Modern science has never been neutral. Rather, it has been intertwined with war, weapons, and environmental destruction. In their contribution to the “Pluriverse of Peace” series, Jade Arbo and Marina Pereira reflect the dark side of the Western narrative of progress. They trace this narrative from European laboratories to Latin American villages, where the destructive aftermath of scientific ‘discoveries’ and everyday resistance to them unfold.
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What happens when the very science meant to improve life becomes a driver of destruction? Who bears the weight of ‘modern progress,’ and who benefits from it? These questions, in an era of climate crisis, toxic contamination, and global inequality, are felt in chemical-laden soils, in fragile but resisting communities, and in the everyday struggles of people often excluded from global ‘narratives of advancement.’
The promise of modern progress has long been told as a story of universal improvement, but it is also a story of division. Western modernity established sharp splits between nature and culture, reason and emotion, human and nonhuman, and these divisions continue to shape the way we live and think today. These divisions are reinforced by three powerful systems working together. Capitalism turned the world into something to be extracted and exploited. Colonialism extended Europe’s control across lands and peoples, both geographically and symbolically. Modern science, in its quest to predict and control, often reduced the world to an object of study. Unlike capitalism and colonialism, however, science can and should also be reimagined and practiced differently.
Politics of separation
Separation also defines the geography of modernity. The stories of conquest and progress have largely been told from the perspective of the Global North, while their consequences have been borne by the Global South. This split between center and periphery is not incidental, it is a structural feature of colonial and capitalist modernity. By keeping extraction, pollution, and dispossession out of sight, modern capitalism made it possible for ‘developed’ nations to celebrate progress while offloading its costs onto distant lands and vulnerable communities.
All three systems (capitalism, colonialism, modern science) operate through separation: separating objects from their environments, production from care, life from the conditions that sustain it, and the North from the South. The result is a series of crises that appear fragmented (ecological, political, social, epistemic) but in fact share a common structure. Modernity is therefore not only a march of progress but also a machinery of division, producing vulnerability at the very moment it promises mastery.
A terrible greenness
Benjamin Labatut’s book “Un verdor terrible” (2020), translated as “When We Cease to Understand the World” (2021), serves as a bridge between Global North narratives of progress and the impacts of related ‘advancements’ in the Global South. Blending biography, science journalism, and fiction, Labatut traces how accidental discoveries and Nobel-winning breakthroughs in chemistry, physics and mathematics have shaped the modern world. Labatut pulls back the curtain on the scientists themselves: the creators of substances that would become both life-giving and life-destroying. His narrative traces the ghosts of twentieth-century science and its role in shaping the contemporary world.
In doing so, the novel exposes a paradox: science cannot be understood as purely good or purely bad. It can be, and often is, both at the same time. Labatut begins his narrative with a genealogy of the color ‘Prussian Blue,’ and through the story of accidental discoveries, we are introduced to the world’s first weapon of mass destruction: chlorine gas, deployed in the First World War. In this chapter, he recounts the work of Fritz Haber, a Nobel Prize-winning chemist known as the ‘father of chemical warfare.’ In 1909, Haber discovered how to transform nitrogen from the air into fertilizer. This made the synthesis of ammonia possible, which consequently enabled the large-scale production of fertilizers. This discovery enabled agricultural productivity to rise dramatically, feeding millions. As Labatut notes, “Had it not been for Haber, hundreds of millions of people who until then had depended on natural fertilizers such as guano and saltpetre for their crops would have died from lack of nourishment.”
The ghosts of modern science
Blending fiction with biographical sketches of famous Global North scientists, Labatut’s work scrutinizes the logic of progress and the dangers of exceptionalist discourses. As mathematician Karl Schwarzschild warns in the second chapter, “we have reached the highest point of civilization. All that is left for us is to decay and fall.” From this point, we are invited to follow a narrative in which scientific discoveries and their makers are haunted by the monstrosity of their creations, leaving behind traces – like ghosts – that extend far beyond what they could have imagined.
These ghostly traces permeate the book: from the development of fertilizers to mathematicians like Mochizuki, who declared that “it was not politicians who would destroy the planet […] but scientists like them who were ‘marching like sleepwalkers toward the apocalypse’”, to figures like Grothendieck, who abandoned everything in a radical critique of the military uses of science and retreated from research to search for a simpler, communal life. Grothendieck wondered: “what new horrors would spring forth from the total comprehension that he sought? What would mankind do if it could reach the heart of the heart?”.
