CHAPTER FOUR
▲▲▲Skills for the Collective
Metaphysics has a bad reputation. Politicians mistrust it almost as
much as scientists do. Speculations of philosophers alone in their
rooms, imagining that they can define the essential furniture of the
world on their own—just what no serious person should be indulging
in any longer. Yet scorn of this sort would keep us from understanding
political ecology. If we were to abstain from all metaphysical medita-
tion, it would be tantamount to believing that we already know how
the world is furnished: there is a naturecommon to all,and on top of
that there are secondary differences that concern each of us as a mem-
ber of a particular culture or as a private individual. If this were the
case, those who have the task of defining the common good would
have nothing to worry about, for the bulk of their work would be ac-
complished: there wouldalreadyexist a unified, unifying, universal-
ized common world. All they would have left to do would be to bring
order to the prevailing diversity of opinions, beliefs, and viewpoints—
a thorny task, of course, but not one presenting fundamental dif-
ficulties, because this diversity does not touch on anything essential,
anything that could involve the veryessenceof things—matters of fact
being stockpiled separately in the cold storage of external reality. Now,
to speak of nature in this way, separating the question of the common
world from the question of the common good, is to cling, as we have
seen in the three preceding chapters, to the most politicized of meta-
physics, thatof nature.
Ecological crises clearly have not immediately undermined this
metaphysics of nature. On the contrary, their theorists have tried
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