Rethinking Consumption and Biodiversity: Insights from Latour’s New Climatic Regime

Biodiversity loss caused by unsustainable consumption and production threatens planetary wellbeing, yet few studies take a holistic approach linking consumption directly to biodiversity. This conceptual study addresses this gap by examining how Bruno Latour’s New Climatic Regime as a novel analytical lens for understanding the systemic drivers and root causes of biodiversity loss and the cultural foundations of overconsumption. This study examines how research has covered the link between consumption and biodiversity under the tensions of local and global scales, and how Latour’s Terrestrial perspective can deepen understanding of consumption in sustainability transitions.  

Drawing on Latour’s critique of the modern division between the local and the global, the analysis highlights how relying on either regime leads to irresolvable contradictions in attempts to address ecological crises. Local framings often fail to capture transboundary challenges, while global framings risk abstracting away from situated ecological relations. Latour’s third, Terrestrial orientation grounded in attachment, interdependence, and recognition of ecological limits opens alternative pathways for reconceptualising consumption within planetary boundaries.   

Findings from the conceptual analysis show that only a small body of existing research explicitly addresses the role of systemic and structural issues and cultural and societal restrictions. Studies that do so emphasise the urgency of moving beyond anthropocentric and growth-oriented paradigms. Latour’s framework offers a bridge between cultural and structural analyses of consumption by situating consumer practices within socio-material networks that include human and non-human actors, ecological limits, embeddedness, and multispecies interdependencies.  

The research further conceptualises consumers sustainable practices in everyday life as potential “seeds of change” within complex socio-material networks. Individual actions such as adopting sustainable practices or shifting purchasing habits gain impact when connected to supportive infrastructures, organisational actors, technologies, and policy environments. Rather than viewing consumers as powerless agents within large systems, the Terrestrial perspective positions them as nodes within socio-material networks, where their actions contribute the emergent reconfiguration of meanings, material flows and relationships. 

Ultimately, the study contributes to interdisciplinary debates on biodiversity-positive futures by advancing a systemic understanding of consumption.