and politics. Thus they continue to be seen as two completely unre-
lated sets, the first of which does not even warrant the name of power.
We are still living under the influence of the myth of the Cave.^36 We
are still expecting our salvation to come from a double assembly, only
one of whose houses is called politics, while the other one simply and
modestly declares its determination to define matters of facts; we have
no inkling that this hope of salvation is precisely what threatens our
public life, just as the fall of heavens, according to Caesar, threatened
my ancestors the Gauls. Such is the trap laid by (political) epistemol-
ogy, the trap that has up to now prevented the various ecology move-
ments from supplying themselves with a made-to-order political phi-
losophy.
I do not hope to convince the reader of this crucial point right away;
it may well be the most difficult one in our common apprenticeship. It
will take all of Chapter 2 to restore coherence to the notion of a collec-
tive of humans and nonhumans, all of Chapter 3 to rid ourselves of the
opposition between facts and values, and then all of Chapter 4 to
redifferentiate the collective using procedures taken either from scien-
tific assemblies or from political assemblies. But readers may be ready
to acknowledge even now that political ecology can no longer be fairly
described as what caused concerns about nature to break into political
consciousness. This would be an error of perspective with incalculable
consequences, for it would reverse the direction of history and would
leave nature, a body invented to render politics impotent, at the very
heart of the movement that is proposing to digest it. It seems much
more fruitful to consider the recent emergence of political ecology as
what hasput an end,on the contrary, to the domination of the ancient
infernal pairing of nature and politics, in order to substitute for it,
through countless innovations, many of which remain to be intro-
duced, the public life of a single collective.^37 In any event, to say that
political ecology is finally removing us from nature or that it attests to
the “end of nature” should no longer be taken as a provocation. The
expression may be subject to criticism, because it may not do justice to
the strange practice of ecologists, but it no longer has—or at least so I
hope—the futile aspect of a paradox. When it seemed to have that as-
pect, we were simply at the crossroads between two immense move-
ments whose contrary influence has for some time made the interpre-
WHY POLITICAL ECOLOGY HAS TO LET GO OF NATURE
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