All the canonical “big problems” of epistemology will appear hence-
forth only as mere martial arts demonstrations. There is a big differ-
ence between the isolated nonhuman tree that falls in the forest, and
the object tree that falls in the forest to smash in the head of the ideal-
ist confronting the realist in a pub across from King’s College! What
can we say about the former? That it falls, and falls by itself. Nothing
more, nothing less. It is the second that responds, polemically, to a
conflict of powerover the respective rights of nature and politics. Only
the object finds itself engaged in the conflict of loyalty between the
new pope and the new emperor— not the nonhuman. Nonhumans
deserve much better than to play indefinitely the rather unworthy,
somewhat vulgar role of object on the great stage of nature. Gravity,
for example: sublime gravity, an admirable rhizome that transformed
Europe and all heavy bodies starting in 1650, deserves much better
than to serve as an irrefutable objection to the social constructivist
who is supposed to claim he can jump out of the proverbial fifteenth-
story window without getting hurt because he believes—or so his
adversaries believe—in relativism! When will we grow up and stop
frightening ourselves with such bugaboos? When will we finally be
able to secularize nonhumans by ceasing to objectify them? When will
we be able not to reduce matters of concern* to matters of fact? When
will we manage at last to be faithful to the promises of empiricism?
By freeing nonhumans from the polemic of nature, we do not claim
to be leaving them to themselves, unattainable, impregnable, unquali-
fiable, as if they occupied the quite unenviable position of “things in
themselves.” If we have to free them, we have to do so completely, and
in particular from the blockade to which Kantianism sought to con-
demn them by depriving them of any possible relations with human
assemblies. The social world is no more made up of subjects than na-
ture is made up of objects. Since, thanks to political ecology, we can
distinguish objects from nonhumans, we are going to be able, also
thanks to political ecology, to distinguish humans from subjects:the
subject was the human caught up in the polemic of nature and courageously
resisting objectivization by Science.Subjects were supposed either to free
themselves from nature in order to exercise their freedom or else to
put their freedom in chains in order to reduce themselves finally to
objects of nature.^60 But humans no longer have to make this choice
that is imposed upon subjects. Once freed of what has been a veritable
cold war, humans are going to take on a very different aspect, and, in-
WHY POLITICAL ECOLOGY HAS TO LET GO OF NATURE
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