phy, in the conception of the social world devised by the human sci-
ences, that allows us to replace nature. It is thus useless to hope that a
“natural contract” will intervene to repair the limitations of the old so-
cial contract, as if one could simply bring together in one great whole
the subjects and objects constituted over the years in order to wage the
most pitiless of cold wars against one another.^7 No matter how long its
digestive process takes, the boa constrictor of politics cannot swallow
the elephant of nature. A body produced to be foreign to the social
body will never be socialized; or else the chemistry of digestion will
have to be altered. Political ecology is doing just this; but it is still un-
aware of what lessons it can draw from this process.
The temptation of globalization appears all the more irresistible in
that ecological crises are translated most often by the disappearance of
everything external to the human world, every reserve for human ac-
tion, every discharge by means of which one could, up to now, in the
delicious euphemism invented by the economists,externalize actions.
This paradox has been noted often: the concern for the environment
begins at the moment when there isno more environment,no zone of
reality in which we could casually rid ourselves of the consequences of
human political, industrial, and economic life.^8 The historical impor-
tance of ecological crises stems not from a new concern with nature
but, on the contrary, from the impossibility of continuing to imagine
politics on one side and, on the other, a nature that would serve poli-
tics simultaneously as a standard, a foil, a reserve, a resource, and a
public dumping ground. Political philosophy abruptly finds itself con-
fronted with the obligation tointernalize* the environment that it
had viewed up to now as another world, a realm as distinct as the
sublunary physics of the ancient Greeks could be, before Galileo, from
the physics of the heavens. As human politics notices that it no longer
has any reserve or dumping ground, what we begin to see clearly is not
that we must at last concern ourselves seriously with nature as such,
but, on the contrary, that we can no longer leave the entire set of
nonhumans captive under the exclusive auspices of nature as such. In
a few short decades, the assembly of humans is finding itself obliged
to reconsider the initial division, and it is asking the other assembly,
which has been meeting in secret for centuries and whose political
work has always been hidden up to now, to contribute its share. Every-
one wants to find out in the name of what Constitution humans and
POLITICS OF NATURE
58