from Science, by making visible once again the apparatuses that make
it possible to say something about nature, apparatuses that are gener-
ally called scientific disciplines. As soon as we add to dinosaurs their
paleontologists, to particles their accelerators, to ecosystems their
monitoring instruments, to energy systems their standards and the
hypothesis on the basis of which calculations are made, to the ozone
holes their meteorologists and their chemists, we have already ceased
entirely to speak of nature; instead, we are speaking of what is pro-
duced, constructed, decided, defined, in a learned City whose ecology
is almost as complex as that of the world it is coming to know. By pro-
ceeding in this way, we add the history of the sciences, shorter but
even more eventful, to the infinitely long history of the planet, the so-
lar system, and the evolution of life. The billions of years since the Big
Bang date from the 1950s; the pre-Cambrian era dates from the mid-
nineteenth century; as for the particles that make up the universe,
they were all born in the twentieth century. Instead of finding our-
selves facing a nature without history and a society with a history, we
find ourselves thus already facing a joint history of the sciences and
nature.^43 Each time one risks falling into fascination with nature, one
has only, in order to sober up, to add the network of the scientific dis-
cipline that allows us to know nature.
At first, such an operation does no more than drive the splinter that
was to be extracted even deeper into the flesh, since we seem to have
added the nightmare of the “social construction of the sciences” to the
cultural representations of nature. So far, the pain has increased...
Everything depends on whether we want to add the history of the sci-
ences provisionally or definitively to the history of nature. In the first
case, the infection is going to get worse, since the wound of epis-
temological relativism will be added to the wound of cultural relativ-
ism; in the second case, we fall from one difficulty into another, larger
one, but at least a cure is possible. “Of course,” our objector will say,
“if you insist, you may add the history of the sciences to the long list of
human efforts to conceptualize nature, to make it comprehensible and
knowable, but it remains true nonetheless thatonceknowledge has
been acquired, there will always be two blocs: nature as it is, and the
variable representations we make of it.” The history of the sciences
belongs indeed to the same list as the history of mentalities and repre-
sentations. It just so happens that this portion of human representa-
WHY POLITICAL ECOLOGY HAS TO LET GO OF NATURE
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