Each scientist is connected to the next. Their stories are interwoven into a narrative of thinkers who are haunted by their creations. This is similar to how Victor Frankenstein was confronted with the destructive vitality of his own work. Although Labatut’s text contains few of the formal markers of science fiction, it engages the conversation that Mary Shelley set in motion: the pursuit of rational mastery of nature that instead generates uncontrollable consequences. What was meant to bring clarity delivers deeper uncertainty.
The Global North’s footprint in the Global South
The book culminates in the realization that we live in a world of complexities, far removed from the promises of finished, objective truths that science once claimed. Recognizing this uncertainty requires a different attitude toward the world, both individually and collectively. The master narrative of progress from the Global North and the slice of life of slow resistance of the Global South are connected by the same thread: the thread that has brought us into the crises we face today.
In the epilogue, “The Night Gardener,” we encounter the repercussions of human action in a small Chilean village near the Andes. It is as though the ghosts of all the discoveries recounted earlier hover over this place, haunting the town and entwining the history of knowledge with a tale of horror. In this final account, the narrative shifts into the first person, moving from the perspective of Global North discoveries to their consequences in Latin America, a region haunted by extractivist policies that guarantee the resources necessary for global scientific advancement much to the detriment of the lives of local people.
This section opens by circling back to the first chapter and the discovery of arsenic, which now kills the dogs of the small village where the characters live. It also appears in a nearby lake that “has survived even though the climate has warmed and ice no longer forms,” and in the very soil of the narrator’s home, which is filled with waste: “the former owner, the man who built the cabin and sold it to me, had to even out the terrain with rubble and and construction debris, so that every now and then, when I dig into the ground to plant flowers and trees, I find cans, bottle caps and pieces of shredded plastic beneath the ground.” The gardener’s life story also emerges here: once a mathematician, he abandoned everything to live in the countryside and tend plants, fully aware that scientific discoveries are never neutral but entangled with war, weapons, and destruction. In this way, the very sacrality of the figure of the scientist is called into question.
In the soil of this town, cultural history and natural history appear as intertwined. The layers of earth in the narrator’s yard accumulate traces of colonial-capitalist progress: cans, caps, plastic. They remain like ghosts of the Anthropocene, material memories of destructive production that embody a kind of violence. What is striking is that, in this outcome of progress, it is no longer Europe but Latin America that comes to the fore in Labatut’s narrative.
Soil refuses to forget
By opening with tales of Western scientific triumph and closing with a scene in a Chilean village, Labatut turns his narrative into a mirror and a portal: it reflects the Global North’s role in shaping the modern world while opening a view onto a world often ignored, where the ghosts of modern progress linger in the soil, the water, and the rhythms of everyday life. To understand what is at stake, we need to take seriously the ‘mundane’ in Latin American literature. The mundane is not trivial. It is the space where violence becomes embodied and where resilience takes root. In the epilogue of Labatut’s book, it is revealed that waste and chemical residue remain in the soil where flowers are planted. The soil quite literally refuses to forget.
The mundane carries the weight of global histories: layers of plastic and rubble in a Chilean garden are monuments to capitalist extraction. In narrating these experiences, Latin American literature transforms the everyday into a site of critical knowledge. It reveals that colonialism and capitalism are not abstract systems, but rather material assemblages of power that perpetuate the ‘slow violence’ (Rob Nixon) experienced daily within the body, home, and community.
Crucially, these works also point toward forms of resistance. The gardener who turns from mathematics to tending plants enacts a quiet refusal of the logic that produced devastation. The characters who persist in caring, connecting, and surviving embody modes of solidarity that resist erasure. In these narratives, the mundane becomes a ground for imagining other ways of living: less spectacular than revolutions or breakthroughs, but no less significant.
Resistance in gardens, kitchens, and neighborhoods
Literature in Latin America is often itself a form of agency – both its mediation and expression. It can embody a ‘slow resistance’ to ‘slow violence’: a patient, persistent refusal that unfolds in daily practices of telling and retelling the impact of master narratives on the daily lives of people impacted by the history of global progress.
What does capitalism look like when filtered through a kitchen, a street corner, a body weakened by pollution? How does the global pursuit of ‘development’ intersect with the daily struggles of ordinary people? Literature in Latin America offers a vocabulary to think about progress differently. It grounds abstract systems in concrete lives. It renders visible the connections between the global and the local, the spectacular and the ordinary. Where imperial and capitalist logics promise grand futures, literature in Latin America reminds us that the desirable world of tomorrow will not emerge solely from laboratories or political treaties. It will also be cultivated in gardens, kitchens, and neighborhoods: in the everyday practices that resist domination and nurture solidarity. By amplifying these narratives, we begin to hear the slow, steady contributions that could guide us toward futures worth living.