Table of Contents

Introduction 3
What Is To Be Done with Political Ecology? 3
Acknowledgments 14
1. Why Political Ecology Has To Let Go of Nature 16
First, get out of the Cave 17
Ecological crisis or crisis of objectivity? 25
The end of nature 35
The pitfall of “social representations” of nature 43
The fragile aid of comparative anthropology 52
Conclusion: What successor for the two-house collective? 61
2. How to Bring the Collective Together 65
Difficulties in convoking the collective 69
First division: learning how to be diffident of spokespersons 74
Second division: associations of humans and nonhumans 84
Third division between humans and nonhumans: reality and recalcitrance 91
A more or less articulated collective 96
Conclusion: the return to civil peace 101
Convocation impossible because of the metaphysics of nature 102
Convocation possible because of an experimental metaphysics 102
Articulated propositions 103
3 A New Separation of Powers 105
Some disadvantages of the concepts of fact and value 108
The power to take into account and the power to put in order 116
The two contradictory requirements captured in the notion of fact 116
The two contradictory requirements captured in the notion of value 119
The collective’s two powers of representation 123
Verifying that the essential guarantees have been maintained 130
Conclusion: a new exteriority 135
4 The Skills for the Collective 143
The third nature and the quarrel between the two “eco” sciences 146
Contribution of the professions to the procedures of the houses 153
The contribution of the sciences 154
The contribution of politicians 161
The contribution of economists 168
The contribution of moralists 173
The organization of the construction site 180
Task no. 1: perplexity: requirement of external reality 181
Task no. 2: consultation: requirement of relevance 181
Task no. 3: hierarchy: requirement of publicity 181
Task no. 4: institution: requirement of closure 181
Task no. 5: separation of powers 181
Task no. 6: scenarization of the whole 181
The work of the houses 183
Reception by the upper house 185
Reception by the lower house 191
Conclusion: the common dwelling, the oikos 199
Perplexity 200
Consultation 200
Hierarchy 200
Institution 200
5. Exploring the Common Worlds 203
The two arrows of time 207
The learning curve 213
The third power and the question of the State 219
Task no. 7: power to follow through 226
The exercise of diplomacy 228
Conclusion: war and peace for the sciences 239
Conclusion 243
What is to be done? Political ecology! 243
Glossary 250
Summary of the argument (for readers in a hurry . . .) 261

Introduction

What Is To Be Done with Political Ecology?

What is to be done with political ecology? Nothing. What is to be done? Political ecology!
All those who have hoped that the politics of nature would bring about a renewal of public life have asked the first question, while noting the stagnation of the so-called “green” movements. They would like very much to know why so promising an endeavor has so often come to naught. Appearances notwithstanding, everyone is bound to answer the second question the same way. We have no choice: politics does not fall neatly on one side and nature on the other. From the time the term “politics” was invented, every politics has been defined by its relation to nature, whose every feature, property, and function depends on the polemical will to limit, reform, establish, short-circuit, or enlighten public life. As a result, we cannot choose whether or not to do political ecology; but we can choose whether to do it surreptitiously, by distinguishing between questions of nature and questions of politics, or explicitly, by treating those two sets of questions as a single issue that arises for all collectives. While the ecology movements tell us that nature is rapidly invading politics, we shall have to imagine—most often aligning ourselves with these movements but sometimes against them—what a politics finally freed from the sword of Damocles we call “nature” might be like.
Critics will argue that political ecology already exists. They will tell us that it has countless nuances, from the most profound to the most superficial, including all possible utopian, rational, or free-market forms. Whatever reservations we may have about them, these movements have already woven countless bonds between nature and politics. Indeed, this is just what they all claim to be doing: finally undertaking a politics of nature; finally modifying public life so that it takes “nature into account”; finally adapting our system of production to nature’s demands; finally preserving nature from human degradation through a sustainable politics. In short, in many often vague and sometimes contradictory guises, concern for nature has already been introduced into political life.
