Divided Natures
Divided Natures
Divided Natures
Kerry H. Whiteside
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Acknowledgements ix
Introduction 1
1 Problematizing Nature 17
2 Humanizing Nature 47
3 Systematizing Nature 79
4 Politicizing Nature 113
5 Personalizing Nature 151
6 Socializing Nature 187
7 Negotiating Nature: Liberalizing or Democratizing? 223
8 Questioning Nature: Reason and Skepticism in French
Ecologism 259
Notes 293
Bibliography 301
Index 319
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dedicated to my parents
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Acknowledgements
gists, including Christopher Stone, George Sessions, and Aldo Leopold. His
attempts to read a couple of French ecologists in light of “Anglo-Saxon”
ecologism goes seriously awry,6 for France has been a seedbed for green theo-
ries that, in varying ways, elude the categories of English-speaking environ-
mental thought. The question raised by studying French ecologism is not
who has the advantage in debates between anthropocentric and non-
anthropocentric ecologists. The question is whether that debate really has to
be the leitmotif of ecologism at all.
In this book I argue that the absence of this debate in France has kept the
discursive field open for different strategies of noncentered ecological argu-
ment. Rather than feel bound to situate their views in relation to some the-
ory of the ultimate ground of environmental values, French green theorists
tend to study how conceptions of nature and human identity intertwine.
They elaborate green thought more often by reciprocally problematizing
“nature” and “humanity” than by refining the distinction between them.
In this sense French ecologists could be said to posit divided natures. They
maintain that what “nature” is shifts in relation to epistemological, social,
and political-ethical changes. Noncentered ecologists see “nature” as multi-
form and as inextricably confounded with humanity’s projects and self-
understandings. They are attentive to how the very meaning of being
human is tied up with our constructions of “nature.” For that reason, they
believe, political ecology can pursue its tasks lucidly only by becoming
aware of the processes linking “nature” and human identity. Noncentered
green theorists forswear rhetoric that reifies nature and fashion a program
whose content is as much “social” as “natural,” all the while seeking to
protect sources of experience that enrich human identity.
Typically, French theorists express their conception of political ecology
as a form of renewed humanism. More particularly, I shall argue, they draw
on traditions of skeptical humanism. Ecological humanism, therefore, is
quite distinct from the epistemologically confident anthropocentric human-
ism that English-speaking ecologists eye with scorn—a tradition that exalts
humanity and gives it unquestioned supremacy over nature. French ecolo-
gists draw on indigenous intellectual traditions associated with Montaigne,
Pascal, and Rousseau. They use those traditions to question facile assump-
tions about human “nature” and thereby to tone down the hubris of
Cartesian humanism. Simultaneously, skeptics challenge the adequacy
4 Introduction
In recent years a few scholars have argued for the need to pay more atten-
tion to cultural distinctions in the way environmental issues are framed in
different countries (Fischer and Hajer 1999; Macnaghten and Urry 1998;
Guha and Martinez-Alier 1997). This book is a contribution to such a pro-
ject, with a caveat: it cultivates an ear for particular accents in the works of
ecological political theorists, more than in expressions of popular culture or
in the attitudes of environmental activists.
Why highlight cultural particularity in green theory? On the face of it,
the more conventional approach seems reasonable. Nature, after all, is
nature. It seems to be of no consequence whether environmental damage
occurs in New York, in Nantes, or in Nairobi. The considerations brought
to bear in evaluating the damage should be everywhere the same.
But matters are not so simple. To live in a distinct linguistic community
is to inhabit a “lifeworld” (defined by Jürgen Habermas as “a culturally
transmitted and linguistically organized reservoir of meaning patterns”7).
And the contents of those cultural reservoirs can differ significantly. It is
not hard to see how this can happen. Theorists in English-speaking coun-
tries frequently read one another’s books; they critique one another in envi-
ronmental journals; they meet in conferences; they exchange academic
positions. A glance at the bibliography of any of the surveys of ecological
thinkers reveals that the works of Americans, Britons, Australians, and
Canadians cross one another’s borders with barely a nod from an intellec-
tual customs inspector. Yet works of French ecologism somehow have got-
ten lost in transit. To a certain extent, the converse is also true in France,
where, although books by Barry Commoner and James Lovelock can be
found in translation, the whole literature of English-language environmen-
tal ethics remains the province of specialized scholars (Larrère 1997) and
has little resonance among French green theorists more generally.
As a result of such differences in the diffusion of ideas, the conversations
of entire linguistic communities take on distinctive characters. Over the
Introduction 5
years, the ease with which conversation passes between thinkers allows cer-
tain modes of argument, a range of terminology, a sense of exemplary prob-
lems, and unintended partialities to build up almost imperceptibly.
Theorists take for granted areas of government activity (or inactivity) that
would be controversial in other communities, and ecologists absorb atti-
tudes toward “wilderness” or “pollution” that are common among their
compatriots but unusual in other nations. Even those who disagree with
the prevailing assumptions find it necessary to construct their arguments
to fit the contours of the debate. As a result, their contrarian views can end
up being formatted by the very ideas they reject.
In effect, the prevalence of certain concepts and modes of reasoning
within a linguistic community creates a rhetorical field. A rhetorical field
favors pushing inquiry into certain territories while leaving others relatively
unexplored.
I do not use the contrasting expressions “English-speaking ecologism”
and “French ecologism” merely to call attention to the national or cultural
origins of different thinkers. Much more than that, I use them to capture the
sense in which a shared language has become the basis for broadly shared
assumptions and patterns of environmental discourse in two linguistic
communities.
The promise of doing systematic, cross-community comparisons of the-
ory lies in its potential to expose widely accepted assumptions and to allow
them to be challenged. I take seriously the idea that cultures are incubators
and preserves of difference. As I see it, the purpose of detecting difference
is not to sanction relativism. Difference invites comparison and, potentially,
correction. Since the conversation of each linguistic community is incom-
plete in relation to a wider universe of discourse, each community stands to
improve its understanding of issues by deliberately contrasting their
fundamental ideas.
Cross-cultural comparisons have their dangers, too. They involve broad
generalizations that can deteriorate into stereotypes. The risks may seem
especially high when an argument throws together ideas from many differ-
ent countries. Some may wonder whether British ecologism is entirely of a
piece with its American cousin. Some may also suspect that what I call
“French ecologism” really describes green thought coming out of most of
the countries in Europe, where the environment has been altered by steady
6 Introduction
Debating Centers
Is only one of these natures real? Are the others secondary or epiphe-
nomenal? Is pastoralism, for example, an understandable but ultimately
retrograde expression of nostalgia—a holdover from a pre-industrial world,
destined to die away as scientific systems ecology enables humanity to sub-
ject every part of the planet to rational control?
My position is that the array of natures expresses profound divisions in
our apprehension and evaluation of reality. Each perspective is a different
way of seeing what “nature” is. In addition, values insinuate themselves
into each view. One nature seems to suppose that satisfying material inter-
ests is the pre-eminent need of an organic being. Another regards spiritual
expression as more fundamental. Some natures presume that a life lived in
accordance with truth requires devotion to scientific norms of objectivity.
Others see truth in more poetic intuitions of wholeness and interconnected-
ness. Put this way, it also becomes evident that our understandings of nature
correlate to equally divided views of our own subjectivity. Our views of
nature imply answers—often contradictory answers—to questions about
the very meaning of life.
To enter the centered environmental debate, one must pay the price of
admission. The characteristic preoccupations of both sides divert us from
seeing what is problematic in both nature and humanity. That is, by assum-
ing that one notion of nature is fundamental and then focusing on whether
that nature contains qualities sufficient to elicit respect by human beings,
theorists tend to suspend inquiry into the identities of both parties to the
relationship. Anthropocentrists and nonanthropocentrists assume that the
division between humans and their nonhuman environment is ontologically
fixed and can serve as the foundation of ecological reasoning. In the process,
they discount the significance of natures that lie outside their field of theo-
retical vision.
Were theorists not wedded to the idea of ecological centering, they might
feel less constrained to devise a theory of value that fixes the traits of gen-
uine environmental concern a priori. What might most impress them is the
irreducible diversity of “natures”—both nonhuman and human—implicit
in environmental practice.
Noncentered ecologists are in a better position to see that the varieties of
protests against environmental degradation derive their unity not from a
theory of value but from the fact that they all see “nature” as a problem.
Introduction 9
Moscovici holds that never before has “nature,” in so many guises, been
so consistently and so self-consciously a focus of critical engagement. A
violated nature has become an essential factor in multiple expressions of a
world gone wrong.
The existence of a “new nature” in this sense is sufficient to challenge age-
old traditions of political theory, even if no single nature is granted onto-
logical primacy. Traditionally, the concept of “nature” has been central to
debates about what it means to have a well-ordered society. Ancients argued
about the perfection of man’s “natural” virtues in the ideal city; modern lib-
erals asserted that just societies preserve “natural” rights. But those natures
were fixed and supposedly knowable. Even when “nature” obviously
changed—as in modernity’s great shift away from teleological and toward
causational understandings of “natural” processes—a new, true nature was
summoned to supplant an old and inadequate one. Centered ecologisms, I
shall argue, for all that they challenge earlier understandings of nature’s abil-
ity to absorb human-induced changes, continue this tradition.
Noncentered ecological theories of the sort commonly encountered in
France, on the other hand, problematize the very founding concepts out of
which environmental concern emerges. For Denis Duclos (1996: 301),
“ecology is at the heart of today’s philosophical, anthropological and polit-
ical problems because it sends us back . . . to the question of the limits of
human practices.” Crucially, Duclos contends not that ecologism defends
a determinate “nature” but that its various claims all raise the idea that
there are goods we can never secure by continually extending our control
over our surroundings. “Nature” has become the vehicle for expressing a
vast array of worries about the quality of life. Environmental philosophies
shortchange this truth when they force us to choose one nature rather than
another.
10 Introduction
cannot end his book without revisiting the philosophical question that
causes such disunity. At that point (p. 255), he decides for anthropocen-
trism! Thus, it may be that the only way to avoid lapsing into centered eco-
logical debate is to take a different philosophical path from the start. That
is what French ecologists do.
The prevalence of noncentered ecologisms in France stands to alter our
understanding of ecological discourse in three ways.
First, within the writings of a single theorist, claims get developed inde-
pendent of their potential contribution to either nonanthropocentrism or
anthropocentrism. This is not to deny that readers will encounter green
claims that are familiar to them from the literature of English-speaking ecol-
ogism (e.g., demands for holistic thinking and environmental justice and for
caution in the application of technology). The difference arises in the way
such claims get framed theoretically. As I shall show at many junctures,
English-speaking ecologists tend to press the most varied observations—
about ecological systems, about animal behavior, about the social construc-
tion of nature, about environmental justice—into the service of one value
center or another. The French help us to see how familiar ideas can lead in
new directions when they are no longer under this rhetorical pressure.
Second, exchanges between two or more French theorists suggest how
ecological debate proceeds when the philosophical reach and consistency of
a theory of environmental value are not the main issues. Noncentered
thinkers challenge one another to confront the significance of their
conceptions of nature and humanity for the distribution of power in a
community. Every conception of nature, it turns out, has implications for
how control is exercised over nonhumans and humans alike. Noncentered
theorists are especially adept at teasing out such implications and subject-
ing them to critical scrutiny.
Third, with regard to the whole field of green political theory, adding
French thinkers into the mix may rebalance our perception of its dominant
controversies. Their presence may help dispel Goodin’s (1992: 8) impres-
sion that “the insight that drives, most powerfully, the current wave of envi-
ronmental concern” is that nature has “an independent role in the creation
of value.” A proper acknowledgement of French ecologism might help
reorient green political theory generally away from interminable debates in
environmental ethics. It might lend credence to a claim only occasionally
12 Introduction
heard and even less often heeded in the English-speaking world: that the
future of green theory lies beyond anthropocentrism and nonanthro-
pocentrism.
enthusiasm for systems theory with the realization that even the most
sophisticated cybernetic models of ecosystems belong in an open-ended
series of ways of knowing nature.
“Politicizing” theorists, including Michel Serres and Bruno Latour, are
the topic of chapter 4. Such theorists contend that political concepts (e.g.,
law, power, hierarchy) run through our conceptions of nature and techno-
logical risk. For these thinkers, humanistic disciplines such as literary stud-
ies, philology, and philosophy shed light on the representations of nature
that structure environmental thought. Theorists of this type end up calling
for more deliberative ways of setting up interactions between human com-
munities and their environments. At times this approach appears “post-
modern,” but postmoderns who assert the utter incommensurability of
values tend to relativize the very scientific knowledge that sparks much envi-
ronmental concern. Latour and Serres, in contrast, exemplify an ecologism
that questions science skeptically but steers shy of depicting it as only a form
of knowledge/power.
Chapter 5 takes up applications of “personalism” to political ecology.
Personalism is a spiritually oriented philosophy that was most powerful in
the 1930s, when it was espoused by Emmanuel Mounier. Mounier’s critique
of modernity emphasized the dehumanizing effects of advanced technolo-
gies and the homogenizing consequences of bureaucratic social organiza-
tion. The philosophical contribution of personalist ecologism is to suggest
that the multiple objects of environmental concern designated by the term
“nature” (e.g., pristine landscapes, healthful consumer products, complex
ensembles of spontaneously evolving phenomena) correlate to different
aspirations of the human personality. Denis Duclos’s studies of how
“nature” appears in relation to the passionate, decentered individual offer
the most compelling updating of secularized personalist insights.
“Ecosocialism,” the topic of chapter 6, is a strain of environmental theory
common to France and the English-speaking world. Ecosocialists protest
the relations among resource depletion, alienating work conditions, and
the unjust treatment of Third World countries. Some ecosocialists have
created unresolved tensions between centralizing and decentralizing
approaches to ecological reform; others have championed relativistic theo-
ries that fail to translate the moral urgency of environmental concern. In
recent years, however, a new strain of ecosocial discourse has taken shape
Introduction 15
in France. Social activists such as Jean-Paul Deléage and Alain Lipietz favor
a contractual ecosocialism in which ideals of equality and autonomy are
conceived as the fundamental values of ecological negotiators who seek to
win the assent of diverse groups to a social order that is stable, distribu-
tively just, and environmentally responsible. English-speaking ecosocialists
typically get drawn into debates over nonanthropocentrism. French con-
tractual ecosocialists are freer to explore how human appreciation of nature
is mediated by historically evolving modes of labor.
Chapter 7 situates ecologism in relation to liberal thought. Liberals some-
times worry that an ecologistic worldview is inherently undemocratic. They
charge that ecologists assume that what is natural is good, thereby denying
human communities the right to set their own purposes. Liberals contend
that the distinction between nature and culture must be preserved if human
freedom is not to be endangered. Too often, however, French liberals and
French ecologists have allowed their debate to be stalled by hyperbolic mis-
characterizations. The liberals have ignored efforts to devise a noncentered
ecologism; the ecologists have not always faced up to the liberals’ con-
tention that humane and democratic theorizing cannot avoid centering on
human reason. In chapter 8 I draw together the arguments for a more con-
clusive debate. Even in noncentered ecologisms, I maintain, it is possible to
detect traces of some sort of rationality that contradicts the language of
contingency and arbitrariness preferred by certain French theorists. I show
how Habermas’s theory of discursive ethics might account for those traces
without requiring ecologists to abandon their insights about the reciprocal
implications of “humanity” and “nature.” At the same time, I argue,
France’s skeptical humanist heritage supplements the theory of commu-
nicative competence. It offers up an ideal of the political ecologist as a cross-
breed whose ability to move among the worlds of scientific, humanistic,
and social inquiry helps keep rationality balanced by insisting on the real-
ity of divided natures.
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1
Problematizing Nature
“In many respects,” writes Jean-Luc Parodi (1979: 40–41), “[French] ecolo-
gism appears, when it finally became structured, as the ideological heritage
of May 1968.” According to Parodi (ibid.), May 1968 remodeled France’s
ideological landscape by “favoring themes of worker self-management,
spontaneity, the criticism of bureaucratic apparatuses, by establishing ‘sec-
ondary fronts’ in feminism, regionalism.” In contrast to countries that have
preservationist and conservationist traditions stretching back into the nine-
teenth century, France has not typically treated preserving nature per se as a
public concern.
The simultaneous appearance of new social and environmental demands
in the late 1960s profoundly affected how French ecologists problematized
nature: they now drew inspiration from a sweepingly critical discourse
about society as a whole. French ecologism developed in a process that
Moscovici (1993) calls a “polymerization” of ideas. Five strands, each a
part of a “culture of life,” intertwined to oppose the “forces of destruction”
in the contemporary world. One strand was a critique of science, particu-
larly of its development of atomic weapons and its integration into eco-
nomic and military structures. A second drew from a critique of colonialism
and the destruction of ethnic diversity worldwide. A third, in the name of
“human authenticity,” updated a European sensibility favoring the coun-
tryside over the city. Moscovici calls the fourth strand sociological, since it
links ecology to class structure and work relations. Through it, Marxist
analyses of relationships between science and industry or of the state’s pref-
erence for economic growth over social justice became a standard part of
French ecological discourse. Finally, a “mixed network” of biologists and
cyberneticians began to challenge physics-based understandings of the
18 Chapter 1
Beginnings
natural things are valuable for what they are. The preservation of the sub-
lime beauty of wilderness was therefore justified for reasons that went
beyond mankind’s need for resources or recreation and beyond a concern
for human health. Around 1900, the idea that government intervention to
protect exemplary fragments of original nature was legitimate and perhaps
even obligatory began to capture imaginations far beyond the United States.
