Conclusion
What Is to Be Done? Political Ecology!
To offer political ecology a legitimate place, it sufficed to bring the sci-
ences into democracy.
Throughout the present book, I have had to propose this solution
while using outmoded terms: “speech,” “discussion,” “Constitution,”
“Parliament,” “house,”logos,anddemos.As I am well aware, I have ex-
pressed only one particular viewpoint, one that is not simply Euro-
pean but French, perhaps even social democratic, or worse still, logo-
centric. But where has anyone seen a diplomat who did not bear the
stigmata of the camp he represents? Who does not put on the livery of
the powerful interests that he has chosen to serve and thus to betray?
If we have to call upon parliamentarians, it is precisely because there
is no vantage point on Sirius from which judges could assign faults to
the various parties. Am I therefore limited to my own point of view,
imprisoned in the narrow cell of my own social representations?That
depends on what follows.It is true that diplomats do not benefit from
the privileges granted by the Heaven of Ideas, but they are not prison-
ers of the dark Cave, either. They are beginning to parley, wherever
they are, with the words they have inherited. They present themselves
with these formulas to others who have no better ones, no more de-
finitive ones, and who are also leaving the narrow confines where they
were born. For a diplomat, the first words do not count, but only those
that follow: the first stitch in the common world that their fragile
terms are going to make it possible to knit. Everything is negotiable,
including the words “negotiation” and “diplomacy,” “sciences” and
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