How could I claim that there is a new task here, one that has not yet been taken up? People may argue over its usefulness, they can quibble over its applications, but we cannot do as if the task has not already been addressed, as if it had not already been to a considerable extent accomplished. If political ecology has turned out to be such a disappointment, it is not because no one has tried to make a place for nature within public life. If political ecology is losing its influence, according to some, this is simply because the interests lined up against it are too powerful; according to others, it is because political ecology has never had enough substance to compete with the age-old practice of politics as usual. In any event, it is too late to reopen the issue yet again. We need either to bury the movement in the already well-stocked cemetery of outdated ideologies, or else we need to fight still more courageously to ensure that the movement will triumph in its present form. In either case, the die is cast, the concepts identified, the positions known. You are showing up too late for a debate whose terms are already set in concrete. The time for reflection is past. You should have spoken up ten years ago.
In this book, I should like to propose a different hypothesis that may justify my ill-timed intervention. From a conceptual standpoint, political ecology has not yet begun to exist. The words “ecology” and “politics” have simply been juxtaposed without a thoroughgoing rethinking of either term; as a result, we can draw no conclusions from the trials that the ecology movements have gone through up to now, either about their past failures or about their possible successes. The reason for the delay is very simple. People have been much too quick to believe that it sufficed to recycle the old concepts of nature and politics unchanged, in order to establish the rights and manners of a political ecology. Yet oikos, logos, phusis, and polis remain real enigmas as long as the four concepts are not put into play at the same time. Political ecologists have supposed that they could dispense with this conceptual work, without noticing that the notions of nature and politics had been developed over centuries in such a way as to make any juxtaposition, any synthesis, any combination between the two terms impossible. And, even more seriously, they have claimed, in the enthusiasm of an ecumenical vision, to have “gotten beyond” the old distinction between humans and things, subjects of law and objects of science, without observing that these entities had been so shaped, profiled, and sculpted so as to gradually become incompatible.
Far from “getting beyond” the dichotomies of man and nature, subject and object, modes of production and the environment, in order to find remedies for the crisis as quickly as possible, what political ecologists should have done was slow down the movement, take their time, then burrow down beneath the dichotomies to dig like the proverbial old mole. Such at least is my argument. Instead of cutting the Gordian knot, I am going to shake it up in a lot of different ways. I shall untie a few of its strands in order to knot them back together differently. Where the political philosophy of science is concerned, one must take one’s time in order not to lose it. The ecologists were a little too quick to pat themselves on the back when they put forward their slogan “Think globally, act locally.” Where “global thinking” is concerned, they have come up with nothing better than an already composed, already totalized, already instituted nature to neutralize politics. To think in truly “global” fashion, they needed to begin by discovering the institutions owing to which globality is constructed one step at a time. And nature, as we shall see, could hardly lend itself any less effectively to the process.
Yes, in this book we are going to advance like the tortoise in the fable, and like the tortoise, or at least so I hope, we shall end up passing the hare, who has decided, in its great wisdom, that political ecology is an outmoded question, dead and buried, incapable of producing thought, unable to provide a new foundation for morality, epistemology, and democracy—the same hare that has claimed to be “reconciling man and nature” in a couple of great leaps. In order to force ourselves to slow down, we will have to deal simultaneously with the sciences, with natures, and with politics in the plural.
Scientific production: here is the first obstacle we shall run into along our way. Political ecology is said to have to do with “nature in its links with society.” Well and good. But this nature becomes knowable through the intermediary of the sciences; it has been formed through networks of instruments; it is defined through the interventions of professions, disciplines, and protocols; it is distributed in data bases; it is provided with arguments through the intermediary of learned societies. Ecology, as its name indicates, has no direct access to nature as such; it is a “-logy” like all the scientific disciplines. Under the heading of science, then, we already find a rather complex mix of proofs and proof-workers, a learned community that acts as a third party in all relations with society. And yet, too often, the ecological movements have sought to short-circuit this third party, precisely in order to accelerate their militant progress. For them, science remains a mirror of the world, to the extent that one can almost always, in their literature, take the terms “nature” and “science” to be synonyms. My hypothesis is, on the contrary, that the enigma of scientific production must be repositioned at the very core of political ecology. This may well slow down the acquisition of the certainties that were supposed to serve as leverage in the political struggle, but between nature and society we shall include this third term whose role will turn out to be crucial.
