They have believed themselves irreversible, without ever managing to
make anything irreversible. All those appellants remain behind them,
around them, before them, in them, like creditors who are knocking at
the door, demanding only that the work of inclusion and exclusion be
taken up again, on new bases, and explicitly. At the very moment
when they weep because they live in a world indifferent to their anxi-
ety, they are still living in this Republic* where they were born in quite
the ordinary way.
Political ecology thus does not condemn the modern experience,
does not annihilate it, does not revolutionize it: it surrounds it, envel-
ops it, fills it to overflowing, embeds it in a procedure that finally gives
it its meaning. Let us put this in moral terms: political ecology par-
dons the modern experience. With a tender, merciful gentleness, it
recognizes that there may not have been any way to do better; it
agrees, under certain conditions, to wipe the slate clean. Despite the
frightening burden of guilt they are fond of dragging behind them, the
moderns have not yet committed the mortal sin of Victor Franken-
stein. They would commit one, however, if they were to put off until
later this reinterpretation of their experience that political ecology is
offering them, and if, seeing themselves surrounded by such a crowd
ofaliens,they were to panic, prolonging even further this modernist
definition of the present time; if they were to believe they were living
in a society surrounded by a nature; if, finally, they were to imagine
themselves capable of obstinately modernizing the planet. Up to now
naive, perhaps even innocent, they would run a serious risk of being
caught by the proverbperseverare diabolicum est.
The Learning Curve
In our quiver, we have not just one of time’s arrows but two: the first,
modernist, which goes toward detachment; the second, nonmodern,
which goes toward reattachment. The first deprives us little by little of
ingredients for building our collective, since essences based on nature
are more and more indisputable, and identities based on arbitrariness
are less and less disputable. The second arrow of time, in contrast,
gradually multiplies the transcendences to which the collective can
appeal, in order to take up again at the next stage what it meant by re-
articulating the propositions, by offering them other habits*. Political
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