Yellowstone already had become a model for preservationist initiatives in
Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.
English-speaking authors’ histories of political ecology typically document
that preservationism has competed with “conservationism” to justify mod-
erating human uses of nature (Norton 1991: 6–13; Taylor 1992: 1–26;
Eckersley 1992: 33–47; Paelhke 1989: 14–22). Gifford Pinchot, appointed
chief of the U.S. Forest Commission in 1896, worried that the United States
was wastefully depleting its resources. Forests felled without replanting, for
example, would deprive the nation of the wood it needed for future devel-
opment. Resources were important for their utility to human beings; there-
fore, they should be managed rationally on the basis of scientific studies and
according to principles of economic efficiency. It was perfectly consistent
with this view to see the forest as “strictly . . . a factory of wood” (Pinchot,
quoted on p. 19 of Taylor 1992). Wisely managed, resources would ulti-
mately contribute to raising the material standard of living of all citizens.
As preservationist and conservationist rationales for environmental con-
cern were gathering force in the New World, the French were still pre-
occupied with fundamental issues of constitutional consolidation. Not the
question of the state’s competence to safeguard resources or to preserve
wilderness but its very legitimacy was yet to be resolved. Viard (1990: 93)
vividly captures the contrast:
When Americans were inventing the first national park, Paris had just lived through
the Commune, the villages of southern France had reached their maximum popu-
lation. . . . The Empire [of Napoleon III] had fallen, France was occupied [by
Bismarck’s Germany]. Americans were discovering the West and occupying it phys-
ically and symbolically. In France, people were endlessly debating and fighting for
or against the Republic. . . . France was coming to terms with the destruction of the
Bastille when Americans were confronting nondomesticated nature.
The next stage in the development of French ecologism arose out of a rebel-
lion against every form of technocratic thinking. In May 1968, after 10
years of paternalistic government dominated by General Charles de Gaulle,
French university students and then workers took to the streets, occupy-
ing factories and parts of central Paris. Their target, recalls Alain Lipietz
(1989: 68), was “an omnipresent, technocratic state.” With future German
Green Daniel Cohn-Bendit as their charismatic spokesman, students
protested against the centralization, authoritarianism, and exclusivity of
the university system. Workers demanded a larger share of their society’s
burgeoning wealth and more control over their working conditions. Guy
Debord, Raoul Vaneigem, and other “Situationists” of 1968 criticized
urban gigantism, loneliness, and the pursuit of quantity of goods rather
than quality of relationships in everyday life (Simmonet 1982: 54, 94).
They railed against routinization, hierarchy, and citizen passivity. Direct
political engagement—outside the rigid structures of the established
parties—was the order of the day.
Ecological themes entered the ideological mix gradually (Legoff 1981).
Dorst’s Avant que la nature meure and Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (pub-
lished in French in 1963) took on new significance after 1968. They served
as elements of a general critique of a society so hedonistically dedicated to
material consumption that it was willing to wallow in its own wastes and
to tolerate the commercialization of spectacular landscapes. The Torrey
Canyon oil tanker disaster of 1967, which fouled the coasts of France and
Great Britain, had already made the environmental dangers of modern tech-
nology more vivid to the French than ever before. France’s first national
park had just opened (in the Vanoise, in 1969) when plans were announced
to allow a ski area to be built there. The journalist Jean Carlier led a peti-
tion drive that convinced President Georges Pompidou to stop it.
Not that Pompidou had himself become a convert to a new ecological
sensibility. He introduced plans to build a highway on the left bank of the
Seine river in Paris with the admonition that “the city must adapt to the
automobile”(Pronier and le Seigneur 1992: 141). Indignation at that proj-
ect occasioned one militant’s turn toward ecology. Brice Lalonde—presi-
dent of the student union of the Sorbonne in 1968, and the man who would
26 Chapter 1
someone deeply concerned with ecological issues, and someone with expe-
rience in the rough and tumble world of political engagement. From the
start, their virtually unanimous choice was René Dumont—a former
Trotskyite, a world-famous agronomist, and an activist on behalf of the
Third World. Dumont treated ecology’s 1974 foray into the electoral arena
with almost deceptive matter-of-factness. He explained: “I believe that we
must use all means of expression that are given to us to affect public opin-
ion: there must be no limits to communication! Also it seems normal to me
to intervene in the electoral process. . . .” (Dumont 1978: 185). From his
own experience, though, he knew that it was far from normal.
Not even people with environmentalist sympathies gave much support
to Dumont’s candidacy. Remaining true to their traditions, the Fédération
française des sociétés de protection de la nature and the Ligue pour la pro-
tection des oiseaux refused to join his cause. They judged his campaign too
politicized (Vadrot 1978: 46). Many on the left opposed Dumont’s candi-
dacy because it threatened to drain away votes just when, for the first time
in the Fifth Republic, the Socialists and the Communists had agreed on a
Common Program that might enhance their electoral fortunes. Dumont
received only 1.32 percent of the first-round vote in the election. After his
quixotic campaign, the rest of the 1970s were years of “difficult con-
solidation” for the French green movement (Sainteny 1991: 13–22). Com-
mittees and networks set up to support Dumont disbanded or lapsed into
inactivity until the next election. Environmentalists did have a few elec-
toral successes in the late 1970s. Solange Fernex, Didier Anger, and other
anti-nuclear activists drew ecology’s highest electoral scores to date in
municipal elections in 1977 and in legislative elections in 1978.6 But until
1984, failure dogged every attempt to form a national green party with
permanent statutes, elected officers, and an authoritative electoral pro-
gram. Nonetheless, Dumont’s candidacy marks a turning point in French
ecologism.
Deliberately challenging his fellow citizens’ long-standing aversion to
partisan environmental activism, Dumont made it his personal, decades-
long crusade “to ecologize politics and to politicize ecology” (Dumont 1978:
185).7 That project entailed far more than running an electoral campaign
with environmentalist themes. It meant casting ecological problems in such
a way that a public inclined to deny their seriousness would finally give
30 Chapter 1
to show how taking ecology seriously would mean rethinking the whole
range of public policy objectives.
Finally, making ecology political presupposes ensuring that its program
is imbued with a sense of social justice. Justice dictates how the benefits and
burdens of community life are properly distributed. Justice provides stan-
dards for deciding whether existing distributions of resources are deserved
or whether they should be called into question. Where justice has been vio-
lated, communities demand that certain principles of rectification be
observed. Otherwise, politics is reduced to relations of force, losing its char-
acter as the activity through which a people constructs a mutually accept-
able common life. Having denounced Goldsmith for failing to take a
sufficiently comprehensive view of the nature of our ecological challenges,
Dumont (1973: 52) adds that some ecologists also neglect to “analyze who
is responsible for the intolerable waste that is leading us to our ruin.”
Dumont taught that relations of domination and dependence—quintes-
sentially political relations, large-scale relations of power demanding moral
evaluation—traverse the entire range of planetary disequilibria regularly
denounced by ecologists. A “political” program is not just a “new philos-
ophy of life.” It sets priorities and chooses appropriate means as a function
of an assessment of moral responsibilities. Taking moral responsibility seri-
ously pushes ecology in the direction of specific ideological commitments.
Exemplifying Politics
other natural (pertaining to the survival of all forms of life in Earth’s ecosys-
tems.) Exactly how they are intertwined and how conflicts between them
would be resolved is left nebulous. This, no doubt, is why every scholar
who has surveyed French ecologism has devised a different taxonomy of
its various strains.
Alphandéry, Bitoun, and Dupont (1991: 10–11) contend that the main
division among ecologists is between futuristic systems theorists and back-
ward-looking partisans of a return to the soil and myths of folk identity.
Simmonet (1982: 6) finds two roots of ecologism: the teachings of scien-
tific ecology and the ideas of new social movements that seek to “take
Homo economicus out of his cramped framework of worker-consumer
to consider him as a unique being endowed with desires and a culture.”
Prendiville (1993: 123–145) proposes a perplexingly eclectic four-part
classification: romantics, mystics, and authoritarians; personalist-
humanists; modernists (those preoccupied by technology, work, and
democracy); and a vast mélange of anarchists, utopian socialists, liber-
tarians, and millenarians.
The most complete survey of ecologism in French is Les sources de
l’écologie politique, in which Jacob (1995: 16–17) manages to reduce
the principal strands of political ecology to three: one originating in “the
worrisome teachings of the science of ecology,” a “libertarian” perspective
that aims “to disengage man from certain constraints (social, economic,
and political) in order to guarantee him a maximal and immediate flour-
ishing,” and “a third nebula” that “proposes to go back on triumphant
anthropocentrism to consecrate a certain form of personalism, which sub-
stitutes the modesty of concrete man for the voluntarism of the abstract
man of Enlightenment thinkers.” What is striking about these categories
from a French viewpoint is the unresolved heterogeneity of the ways they
frame environmental questions. From the viewpoint of English-speaking
ecologism, something else entirely is remarkable: None of the categories
of French ecologism turns on, or even addresses, ways of conceiving the
value of nature itself. Just when it appears that Jacob may be about to
bring up such an issue (by mentioning “triumphant anthropocentrism”),
he veers back toward “personalism” and its view of “concrete man.”
Could this mean that cultural differences run throughout green political
thought as it is practiced in the two linguistic communities?
Problematizing Nature 43
Theoretical Centering
all values—are human-centered at least in the sense that they stem from
human judgment and in the sense that they ultimately appeal to the total
context of what makes for a good, rich, vibrant human existence (Norton
1991: 250). The good is not intrinsic to the nonhuman things themselves.
Debates between those two tendencies are so prevalent in the ecologism
of the English-speaking world that every scholar who surveys this field finds
it unavoidable. In the most widely referenced source work on green politi-
cal thought, Andrew Dobson (1995: 5) prepares for an extended analysis
of anthropocentrism by arguing that ecocentrism is the feature that most
“serves to distinguish ecologism from the other political ideologies.” From
their nonanthropocentric perspectives, both Robyn Eckersley (1992) and
Brian Baxter (1999) make the distinction between ecocentrism and
anthropocentrism the organizing principle of their reviews of environmen-
tal political theory. Theorists of the opposite persuasion are no less inclined
to highlight this dichotomy. To clear the stage for his own “enlightened
anthropocentrism,” Tim Hayward (1998) decries “two dogmas of ecolo-
gism”: anti-anthropocentrism and a commitment to the intrinsic value of
nonhuman nature. John Barry (1999b: 2) calls ecocentrism a “sacred cow”
of green political theory and defends an “anthropocentric moral base” for
the ecological transformation of the liberal democratic state. Indeed,
philosophers surveying ecologism say that evaluating claims of intrinsic
value has become the central task of the whole field environmental ethics
(O’Neill 1993: 8; Taylor 1992: 108; Weston 1996: 286; Wells and Lynch
2000: 20). Surely Baxter (1999: 6) is right about English-speaking ecolo-
gism when he notes that nonanthropocentric moral claims have achieved
such a degree of prominence that “at the very least, devotees of rival moral
positions have now to have some argument to weaken or refute the claim
of the moral considerability of the nonhuman.”
The debate between nonanthropocentrists and anthropocentrists typi-
cally12 problematizes neither nature nor humanity. As much as they reject
age-old assumptions of nature’s limitless bounty or maintain that humans
are no longer unique in their moral considerability, neither side makes reflec-
tion on the conceptual interdependency of humanity and nature the focus of
its philosophical project. We humans are one thing; nature is another.
Anthropocentrists believe that only humans’ well-being interests consti-
tute moral value. We are centered in the sense that our psychic unity gives
Problematizing Nature 45
nature in a new way, without questioning its identity. Trees are trees, and
(at least in some circumstances) we must let them be.
In a centered ecological theory, the center is the fixed point. Everything
else gets relativized to it. Either humanity is the center and nature is made
to accommodate itself to human well-being or nature is the center and
humanity has a moral duty to adjust its actions to make room for the flour-
ishing of natural things.
What I will call the centeredness assumption that runs through so much
English-speaking ecologism obscures another option. There is a possibility
that thinking about our ecological predicament might best be developed by
avoiding the very habit of “centering” our attention. Rather than focus on
how to adjust relations between two presumably distinct entities, one might
open up ecological theory by examining how the identities of “nature” and
“humanity” get constituted—together, reciprocally—in the first place. I call
such theory noncentered. Now, the early popularizers of French ecologism
did not articulate a noncentered theory in this sense. But they did reinforce
a rhetorical field in which “human” and “natural” issues are kept con-
stantly intertwined.
What is most characteristic of French ecologism since 1968 is its tendency
to absorb diverse values—such as beauty, durability, justice, communal sol-
idarity, and protecting life in all its spontaneous variety—without regard
to whether they can be explained from one center or another.
If the early advocates of French political ecology came up short in the
area of intellectual synthesis, their eclectic efforts were significant nonethe-
less because they allowed neither the social nor the environmental side of
their agenda ever to disappear from view. The potential unity of the well-
being of the planet and the well-being of humanity is almost always
assumed. Giving philosophical heft to such an assumption becomes the
characteristic task of French ecological theory. That is the theme of the rest
of this book.
2
Humanizing Nature
a work on political ecology was all the more unexpected from a rising social
psychologist. If, as conventionally understood, social psychology studies
the processes through which groups “socialize” their members, imparting
values and beliefs to them, getting them to adjust their behavior to meet
others’ expectations, then Moscovici takes a most unorthodox turn. He is
critical of the premises of the contemporary human sciences, whose con-
ceptions of “society emphasized the opposition of man to nature.” They
underestimate society’s role of regulating “material forces” and neglect the
“creation of productive and scientific faculties” (Moscovici 1994: 367).
Moscovici’s purpose is to demonstrate that different social groups form out
of different relations to the “nature” that their work and technology bring
into existence. “Socialization” is not only a “social” process of transmitting
norms from person to person; it is reciprocally a matter of our collective
engagement with a material world.
The Essay on the Human History of Nature begins on a prophetic note.
The late twentieth century, says Moscovici (1968: 6–7), must grapple as
seriously with “the natural question” as the eighteenth century did with
“the political question” and the nineteenth century with “the social ques-
tion.” The political question concerned how to expand political represen-
tation beyond the noble class; the social question asked how to manage civil
society so as to mitigate economic inequality. The natural question arises
out of the unprecedented and pervasive power of modern science. “We are
now able, consciously and methodically, to intervene in the biological equi-
librium of most plant and animal species, to preserve or destroy them, to
change the climate, to modify the cycle of energy transformations. Our geo-
morphic action no longer knows any limits.” (ibid.: 7)
“The natural question” has two meanings, which can be distinguished
more clearly that Moscovici usually does. On the one hand, it signifies a
growing tendency to problematize social issues around the concept of
nature and to make “nature” itself into an ideal. For ages, theorists have
worried about how human liberty and political power might be reconciled
or about how the workings of society might interfere with the prospects for
human self-realization. If ideals of over two millennia of political theoriz-
ing were reduced to one-word slogans, they might be expressed as follows:
Justice! Virtue! Peace! Liberty! Equality! Moscovici’s thesis is that another
ideal is becoming increasingly prominent: Nature! Environmentalists, to
50 Chapter 2
Labor and technology are not simply means through which we transform
the world, as if matter passively awaited their transformative power. They
position humanity in ways that alter our understanding of what nature is.
In that sense, humankind creates its own nature.
At the same time, humans are also the subject of nature. The very skills
and technological innovations that make nature appear to us in certain
ways end up transforming social structures too. The spread of farming and
animal husbandry causes hunters to disappear or move on. Those who
practice agricultural arts devise elaborate rites and practices to ensure the
transmission of their knowledge from generation to generation. Similar
processes are at work today. “Tight cooperation between technicians,
artists, scientists is indispensable to bring forth the qualities of the physical
world, and to interest other collectivities in consolidating their knowledge.”
(Moscovici 1968: 80) In the process of moving society from one “state of
nature” to another, certain groups are the primary movers, the “carriers of
invention”: the artisans of the ancient world; in the modern era, the
mechanical engineer; today, scientists.
In one of his most striking theoretical claims, Moscovici (1968: 119)
asserts that the fundamental principle structuring social relations is not
wealth or kinship or class but “la division naturelle.” According to the prin-
ciple of natural division, societies’ needs for reproduction and innovation
encourage the development of distinct groups with different forms of
knowledge and skills in relation to the material world. Divisions along lines
of sex, age, and occupation stem from a society’s mode of interaction with
material forces. These differ as communities depend on hunting, or farm-
ing, or mechanized production. These “natural categories,” as Moscovici
names them, are the human medium through which “nature” evolves. The
interaction of natural categories, whether ordered in hierarchies or disor-
ganized by competition and conflict, sets in motion the process by which
newly dominant skills reveal previously unsuspected properties of matter
(ibid.: 155).