Nature is the second speed bump that political ecology is going to find along its route. How, some will object, can nature inconvenience a set of militant and scientific disciplines that have to do with the way to protect nature, to defend it, to insert it into the play of politics, to make an aesthetic object of it, a subject of law, or in any case a concern? And yet this is where the difficulty originates. Every time we seek to mix scientific facts with aesthetic, political, economic, and moral values, we find ourselves in a quandary. If we concede too much to facts, the human element in its entirety tilts into objectivity, becomes a countable and calculable thing, a bottom line in terms of energy, one species among others. If we concede too much to values, all of nature tilts into the uncertainty of myth, into poetry or romanticism; everything becomes soul and spirit. If we mix facts and values, we go from bad to worse, since we are depriving ourselves of both autonomous knowledge and independent morality. We shall never know, for example, whether the apocalyptic predictions with which the militant ecologists threaten us mask the power scientists hold over politicians or the domination politicians exercise over poor scientists.
This book proposes the hypothesis that political ecology has nothing at all to do with “nature”—that blend of Greek politics, French Cartesianism, and American parks. Let me put it bluntly: political ecology has nothing to do with nature. To put it even more strongly, at no time in its short history has political ecology ever had anything to do with nature, with its defense or protection. As I shall show in Chapter 1, the belief that political ecology is interested in nature is the childhood illness of the field, keeping it in a state of impotence by preventing it from ever understanding its own practice. My hope is that the weaning process, even if it appears somewhat harsh, will have more favorable effects than the forced maintenance of the notion of nature as the sole object of political ecology.
The third, most troubling, and most controversial obstacle obviously comes from politics. We know the difference between scientific ecology and political ecology, between the student of ecology and the militant in the ecology movement. We also know how much difficulty ecology movements have always had finding a place on the political chessboard. On the right? The left? The far right? The far left? Neither right nor left? Elsewhere, in government? Nowhere, in utopia? Above, in technocracy? Below, in a return to the sources of wisdom? Beyond, in full self-realization? Everywhere, as the lovely Gaia hypothesis suggests, positing an Earth that would bring all ecosystems together in a single integrated organism? There can be a Gaia science, a Gaia cult, but can there be a Gaia politics? If we reach the point of defending Mother Earth, is that a politics? And if our goal is to put a stop to noise pollution, to shut down city dumps, to reduce the fumes of exhaust pipes, it really isn’t worth making the effort to move heaven and earth: a cabinet ministry will do. My hypothesis is that the ecology movements have sought to place themselves on the political chessboard without redrawing its squares, without redefining the rules of the game, without redesigning the pawns.
Nothing in fact proves that the divison of labor between human politics and the science of things, between the requirements of freedom and the powers of necessity, can be used as such in order to harbor political ecology. It may even be necessary to hypothesize that the political freedom of humans has never been defined except in order to constrain it by applying the laws of natural necessity. If this proved to be the case, democracy would have been made impotent by design. Man is born free; everywhere he is in chains; the social contract claims to emancipate him; political ecology alone can do this, but political ecology itself cannot expect to be saved by free men. Obliged to redefine politics and science, freedom and necessity, the human and the inhuman, in order to find a niche for itself, political ecology has lost heart along the way. It thought it could rely on nature to hasten the advent of democracy. Today it lacks both. The task must be taken up again from a different direction, by a longer and more perilous detour.
By what authority can I subject political ecology to the three tests of scientific production, the abandonment of nature, and the redefinition of the political? Are the author and those who have inspired him militant ecologists? No. Recognized ecologists? Not that either. Influential politicians, then? Certainly not. If I could plead any authority at all, I are well aware that we would save our readers time: they could trust me. But the point is not to save time, to speed up, to synthesize masses of data, to solve urgent problems in a hurry, to ward off dramatic cataclysms by equally dramatic actions. The point is not even to draw upon meticulous erudition in order to do justice to those who think seriously about ecology. In this book, the point is simply to raise a familiar question once again for myself, and perhaps for myself alone: what do nature, science, and politics have to do with one another? Weakness, it seems to me, may lead farther than strength.
