there is nothing astonishing in that.” To take one example in a thou-
sand, we are all familiar with the ravages of social Darwinism, which
borrowed its metaphors from politics, projected them onto nature it-
self, and then reimported them into politics in order to add the seal of
an irrefragable natural order to the domination of the wealthy. Femi-
nists have shown often enough how the assimilation of women to na-
ture had the effect of depriving women of all political rights for a very
long time. The examples of ties between conceptions of nature and
conceptions of politics are so numerous that we can claim, with good
reason, that every epistemological question is also unmistakably a po-
litical question.
And yet, if this were true, my project would collapse at once. In fact,
to reason in this way amounts to retaining a two-house politics by
transposing it into the academic realm. The idea that “nature does not
exist,” since it is a matter of “social construction,” only reinforces the
division between the Cave and the Heaven of Ideas by superimposing
this division onto the one that distinguishes the human sciences from
the natural sciences. When one speaks as a historian, a psychologist,
an anthropologist, a geographer, a sociologist, or an epistemologist
about “human representations of nature,” about their changes, about
the material, economic, and political conditions that explain them,
one is implying, “quite obviously,” that nature itself, during this time,
has not changed a bit. The more the social construction of nature is
calmly asserted, the more what is really happening in nature—the na-
ture that is being abandoned to Science and scientists—is left aside.
Multiculturalism acquires its rights to multiplicity only because it is
solidly propped up bymononaturalism*. No other position has any
meaning at all; otherwise we would revert to the olden days of ideal-
ism and believe that the changing opinions of humans modify the po-
sition of moons, planets, suns, galaxies, trees that fall in the forest,
stones, animals—in short, everything that existsapart from ourselves.
Those who are proud of being social scientists because they are not na-
ive enough to believe in the existence of an “immediate access” to na-
ture always recognize that there is the human history of nature on the
one hand, and on the other, the natural nonhistory of nature, made up
of electrons, particles, raw, causal, objective things, completely indif-
ferent to the first list.^40 Even if, through work, knowledge, and ecologi-
cal transformations, human history can modify nature in a lasting
WHY POLITICAL ECOLOGY HAS TO LET GO OF NATURE
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