Suffice to say, his reading of Tyrell's book is scathing. However, there is far more to the text than just the critique. He fleshes out his post-Darwinian reading of Lovelock's work quite a bit and makes very clear the fundamental inscrutability and plurality of Gaia as he understands the concept.

Lovelock describes a planet that is alive because his prose is alive, meaning that any time you add an entity, even if it's a gas, a rock, a worm or a mat of micro-organisms, it vibrates with all the historical specificity of the other agencies intertwined in it. (18)