Even this human medium has no fixed nature. Human anatomy as we
know it is the result of our ancestors’ creation and use of artifacts. In his
more anthropological work La société contre nature, Moscovici traces the
development of human characteristics such as the use of tools and com-
munication out of primate societies and argues that humanity’s distinction
54 Chapter 2
from the apes is the result only of “la division naturelle”—not a funda-
mental difference of “nature.” Thus, “ it is illusory to claim that we possess
nature as an autonomous, closed or ultimate entity. On the contrary, we
elaborate it progressively and restructure it periodically. . . . What we mas-
ter is a movement, by transforming relations of which we ourselves are a
part.” (Moscovici 1972: 169–170) Note that when denying that “nature”
is “autonomous” or “ultimate,” Moscovici is not saying that its features
are unknowable or infinitely pliable. To “master . . . a movement” suggests
that we can achieve greater understanding of the external world and of our
own characteristics by studying their processual linkages rather than by
examining them separately. The essential question is: what sort of mastery
would this improved understanding enable to us undertake?
Moscovici (1968: 24) argues that in our cybernetic era the co-evolution
of nature and humanity has reached a decisive point. Humanity is now
obliged to “take charge of nature.” The natural question challenges
mankind to participate in “the government of the natural order.” It is
important to keep constantly in mind, however, that the “nature” whose
“governance” Moscovici envisages is not the “nonhuman” world. We must
not imagine governing nature as being like tending a garden or safeguard-
ing a patch of wilderness. Such images reify “governed” and “governor”
alike. Nature, to repeat, is the configuration of elements made to emerge by
human labor and art, technical knowledge, and technology. And since it is
through the creation and dissemination of skills that societies develop their
states of nature, “governing nature” takes place through understanding and
channeling this process of skill creation.
Centered Ecologisms
them in their struggle to survive.” From the standpoint of each life form, it
is intrinsically valuable to be in a flourishing state. Taylor concludes that we
have a duty to respect not only human life but every individual life.
Taylor’s methodologically individualist interpretation of intrinsic value is,
however, atypical in the literature of environmental ethics (Katz 1997: 69).
Often what troubles ecologists about human activities is not that they
destroy this or that particular nonhuman life. After all, what could be more
“natural” than mutual instrumentalization? Individual plants and animals
do that all the time to one another in processes that are essential to the flour-
ishing of life throughout an ecosystem. Ecologists worry most when human
activities degrade entire ecosystems. Such worry would seem to argue for
attaching worth to relationships of complex interdependence, adaptation,
and dynamic equilibria—not, or not only, to individual life forms. Many
nonanthropocentrists argue that moral considerability inheres in holistic
entities (Rolston 1988; Callicott 1989; Katz 1997).
Nonanthropocentric reasoning, however, generates ethical conundrums
that call into question its very coherence. For example, once one goes down
the path of defending nature’s intrinsic value, it is not easy to avoid bio-
centric egalitarianism—a declaration that every life form has equal worth.
According to Taylor, the differentia that, supposedly, give human beings
special moral worth always beg the question of what features really are
morally worthy. True, we value reason, and reason is probably crucial to
actualizing a human life. But other creatures have their distinctive capaci-
ties that help them fully actualize their lives in relation to their own envi-
ronment. In the absence of any non-question-begging criteria for moral
distinction we must conclude that “animals and plants have a degree . . . of
inherent worth equal to that of humans” (Taylor 1986: 152).
Yet biospheric egalitarianism seems ethically absurd. Isn’t the notion that
natural things have an inherent worth equal to that of human beings incon-
sistent with the very existence of human life? Acknowledging something’s
inherent worth means, at a minimum, not deliberately killing it if it poses
no direct threat to oneself. Humans who feed and shelter themselves, how-
ever, virtually have to kill some plants and animals. Acknowledging nature’s
inherent worth seems to condemn us.
Nonanthropocentrists try to avoid that clearly unacceptable conclusion
by explaining why certain human activities that entail taking nonhuman
62 Chapter 2
life are, nevertheless, consistent with respect for nature. But their explana-
tions flirt with anthropocentrism. Taylor, for example, holds that all species
are equally entitled to live according to the same principles. Among equals,
conflicting moral claims should be settled in a principled way through pri-
ority rules. The most important of these is the principle of self-defense. “The
principle of self-defense permits actions that are absolutely required for
maintaining the very existence of moral agents. . . .” (Taylor 1986: 265).
Like every other species, human beings are justified in taking the lives of
other species, but only to fulfill their “basic” interests. And lest that word
be used to conjure images of inhumanly austere conditions, Taylor allows
that humanity’s basic interests include cultural participation. We write
down languages, create art, develop technologies. Thus, even if some cul-
tural practices come at the expense of nonhuman lives, they can be morally
permissible (ibid.: 281).
Does our cultural need for writing paper supersede the right of pulp-pro-
ducing trees to exist? Aren’t automobiles part of our culture, even if their
emissions contribute to global climate change? Taylor cannot mean that
just because a human practice has a cultural dimension, it automatically
trumps the intrinsic value of nonhuman things. We need ways of assessing
the good of cultural practices vis-à-vis harms to nature. But the idea of
nature’s intrinsic value forbids precisely such calculations of comparative
worth; Taylor’s biocentric egalitarianism puts the well-being of each life-
form on its own scale. The point, of course, is not that Taylor would want
to defend every “cultural” practice. It is that an egalitarian interpretation
of nature’s intrinsic value has such potentially inhumane implications that
even a firm advocate feels compelled to qualify it. In doing so, however, he
accords advantages to humans that seem to give them special entitlements
in relation to everything else that is natural.
Making nonanthropocentrism more holistic does not solve the problem.
Consider the reasoning of Lawrence Johnson. Johnson believes that he per-
suasively counters the egalitarian logic imbedded in the notion of nature’s
intrinsic value. He argues that any living system that can be said to have
“integrated effective functioning of [its] self as a whole” carries some moral
considerability (1991: 142). Since this is true of species and ecosystems as
well as of organisms, we must to some degree respect them all. Johnson
proposes that we “give due respect to all the interests of all beings that have
Humanizing Nature 63
abandon “nature” once and for all because nature is only a social creation.
Socially constructed and reconstructed a thousand times, it is hopelessly
caught up in metaphysical dualism. If we are to become more solicitous of
the world around us, we should look to what we “encounter before we
discover ‘nature’“—before whatever we encounter gets dissected and
reassembled and mythologized in our cultures. Taking a cue from phe-
nomenology, Evernden sets forth a conception of “the ultrahuman.” The
direct apprehension of a phenomenon “accepted in its full individuality, as
a unique and astonishing event,” may evoke a quasi-religious sense of awe.
A person who gets wonder-struck in this way could be “a more benign
creature,” concludes Evernden (ibid.: 124).
The dualizing rhetorical field of English-speaking ecologism makes itself
felt in even this resolutely anti-dualist argument. First, Evernden criticizes
the ahistorical realism of intrinsic value conceptions of “nature” by up-
ending them: if nature is not real, it is socially constructed. But, contrary
to his intentions, that move seems to leave the world (whatever one wants
to call it) entirely open to human technological manipulation. Thus, he
goes in search of something with its own fundamental identity that can
serve as a limit to such designs. He finds the “ultrahuman”—and, as in so
much English-speaking ecologism, the “ultrahuman” is virtually synony-
mous with “wildness” (Evernden 1992: 121). Wildness is suspiciously
close to the most common meaning of “nature”: “everything which is not
human . . . , [that which is] ‘otherness’ to humanity” (Soper 1995: 108).
Following Evernden’s historical approach, however, there is little reason to
think that the “ultrahuman” is truly fundamental. As Roderick Nash
maintains (1967: xiv), a notion of “wildness” makes sense only for those
whose culture contains a conception of “controlled and uncontrolled
nature.” If “nature” is a social creation, so too is “the wild.”
That would lead us back to an unsatisfying constructivism. Social con-
structivism, in that case, is only a variant of the “subjective” component of
the traditional dualism. The constructivist attributes agency to society
rather than to the individual cogito. But, like the cogito, society is ultimately
free in its own constructive activities. Society constructs “nature,” society
constructs “the wild.” Instead of a nature-culture dualism, we are left with
a dualism of the wild and the social. Evernden gets into these difficulties
because his motivation is the same as that of both anthropocentrists and
Humanizing Nature 71
to imagine that Moscovici might even connect the attributes of the ethicists’
subject—its attachment to rule-following, its desire for generalization, its
expectation that moral intuitions be tested against potential counterexam-
ples almost like scientific hypotheses—to a society in which science and high
technology so crucially mediate relations with our material surroundings.
Perhaps the most troubling question to be asked of a noncentered ecol-
ogism is whether it ends up once again permitting humanity’s unconstrained
right to change its surroundings as a function of its own desires (Köhler
1983: 28–29). Is it really possible to accept “nature” and “humanity” as
reciprocally determining without legitimizing technologies and work prac-
tices that end up eliminating an animal species or turning a beautiful canyon
into a rock quarry? In fact, doesn’t Moscovici’s call for “the government of
the natural order” represent the ultimate extension of a Cartesian project
of bringing nature entirely under human mastery? As will become appar-
ent in the course of this study, such questions can aptly be addressed to
almost all of the French ecologists, not just to Moscovici. Thus, we should
defer an answer until we have more fully examined the variety of ways that
they reciprocally problematize “humanity” and “nature.” Here I suggest
only that, in preparing to respond that question, we must concentrate our
attention on the concept of “humanism”—a concept constantly evoked in
a positive sense by French ecologists but often ignored or regarded with
suspicion by English-speaking ones.
In the rhetorical field of English-speaking ecologism, “humanism” fre-
quently gets confounded with anthropocentrism. David Ehrenfeld’s The
Arrogance of Humanism makes the classic case. Ehrenfeld maintains that
“humanism” is the dominant religion of our era. The central tenet of this
faith is that “all problems are soluble by people” (Ehrenfeld 1978: 16).
Humanity seeks to “engineer” its own future by scientifically studying phe-
nomena, then devising technological remedies for social problems. At the
head of Ehrenfeld’s list of things that are lost when we approach the world
humanistically is “wilderness, which is not any particular species or habi-
tat type, but a higher class of life form with its own nobility derived from
its complete independence of human beings” (ibid.: 255). The deep ecolo-
gists Bill Devall and George Sessions (1985: 54, 111, 118) similarly com-
bine a critique of humanism with a desire to protect “vast areas free as
untrammeled wild places.” In fact, critical assessments of “humanism” are
Humanizing Nature 73
and ahistorical rules of justice. Once they have located the center of intrin-
sic value in nature or man, they have an extraordinary faith in the power
of reason to devise an internally consistent set of rules and measures that
will allow us to give every being its due. It is this similarity that lets
anthropocentrists charge that, since human beings will necessarily end up
making decisions about what constitutes the welfare of nonhumans, every
ethic is at bottom anthropocentric. The very intellectual complexity of a
nonanthropocentric ethic can be taken as evidence that reason—“the solid
rock of human nature”—is the true measure of moral worth, not qualities
inherent in natural things.
But what if the drive towards ethical completion itself were part of the
problem? In her late works, Judith Shklar argued that overconfidence in
the “normal [rationalistic] model of justice” makes people insensitive to
wrongs ignored or prettied up by that model. She contended that many of
our most deeply felt ethical convictions—our endorsement of tolerance,
social equality, democracy, our awareness of victimhood in places where it
has not been seen before—arose less by rational systematizers measuring
social practices against abstract philosophical standards than by skeptical
questioning (Whiteside 1999). Skeptical humanists point to the gaps in
every philosophical system; they demonstrate the potential for abuse that
occurs when an intellectual perspective is stretched to cover the totality of
experience.
Skeptics strive for ethical effects by playing one type of knowledge off
against another. They listen attentively to claims of those whose views have
been devalued by prevailing conceptions of what is right or “civilized.” But
when skeptics catch others out in contradiction or ethical deficiency, they
do not automatically turn to formulating a new, more complete ethic. They
cultivate an appreciation of the irreducible diversity of values and throw
them in the face of the forces of commensuration and uniformity.
The only quibble that ecologists might have with Barthes’s description
of this second humanism is his labeling it “progressive.” “Progress” is a
term too bound up with notions of material abundance and normalization
of behavior to be allowed to name a perspective that often challenges those
very ideals (Moscovici 1976: 102–103). It was not an intention to foster
“progress” per se but a skeptical turn of mind that made Rousseau into a
critic of the “old impostures.” Rousseau charged that science and progress
Humanizing Nature 77
human cultures have devised over millennia. That is why Moscovici (1978:
55) sees the ideological distinctiveness of ecologism in its commitment to the
quality of life rather than to the quantity of material production. Ecologists
contend that market economies have failed to value not only nonhuman
habitat but also human communal solidarity and social justice. They try to
integrate critiques of alienating work conditions with proposals for con-
serving resources. They charge that representative institutions and bureau-
cracies are overcommitted to economic growth and undercommitted to
goods such as beautiful landscapes and biological diversity. They see local
environmental degradation in the context of concerns for world peace. They
promote participatory practices not only to mobilize people on behalf of
ecological issues but also because they prize a human personality that is
active, socially aware, and attentive to the needs of others. The normative
quest of French ecologists is ethically pluralistic. It leads to no metric, no
prioritizing scheme, that would reconcile all values. Doubt about the time-
less essence of either the human subject or “nature” makes it possible to
talk of “humanizing nature” without implying an anthropocentric project
of seeing “nature” simply as raw material to satisfy human desires.
This multivalent awareness of “the natural question” has been made pos-
sible, Moscovici argues, by the developments in nineteenth and twentieth-
century science that led him to characterize our state of nature as
“cybernetic.” Neither an organic nor a mechanical worldview supports the
general characteristics of Moscovici’s own theorizing: an assertion of the
substantive unity of nature and society, attention to the mutability of mat-
ter, and a call for “governing” nature. As the next chapter will emphasize,
the nature envisioned in a systems approach does all of these things.
3
Systematizing Nature
France’s ecological movement began, says Marc Abélès (1993: 9), as a form
of “ruralizing romanticism.” But it became a movement of lasting political
significance only when it incorporated a scientific discourse showing that
“the planet is a complex system of interactions” (ibid.: 10). So influential
has the systems view been among French ecologists that one group of
French sociologists call it “the spontaneous philosophy of post-modern
ecology” (Alphandéry et al. 1991: 117). The systems approach, they
explain, “starts from a desire to go beyond the traditional scientific divi-
sion between the exact sciences and the human sciences, in order to appre-
hend the complexity of relations between nature and culture. . . . It wants
to supply, through intersecting concepts such as information and energy,
order and disorder, complexity and self-organization, feedback, regulation
and entropy, a total vision that grasps the unity of the fundamental mech-
anisms of nature, man and society.” (ibid.: 116) None of these concepts are,
in themselves, unique to French ecologism. At least since 1953, when
Eugene Odum’s Fundamentals of Ecology was published, the systems
approach has informed the international research program of scientific ecol-
ogy. To the extent that that research program has yielded knowledge about
unsustainable levels of resource consumption, the adverse of effects of
monocultural crop production, and human-induced climate change, it is
only to be expected that political ecologists around the world would draw
upon it. Certainly concepts borrowed from systems theory are prominent
in the green thought of English-speaking countries.
Two factors change, however, as one moves into the world of French
ecologism.
80 Chapter 3
First, one notices that in France ecologists of almost every stripe take on
the language of the systems approach at some point (Prendiville 1993: 130;
Simmonet 1982: 13; Jacob 1995: 43–56). Among English-speaking ecolo-
gists, systems ecology usually competes for influence with ideas drawn from
older environmental traditions. Henry David Thoreau and John Muir, for
example, introduced Americans to a sort of respect for nature grounded
not in the science of ecology but in immediate experiences of untamed land-
scapes. Nonanthropocentrists and anthropocentrists alike appeal to this
tradition when they connect environmental values to the direct perception
of the wild. In Britain, environmentalist ideas sometimes emerge out of cul-
tural preservationists’ efforts to protect the “English” characteristics of the
pre-industrial countryside (Macnaghten and Urry 1998: 35–38; Barry
1999a: 99–104). In that case, one hears more of the heritage of hedgerows
than of feedback and entropy. The pervasiveness of systems theory in
France, however, means that theorists more often develop their perspectives
by amending its concepts, rather than those advanced by wilderness enthu-
siasts or pastoral environmentalists.
The second difference concerns how the systems approach is taken up
theoretically in France’s humanistically charged rhetorical field. In the
English-speaking world, systems ecology has regularly been swept into
debates for and against nature’s intrinsic value. The drive to center ecolo-
gism sometimes hides a fateful ambiguity in the systems perspective: Its
holistic view of nature potentially validates both nonanthropocentric and
anthropocentric extremes. Nonanthropocentrically, humanity can be fully
naturalized as part of an ecosystemic whole, i.e., seen as just one more
species within nature and subject to its laws. Anthropocentrically, nature
can be more fully humanized than ever before. By virtue of understanding
ecosystemic relations, humanity learns how to subject nature to its purposes
with impunity. Mindful of this ambiguity, French ecologists attempt to take
advantage of the insights of scientific systems ecology while consciously
resisting its potential to spawn a centered ecologism. They do so with vary-
ing degrees of consistency and success.
