ing more complicated than to discover and summon reliable wit-
nesses capable of finding exactly the right speech impedimenta. You
want to spread genetically modified organisms in Swiss fields? Fine.
Who is to pass judgment? The Swiss, probably. The users of illegal
drugs attach so much importance to their drugs that they prefer to die
from them rather than do without them? Okay. Who is to pass judg-
ment? Why not drug addicts? In any case, they cannot not sit on the
jury. The salmon are deserting the tributaries of the Allier and ignore
the ladders set up on the dams. Who is to pass judgment? The salmon,
of course; at the very least they have to participate in the jury. You
want to save the elephants in Kenya’s parks by having them graze sep-
arately from cows? Excellent, but how are you going to get an opinion
from the Masai who have been cut off from cows, and from the cows
deprived of the elephants who clear the brush for them, and also from
the elephants deprived of the Masai and the cows?^56 These are the
sorts of thorny questions proposed to the upper house, which is re-
sponsible for defining a plan of investigation for each entity, a path of
trials that will make it possible to evaluate the entity’s claim.
It will be objected that the upper house only recycles the human
mode of consultation for use by nonhumans, and that it is hard to see
why one would want to extend the formalism of social democracy to
objects! But the upper house does just the opposite, for it benefits
henceforth from the advantages offered by the cooperation of the vari-
ous professions. The social democrat can finally learn from scientists
how to treat foreigners with respect. By a cruel paradox that says a lot
about the weaknesses of modernism, we actually know how to con-
sult nonhumans better than humans! A natural scientist would never
imagine that the plan for her investigation is fixed once and for all for
any phenomenon whatsoever. This would be like imagining that a sci-
entific method exists! Discover a possible approach, turn up a reliable
witness, find the way to falsify a hypothesis, why, that is often enough
right there to warrant a Nobel Prize! No one would dream of talking
about elephants without consulting the said elephants by experimen-
tal procedures of unprecedented subtlety. With humans, though, we
do not take so many precautions. On the pretext that humans are en-
dowed with speech, politicians, like many survey specialists, sociolo-
gists, journalists, and statisticians, imagine that one can speak of them
in their place and without ever truly consulting them—that is, without
POLITICS OF NATURE
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