Political ecology obviously had a model: another “habitat science”
that etymology does not distinguish from the first and which is called
eco-nomy.It is through economics much more than through the natu-
ral sciences or militant ecologists that common sense regularly en-
counters nature, that is, the aptitude of thenomosto short-circuit the
polis.We have succeeded in freeing ourselves from the first nature,
that of the Cave and of (political) epistemology; we have been able to
put into play the second nature, that of the ecological thinkers, but our
efforts would be in vain if we kept intact thethird nature,which pur-
ports to assume all the functions of the collective without paying ei-
ther the political or scientific price.
After eliminating the poison of the “cold, gray” nature of the pri-
mary qualities, after combating the misunderstanding of the “warm,
green” nature of the ecologists, we still have to overcome the obstacle
of the nature “red in tooth and claw” of the ecopoliticians,^5 the nature
that purports to replace the relations of progressive composition of
the common world with the law of the jungle governing a nature de-
prived of all political life. The influence of this third nature is all the
greater in that, under vaguely Darwinian appearances, it serves as a
springboardinsiderather than outside the collective.^6
Now, economics is no more “ecopolitically correct” than ecology is.
Nomosandlogosrightfully belong to thepolisonly provided that they
do not serve as shortcuts for damaging the state of law. Economics
pays a high price for the harshness that allows it to claim the title of
the most “dismal” of the social sciences. To all appearances, however,
it deals with all the topics we have evoked up to now under the name
of political ecology. It too bears on groupings of humans and non-
humans, which it calls “producers,” “consumers,” and “goods”; it too
seeks to take into account the elements that it has to internalize in its
calculations; it too wants to establish a hierarchy of solutions, in order
to discover the optimum in its allocation of resources; it too speaks of
autonomy and freedom; it too manages to produce an exterior, that of
the elements that it has provisionally thrown out of its calculations:
elements that it has precisely, in its own terms, “externalized.” Appar-
ently, then, the collective that we have deployed does no more than re-
discover the good sense of political economics, a modernist discipline
par excellence, one that allows us to make rational calculations regard-
ing all associations of people and things, and that would end up auto-
POLITICS OF NATURE
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