René Passet keeps his use of systems theory off center by emphasizing the
irreducible diversity of environmental values. This diversity confounds any
attempt to derive values from nature or to reduce environmental value to
economic value. Joël de Rosnay tries to follow a similar path but stumbles
Systematizing Nature 81
into the ambiguity of the systems approach. Edgar Morin offers the most
sophisticated use of a noncentered systems approach. Determined to miti-
gate the potentially authoritarian political implications of systems ecology,
Morin employs psychology, phenomenology, and a quasi-Hegelian histori-
cism to deny closure to any potential center of green value.
its complexity, and according to its own dynamics” (Rosnay 1975: 119).
What matters to the character of a system is not the properties of its isolated
components but its structure: how its components functionally support one
another to form a whole. By virtue of the complexity of interactions among
its parts, a system develops properties (e.g., the ability to be self-regulating)
that cannot be explained solely by the properties of their building blocks.
Thus, the system as a whole appears goal-directed. In pursuit of that goal,
relationships between the system’s parts can be flexible and irregular.
(2) As the science of self-regulating systems, cybernetics shows how sys-
temic properties are stabilized—or disrupted—by flows of matter and
energy interpreted as information. That is, cybernetics studies how systems,
including life forms, respond to their environment not merely by reacting
mechanically to forces impinging on them but also (and more important)
by processing inputs as messages. Matter and energy entering the system
(“inputs”) and exiting the system (“outputs”) have to be kept in balance in
order for the system to persist. “Negative feedback” consists of inputs that
provoke corrective, equilibrium-preserving changes in the system. Through
negative feedback loops, systems become “self-regulatory”—for example,
they tend to preserve a certain temperature, a certain concentration of
chemicals, or a certain level of population. Positive feedback consists of
inputs that continually reinforce a single direction of change, thus throw-
ing a system out of equilibrium and toward growth or death. Open systems
exchange energy and material with their external environment (Robin
1975: 75).
(3) Complex systems are characterized by dynamic stability. Systems pre-
serve their identity through a continual process of self-renewal. Unlike a
crystal, which remains self-identical in the sense that its constituent mole-
cules remain the same and are locked into certain organizational patterns,
an organism keeps its identity by “maintaining its structure and its func-
tions through a multiplicity of dynamic equilibria” (Rosnay 1975: 129).
Likewise, entire ecosystems consist of dynamic equilibria between numer-
ous species of living organisms and cycles in the nonbiotic environment.
Complex systems are homeostatic: they “react to environmental change . . .
by a series of modifications that are equal in size and in the opposite direc-
tion to those that gave rise to them: the goal of these modifications is to
maintain the internal equilibrium” of the system (ibid.: 129). In this way,
Systematizing Nature 83
evaluative work gets done, not when scientists formulate such axioms, but
when environmental managers apply them to protect “ecosystem health.”
Nature, revealed scientifically as a set of self-identical processes, remains
the focal point of human valuation.
What might be missing when debate proceeds in this way? Examining the
works of French ecologists who also use systems theory might make us
aware of several suppressed or deferred lines of inquiry. In France, the ambi-
guity of the nature/humanity distinction is woven into systems-theoretic
reflections. Theorists examine how the exercise of power in human com-
munities is bound up with the very terms used to describe “nature.” They
probe the psyche of the human subject who will make decisions about either
respecting nature or managing it. Rather than maintain that through a sys-
tems approach we have finally understood our place in nature (because now
there is a place in nature for complexity, goal-oriented adaptation, auton-
omy), or that a systems approach furnishes a new view of nature from which
we can deduce moral obligations, French ecologists call attention to how
human values interact with scientific understandings of the natural world.
The systems approach took root in France largely as a result of the efforts
of the “Group of Ten.” That group’s predecessor—an intellectual club
called Objectif 72, created in 1965—sought to bring awareness of scien-
tific and technological advances into political discourse. Jacques Robin,
Robert Buron, Henri Laborit, and Edgar Morin (each of whom had
attended some meetings of Objectif 72) were the core of a larger group of
economists, computer scientists, and sociologists who, beginning in 1967,
assembled regularly to converse about relationships between technology
and society. The starting point of the Group of Ten’s discussions was this
question: “If we took account of the new knowledge in the fields of com-
puter science, biology, and neuropsychology, would this help decision mak-
ers to some degree to rid political discourse of its magical elements?” (Robin
1990: 82) Like Enlightenment thinkers, the Group of Ten hoped that
human intelligence would be able to penetrate the mysteries of the sur-
rounding world and use its new-found knowledge to drive out superstition.
Giving their project a political tinge from the very start, the Group of Ten
88 Chapter 3
eagles but not necessarily spotted owls. The variability in the ways that
Sagoff’s environmentalism might treat different species reveals that he is
defending noninstrumental values in American culture, not values intrinsic
to nonhuman entities. In a linguistic community where “arguments have
come increasingly to be cast in terms of the interests of nature itself”
(Goodin 1992: 8), it seems, theorists sometimes find it difficult to resist the
polarizing force of its rhetorical field—even if it causes them to skip from
one ecological center to the other.
Another troubling aspect of a culturalist argument is that it tends to dis-
place entirely the role of scientific ecology in defining “nature.” Sagoff does
not deny the relevance of systems ecology to decision making in environ-
mental affairs; he merely rejects claims that its methods constitute the sole
path of “rational” inquiry. As a pragmatist and a democrat, he holds that
inquiry can be rational so long as it “emphasizes virtues of clarity and open-
mindedness” (Sagoff 1988: 12–13). This conception of rationality helps to
legitimize forms of environmental policy making that include deliberations
by ordinary citizens, not just experts. The problem is that a culturalist inter-
pretation of intrinsic value risks making environmental policy simply a
reflection of social identity. We have to ask if a largely aesthetic-historical
approach to environmental issues does not divert our attention from the
complex interconnections that systems ecologists wish to call to our atten-
tion. Culturally, wetlands may be little more than dismal swamps.
Ecosystemically, however, they are crucial links in the circuit of life: they
are spawning grounds for numerous species of plant and animal life; they
filter out waterborne pollutants; they resupply underground aquifers; they
mitigate floods. Ignorance of these systemic functions, which is often cul-
turally encoded, contributes to environmentally destructive strategies of
economic development. For purposes of deciding what most deserves pro-
tection, Sagoff’s environmentalism is in danger of viewing “nature” only
through a cultural lens.
From Passet’s viewpoint, nature is not so subjective. Ecological thinkers
have to make room for a scientific-realist moment as they try to evaluate the
processes through which humanity transforms the world and, reciprocally,
is itself transformed. He proposes no unifying theory of value, culturalist or
otherwise, through which to process scientific information. His appeal to
“being” signals a determination to use the scientific realism of the systems
Systematizing Nature 93
approach while holding at bay any tendency to let its authority override
multivalent human judgments. On that difficult path, Passet keeps his bal-
ance reasonably well. He owes that balance, we shall see, to his awareness
that science and politics compete as forms of power. Not every systems the-
orist, French or English-speaking, does so. The writings of Joël de Rosnay
illustrate the dangers of a politically less cautious use of a systems approach.
Joël de Rosnay was at one time a researcher in biology and computer sci-
ence at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Later he was Director of
Research Applications at the Pasteur Institute. Today he is a director of the
City of Science and Industry near Paris. He was a relative latecomer to the
Group of Ten in the early 1970s. But through works such as Le macroscope
(1975) and L’homme symbiotique (1995), Rosnay has become probably
the most widely read advocate of ecological systems theory in France.
For Rosnay (1975: 22), the interrelations that make up an ecosystem
mean that “in a certain way, [an ecosystem] is a living organism.” Like an
individual organism, an ecosystem captures energy, circulates nutrients, and
spontaneously adopts stabilizing strategies in response to perturbations.
Rosnay—who explicitly favors Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis—argues that,
through the rapid spread of technological developments, humanity has
turned itself into a “social macro-organism,” or what he calls a “cybionte”
(a neologism combining the idea of a cybernetic, self-regulating machine
and a living organism) (1995: 143). On roads, railways, and air routes, the
cybionte circulates its own vital nutrients. Our machines are like muscles
and organs that move and process matter. To register needs or threats, we
have developed nerve-like detectors: markets, media, polling firms. Just as
sensory impressions are transmitted through the entire nervous system of a
living organism, we have covered the globe with information networks.
Coordination of all of these subsystems is in part deliberate (e.g., the regu-
latory activities of governments and international organizations) and in part
spontaneous (e.g., the decentralized “parallel processing” of information
accomplished by individuals and firms attempting to adapt to local
changes). All these components are linked systemically. Our interdepen-
dencies give us the potential to become organized in such a way that we
94 Chapter 3
eyes, it is not that the traditional borders were always unclear or indefen-
sible. Rosnay obviously has considerable—perhaps inordinate—confidence
in the ability of the sciences to understand natural processes. But advances
in that understanding, he argues, are now leading to so many border cross-
ings—from genetically engineered bacteria to species redistribution across
the globe to, someday, direct connections between human brains and com-
puters—that the very notion of a frontier between the natural and the arti-
ficial is becoming meaningless.
Implicit in this claim is a human history of nature. Rosnay is saying that
the idea of “nature” long reflected humankind’s relative technological
impotence. As our technological prowess increases, “nature”—for better
or for worse—loses its conceptual power to express the idea of “all that is
nonhuman.” Rosnay replaces the traditional dichotomy of nature and
humanity with a systems view of the two. A systems approach, in this view,
is not a new understanding of nature; it is a unifying mode of thought that
enables us to grasp relationships both within and between what were for-
merly called nature and society. And, although Rosnay believes that sys-
tems theory helps us better appreciate the complexity, significance, and
fragility of ecosystems, it does not lead him to declare that any part of
nature deserves respect because it embodies an “end in itself.” Systems the-
ory decenters our way of conceiving ourselves, preparatory to designing
new ways of integrating a wide range of human interests and environ-
mental constraints. In practice, Rosnay probably agrees entirely with the
pluralistic perspective of René Passet (whose work he often cites). Thus,
there is in Rosnay’s work a glimmering of what is characteristic of French
ecologism: a sense of a “humanized” nature that leads toward an ecolo-
gism dedicated to rethinking the very frameworks of thought that have
forced us to fit ourselves into a dichotomy of natural and human things.
But only a glimmering. Repeatedly, Rosnay reverts to the traditional dual-
ism—and in ways that raise disturbing political-ethical questions about
his work. When he says, for example, that systems theory offers “a new
vision of nature” (1995: 34), he continues to allude to what nature really
is. In the process, he replaces an old dualism with an old monism. He nat-
uralizes humanity. He submerges it in the symbiotic couple of the cybionte
and Gaia. In that case, a “humanist morality” really consists of the values
that we have to adopt in order to maintain the vital functions of this “plan-
Systematizing Nature 97
be dismissed as naive, and his easy talk of “man” becoming the “co-pilot”
of the living world obscures questions about who will actually be steer-
ing the system.
What is missing from Rosnay’s use of systems theory is a set of political
reflections that, in effect, knock ecological thinking off center. Those reflec-
tions appear in the works of Rosnay’s more circumspect colleagues in the
Group of Ten. René Passet (1979: 230) warns that the systems approach
inherently disposes its practitioners to think of individuals as replaceable—
sacrificeable—units in a larger whole. That is why he not only praises decen-
tralization (as Rosnay does) but also (unlike Rosnay) puts the whole issue
of political deliberation in a framework whose dimensions far exceed those
of a systems approach. “To the degree that a value system cannot be demon-
strated scientifically,” says Passet (ibid.: 237), “there are necessarily many
conceptions of social utility. This constitutes, in my opinion, an invitation
to pluralism, to tolerance, and a justification for alternating in the democ-
ratic exercise of power.” In Passet’s conception of “being,” politics takes
precedence not only over economics but also over science, even as knowl-
edge from both of those domains is fed into the community’s deliberative
processes. Robin (1989b: 202–210) emphasizes that systems become self-
regulating only by maintaining a balance between reproducing their own
structures and remaining open to external, environmental variations. It is
this balance that constitutes a system’s autonomy. In regard to human soci-
ety, this implies that a culture that reproduces itself too efficiently actually
hampers its ability to respond to environmental change. From this per-
spective, Rosnay’s cybionte is more alarming than ever. Robin fears that
industrial society, with its patterns of audacious technological innovation,
mass consumption, and anonymous individuality, has short-circuited the
autonomy-renewing potential of democratic organization.
Such political reflexivity can keep systems-inspired thinking from settling
on a stable center of environmental value. At one moment, French ecolo-
gists understand scientifically the systemic consequences of technologies on
the environment; at another, they watch for politically contestable imagery
within the presentation of scientific description; on top of all of that, they
situate scientific knowledge in a swirl of values whose diversity attests to a
context—Passet calls it “being”—that is more encompassing that even the
most inclusive ecosystem. Those traits of noncentered theorizing, present in
100 Chapter 3
ism has been less influential among French ecologists than one might
expect. The rarity of centered ecologisms in France deprives postmoderns
of their most obvious targets. Indeed, many French ecologists explicitly crit-
icize postmoderns for being insufficiently attentive to the actual processes
of scientific investigation that so profoundly shape our views of nature. It
is the reflexive realism of noncentered ecologisms that postmodern analy-
ses of codes and discourses tends to miss.
must learn to negotiate a new contract with a nature whose links of inter-
dependence and equilibria generate rights that we must respect. Reciprocity
with nature must replace mastery over it as the regulative norm of human
activity (ibid.: 67).
The natural contract includes “nature” in a planetary sense. The social
contract was always implicitly local. In spite of the abstractly universal
character of their imaginary contract, theorists envisioned it as legitimiz-
ing something like a national community—a group of people probably
sharing a language, a limited territory, and certain cultural traditions. The
natural contract, however, pertains to the planet as a whole and to future
generations. What is unprecedented in our ecological predicament is that
powerful technologies of energy production, communication, and com-
merce, as well as the instruments of war, are affecting environmental qual-
ity world-wide. We have created a “world-object.” The natural contract
must be correspondingly global and incorporate the interests of future gen-
erations (Serres 1990: 67–73).1
What should we do, however, when scientists themselves are not certain
about the global effects of human activity on the world? For example, what
if it cannot be proved definitively that emissions of greenhouse gasses are
causing global warming? Shouldn’t we await more certain evidence before
acting? Serres responds by borrowing a page from a skeptical humanist.
Blaise Pascal reasoned that it made sense for individuals to wager that God
and the afterlife did exist, even if they had doubts about them. Eternal life
and happiness are the highest of stakes. If one lives a godly life and God
exists, there is everything to gain; if God does not exist, “you lose noth-
ing,” claimed Pascal (1971: 439). For Serres, identical reasoning pertains
whenever there is potential for global environmental disaster. Suppose a
danger is alleged to exist. If we bet against its materializing, and we win,
life goes on as before. But if we lose, we lose everything. Now suppose that
we respond to the danger by taking action to avoid it (e.g., reducing emis-
sions of greenhouse gases). If we are wrong, “we lose nothing.” But if we
are right, “we win everything and remain actors in history” (Serres 1990:
19). Where the highest goods are in jeopardy, caution is the order of the
day.
Ferry warns that Serres has begun a process of smuggling anti-humanist,
undemocratic, and disturbingly un-French notions of nature’s intrinsic
Politicizing Nature 117
driven engine has replaced the “fixed point” as the organizing model of
understanding. Descombes (1980: 90) calls Serres “the virtuoso of the iso-
morph” for his skill in finding formal equivalences across such disparate
domains of knowledge.
To understand the isomorphisms of which The Natural Contract is con-
structed, we must turn our attention to the first mention of that concept in
an essay written more than 10 years earlier. In The Birth of Physics in the
Text of Lucretius (1977), Serres maintains in all seriousness that a didactic
poem written in the first century B.C. contains a view of nature that is struc-
turally homologous to that of a modern physics inspired by thermody-
namics and cybernetics.
In Lucretius’s resolutely nonteleological philosophy, the universe consists
of randomly falling atoms. It has no intrinsic order. All is flux, dispersion.
How then do recognizable bodies take form? Structures form through the
phenomenon of the clinamen. A tiny deviation in the monotonous flow of
atoms creates a turbulence in which they connect and spiral together in a
temporary order. Lucretius describes the emergence of something by devi-
ation from a state of equilibrium. Stability is now homeorrhesis—not a solid
structure but the constancy of a flowing, localized circuit of matter per-
ceivable against a background of formless flux (Crahay 1988: 78). “The
Lucretian world,” says Serres (1982: 116), “is globally entropic, but nega-
tively entropic in certain swirling pockets.” The clinamen begins a process
of self-conservation. “Repair, feeding, feedback” are the productive phe-
nomena that constitute natural forms capable of resisting the eternal flux
(Serres 1977: 76). Lucretian physics posits an empty space and a flow of
atoms as the basic reality of the universe; they are the “foedera fati,” the
laws of fate. The forms that take shape from the clinamen, born in radical
indeterminacy, cannot be attributed to fate. They are “foedera naturae”—
natural contracts. They have enough stability for their laws to be described,
but they are too fragile, local, and variable to be called fundamental laws
of the cosmos.
