(p. 25) in politics and why we cannot accept the traditional term “na-
ture,” which was invented in order to reduce public life to a rump par-
liament. To be sure, the idea that the Western notion of nature is a his-
torically situated social representation has become a commonplace.
But we cannot settle for it without maintaining the politics of the
Cave, since doing so would amount to distancing ourselves still fur-
ther from the reality of things themselves left intact in the hands of
Science.
To give political ecology its place, we must thenavoid the shoals of
representations of nature(p. 32) and accept the risk of metaphysics. For-
tunately, for this task we can profit from the fragileaid of comparative
anthropology(p. 42). Indeed, no culture except that of the West has
used nature to organize its political life. Traditional societies do not
live in harmony with nature; they are unacquainted with it. Thanks to
the sociology of the sciences, to the practice of ecologism, to anthro-
pology, we can thus understand that nature is only one of the two
houses of a collective instituted to paralyze democracy. The key ques-
tion of political ecology can now be formulated: can we finda successor
to the collective with two houses(p. 49): nature and society?
chapter 2:Once nature has been set aside, another question arises
—how to bring the collective together(p. 53)—that is heir to the old na-
ture and the old society. We cannot simply bring objects and sub-
jects together, since the division between nature and society is not
made in such a way that we can get beyond it. In order to get ourselves
out of thesedifficulties in composing the collective(p. 67), we have to
consider that the collective is made up of humans and nonhumans
capable of being seated as citizens, provided that we proceed to the
apportionment of capabilities. The first kind of division consists in re-
distributing speech between humans and nonhumans,while learning to
be skeptical of all spokespersons(p. 62)—those who represent humans as
well as those who represent nonhumans. The second apportionment
consists in redistributing the capacity to act as a social actor, while
considering onlyassociations of humans and nonhumans(p. 70). It is on
these associations and not on nature that ecology must focus. This
does not mean that the citizens of the collective belong to language or
to the social realm since, by athird apportionment,the sectors are also
defined byreality and recalcitrance(p. 77). The set of three apportion-
ments allows us to define the collective as composed of propositions.
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