ognize, in addition to smooth objects, the proliferation of matters of
concern*.^21 They are of an entirely different character from the earlier
ones; this explains why we talk about acrisisevery time they emerge.
Unlike their predecessors, they have no clear boundaries, no well-de-
fined essences, no sharp separation between their own hard kernel
and their environment. It is because of this feature that they take
on the aspect of tangled beings, forming rhizomes and networks. In
the second place, their producers are no longer invisible, out of sight;
they appear in broad daylight, embarrassed, controversial, compli-
cated, implicated, with all their instruments, laboratories, workshops,
and factories. Scientific, technological, and industrial production has
been an integral part of their definition from the beginning. In the
third place, these quasi objects have no impact, properly speaking;
they do not behave as if they had fallen from elsewhere onto a world
different from themselves. They have numerous connections, tenta-
cles, and pseudopods that link them in many different ways to beings
as ill assured as themselves and that consequentlyno longerconsti-
tuteanother universe, independent of the first.To deal with them, we do
not have the social or political world on one side and the world of ob-
jectivity and profitability on the other. Finally, and this may be the
strangest thing of all, they can no longer be detached from the unex-
pected consequences that they may trigger in the very long run, very
far away, in an incommensurable world. On the contrary, everyone
paradoxically expects the unexpected consequences that they will
not fail to produce—consequences that properly belong to them, for
which they accept responsibility, from which they draw lessons, ac-
cording to a quite visible process of apprenticeship that rebounds onto
their definition and that unfolds in the same universe as they do.
The famous prions, probably responsible for the so-called mad cow
disease, symbolize these new matters of concern as much as asbes-
tos symbolizes the old risk-free matters of fact.^22 We argue that the
growth of political ecology can be traced through the multiplication of
these new beings that henceforth blend their existence with that of
classic objects, which always form the background of the common
landscape.^23 It seems to me that this difference between risk-free mat-
ters of fact and risky matters of concern is much more telling than the
impossible distinction between the crises that call nature into ques-
tion and those that call society into question. We are not witnessing
POLITICS OF NATURE
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