Still “science remains science and laws remain laws but what changes is
the global contract, the general scheme of things that scientists agree to call
‘physics’” (Serres 1982: 102). Contemporary scientists have begun to for-
mulate a physics that is structurally akin to Lucretius’s physics of flux and
turbulence. The very title of a systems-theoretic book that is influential in
120 Chapter 4
many ecological circles, Order Out of Chaos, could have easily been
adopted by Lucretius. The “nature” of Isabelle Stengers3 and Ilya Prigogine
is dynamic, processual. They argue that living things (and some nonliving
ones) form “dissipative structures” in an entropic universe. Such structures
strive to maintain their form by regulating the flow of energy though them
and metabolizing other systems’ structures. When random environmental
fluctuations overwhelm those structures, more complex systems emerge to
create new zones of stability. Indeterminacy, flux, emergent structure, local-
ized stability, entropy: these themes of modern physics are the themes of
Lucretian atomism too.4
Serres is not saying that Lucretius got nature right 2000 years ago and
that modern science from Descartes to Laplace got it wrong. Like other
French ecologists, Serres is engaged in reconceiving the nature-culture
nexus, not simply correcting our view of nature. This early discussion of
the natural contract shows how this is so. Serres turns to Lucretian physics
because, unlike twentieth-century science, Lucretius offers a conception of
nature that is not complicit in the violence of warfare. Though many
philosophers since the Enlightenment have seen in modern science the path
to human reconciliation, Serres emphasizes throughout his works the
greatly enlarged capacity for violence that they create. Referring to the
development of the atomic bomb and its relationship to “scientific opti-
mism,” Serres writes: “Hiroshima remains the sole object of my philoso-
phy” (1992a: 29). The bomb over Hiroshima obliterated any illusions that
science could only be a force for life and ethical progress. Serres ends his
essay on Lucretius with a dark allusion to this central theme (1982: 124):
“Violence is not only in the use of science but still hides in the unknown
of its concepts. . . . The world after Hiroshima can still die from the
atoms.”
“The unknown of its concepts” refers to Serres’s argument that science
proceeds from certain founding images and metaphors that condition the
ways—violently or lovingly—it handles the phenomena it studies. One
physics takes shape under the sign of Mars, the god of war. It is a physics
of rank-and-file formations, parallel lines, chains, sequences, rivalry, power,
and competition; it is a view that imagines “cutting up the bodies into atom-
ized pieces, letting them fall.” This is “the foedus fati, what physics under-
stands as a law; things are that way” (Serres 1982: 100). And then, with a
Politicizing Nature 121
political extension of his argument, Serres (ibid.) notes that “it is also the
legal statute in the sense of dominant legislation.” Serres investigates how
a strategic and political terminology—the martial metaphors—shaped
understandings of the “natural” world from the very start of scientific
understanding and how those understandings were transmitted historically
in the works of Francis Bacon and René Descartes.
But there is an alternative. Lucretian physics forms in the presence of
Venus, the goddess of love. This is a physics of “vortices, of sweetness, and
of smiling voluptuousness,” one in which there are flows, turbulence, and
a degree of freedom. In the Lucretian view, order is achieved not by domi-
nation but through a gathering together, a conjugation of things that are in
constant, vortical movement—a foedera naturae, a natural contract. Here
“nature is formed by linkings, . . . relations, crisscrossing in a network”
(Serres 1982: 114). Serres’s point is that science is always “conditioned” by
founding concepts drawn not from science itself but from other domains:
politics, military strategy, mythology. These founding concepts do not deter-
mine the content of scientific knowledge (e.g., the law of gravity or of
entropy in closed systems). However, they do affect what Serres calls the
“topography” of the sciences: the “global form [of a science’s parts] and its
relief at local points.” And these in turn influence how the science is used.
“The physics of Lucretius . . . is in fact the same as that of Archimedes, but
the postulation of Venus and the exclusion of Mars transform it.
Hydrostatics in the first is related to the constitution of living beings; in
the latter it is related to the theory of ship-building.” (ibid.: 107) An under-
standing of the world informed by notions of fluidity and change rather
than order and repetition, by contractual federation rather than strategies
of domination, is, Serres believes, more consistent with the flourishing of
life in general.
In this essay, then, Serres does not see the “natural contract” as an ethical
act in which people come to an agreement to respect all the values they attach
to nature. Nor does he contend that the natural contract comes from a per-
ception of nature’s pre-existing values, which then receive juridical recogni-
tion. The natural contract is a concept that arises from an attempt to
conceptualize phenomena in a particular way in which “knowing” means
understanding the bonds and interactions that create form-sustaining
structures in an essentially disorganized universe. Though our socially
122 Chapter 4
inherited ways of thinking are shot through with notions that predispose us
to adopt attitudes of violence and mastery in relation to our world, con-
tractual notions are available with which we might establish a more life-
sensitive “topography” of existence.
In The Natural Contract Serres continues the line of argument laid out
above. Essentially, he exploits structural equivalences between contractual
understandings of human communities and scientific understandings of
nature in order to allow us to conceive an ecologically responsible politics
without getting caught in the nature/culture dualism. The equivalences clus-
ter around two related concepts: contract and law.
Let us consider contract first. The kind of assertion that disturbs Ferry
occurs when Serres (1990: 69) announces that “the earth speaks to us in
terms of forces, connections, and interactions, and that suffices to make a
contract.” Ferry (1992: 151–152) retorts that this is inconceivable, insofar
as contracts presuppose autonomous subjects capable of making moral
commitments, and that Serres can speak of a natural contract only by mis-
leadingly ascribing human properties to the earth. Serres would point out,
however, that contracts are not so firmly associated with subjectivity. The
original image of “contract” is more physical than metaphysical. The word
comes from com-trahere, to draw together. It conveys an image of tighten-
ing ropes, as in adjusting the rigging on a sailing vessel. If we speak of con-
tracts today as moral and legal bonds created by bargaining among free
individuals, something of the physical founding image still remains: a com-
plex set of linkages, combining constraints and freedoms, in which each
element receives information through every adjustment in the system as a
whole (Serres 1990: 162). The language of contract does not presuppose a
metaphysical divide with autonomy on the one side and physical necessity
on the other. Contract is therefore more than a foundational concept in rela-
tion to the origin of human communities. Serres reveals the forgotten role
of contract in imagining relationships between human and nonhuman
beings in terms of equilibrium, partnership, and reciprocal influence. By
mapping out formal equivalences between humanity and nature, we can
begin to see the possibility of a “negotiation” with nature in which certain
Politicizing Nature 123
terms and accepted procedures. Those practitioners’ results are then tried
before juries of scientific peers. In this sense, “science proceeds by contracts”
(ibid.: 42).
But it is not only contracts internal to the scientific community that val-
idate its knowledge. Serres insists that confrontations between scientists
and the larger civic community are integral to the history of science. That
is, trials such as those of Galileo and Lavoisier should be seen as some-
thing other than moments when the forces of obscurantism blocked the
march of reason. Serres contends instead that scientists’ appearances
before such tribunals are the moments when the internal history of the sci-
ences (the scientists’ own judgments of truth) and their external history
(the community’s judgments of right) get synthesized: “Truth, which seems
to us like it must be founded on something other than an arbitrary con-
vention, is on the contrary so founded. . . . What is science, knowledge,
even thought? The totality of confrontations with all the other founda-
tions of truth with this fundamental act of arbitration. Every certainty must
present itself, to be registered and confirmed, to be canonized, before a tri-
bunal.” (Serres 1990: 121–122) Like Lucretius’s atoms falling in a void
and federating in natural contracts, knowledge, according to Serres, takes
shape against a background of chaotic noise and violence. It forms in the
struggles of different groups to vindicate their own understandings of truth
and to obtain social recognition of their contractual protocols for getting
access to it.
In this struggle, science has proved extraordinarily successful. Since
Galileo’s trial, external tribunals have dared less and less to call science to
account. Against the Church, Galileo claimed the right of scientists to speak
for things themselves, to describe and manipulate the world as they saw fit.
Serres treats Galileo like the originator of property in Rousseau’s Discourse
on Inequality: one who marks off a territory and finds others “simple
enough to believe” that their traditional rights would survive unchanged
(1990: 133). Only later—too late—do they discover that their rights do not
survive. Traditionally, civic and religious authorities have claimed the right
to judge all matters pertinent to the community’s well-being, often in the
name of “natural law” or God’s ordinances. In the modern world their writ
runs no longer. “Nature becomes a global space, empty of men, left alone
by society, a place where the scientist judges and legislates, that he masters,
Politicizing Nature 125
352–356). His account of the processes through which “humans and non-
humans swap properties” exemplifies more concretely than any theory
since Moscovici’s Human History of Nature how French ecologists try to
move in a noncentered rhetorical space.
Latour’s international reputation stems from his work in an area some-
times called “the sociology of scientific knowledge” and sometimes “sci-
ence and technology studies.” Latour now prefers to call it “the symmetrical
anthropology of science.” The different labels are an index of a progressive
radicalization of his thought. His first major work, Laboratory Life, is best
classified as an essay in the sociology of scientific knowledge.8 Latour enters
a laboratory to study the scientists who discovered a hormone regulating
the human endocrine system. The hormone’s presence—its very existence—
is measured by a bioassay whose reliability scientists establish only by their
persuasive abilities. What ends up counting as a “fact” about nature
emerges only as a result of scientists’ building networks of allies. An
observer of such a process, says Latour, would “portray laboratory activ-
ity as the organization of persuasion through literary transcription” (Latour
and Woolgar 1979: 88). But if scientists are not actually doing what they
claim to be doing (discovering facts about the world), what motivates their
work? Latour argues that they are engaged in a cycle of building up their
credibility and reinvesting it in the “continual redeployment of accumu-
lated resources” (ibid. 1979: 198). This motivational explanation is a vari-
ation on the ways that sociologists of science trace the influence of personal
interests and economic forces on scientific inquiry. Latour’s early work
makes scientific “fact” appear as something constructed through social
negotiation.
In subsequent books, Latour diminishes the role of human interests in
the constitution of knowledge. Correspondingly, he accentuates the role of
“actants.” Actants may be people, but they may also be “natural” entities
(e.g., bacteria), measuring devices, or machines. Latour maintains that the
networks of humans and nonhumans out of which scientific facts emerge
are so tangled that the distinction between subjective agents and natural
objects breaks down. Louis Pasteur’s extraordinary success in demonstrat-
ing the bacterial origin of anthrax, for example, was not, in Latour’s view,
the result of a genius’ presenting incontrovertible evidence to scientific
peers. His demonstrations required the mobilization of farmers, army doc-
Politicizing Nature 129
“societies” thus stem from experience with things. But technique is not the
ultimate origin of social structure; it too has a history. Technique arises
through a type of human interaction not yet sufficiently formalized to count
as “society” yet organized enough for people to learn to remove objects
(stones, wood, animal skins) from their original settings, to recombine them
(e.g., into a hammer), to use them in new ways, and to pass this knowledge
on to others (Latour 1994a: 801–803). At one stage, nonhumans pass on
their properties to humans; at another, humans “socialize” nonhumans by
implanting purpose in them, by interpreting them in ways compatible with
the community’s requirements for intelligibility, and by extending and lim-
iting their use in communal life.
Political ecology is, according to Latour, a socializing stage. The preced-
ing “technological” stage is characterized by the fusion of science, organi-
zation, and industry. Scientists map genomes, fabricate artificial hormones
through complicated sequences of chemical transformations, and clone
sheep. Agribusiness commercializes these achievements; drug companies
and government regulators negotiate their safe applications. All these par-
ties see the material under their purview as just that: matter, not a right-
bearing subject. Still, their view of matter has evolved. Matter now behaves
like a “complicated organization.” It is not merely a passive substance that
takes on properties additively. As theorized in systems ecology, complex
organizations of elementary units take on characteristics similar to intelli-
gence and purposiveness. Such organizational understanding prepares the
way for the next shifting of competence. “Technologies have taught us to
manage vast assemblies of nonhumans” such that “our newest sociotech-
nical hybrid brings what we have learned to bear on the political system”
(Latour 1999a: 202). Latour identifies political ecology with the idea of
granting some kinds of rights to nonhumans. Nonhumans are “tak[ing] up
some of the properties of citizenship” (Latour 1994a: 796–797).
Toward what end are we directing these “assemblies of nonhumans”?
What sorts of problems do we face such that the planet needs large-scale
management? Latour opens his book Nous n’avons jamais été modernes
[We Have Never Been Modern] by listing a number of peculiar entities that
we now encounter every day in the news: the “hole” in the ozone layer,
forest fires that threaten endangered species, whales tagged with radio
transmitters (Latour 1991: 7–9). The peculiarity of these phenomena is
132 Chapter 4
that they are all “hybrids.” Hybrids are neither things-in-themselves nor
simply social constructions. They are mélanges of something that tran-
scends human control and of actions imputable to mankind. Political ecol-
ogy is about treating the problematic consequences of hybridization in a
“nonmodern” way.
For Latour, two “practical ensembles,” ordinarily kept scrupulously
apart, form the constitution of modernity. Moderns believe that nature has
an independent objective existence—that natural phenomena exist quite
apart from any human construction. Scientists set themselves up as nature’s
spokesmen. Their studies, instruments, and experiments give voice to
nature. They represent nature to the rest of us—nature as it really is, undis-
torted by superstitions and anthropomorphisms. Society, on the other hand,
is a human construction. Starting with Hobbes’s theory of the social con-
tract, moderns understand society as a pact decided freely among individ-
uals. Social-contract theorists invite us to imagine creating society de novo,
as if employing a purified form of reason shorn of ancestral myths and cus-
toms. The tendency of modern thought is to undermine ancient notions that
political life must take its purposes and limits from nature. Society comes
into existence when individuals choose a representative body that gives
voice not to nature but to their collective will.
What if the two modes of representation come into conflict? What if
nature’s scientific representatives make some claim that contradicts the
pronouncements of the people’s representative body? Moderns, says
Latour, essentially deny the possibility of conflict. They recognize two
entirely separate modes of representation. Politics is excluded from the lab-
oratory so that scientists may speak for things. At the same time, nature’s
things have no direct bearing on political representation, which is a mat-
ter of will and artifice. Should a controversy arise as to whether to classify
something as natural or as artificial, moderns reaffirm their acts of con-
ceptual “purification.” They fractionate the phenomenon into its “nat-
ural” and cultural components, thus preserving each side of the modern
division in its purity.
This divisional arrangement must be understood as a whole, like the sep-
aration of complementary powers specified in a political document. Nature
and society are separated in the “constitution” of the modern world.
Moderns expect the increasing power of science and technology to ease
Politicizing Nature 133
Decentering Ecologism
Theoretical French ecologism often takes issue with the rhetoric of the
French ecology movement. Latour (1999b: 42) complains that some ecol-
ogists wrongly claim an a priori understanding of the unity of natural phe-
nomena. Others, particularly leftists, try vainly to apply the logic of class
struggle to environmental crises (Latour, Schwartz, and Charvolin 1991:
38–41). But Latour, following the usual pattern of French ecologism, never
declares himself either an anthropocentrist or an ecocentrist. Still, anyone
steeped in English-speaking ecologism will immediately understand that
Latour’s tolerant view of hybrids precludes his making respect for nature’s
intrinsic value the touchstone of political ecology. Any attempt to derive
norms from nature, whether composed of individuals or of ecosystems, runs
up against his charge that “nature” as we understand it is already an arti-
fact of the ethically charged settlement embodied in the “modern constitu-
tion.” In Latour’s pragmatogony as much as in Moscovici’s history, there
Politicizing Nature 135
least potentially distinct from each other. Winner supposes that purifica-
tion is possible.
Latour’s principle of symmetrical observation forces him to study not
only the social construction of nature but also, and equally, the natural con-
struction of society. “Yes, society is constructed,” he admits; “but not just
socially constructed”—because “society” has acquired its form by swap-
ping properties with nonhumans, just as their properties develop from being
“socialized” (Latour 1994a: 793; 1999a: 198). In Latour’s pragmatogony,
the tasks of political ecology arise from earlier understandings of the prop-
erties of nonhuman systems. Yes, there are human agents who now talk of
granting rights to nonhumans in order to oppose the accelerating produc-
tion of hybrids. Their opposition is not simply an act of will, a populist
appropriation of political initiative from self-centered elites. It presupposes,
Latour says, agents whose very ability to conceive of environmental pro-
tection in this way stems from lessons learned through “technoscience”
(1999a: 203–204). The technoscientific coordination of research, organi-
zation, and industry (e.g. the genome-sequencing project) elicits unexpect-
edly complex behavioral properties in matter. It is this complexity that
makes nonhuman phenomena eligible to become the focus of new forms of
environmental concern.
At the same time, Latour calls for careful attention to the construction of
political terms too. Interpreting Hobbes, for example, one witnesses how
concepts of “power” and “representation” get defined in full awareness of
the need to secure political authority against potential challenges made in
the name of truths established through independent empirical experimen-
tation (Latour 1991: 42–43). Symmetrically, one assumes neither that soci-
ety is the ground of science nor that scientific understandings of nature are
the ground of politics. An ecologism that is neither anthropocentric nor
ecocentric requires painstaking, empirical, “anthropological” fieldwork
that maps out in detail the networks in which exchanges between these
domains takes place. Its political effect comes from turning informal, clan-
destine exchanges into overt, socially negotiated ones.
