of summoning them up. The real merit of militant ecology is the ever-
new surprise that comes when a new actor, human or nonhuman,
emerges in the course of action when we least expect it. The definitive
form of the human, the ineluctable composition of nature: these are
just what militant ecology is most likely to miss. Political ecology can-
not distribute either freedom or necessity once and for all; it surely
cannot decide in advance that nature will possess all necessity and hu-
manity all freedom. It finds itselfengaged in an experimentin the course
of which the actors, during the trial, try to connect with one another
or to do without one another. Yes, the collective is indeed amelting pot,
but it does not fold in together objects of nature made of matters of
fact and subjects endowed with rights; it mixes together actants de-
fined by lists of actions that are never complete. If a maxim had to be
stitched onto the flag of political ecology, it would not be, as some of
its militants still believe, the lapidary formula “Let us protect nature!”
It would be a different one, much better suited to the continual sur-
prises of its practice: “No one knows what an environment can do...”
In this situation of ignorance, whereas the emergence of an object
or a subject can provoke indignation, the emergence of a new associa-
tion of humans and nonhumans (other protocols, other trials, other
lists of actions) can only give rise torelief,since the experimentation is
beginning and the repertoire of actions is not closed. While subjects
may well find it unbearable to have their speech cut off by an object
with an irrefutable word, humans can experience pleasure when they
discover that they are in the presence of new nonhumans that can par-
ticipate in the composition of their collective existence.^33 If objects are
scandalized to find themselves cast into doubt by the accusation of so-
cial construction, nonhumans find only advantages in being offered
new resources allowing them to “land,” as it were, in the collective.
Neither subjects nor objects could absorb without scandal the modi-
fication of the lists of actants to be taken into account. What was given
to the one had to be taken from the other. The pairing of humans and
nonhumans is designed, on the contrary, for just this purpose: to allow
the collective to assemble a greater number of actants in a single
world. The terrain is now wide open. The list of nonhumans that
participate in the action is expanding, the list of humans who partici-
pate in their reception likewise. We no longer have to defend the sub-
ject against reification, or to defend the object against social construc-
POLITICS OF NATURE
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