readers may turn right away to the first section of Chapter 5, “The Two Arrows of
Time.”
- I am well aware that there is no lack of good reasons that would make it possible
to explain why, in the heat of a new battle, ecological thinkers have not devoted all
their strength to discussing the political nature of nature. Like Sartre before them, they
did not want to dishearten the proletariat by beginning to doubt the Science that
seemed to them to serve as the indispensable lever for public emotion. This “strategic
naturalism” allowed them to turn these famous ineluctable laws of nature against their
enemies. Their tactics may have been good ones in war, and it is somewhat unfair to
criticize them for this expedient use of nature, but it still remains bad political philoso-
phy. In the long run, one cannot pour new wine into old skins. See, for example, the
caricatural use of scientism in Paul Ehrlich and Anne Ehrlich (1997); the authors sim-
ply wanted indisputable “good” science to triumph over the “bad” science of the reac-
tionary ideologues. A philosophy of ecology that did not absorb the controversies
among scientists would neglect all its intellectual duties. - There is no shortage of remarkable works on the impossibility of stabilizing the
modifier “natural.” My two favorites are Alston Chase (1987), and Cronon’s astonishing
book on Chicago (1991). On parks, the example of my friend David Western (1997); for
an introduction, see Cussins 1997. For France, see Danny Tromm’s fascinating thesis
(1996). The connections between the patrimonialization of art and that of nature are
made very clear in Poulot 1997. See Daston 1998, a fascinating work on the history of
nature in science, and Daston and Park 1999. - In all this research I have greatly profited from Lafaye and Thévenot 1993 and
Thévenot 1996; these works displace the false debate about nature by using the key no-
tions of proximity and attachment. - This is the whole problem of the “Seventh City,” so called by allusion to
the work of moral and political philosophy initiated by Luc Boltanski and Laurent
Thévenot (1991). If there is a seventh city in addition to the six that the authors have
deployed, then this opens up the question of the limits of common humanity (Latour
1998). - This is how I interpret the expressions “risk society” and “manufactured uncer-
tainties” popularized by Beck (1992). Beck certainly does not mean that we are more at
risk today than we were yesterday, but that consequences are attached to objects in a
way that is forbidden by modernism. A risky attachment is a “smooth” object to which
its associated risks, its producers, its consumers, its cortege of “affairs” and juridical
challenges, are finally added (Beck 1995). In short, an interesting, tangled object, very
close to the objects described by anthropologists. See Strathern 1992 and Thomas 1991. - See the very detailed report that makes it possible to distinguish the case of as-
bestos from that of the prions responsible for mad cow disease: “In fact, the dossier
[that of asbestos] was born very early in the alarmist mode (by 1900); later, at the time
of maximum production and consumption of the different varieties of asbestos in the
1970s, it shifted to the mode of conflict and protest and then passed into a modality of
bureaucratic responsibility, which, after the fact, gives the impression of a nearly four-
teen-year-long blanket of silence, only to emerge again into the mode of scandal and
accusation (‘contaminated air’)” (Chateauraynaud, Hélou, et al. 1999, 124). See also
Chateauraynaud and Torny 1999.
NOTES TO PAGES 19–23
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