This is not to give noncentered ecologism the final advantage. The lessons
of cross-cultural theoretical comparisons flow in both directions. Winner’s
perspective exposes a missing side of the edifice of Latour’s political ecol-
ogy. Winner’s political agents know their interests and take advantage of
Politicizing Nature 139
Postmodern Ecologism?
space” (Crahay 1988: 74). Latour insists that his investigations of science
and society are not dialectical. There is no tale of transcending contradic-
tion by the growth of an ever more comprehensive synthesis, no odyssey in
which humanity comes gradually to self-knowledge.
The project of politicizing nature sounds like a “postmodern” project.
According to Jean-François Lyotard (1979: 63), “grand narrative has lost
its credibility” in a “postmodern” culture. Modernity’s master narratives
included a story of human progress through the domination of nature, its
objectification, and its subjection to technological control. In the process,
science dissipates irrational custom and myth. Removing the veils of irra-
tionality would be the path to enlightenment. Moderns recount history as
the unfolding of universal rationality. Postmoderns regard each component
of this narrative as a construction ripe for deconstruction. Human subjects
are not autonomous moral agents; they are sites shaped by power, con-
sciousnesses produced by networks of forces (Conley 1997: 4). In Michel
Foucault’s view, for example, human sexuality is culturally constructed by
means of repressive social standards regarding care of the body and accept-
able forms of behavior. Nature is not objectively there. In fact, “naturaliz-
ing” something, interpreting it as the expression of some unchangeable
essence that is its “nature,” is one of the most powerful ways of enforcing
one normative construction against possible competitors. Modernist
Enlightenment presupposes commensurable values so that movement from
one conception of well-being to another can be evaluated as progressive or
regressive. For postmoderns, the incommensurability of moral discourses is
a corollary of the indeterminacy of meaning. In the place of theoretical crit-
icism based on supposedly universal standards or practical criticism embod-
ied in a supposedly universal class, postmoderns typically propose multiple
forms of localized resistance against the forces of normalization.
French postmoderns have penetrated ecological political theory—but,
curiously enough, more in its English-speaking than in its French variant.10
I want to suggest that even postmodernism plays itself out differently in
French than in English-speaking ecologism, precisely because of differences
in the rhetorical fields that I have been emphasizing throughout this book.
Postmodernism offers a tempting critical framework in which to oppose
ecological theorists who allude to “nature” and “wilderness” as if those
concepts were unproblematic. It is much less alluring in a linguistic
142 Chapter 4
conclusions, despite his obvious sympathy for green causes. Thus, when he
talks about ecologists as a “counter-power,” it is more their role in resist-
ing the accumulation of power per se than in championing any “environ-
mental” issue such as protesting the contamination of underground aquifers
or the loss of biodiversity that he admires. Since in his view there is no such
thing as the environment, he can only call a policy “environmental” because
other people have done so in order to express their utilitarian, hygienic, aes-
thetic, or spiritual preferences. Without a conception of “nature” or the
“environment” that gives the world some standing outside of social codes,
Lascoumes is sometimes reduced to describing “environmental” policy in
pluralist fashion, as whatever measures result from the adjustment of inter-
ests among competing groups. (See, e.g., Lascoumes 1994: 107, 271.)
Second, for the moment, at least, the theme of eco-power blows the dangers
of technical expertise out of proportion in relation to more commonly
acknowledged problems in environmental decision making. Lascoumes has
written one of the most fascinating and detailed books of case studies of
environmental policy in France. The lesson of those cases, however, is
arguably quite different from the one he draws. They illustrate less the
unchecked authority of scientists and technicians than the weakness of the
French Ministry of the Environment and of environmental civic associa-
tions, including their expert advisers. Often Lascoumes’s evidence shows
how interest groups favoring the rapid expansion of industry and infra-
structure—real estate developers, manufacturers, agribusinesses—have
played a preponderant role in shaping environmental legislation and its
implementation. Such evidence suggests that what distorts public deliber-
ations on environmental policy is not only the exclusion of various non-
expert actors from the political process. It is also—largely—the influence of
monied interests in determining the community’s priorities. In that case,
better environmental protection depends more directly on the emancipa-
tory “modern” project of devising political forms in which democratic
norms of equality and undistorted communication allow the full range of
community interests to be represented than on the “postmodern” project
of exposing every legitimizing discourse as a form of power.
Postmodern critique is useful when it uncovers politically dangerous
extensions of centered ecologisms. Like Edgar Morin, René Passet, and
many other French ecologists, Lascoumes calls for vigilance against the
146 Chapter 4
potential for ecologism to turn authoritarian if it takes its cues only from
scientists and technicians. To redeem his ideas as potential contributions to
social criticism, however, two amendments are necessary. First, it must be
the case that “the environment” or “nature” stands for something more than
a series of codes employed by rival social groups to incline policy in their
favor. Conceding that “nature” is not identical with human interests in the
world need not lead back to a positivistic epistemology. Latour’s anthropo-
logical investigations into the complex networks of humans and nonhumans
that constitute scientific “facts” present a significant alternative. Lascoumes’s
own predilection for hybrid forums suggests a similar option—provided that
we can view the forums as opportunities to elicit a better understanding of
the world (e.g., to bring out factual observations and ethical considerations
that experts might ignore), not merely as another arena for social competi-
tion. Second, Lascoumes’s amended theory should not rule out the possibil-
ity that people who become more aware of how social codes and hidden
power operate can use that knowledge to develop strategies to overcome
these obstacles. Lascoumes’s empirical case studies could then contribute to
developing a more ecologically rational social project.
Postmodern critique becomes seriously counterproductive, however,
when a fascination with incommensurable discourses takes the place of any
attempt to grapple empirically with a world undergoing rapid ecological
deterioration. One last and particularly egregious example shows how far
wrong postmodernism can go.
In his 1994 book The Illusion of the End, Jean Baudrillard lambastes
Serres’s book The Natural Contract. In a chapter titled “Maleficent
Ecology,” Baudrillard (1994: 78–88) asserts that the central problem today
is that “the human race is beginning to produce itself as waste-product, to
carry out this work of waste disposal on itself.” We do this, he charges, not
only by polluting but also by building, by paving, by advertising, by turn-
ing events into news, and by laying off workers. It is a “symbolic rule” that
a rising view of “human-beings-as-waste” is “accompanied by a new
human rights offensive.” Rights are what we invoke when the right-
protected quality has already disappeared. On this reading, Serres’s “nat-
ural contract amounts to a definitive recognition of nature as waste.”
Baudrillard continues: “We have objectified [nature] to death, and this eco-
logical cover merely asserts our right to go on doing so.” By treating nature
Politicizing Nature 147
vast legacy of ways of valuing the world. Observers who label French ecol-
ogism “humanistic” do so not because they confuse “humanism” with
anthropocentrism but because they see connections between ecological
thought and this rich heritage (Sandoval 1995: 116–117; Chalanset 1997:
5, 13–16). Serres’s erudite juxtapositions of philology, the history of law,
and ancient philosophy are evidence of this. In his view (1992a: 259, 266),
ecologism depends as much on the human sciences (because they teach tol-
erance by undermining old prejudices) and on the humanities more gener-
ally (because they investigate rigorous knowledge in myth and literature) as
on the natural sciences.
But humanism must be renewed if it is not to succumb to “semi-paralysis.”
Latour (1991: 186) calls for a “redistributed humanism.” A redistributed
humanism prizes our dual role as the source of quasi-objects and the recip-
ient of their properties. Latour sees the possibility of “Enlightenment with-
out modernity”—that is, a continuing quest for scientific and social
understanding, absent the modern bifurcation of nature and culture and
shorn of modern habits of ideological denunciation. Renewing humanism
requires bringing “cultural modernity,” as Serres puts it, into closer contact
with contemporary science. His appointment to the Conseil pour les droits
des générations futures [Council for the Rights of Future Generations], like
Morin’s service as president of the Conseil scientifique de la consultation
natoinale sur les lycées [Scientific Council for the National Consultation on
High Schools] and Jöel de Rosnay’s work of popularizing ecological under-
standing at the museum known as the Cité des sciences et de l’industrie, indi-
cates that a humanistic ecologism has among its primary targets the
educational practices of the institutions through which society produces cit-
izens who will exploit or care for the earth.
The lesson of nature’s politicizers is that contact between the sciences and
the humanities entails far more than giving technicians and humanists the
missing complement of their own education. Ecological reflexivity means
becoming conscious of the interpenetration of different branches of knowl-
edge. For Serres and Latour, only deeper awareness of the founding concepts
that lead us to engage destructively with the world could allow us to imag-
ine ways of mitigating the undesired effects of our own activities.
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5
Personalizing Nature
Those who politicize nature argue that both human society and nature are
structured by cross-cutting collective understandings of law, contract, and
representation. Where, however, is the person in the understandings of
ecologism that follow from these theories? What becomes of the subject
who perceives, who chooses, who intends, who loves? Does the project of
politicizing nature come at the cost of dissolving the individual conscious-
ness in a stream of collective representations, reducing the person to a being
who simply perpetuates culturally transmitted conceptions of power and
right? Is there a danger that certain conceptions of nature may negate the
individual’s status as a creative actor or as a spiritual being? If respecting the
unique identities of “natural” things requires limiting human prerogatives,
is the concept of free individuality an obstacle to ecologism—or, in some
sense, its precondition?
In France these questions arise most frequently in a personalist perspec-
tive. Personalists place individual épanouissement [self-realization or flour-
ishing] at the top of the ecological agenda. In this regard, their perspective
bears a certain resemblance to the “ecological virtue” approaches proposed
by some English-speaking ecologists in the 1990s (Barry 1999b; O’Neill
1993). But the long pedigree of French personalism gives its French pro-
ponents a different cache of ideas to draw upon. In 1903 the founder of
French personalism, Charles Renouvier, wrote: “The term ‘personalism’
assigns us the task of demonstrating, with reasons—at first logical, then
moral—that knowledge of the person as consciousness and will is the foun-
dation of all forms of human knowledge.”1 Renouvier meant to assert the
primacy of the personality and its spiritual quest over any positivistic analy-
sis of human behavior. No biological or social conditioning could give an
152 Chapter 5
only there will he recover his candor and his lost freedom.” To this end, he
organized camping retreats in the Pyrenees and in the plains of southwest
France so that individuals might shed an artificial life devoted to material
pleasures. He envisioned a personalism oriented toward an “ascetic city.”
Declaring that nature “must be to personalism what class consciousness is
to socialism,” Charbonneau first developed an argument that the condi-
tion of the earth has to be understood in relation to the conditions of human
self-realization.3 With his friend Jacques Ellul,4 he formulated “Gascon
personalism,” questioning the moral neutrality of technology.5 Ellul and
Charbonneau believed that technology—not just mass politics—created
pressures for social conformity and for alienated human relations.
Over the course of some 20 years after World War II, Charbonneau com-
posed Le Système et le chaos: Critique du développement exponentielle
(1973). In that work he ferociously attacks state power. He alleges that the
state operates less as a corrective to a private sector that sometimes unfairly
pursues private gain than as an accelerator of economic growth, and that
it subjects individuals to homogenizing methods of administration and
economic development, fostering wars and overexploiting nature.
Charbonneau admits that technical and scientific progress are not in them-
selves evil, insofar as they “allowed man to be liberated from the suffering
and terrors of nature” (ibid.: 157). But their very success in reducing
nature’s terrors created the conditions for a world in which “nature” will
have disappeared. “If the accelerated growth of a population depending on
accelerating production continues . . . , a moment will come when not iron
and cars are lacking, but elements: water, space, time.” (ibid.: 14)
Similar fears informed the works of Denis de Rougement, but not before
the 1970s. A Swiss intellectual, Rougement had begun making a reputation
as a personalist some 40 years earlier.6 In Politique de la personne (1934)
he maintained that our lives must combine respect for our own freedom as
individuals who make choices, create, and take risks with a sense of respon-
sibility toward others as persons and as members of a community (Saint-
Ouen 1995: 16–20). His most celebrated work, L’Amour et l’Occident
(1939), explores the latter theme. The Western conception of love, he
argues, encourages a union that nonetheless preserves the distinct identi-
ties of its constituent persons. European culture also contains, however,
another conception of passionate love—one that aims at the fusion of indi-
Personalizing Nature 155
use and perception,” argues Don Alexander (1990: 169), it makes most
sense to define bioregionalism “in terms of an environmental ethic and a
cultural sensibility.” Cultural bioregionalists extend the insight of Lewis
Mumford (1938), for whom regions reflect geographic, economic, and cul-
ture dimensions. In fact, mixed culturalist and nature-centered formula-
tions of bioregionalism are common in the English-language green
literature. That is what first led Alexander to conclude that “bioregional-
ists are somewhat confused” (1990: 164). To overcome the confusion, he
offers a “bioregional consciousness” that reflects “the interrelated natural
and social realities that impinge on the individual” (ibid.: 172).8
Interrelationship does not necessarily transcend dualism. Alexander
leaves the two centers intact, for he is not suggesting that what “nature” is
is somehow internal to the very meaning of society or individuality. When
he says that “nature sets limits, but it does not dictate how we should treat
one another” (1990: 169), Alexander barely deviates from Sale’s reliance
on scientific ecology. He disagrees with Sale not in defining nature but in
denying that such science establishes moral imperatives for human com-
munities. The “social” side of Alexander’s analysis is similarly conven-
tional. He allows people to decide what significance to give scientific
information when integrating it into their understandings of a good life. He
is not claiming that the very meaning of society or individuality is insepa-
rable from conceptions of “nature.” At best, he ends bioregional confu-
sion only by asserting the supremacy of human, communal values. Having
rejected biocentric bioregionalism, he opts for a moderately anthropo-
centric substitute.
Indeed, Charbonneau (ibid.: 151–152) posts a warning against the very sort
of reasoning that supports Sale’s bioregionalism:
The temptation of ecology—originally, the science of natural ecosystems—is to
limit itself to a naturalism that chooses nature against man, his culture and his free-
dom. . . . It is a question not of choosing between Nature and Man, but between
society that destroys man along with nature and a local society that reconciles
them. . . . The regionalist revolt can give the ecological movement its human, social,
and political substance. Without this, the ecological movement is danger of get-
ting lost in the ideology and spectacle of naturalism.
So “science will have liberated man from nature only to hand him over to
an even more burdensome society” (ibid.: 160). We are faced with three
choices, and only three: “chaos” (wars, economic crises, and penury of
resources), “system” (a totally rationalized society), and “an equilibrium,
halfway between chaos and system, voluntarily maintained by man, who
has become master of his science and tools, as he has become of nature”
(ibid.: 15).
For Rougement, confronting the limits of growth raises the question of
“finalities.” He asks: “Toward what, in fact, is humanity directed in this
finite world? Toward progress, as we thought yesterday, or toward the
Apocalypse?” (Rougement 1972: 17). He worries that the Club of Rome
emphasized material harms at the expense of “psycho-sociological ones”
(a generalized fear of the future, unemployment, restrictions on liberty),
and that encountering the limits of growth could cause a “penury of the
meaning of life” (ibid.: 27).
Rougement and Charbonneau see in the ecological crisis further evidence
of the need to build theoretically on the critique of individualism that has
been a mainstay of personalism since its earliest years. “Individuals” are
the social atoms of marginalist economic theory and liberal contractarian
theory. They are self-contained and instrumentally rational. Their motives
are expected to be materialistic, competitive, and acquisitive. Individuals
are essentially (“naturally”) free—that is, minimally constrained in the
range of activities they may rightly pursue. These characteristics give them
great potential for internal consistency. Because pursuing their own inter-
ests is their primary motivation, they can imagine arranging those interests
rationally so as to allow them to maximize their preference satisfaction.
Moreover, the priority they give to satisfying self-originating desires leads
them to regard the community as beneficial only to the extent that it helps
them fulfill their own interests. To preserve as much scope as possible for
individuals to pursue their interests, the community must keep the pre-
scription of communal ends to a minimum. It must leave them free from
constraint.
The personalist view of freedom resembles the individualist view only
superficially. Individualists and personalists alike refuse to regard human
beings merely as sites where anonymous collective forces and social codes
play themselves out. According to a personalist account of freedom,
160 Chapter 5
The discovery that one is both body and mind—both “nature” and
“spirit”—prompts the first awareness of difference (Charbonneau 1951:
434; 1991a: 266–275). Even as we know ourselves to be a unity, we become
aware of two parts of our being, each with radically different needs. This
is the awareness we develop when learning to respect other people and
when seeking to protect our surroundings against the forces of homogen-
ization and destruction.
To accept nature’s otherness in this way is to establish a relationship that
is properly called a relationship of love. Love is a passionate rapport that
seeks union with the other, all the while encountering resistance from it
and affirming its difference. It is because liberty and nature intertwine in
this erotic way that Charbonneau’s ecologism valorizes the pays rather
than the bioregion. The pays is the land that has, over generations, partly
yielded to its inhabitants’ loving tendance while retaining enough of its
own identity to make their freedom meaningful. Thus, Charbonneau’s
philosophy is not ecocentric. Ecocentrism presupposes an ability to dis-
cern “life” independent of our will, whereas for Charbonneau such life
appears because of our liberty. Nor is he anthropocentric, insofar as
anthropocentrists regard human beings as centered in their manner of
exercising their will. Utilitarian anthropocentrists, for example, suppose
that it is possible to conceive a morally rational integration of human
interests, as if they all radiated from a single, unifying judgment. The
ambivalent personality experiences no such harmony.
