of God and the death of man, nature, too, had to give up the ghost. It
was time: we were about to be unable to engage in politics any more at
all.
Readers may protest that this is a paradox. If they do, it is because
they have the popularized version of deep ecology in mind: a move-
ment with vague contours that claims to be reforming the politics of
humans in the name of the “higher equilibria of nature.” Now, deep
ecology, in my interpretation, is situated as far as possible from politi-
cal ecology; moreover, the confusion between these two approaches is
what constantly disrupts the strategy of the “green” movements. The
latter, persuaded that they could organize themselves along a spec-
trum ranging from the most radical to the most reformist, have in ef-
fect agreed to put deep ecology at the far end of the spectrum. By a
parallelism that is not accidental, deep ecology fascinates political
ecology, as communism fascinated socialism—and as the serpent fas-
cinates its prey. But deep ecology is not an extreme form of political
ecology;it is not a form of political ecology at all,since the hierarchy of
beings to which it lays claim is entirely composed of those modern,
smooth, risk-free stratified objects in successive gradations from the
cosmos to microbes by way of Mother Earth, human societies, mon-
keys, and so on. The producers of this disputed knowledge remain
completely invisible, as do the sources of uncertainty; the distinction
between these objects and the political world they bombard remains
so complete that it seems as though political ecology has no goal but
to humiliate politics still further by reducing its power, to the profit of
the much greater and much more hidden power of nature—and to the
profit of the invisible experts who have decided what nature wanted,
what it could do, and what it ought to do.^28 By claiming to free us from
anthropocentrism, political ecology thrusts us back into the Cave,
since it belongs entirely to theclassicdefinition of politics rendered
powerless by nature, a conception from which political ecology, at
least in its practice, is just beginning to pull us away.^29
Now we can see the problem that obliges us to distinguish between
what the ecological militants do and what they say they do. If we de-
fine political ecology as something that multiplies matters of concern,
we give it a different sorting principle from the question of whether it
is concerned or not with nature, a question that is going to become not
only superfluous but politically dangerous as well. In its practice, po-
POLITICS OF NATURE
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