If I have no authority of my own, I nevertheless benefit from a particular advantage, and this alone is what authorizes me to adress my readers: I am interested in political production no more and no less than I am interested in scientific production. Or rather, I admire politicians as much as I admire scientists. Think about it: this two-fold respect is not so common. My absence of authority offers precisely the guarantee that I will not use science to subjugate politics, or politics to subjugate science. My claim is that I can turn this minuscule advantage into a major asset. To the question with which I began—What is to be done with political ecology?—I do not yet have a definitive answer. I only know that if I did not try to modify the terms of the debate by finding a new way to tie the Gordian knot of science and politics, the full-scale experiment in which we are all engaged would prove nothing one way or the other. It would always lack an adapted protocol; I would always reproach myself for missing the opportunity to redefine politics that ecology might have offered.
There is one more constraint to which I have sought to subject myself. Although I have to refashion the three conjoined notions of nature, politics, and science, I have chosen to use neither the denunciatiory nor the prophetic tone that often accompany the works of political ecology. Although I am preparing to work through a series of hypotheses in which each one will be stranger than the one before, it is nevertheless common sense* that I seek to reflect above all. As it happens, common sense is opposed for the time being to good sense*. To proceed quickly I shall have to go slowly, and to be simple I shall have to present a provisional appearance of radicality. My goal is thus not to overturn the established order of concepts but to describe the actual state of affairs: political ecology is already doing in practice everything that I assert it has to do. I am simply betting that the urgencies of action have prevented it from situating the precise originality of what it was accomplishing in a groping fashion because it did not understand the reversal in the position of the sciences that these innovations implied. The only service I can render political ecology is to offer it an alternative interpretation of itself, a different common sense, so that it can try to determine whether it finds itself in a more comfortable position or not. Up to now, as I see it, philosophers have only offered to clothe political ecology in ready-to-wear garments. I believe it deserves made-to-order garb: perhaps it will find itself less constricted, more at ease in tight places.
To keep this book to a reasonable length, I have said little about the field studies on which it is based. Because I could not make the basic argument more accessible by shoring it up with solid empirical proof, I have organized it meticulously in such a way that readers always know what difficulties await them: in addition to the glossary, I have also drawn up a summary at the end that can serve as a crib sheet.
In Chapter 1 we shall rid ourselves of the notion of nature by turning first to the contributions of the sociology of the sciences, then to those of the ecology movements (their practice, as distinct from their philosophy), and finally to those of comparative anthropology. Political ecology, as we shall see, cannot hold on to nature. In Chapter 2, I shall proceed to an exchange of properties between humans and nonhumans*; this will allow us to imagine, under the name of collective*, a successor to the political institutions that have been awkwardly brought together up to now under the aegis of nature and society. This new collective will allow us to proceed in Chapter 3 to the transformation of the venerable distinction between facts and values; we shall replace it with a new separation of powers* that will offer us more satisfactory moral guarantees. The distinction between two new assemblies—the first of which will ask “How many are we?” and the second “Can we live together?”—will serve political ecology as its Constitution. In Chapter 4, readers will be rewarded for their efforts by a “guided tour” of the new institutions and by a presentation of the new professions contributing to the animation of a political body that has finally become viable. The difficulties will begin again in Chapter 5, where we shall be obliged to find a successor to the ancient split that separated nature (in the singular) from cultures (in the plural), in order to raise once again the question of the number of collectives and the progressive composition of the common world* that the notion of nature, like that of society, had prematurely simplified. Finally, in the conclusion, I shall address questions about the type of Leviathan that allows political ecology to exit from the state of nature. In view of the spectacle that has been embraced throughout, readers will perhaps forgive me the aridity of the route.
Before ending this introduction, I need to define the particular use that I am going to make of the key term, political ecology*. I am well aware that it is customary to distinguish scientific ecology from political ecology, the former being practiced in laboratories and field expeditions, the latter in militant movements and in Parliament. But as I propose to reshape the very distinction between the two terms “science” and “politics” in every particular, it will be clear that we cannot take that distinction at face value for it is going to become untenable as we advance. After a few pages, at all events, there will be little point in differentiating among those groups of people who want to understand ecosystems, defend the environment, or protect nature, and those who want to revive public life, since we are going to learn instead to distinguish the composition of the common world that is built “to according to due process” from that of a world elaborated without rule. For the time being, I shall retain the term political ecology, which remains an enigmatic emblem allowing me to designate—without defining it too quickly—the right way to compose a common world, the kind of world the Greeks called a cosmos*.