Personalizing Nature 163
Philippe Saint Marc and Jean-Marie Pelt are both academics with Christian-
democratic leanings. Pelt, a professor of plant biology at the University of
Metz, founded the European Institute of Ecology in 1972 to conduct
research on pollution, ecotoxicity, and urban ecology. In the mid 1970s he
joined Rougement’s Ecoropa, and in recent years he has been its honorary
president (Jacob 1995: 105). Widely cited in the French media and occa-
sionally testifying before parliamentary committees, Pelt is a botanist with
a public (but not partisan) vocation. In the late 1990s, for example, Pelt
took the lead in opposing the cultivation of genetically modified crops in
Europe (Pelt 2000). His books L’Homme re-naturé (1977) and Le Tour du
164 Chapter 5
monde d’un écologist (1990) are among the representative works of French
ecologism (Jacob 1995: 157).
Saint Marc has been a professor at the Institut d’Études Politiques and
serves as a high functionary in the Cour des Comptes (one of France’s pres-
tigious grands corps, charged with assessing the budgets of state agencies).
In 1972, he co-founded a new association of some twenty nature-protection
societies, the Comité de la Charte pour la nature. The charter, which gath-
ered 300,000 signatures, began by proclaiming that a “right to nature” was
the foundation of any civilization and that when using the natural envi-
ronment we must “transmit to future generations a physical and aesthetic
inheritance that they will need for their existence and épanouissement.”10
Consistent with his elite position in the government, however, Saint Marc’s
politics have otherwise not been notably populist. He is associated with the
Centre des Démocrates Sociaux, the tiny successor to a Catholic center
party of the 1940s inspired by Mounier’s personalism. Since the 1970s he
has developed a reputation as a persistent environmental critic of market
liberalism.
Saint Marc (1971: 34) asserts that “Man damages Nature because he
gains by it—often a great deal—and it is costly to him—often very costly—
to preserve it.” He argues that nature supplies us with numerous goods
beyond those of immediate use value: open space, self-cleansing capacities
of air and water, and places for relaxation and contemplation, among many
others. Such “immaterial” goods go unpriced or underpriced in economies
devoted to maximizing material production. As a consequence, capitalist
and communist economies have pillaged their environment (Saint Marc
1978: 387). Since the breakup of the Soviet Union, Saint Marc has targeted
“ultraliberalism”—global free trade, deregulated internal markets, ever
more individualistic interpersonal relations—as the source not only of envi-
ronmental devastation but also of a worsening disparity between rich and
poor nations, rampant urbanization, rising social aggression, and moral
decline (1994: 281, 291ff., 315).
Inasmuch as market liberalism fails to protect the environment ade-
quately, the alternative—as Saint Marc proposes in the title of his most
famous book—is “the socialization of nature.” “State dirigisme,” Saint
Marc affirms (1971: 61, cf. 21, 24, 284–298), “is essential; it is up to the
State to set development objectives that are compatible with safeguarding
Personalizing Nature 165
traversing the system is cut off. Living systems, in contrast, develop home-
ostatic mechanisms to capture and process energy such that they develop a
capacity to maintain their identity across a range of environmental condi-
tions. Even single-cell life forms perpetuate their existence by keeping the
concentration of certain molecules in themselves within determined ranges
of fluctuation. They are more self-determining than less complex, nonliv-
ing systems (Pelt 1996: 58). More complex life forms are also vastly more
individuated. Individuation allows each creature to deploy wider arrays of
equilibrium-preserving processes—e.g., mobility to search for food, refined
senses for detecting the presence of predators. They are “freer.”
Human freedom itself can now be seen not as something that distin-
guishes us metaphysically from every other life form but rather as an exten-
sion of systemic properties that appear along a continuum. Life takes form
through the complexification of inert matter; consciousness takes form
through the complexification of living matter (Pelt 1977: 149). The human
brain itself is the product of increasing evolutionary complexity. The neo-
cortex is the seat of specifically human abilities, including “innovation,
imagination, creation—in a word, liberty” (ibid.: 253). By developing indi-
viduated communities, we extend this process. We collectively create the
means to resist—to “free” ourselves from—what other species encounter as
environmental determinisms: droughts, floods, diseases, famine.
The problem, according to Pelt (ibid.: 255), is that the same highly
evolved cortex that allows us to invent cultural and technological
responses to environmental conditions may not be sufficiently integrated
with the life-preserving instincts of other parts of our brains so that we can
react adaptively to the dangers that our liberty creates. Still, our best hope
remains our creative consciousness. If our “automatic behaviors” induce
us to ignore or override signs that our technologies are disrupting the nat-
ural equilibria on which life depends, then our best chance for survival
depends on perceiving those dangers and freely revising our own values as
a consequence. In true personalist fashion, Pelt (ibid.: 259) declares that the
time has come “for each person to question himself on the meaning of life
and on the meaning of his life.” We must reexamine our assumptions about
our rights of property, about the desirability of accumulating material
goods, and about our relationships with our neighbors both in space and
in time.
Personalizing Nature 171
Pelt does not hesitate to apply natural models to society, even as he cau-
tions against applying social models to nature. He criticizes Marx for
“politicizing nature”—that is, for interpreting Darwin’s theory of compet-
itive relations among species as an ideological reflection of human social
relations in contemporary capitalism (ibid.: 22–23). Systems ecologists, in
contrast, avoid the partiality of perspective that comes of interpreting
nature in human (social-political) terms by studying the roles of both sym-
biotic and competitive relations in biotic communities. In effect, through
systems ecology, Pelt turns Marx on his head, asking rhetorically:
“Contrary to Marx, who ‘politicized nature,’ . . . would it not be appro-
priate to reinterpret society in the light of nature, thus to ‘naturalize poli-
tics’?” (ibid.: 234)
Deaf to Charbonneau’s warnings, Pelt repeatedly suggests that a renewed
human culture take its lessons from the insights of the view of nature offered
by systems ecology (ibid.: 157–158, 161, 225–230). He recommends that
human communities value individual liberty because, like random “disor-
ders” within ecosystems, it eventually generates new and more successful
forms of adaptive behavior. In the same way, humanity should recognize
that preserving cultural differences and regional autonomy helps protect
the sources of its own renewal. Species maintain not only competitive rela-
tions but also cooperative, symbiotic relations. Not to perceive this mix of
behaviors in nonhuman communities deprives human communities of mod-
els they can use to improve social justice. We must balance economic
competition with norms of mutuality.
The idea of naturalizing society in this way remains as problematic as ever.
Pelt’s science offers something quite different from a nonpolitical model for
a program of ecological reform. Thanks to Latour, we can no longer read
passages like the following without perceiving how the process of politiciz-
ing nature is taking place within them: “In passing from a unicellular to a
multicellular being, life takes a decisive step, but at the cost of a heavy sac-
rifice for each cell integrated into a complex organism; it must henceforth
accept the law of the group and renounce the free deployment of all the
potentialities contained within its genetic inheritance.” (Pelt 1996: 67)
“Liberty never consists in being able to do just anything: for a cell as for a
human, liberty ends where it impedes the liberty of others. But the sacrifices
agreed to [consentis] by the cell benefit the entire organism.” (ibid.: 74)
172 Chapter 5
local cultures but that they will disrupt planetary ecological equilibria. What
aspects of personhood account for that more extensive interest? What about
claims that certain “wild” territories deserve special protection? What rea-
sons are there for contesting the cultivation of genetically modified crops?
Establishing the ground of such claims seems to require a more complex psy-
chology than Charbonneau’s bipartite personality can furnish. For that, one
can turn to the works of Denis Duclos.
Duclos’s interest in ecology dates from his university days (the late
1960s) at Nanterre, where he studied under Alain Touraine and Henri
Lefebvre, two sociologists who influenced many in the environmental
movement. For a time Duclos was a member of the Communist Party. As
an enthusiastic young activist in the 1970s, he took stands against nuclear
power and dependence on the automobile that eventually set him at odds
with a party dedicated to raising material production and protecting jobs.14
Since the late 1970s, Duclos has been affiliated with the Centre National
des Recherches Scientifiques, where his research has focused on the social
construction of risk perception.
At first, Duclos was attracted by the hypothesis that risk perception was
a function of an individual’s specific institutional affiliations and related
roles. Gradually, however, he was obliged to widen his perspective. A book
titled Industrialists and Environmental Risks (Duclos 1991a) demon-
strated, unsurprisingly, that factory owners and managers tended to reject
ecologism and to defend the social utility of their production. This result
complemented Duclos’s earlier finding (in his 1981 book De l’usine on peut
voir la ville [From the factory one can see the city] that workers were hardly
more inclined than industrialists to contest socially dangerous practices. In
L’Homme face au risque technique (1991b: 225 ff.), Duclos argues that
making the state responsible for regulating risk is not a sufficient remedy.
Where administrative power becomes supreme, additional problematic
behaviors set in. Administrators let policies be driven by inappropriately
quantified analyses, or they invoke procedures that prevent full or timely
airing of complaints. Why are perceptions of risk often handled so eva-
sively? Because, says Duclos (ibid.: 30), a common impulse animates all
modern social institutions: “We do everything we can so that the technical
machine never stops. . . .” Technologically created dangers can be denied,
Personalizing Nature 175
The first passion consists in our impulse to affirm our identity in the face
of otherness. When our surroundings become too uniform, too artificial—
too much like ourselves—“nature” gets expressed as that which is “not us.”
Environmentalist demands for a nature that remains pure and wild are a
reaction to social trends that undermine our quest for subjective singular-
ization. Such demands, however, can be pushed to an extreme in which
“nature” is asserted as a mute and unalterable whole and in which those
accused of altering it become the target of hatred (ibid.: 23–51).
Second, we must constitute ourselves as subjects of objects that we love
or reject. In this case “nature” takes the form of a divisible aggregate of
qualities and places which the self seeks to master in order to compensate
for feelings of missing wholeness. Nature then exists as something “worked
over, taken apart, reassembled and then dissociated again” (ibid.: 56–57).
This is Cartesian nature: something to master.
The third passion makes people “negotiate the very location of their iden-
tities and objects in the collectivity of other subjects,” especially by means
of elucidating symbols (ibid.: 16). As social relations are made denser, sub-
jecting individuals to norms and laws of all sorts, people cling to their abil-
ity to manipulate symbols as evidence of their free subjectivity. The freedom
of the socialized subject comes at a price: it makes him “the greatest enemy
possible of nature”—that which is outside of all society (ibid.: 74). The
symbol-using subject then tries to restore his or her access to the loved object
by evoking it theatrically: nature as decoration, as romantic countryside.
Fourth, people must “situate their positions in the system of signifiers
that they use to think.” In search of a precise content for the signifier, we
turn ourselves into objective observers of nature, using precise measure-
ment to discover the rules of its underlying order. Obsessionally, this view
of nature can lead to “the attempt to program an ‘integrated, global, and
interdisciplinary’ ecology” in which nothing would escape our desire to
reign in every thing that is singular or disorderly (ibid.: 84–87).
In these four passions one can recognize various modes of political ecol-
ogy: in the first and the second, deep ecology and utilitarian environmen-
talism; in the third and the fourth, Charbonneau’s sentimental regionalism
and Rosnay’s cybernetic holism. It is not Duclos’s intention to declare any
of these modes invalid. His purpose is twofold. He seeks, first, to make us
realize how these modes grow out of our own subjectivity. Rival theorists
Personalizing Nature 179
Ecosocialists, on the other hand, are dissatisfied with a vision that down-
plays the significance of “material” forces in forming the individual will
and that sometimes weakens political action on behalf of issues of social
and international justice. These misgivings have not, however, stopped
ecosocialists from absorbing some personalist ideas. If French ecosocialists
are more “libertarian” than the traditional left, if they speak more of
decentralization and épanouissement than of central planning and class
identity, it is because they have forged their ideas in a dialogical context
where personalists—not ecocentrists or anthropocentric environmental
progressives—have been among their consistent interlocutors.
6
Socializing Nature
It is obvious, Serge Moscovici once asserted (1978: 138), that the ecologi-
cal movement has to be situated “in the socialist stream” because of its
desire for “a more communicative, more just, and less hierarchical society.”
At least it was obvious in France, where most major theorists of ecologism
have had a leftist past. Even advocates of seemingly distinct forms of ecol-
ogism—those indebted to the systems approach and to personalism—have
adopted a language of “socializing” nature (Rosnay 1975; Saint Marc
1971). The first thing to strike an English-speaking reader about eco-
socialism in France is not the novelty of its themes but the pervasiveness of
its influence.
As a specific current within the stream of green thought, French eco-
socialism was launched in the 1970s, when André Gorz and René Dumont
played major roles not only in politicizing ecology but also in drawing atten-
tion to links among resource depletion, alienating work conditions, and
unjust treatment of Third World countries. Later ecosocialists followed suit.
In the 1990s, Alain Lipietz (1993a: 37) argued that green thought “re-
founds” Red theory by siding with the exploited, workers, and the Third
World. Likewise, Jean-Paul Deléage, the editor of the journal Écologie et
Politique, contends that “without the socialist idea, there is only an ecology
that is nostalgic for a bygone past” (1997: 138).
No one should take the durability of the ecosocialist label as a sign of
theoretical homogeneity or intellectual stagnation. In fact, French eco-
socialism has undergone a marked evolution. In the 1970s it was the appre-
hension of seemingly objective limits of growth that ecologized the political
sensibilities of socialists such as Gorz and Dumont. They responded with
unabashedly utopian theorizing. In the process they created unresolved
188 Chapter 6
currents of green theory barely trickle through France, and this difference
significantly influences ecosocialist expression. Confrontations with non-
anthropocentrists have driven some English-speaking ecosocialists to accept
their rivals’ terms of debate. The French contrast, I shall argue, shows why
this acceptance is unnecessary. The feebleness of nonanthropocentric ecol-
ogism in France has left French ecosocialists freer than their English-
speaking counterparts to develop lessons from Marx in ways that dissolve
the significance of any alleged center of environmental concern.
upon the notion that production should be geared directly to human need
so that ecological considerations become integral parts of production deci-
sions (Dobson 1995: 171). Greens generally agree with Marx’s socialist
vision too in their championing an egalitarianism that opposes differen-
tials of class, race, and gender and in struggling to make work and social
life more varied and meaningful. Marx’s understanding that capitalism
and its successor modes of production would eventually overcome
parochialism, fostering a sense of solidarity in the human community as a
whole, resonates with greens who emphasize the planetary dimensions of
our ecological predicament. On the other hand, ecosocialists commonly
acknowledge that Marx frames his emancipatory ideal in a way that stunts
its ecological potential. Marx usually assumes that capitalism is con-
strained only by its internal contradictions; he does not acknowledge there
are external, “natural” constraints on production (Deléage 1994c: 47).
Aside from exceptional passages, Marx tends to assume that, until labor
transforms them for human use, the means of production supplied by
nature are valueless. And his historical eschatology turns the succession of
modes of production into a tale of human emancipation from the
constraints of nature.
Socialism requires an “eco-” prefix because Marx’s hope to meet human
needs through ever-expanding, socially rationalized production did not take
account of the earth’s finitude: its finite supply of resources, its limited abil-
ity to reabsorb waste and restore biologically depleted ecosystems. This is
what led James O’Connor (1998: 165) to hold that Marxism, to become
ecological, must recognize the “second contradiction of capitalism,” in
which “the combined power of capitalist relations and productive forces
self-destruct by impairing or destroying rather than reproducing their own
conditions.” French green theorists are largely in agreement with this.
Ecosocialists recognize that “the age of a finite earth has begun” (Lipietz
1989: 61).
To an English-speaking ecocentrist, ecosocialists look unambiguously
anthropocentric. Ecosocialists direct their ethical concern not to nature’s
“intrinsic value” but to nature’s role in sustaining human well-being
(Eckersley 1992: 127–132). A determination to surmount social inequali-
ties, to improve working conditions, and to overcome world poverty is all
well and good. But concern for the well-being of nonhuman entities per se
Socializing Nature 191
Utopian Ecosocialism
Early on, the men most responsible for politicizing ecology in France,
André Gorz and René Dumont, gave ecosocialism two distinctive features.
Dumont’s ecologism is uncompromisingly Third Worldist. His outrage at
international inequalities shocks greens out of forming political priorities
as a function of ecological problems encountered mainly in highly indus-
trialized societies. Gorz’s writings, on the other hand, epitomize attempts
to link outrage at environmental destruction with a commitment to demo-
cratic self-management and to limiting the spread of economic rationality.
Socializing Nature 193
In the lifeworld, “nature” refers to all the ways in which human beings
experience and value their surroundings before their perceptions are ratio-
nalized by scientific, economic, or even philosophical methods. Lifeworld
perceptions may well include brute dismay at a blanket of brown air over
a city—even if experts offer reassurances that pollution levels are tolerable.
