litical ecology disrupts the ordering of classes of beings by multiplying
unforeseen connections and by brutally varying their relative impor-
tance. Still, if political ecology—because of the modernist theory that
it thinks it cannot get along without—believes that it is obliged to
“protect nature,” it is going to focus on the wrong objective as often as
on the right one. Even more perversely, it is going to let itself be intim-
idated by deep ecology, which, because it defends the largest beings ar-
ranged in the most rigid and incontrovertible fashion possible, will al-
ways seem to have the high ground, appropriating the power invented
by the myth of the Cave for its own benefit. Whenever political ecol-
ogy encounters beings with uncertain, unpredictable connections, it is
thus going todoubt itself,believe it has been weakened, despair over its
own impotence, be ashamed of its weakness. As soon as a situation
shows arrangements that are different from the ones it had predicted
(that is, always!), political ecology is going to think it is mistaken,
since in its respect for nature it thought it had at last found the right
way to classify the respective importance of all the beings it purported
to be linking together. Now, it is preciselyin its failures,when it de-
ploys matters of concern with unanticipated forms that make the use
of any notion of nature radically impossible, that political ecology is
finally doing its own job, finally innovating politically, finally bringing
us out of modernism, finally preventing the proliferation of smooth,
risk-free matters of fact, with their improbable cortege of incontest-
able knowledge, invisible scientists, predictable impacts, calculated
risks, and unanticipated consequences.
We see the confusion into which we are plunged if we mistake polit-
ical ecology’s theory for practice: the opponents of deep or superficial
ecology reproach it most often with conflating humans with nature
and thus forgetting that humanity is defined precisely by its “removal”
from the constraints of nature, from what is “given,” from “simple
causality,” from “pure immediacy,” from the “prereflexive.”^30 They ba-
sically accuse ecology of reducing humans to objects and thus seeking
to make us walk on all fours, as Voltaire said ironically about Rous-
seau. “It is because we are free subjects forever irreducible to the con-
straints of nature,” they say, “that we deserve to be called human be-
ings.” Now, what best fulfills this condition of removal from nature?
Why, political ecology, of course, since it finally brings the public de-
bate out of its age-old association with nature! Political ecology alone
WHY POLITICAL ECOLOGY HAS TO LET GO OF NATURE
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