To remain compatible with the terminology introduced in Latour 1993, we could
also call them quasi objects. The expression “matters of concern” simply adds to ob-
jects all the machinery that is necessary to maintain them as established facts, as was
recognized more than half a century ago by Ludwig Fleck (1935), and recently docu-
mented, for instance, by Hans-Jorg Rheinberger (1997).
Genetically modified organisms would provide another marvelous example,
since they are already agitating everyonebeforehaving had any unwanted conse-
quences, their proponents and opponents operating in full viewbeforethey are part of
any stabilized practice.
It seems to me that, for the French at least, the contaminated blood scandal
served as an intermediary between the last modernist objects and the first risky objects
of ecology. It was still possible at that point to believe that the drama of contaminated
blood could be absorbed within the old framework of controlled action. This is no
longer the case with mad cow disease and still less with the “all-out war” over geneti-
cally modified organisms. See the remarkable book, a very important one for me, by
Marie-Angèle Hermitte (1996); the role played by the expectation of absolute certain-
ties on the part of Science is used to explain the French government’s slowness to re-
act.
I shall not define this term until Chapter 2; for the time being, it retains its un-
differentiated meaning of “human or nonhuman actor, anything that acts—that is,
modifies the state of another.”
Whence the importance for my work of the thesis of Florian Charvolin (1993),
which built on a meticulous analysis of the archives to demonstrate the enormous
work of aggregation necessary for first minister of the environment’s controversial and
badly organized intervention.
Safaris are now organized in the Chernobyl region to watch wildlife; naturalists
worry that the possible end of the Cold War in Korea will threaten the wildlife that has
been flourishing in the no man’s land along the demarcation zone! As to the most pol-
luted zone of the United States, it has also become the richest in new species (Cronon
1996).
Moreover, this is why ecological thinkers have so often been infatuated with the
sciences of phenomena far from equilibrium, even though these sciences can offer
them nothing more than a metaphor for the much more fundamental imbalances that
political ecology has been able to bring to light. Yes, nature is “far from equilibrium,”
but in an entirely different sense than chaos theories or other borrowings from physics
claim! The ideas of nature and of equilibrium are contradictory. See Botkin 1990 and
Deléage 1991.
This link between deep ecology and democracy remains uncertain, as Luc Ferry
has shown (Ferry 1995). The example of Jonas is particularly clear, for example, when
he writes: “What we are talking of so far are the governmental advantages of any tyr-
anny, which in our context one must hope to be a well-intentioned, well-informed tyr-
anny possessed of the right insights...If,aswebelieve, only an elite can assume, ethi-
cally and intellectually, responsibility for the future” ( Jonas 1984, 147). It is decidedly
difficult to free oneself of the vanities of scientific power, especially when one can with
moral rectitude join the magisterium of Science.
See Naess 1988; even if Arne Naess’s work goes a little deeper than deep ecology,
