order not to fall into a perverse fascination with differences, it is nec-
essary to move quickly to create a common ground that replaces sur-
prise with the deep complicity of solutions. By joining the recent dis-
coveries of comparative anthropology with those of political ecology
and the sociology of the sciences, we should be able to get along en-
tirely without thetwo symmetrical exoticisms:the one that makes West-
erners believe that they are detached from nature because they have
forgotten the lessons of other cultures and live in a world of pure, ef-
ficient, profitable, and objective things; and the one that made other
cultures believe that they had lived too long in the fusion between the
natural order and the social order, and that they needed finally, in or-
der to accede to modernity, to take into account the nature of things
“as they are.”
The modern world—to which Westerners sometimes regret belong-
ing, even as they insist on bringing other cultures in to join them!—
does not have the characteristics commonly attributed to it because it
lacks nature entirely.Nature plays no role in either world.Among West-
erners, because their world is political through and through; among
non-Westerners, because they have never used nature as a place to set
aside half of their collective! Whites are neither close to nature be-
cause they and they alone finally know how it works, thanks to Sci-
ence, nor distant from nature because they have lost the ancestral se-
cret of intimate life with nature. The “others” are neither close to
nature because they have never separated it from their collective nor
distant from the nature of things because they have always mistakenly
confused it with the requirements of their social order. Neither group
is either distant from or close to nature. Nature has played only a pro-
visional role in the political relations of Westerners among themselves
and with others. It will play no further role, thanks to political ecology
as it has finally been rethought so it could catch up with militant ecol-
ogy. Moreover, if we take nature away, we have no more “others,” no
more “us.” The poison of exoticism suddenly dissipates. Once we have
exited from the great political diorama of “nature in general,” we are
left with only the banality of multiple associations of humans and
nonhumans waiting for their unity to be provided by work carried out
by the collective, which has to be specified through the use of the re-
sources, concepts, and institutions of all peoples who may be called
upon to live in common on an earth that might become, through a
long work of collection, the same earth for all.
POLITICS OF NATURE
46