have to be instituted. A bombardment of objects out of nowhere and
not made by human hands pushes representations ever further back
into archaism. An extraordinary ambition: modernize the planet to
the point of making all trace of irrationality disappear, replaced by un-
touchable reason. Curiously, modern history ends up resembling the
(very bad) filmArmageddon:an objective missile, a comet from the
outer reaches of the galaxy, will soon put an end to all human quarrels
by turning the Earth into glass! What it hopes for as its salvation, as its
final deliverance, is an Apocalypse of objectivities raining fire on the
collective.^7 The moderns imagine the radiant future as the definitive
elimination of everything human and nonhuman! The Platonic fire,
from the Heaven of Ideas, finally irradiates the dark Cave, which melts
under its brilliance. A strange myth of a cataclysmic end of history for
a political regime that pretends to give lessons in reason and morality
to hapless and ignorant politicians...
Political ecology, for its part, knows neither reservoir nor dumping
ground. The intake and outlet pump turns out to be jammed, plugged,
pretty much rusted out beyond repair. As a result, it can no longer put
into effect the difference between the rational and the irrational, be-
tween the indisputable “fact” of nature and the merely social “repre-
sentation”: political ecology will thus never be able to push the cursor
of time little by little along an irreversible line that would go from a
confused past to a more enlightened future. Theoretical ecology, the
one that first took back from the moderns their conception of nature
and the corresponding conception of time, has of course tried its hand
at this. It first believed that by introducing the concern for nature into
politics, it could finally put an end to human waste, exploitation, and
irrationality. Disguised as a revolutionary bend in the road, this was
nevertheless only a matter of accelerating modern times: nature dic-
tated its laws to history still more imperiously than it had done in
the past. What is more, historicity itself was disappearing, confused
with the movement of nature. No, decidedly, political ecology can no
longer make the clock of the moderns work, no matter how revolu-
tionary the latter claim to be, for it has chosen to stop constructing its
public life around the distinction between facts and values, the only
cog capable, up to now, of carving out a truly lasting, irreversible, pro-
gressive difference between yesterday and today.
Must political ecology then refrain from plunging into history?
POLITICS OF NATURE
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