For the same reason, we can speak again about morality without
finding ourselves paralyzed by the question of foundations. In the
name of what must wolves be preferred to bison in Yosemite Na-
tional Park? In the name of what principle must the sheep named
Dolly be forbidden to photocopy herself in thousands of clones? What
duty obliges us to reserve the water of the river Drôme for fish as op-
posed to using it to irrigate corn fields subsidized by Europe? We
no longer have to oscillate between the irrefragable right of humans—
extended or not by their future generations—and the indisputable
right of “things themselves” to enjoy existence. The question becomes
whether or not we have caught the totality of these beings in our
nets—sheep, farmers, wolves, trout, farm supports, and wandering
streams. If we have, then we now have to conduct experiments on the
compatibility of all these propositions, these cosmograms, by discov-
ering, through another trial, how the assemblage is going to resist if
one rejects—excludes—a single one of its members. What will Yosem-
ite become, for example, without wolves? What is a fish without wa-
ter? What is a producer of corn without a protected market? In con-
trast, if some entities are missing, then we have to start the work of
collection all over again. Morality has changed direction: it obliges us
not to define foundations, but to recommence the process of composi-
tion while moving as quickly as possible to the next iteration. The
foundations are not to be found behind us, beneath us, or above us,
butahead of us:catching up with them is our future, as we place the
collective in a state of alert, to register as quickly as possible the appeal
of the excluded entitiesthat no morality ever again authorizes us to ex-
clude definitively.Every experiment produces arrears that will have to
be paid one day. We can never call it quits. It would be sinful to sus-
pend the learning curve for good, even—or especially—in the name of
intangible moral principles that would define humanity once and for
all and without due process.^16 Humanism, too, must become experi-
mental.
By entrusting the concern for finding its way to experimentation, by
making morality a path of trials, the collective also gets itself out of a
difficulty that might paralyze it as it has paralyzed theoretical ecology,
which has been confronted abruptly and without mediation by the ob-
ligation to “take everything into account.” It seems, indeed, that in
passing from modernism to political ecology, we pass from the impre-
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