is finally bringing the intrinsically political quality of thenatural order
into the foreground.
We understand without difficulty that political ecology can no
longer be presented as a new concern that arose in Western conscious-
ness around the middle of the twentieth century, as if since the 1950s
—or 1960s or 1970s, it hardly matters—politicians have finally become
aware that the question of natural resources had to be included on the
list of their usual preoccupations. Never, since the Greeks’ earliest dis-
cussions on the excellence of public life, have people spoken about
politics without speaking of nature;^31 or rather, never has anyone ap-
pealed to nature except to teach a political lesson. Not a single line
has been written—at least in the Western tradition^32 —in which the
terms “nature,” “natural order,” “natural law,” “natural right,” “inflex-
ible causality,” or “imprescriptible laws,” have not been followed, a
few lines, paragraphs, or pages later, by an affirmation concerning the
way to reform public life. Certainly, the direction of the lesson can be
reversed; the natural order is sometimes used to critique the social or-
der, and the human sometimes used to critique the natural; people can
even seek to put an end to the link between the two. But no one can
claim under any circumstances to be dealing with two distinct preoc-
cupations that had always evolved in parallel until they finally crossed
paths thirty or forty years ago. Conceptions of politics and concep-
tions of nature have always formed a pair as firmly united as the two
seats on a seesaw, where one goes down when the other goes up, and
vice versa. There has never been any other politics than the politicsof
nature, and there has never been any other nature than the natureof
politics. Epistemology and politics, as we now understand very well,
are one and the same thing, conjoined in (political) epistemology to
make both the practice of the sciences and the very object of public
life incomprehensible.
Thanks to these double findings of science studies and of practical
ecology, we are going to be able to define the key notion ofcollective*,
whose meaning we are thus gradually specifying. In fact, the impor-
tance of the term “nature” does not stem from the particular charac-
ter of the beings that it is supposed to have assembled and that are
thought to belong to a particular domain of reality. The whole power
of this term comes from the fact that it is always used in the singular,
POLITICS OF NATURE
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