As inhabitants of a lifeworld, we may be awestruck at an alpine landscape—
even if economists argue that the area would be economically more valu-
able as a ski resort. In everyday life, we lavish affection on animals—even
if such sympathy seems ethically discontinuous with our carnivorous diets.
Out of the lifeworld comes a multitude of orientations that, no matter how
confused from a philosophical viewpoint, often have a validity that intel-
lectual systems ignore. These orientations play a crucial role in stimulating
individual creativity and social criticism. As economic rationality colonizes
the lifeworld, it destroys such sources of cultural renewal—including ori-
entations that favor environmental concern. Conversely, to appreciate the
lifeworld and to defend its valuational resources is to make ecological lim-
its stand out in relief. That is, if capitalism’s rationalizing responses to envi-
ronmental dangers are blocked by values drawn from the lifeworld, we
must devise new social strategies to adapt to “nature.” So this nature exists
neither as an enveloping system from which we draw value nor as a sepa-
rate entity that humanity learns to appreciate in more diverse ways. Its exis-
tence takes shape acentrically, in relation to a shifting field of values.
None of these refinements in interpreting Gorz’s theory immunize him
against political criticism. Some scholars charge that Gorz’s attempt to mix
decentralized communities and central planning is fraught with inconsis-
tency. As long as complex technologies are used, and as long as communi-
ties are woven into webs of exchange, autonomy will be compromised
(Frankel 1987: 59–61). However, it is too rarely pointed out that Gorz’s
mixing of themes of autonomy and ecology is even more problematic.
The answer to the question “In what sphere is ecological responsibility
handled?” must be “It is almost entirely a heteronomous function.”
Gorz asks us to imagine a society in which goods to meet mankind’s fun-
damental material needs are produced in highly automated enterprises,
coordinated by state planners. Thus, the sorts of economic activity that have
led to environmental destruction under capitalism—mining, large-scale
agriculture, chemical manufacturing, and so forth—will continue in some
198 Chapter 6
who has spent his entire professional life documenting the effects of poverty
and environmental devastation in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, sees his
contribution to ecologism consisting mainly in “completing the theses of
the Club of Rome . . . by insisting much more on the tragedy of the Third
World” (1986: 12).
In Dumont’s view, most of the responsibility for the “tragedy” of the
Third World falls on the industrialized countries of North America and
Western Europe. First, this is because “problems like the exhaustion of raw
materials and pollution are not the doings of the poorest people, but come
essentially from the richest countries” (1973: 46). Prodigious consumption
of petroleum, emission of ozone-destroying refrigerants, demand for trop-
ical woods, and similar problems emanate from the countries with the
world’s highest standard of living. Second, developed countries must make
amends for a long history of unjust relations with the Third World. Colonial
powers deliberately overturned local agricultural practices in order to get
products such as coffee and sugar. Many of those economic structures
remain today, shoring up local elites and ensuring the “independent” coun-
tries’ continuing trade dependency on their former colonizers. Third, even
in the post-colonial era, First and Second World economies retain unfair
trade advantages over the Third World: “In the framework of what we
today call unequal exchange, we buy . . . raw materials and agricultural
products from underdeveloped countries at low prices, and we sell them
back finished products at high prices.” (Dumont 1977: 239) Unequal
exchange brings together the conditions for the “pillage of the Third
World.” Unable to earn enough foreign exchange to finance their develop-
ment, these countries are trapped in poverty. Thus, if their inhabitants are
pushed to adopt ecologically destructive practices (e.g., deforestation or the
cultivation of soil-destroying crops) just to survive, the responsibility is not
primarily theirs. In many ways, developed countries are implicated in sus-
taining “an intolerable world” (Dumont 1988).
The distinguishing feature of Dumont’s ecosocialism is its requirement
that we assess the state of the planet from the perspective of “the exploited
peasantries” of the world’s poorest countries (Dumont 1988: 273). When
politicizing the French environmental movement, it will be recalled,
Dumont refused to allow the worries of local preservationists to set the
agenda. By continually linking problems of environmental degradation with
200 Chapter 6
lation to achieve socialist objectives. Consider some of his most recent pro-
posals: Foreign aid to Third World countries should favor “human devel-
opment.” Investment in education, vocational training, and preventive
medicine should take priority over investment in industry and infrastruc-
ture. Reforestation should be encouraged and debt should be reduced
through debt-nature swaps. Land reform is essential. Creditors should
ensure that economic power is channeled to women as well as men. Where
interests of workers in the North and the South are in competition, as in
the textile industry, governments in the North should tax imports (thus pro-
tecting their workers) and should then use the tariffs to promote social and
environmental protection in countries of the South (Dumont and Paquet
1994: 122–136).
Dumont’s Third Worldist program, like Gorz’s autogestionnaire project,
remains radical. Carrying through such policies in ways that would effec-
tively rebalance North-South relations would require from the North long-
term commitments and financial sacrifices that no existing government has
come close to endorsing. What has diminished among French ecosocialists
is the utopian impulse. That impulse takes theory beyond positing certain
ethical ideals. It sets about imagining their complete realization in a thor-
oughly revolutionized society. Gorz concluded Écologie et liberté with a
scenario in which France has been magically transformed. There are work-
ers’ cooperatives and liberated schools. Bicycles and trams are provided for
transportation. Industries are ordered to produce only enough to cover
everyone’s needs. A bit more cautiously, Dumont (1973: 19) prefaced his
self-described “utopian” plans with the claim that their purpose was to elicit
constructive criticism, not to serve as blueprints. Still, like Gorz, Dumont
(1977: 277) saw no profound tension between calls for “planetary organi-
zation” and centralized resource distribution, on the one hand, and “a
decentralized and self-managed society” on the other.
The problem with ecosocialist utopian speculation is twofold. First, it
attributes to central planning a degree of efficacy and beneficence that it
has rarely if ever achieved in practice. On this issue, the anti-statist per-
sonalists have been the more prescient thinkers. Not until 1989 did Dumont
clearly admit that the idea of collectivizing the principal means of produc-
tion and exchange had “obviously failed on the economic level” (1989:
138). Still a ferocious critic of economic liberalism, Dumont now sees
202 Chapter 6
Ecosocialism Relativized
In the 1980s, French ecosocialism was swept into a broader “Arc en Ciel”
movement—a “rainbow” of leftists who could abide neither George
Marchais’s obstinately unreformed Communist Party nor François
Mitterrand’s comfortably reformist Socialist Party. Under Antoine
Waechter’s influence, the newly consolidated green party, Les Verts, was
more interested in asserting a distinctive ecological identity than in creating
broad alliances. With the 1988 presidential elections approaching, intel-
lectuals and activists gathered more than 1,000 signatures in an attempt to
overcome divisions between the autogestionnaire and ecological move-
ments (Bennahmias and Roche 1992: 79)
Supporting the “Appel pour un arc en ciel” were two historical figures of
French and German ecologism: René Dumont and Daniel Cohn-Bendit.
Socializing Nature 203
Joining them were the left-leaning Verts Félix Guattari and Dominique
Voynet. And there were some supporters (e.g., the economist Alain Lipietz)
who had long records of militancy in favor of an alternative left. This
attempt to constitute a heterogeneous leftist coalition, although short-lived,
established the distinctive tone of French ecosocialist writings in the 1980s.
It relayed the autogestionnaire and Third Worldist themes of Gorz and
Dumont without managing to mitigate the tensions between the centraliz-
ing and decentralizing interpretations of ecosocialism that run through their
works. The essays of Pierre Juquin and Félix Guattari transcribe this irres-
olution into theory.
As a spokesman for the French Communist Party, Pierre Juquin was in
charge of the party’s positions on ecological issues in the 1970s. He had
long been something of a maverick by the standards of Marchais’s ossified
organization. Encouraged by the enthusiasm for the Arc en ciel movement,
Juquin announced his intention to run a Red and Green ticket in the 1988
presidential elections. Exclusion from the Communist Party followed forth-
with. In his campaign, Juquin sought to unite all those who wanted to ren-
ovate the French far left. After obtaining only extremely modest electoral
results, he then tried to establish a “Nouvelle Gauche” movement—again
with little success (Jacob 1999: 277). His alternatives exhausted, Juquin
applied to join Les Verts. He was admitted in October 1991 after rigorous
questioning by party members who feared that their green waters were
about to be invaded by “red submarines” (Le Quotidien, August 30, 1991).
Had they read the manifesto that Juquin and others had published in 1990,
they would have discovered a work more unsettling for its philosophical
slipperiness than for any covert program of ideological aggression.
Explicitly socialist in their leanings, Juquin and the other authors of Pour
une alternative verte en Europe put ecological disruption on the list of evils
inherent in an economy organized to maximize profit, along with poverty,
exploitation of workers, and imperialism. They warn against “eco-
Keynesian” approaches to the environment on the ground that such
approaches leave untouched the essential factors of disorder in the econ-
omy. The dominance of exchange value under capitalism undermines
attempts to give value to ecological goods.
Although Marx is the only thinker whom Juquin et al. consistently cite
favorably, they also note his shortcomings: His notion that the state of
204 Chapter 6
understanding of ecological processes. His point is that even the most sophis-
ticated, scientific understandings of natural phenomena take shape in a
framework of social priorities and prejudices. No one has access to a total-
izing perspective that might justify automatic deference on the part of ordi-
nary citizens. There are only “partial objectivities” that flow out of social
groups with diverse economic, sexual, and cultural orientations (Deléage
1992a: 9). Their voices have a significant role to play in correcting the dis-
tortions induced by the social context of science. Deléage looks forward to
“a culture of counter-expertise” in which scientific analysis would have to
answer to more probing ethical scrutiny. At the same time, he regards science
as indispensable in helping citizens understand the ecological consequences
of their actions and the alternatives—the margin of freedom—left to them.
Ecosocialism should be critically rational, closely tied to diverse social
groups, and thoroughly democratic. As Deléage recognizes, this vision of a
pluralistic ecosocialism implies “reconceptualizing not only mankind’s
belonging to nature, but also the social contract” (1993b: 12–14). How such
a new contractualism might integrate material productivity, social equality,
and environmental responsibility Deléage leaves as an open challenge to
theoretical reflection. Alain Lipietz takes up this challenge.
Affiliated since the 1970s with a research institute concerned with economic
planning, Alain Lipietz is known as a leader in the “regulation school” of
political economic theory in France.5 After years of participating in politi-
cal movements to the left of François Mitterrand’s Socialist Party, Lipietz
decided to join Les Verts in 1988. Within only a few years he was named
spokesman of the party’s economic commission and elected a regional coun-
cillor in the Paris region (Gher 1992). He was the main author of Les Verts’
1992 economic program. In June 2001 he was selected as the party’s pres-
idential candidate for the 2002 national elections.
In Vert Espérance [Green Hope] (1993a), Lipietz recounts the intellectual
changes that led him from expounding an ideological mélange of commu-
nism and French Maoism to embracing political ecology. Today he no
longer believes in the centrality of the workers’ movement; he no longer
believes that capitalism is the unique source of all forms of oppression. He
Socializing Nature 213
1987: 18). The state furthers this process of normalization by putting its
legitimizing imprimatur on the compromises and customs that form the
hegemonic system.
Still, nothing guarantees the long-term success of such efforts. A regime
of accumulation may eventually be unable to fulfill all the expectations it
creates. Changes in technology, in trade, or in available resources may cause
unforeseen friction among the pieces of the hegemonic system. Indeed, this
is to be expected, since regulation lessens social tensions but does not elim-
inate them—at best, it creates “armistices” within class struggles. Capitalist
“extortion of surplus value” remains (Lipietz 1994: 41). A crisis occurs
when the system of regulation shows itself unable to stem mounting pro-
ductivity losses, trade deficits, and sociopolitical turmoil. Social actors then
search for the terms of a new compromise—one better able to manage the
accumulated tensions of the previous regime.
Most regulationists apply this general schema for understanding social
change to the postwar political economy of Europe and the United States.
Lipietz especially contends that the “Fordist” social compromises that
underwrote prosperity in the 20 years that followed World War II have been
unraveling since the late 1960s. In his 1989 book Choisir l’audace
[Choosing Boldly, published in English under the title Towards a New
Economic Order] he explains the nature of the crisis and, for the first time
in his major writings, links it to ecological concerns.
Lipietz argues that what sustained the relative social peace and economic
resurgence of most industrialized Western countries after World War II was
a “Fordist” regime of accumulation. Fordism couples a model of work
organization based on high levels of mechanization and Taylorist “ratio-
nalization”6 with agreements to distribute the fruits of economic growth
widely within the nation. The first element of Fordism disadvantaged work-
ers by devaluing the knowledge of the production process they had gained
on the shop floor, thereby making work less fulfilling. It made workers eas-
ier to replace, thus potentially lowering wages. The resulting possibilities of
labor unrest and declining productivity made a second element of Fordism
essential: In compensation for their diminished position in the workplace,
workers demanded that management redistribute more of the profits to
them.7 In the 1930s and the 1940s, from the American New Deal to the
Scandinavian social democracies, to the French model of economic
216 Chapter 6
social reconciliation. Like the later Gorz, Lipietz understands that moving
beyond conflict requires mutually respecting discussion, not utopian visions
of social harmony. Second, contractual ecosocialism advances its program
through a broadly participatory, consensus-oriented process of negotiation.
Although Lipietz admires Guattari, he does not simply praise dissensus. For
Lipietz (1988a: 84), the Alternative “defines itself in terms of a community
sharing a minimal agreement of what is just and good to build together.”
Greens “seek to convince others, by the rightness of their proposals and the
example of their work, to come together in a common struggle for life”
(Lipietz 1993a: 41).
Yet moving toward what is “just and good” may require painful sacrifices
on the part of those who have benefited from unjust practices. A contrac-
tualist view therefore requires putting together a package of changes that
includes measures designed to secure the consent of potentially recalcitrant
groups. Along this line, Lipietz (1993a: 84) argues that ending the exploita-
tion of the peoples of the South will never win majority support in the North
unless it is tied to ideas such as expanding free time and supporting “more
festive” forms of social life. In a sense, then, he tries to create an attractive
formula out of the partialities of Dumont’s Third Worldism and Gorz’s
autogestionnaire agenda. The former has the politically unpalatable con-
sequence of defining ecosocialism largely in terms of austerity. (See, e.g.,
Dumont 1978: 184.) The latter has the ethically problematic characteristic
of neglecting the specificity of Third World development. Joined together
as parts of a social compromise, however, these two currents help remedy
each other’s defects.
Thus, the ecological turn in contractualist theorizing brings together the
regulationist emphasis on the consensual resolution of social conflict with
an environmentalist value system—one that defends ecologically sustain-
able development and respect for nature. Yet it is by no means clear how
ecosocialist contractualism melds explanation and evaluation. Can one
derive green values through the same cognitive processes of observation,
reasoning, and testing that support regulation theory? If so, how? If not,
with what sort of argument does one support green values? How do the
motivations imputed to social actors in regulation theory tally with the
transformed ethics presupposed by a green society? What is the relation-
ship between “compromise” as a variable in regulation theory’s explanation
220 Chapter 6
our biosphere,” he chooses an image designed to make us all see the folly
of wrecking the very system that supports our lives. He denounces distrib-
utive systems that allow the wealthy North to capture a disproportionate
share of the planet’s resources, disregarding the more urgent needs of the
South. He assesses the relative ability of different strategies of economic
development to improve the quality of life of all. In all such cases, Lipietz
is proposing more than an alternative ethic which others may or may not
find attractive. He lays out a candidate for a system of values that is more
consistent, that better meets our own stated goals, that does not make
unwarranted assumptions—in a word, that is more rational, in a sense not
conveyed in his more Weberian statements.
Equally unsatisfying, Lipietz disconnects his “green” values from the
nature of the crisis itself by making it seem that the values of an ecological
ethics arise in ways that are entirely distinct from cognitive processes of
observation, reasoning, and testing. Ecological challenges do not articulate
with human interests in any systematic way, such that one might expect cer-
tain conditions of environmental change to favor the development of a
“green” consciousness. Demands to protect biological diversity, for exam-
ple, appear to arise simply because some new social movements decide that
such protection is important—not because at this particular historical junc-
ture humankind’s species-depleting activities have reached a point where
they are particularly likely to activate an interest in the preservation of eco-
logical systems. A decisionist model of moral criticism deflects theorists
from the important task of explaining the origin of interests or of the con-
ditions favoring their critical reevaluation.
In chapter 8, I will explore whether some of these unresolved problems
might be better addressed within the theoretical framework proposed by
Jürgen Habermas. Seeing historical change in terms of a critical, reflexive
learning process might better encompass the French ecosocialists’ commit-
ments to democracy, social equity, and environmental care than some of
their own explanatory claims.
But it must be admitted that the noncenteredness of French ecologism
challenges any efforts to advance that theoretical convergence. Some would
say that Habermas can interpret the natural world only as an object to be
technologically dominated by a separate subject (di Norcia 1974–75: 89).
Lipietz (1993a: 49) insists, in contrast, that
222 Chapter 6
the ‘environment’ is not at the center of political ecology. Rather, there is a complex
totality, structured as a triangle: the human species, its activity, and nature. Nature—
threatened and transformed by man—is both the matrix and the basis of that activ-
ity. . . . The target of political ecology can be none other than that decisive mediation
between humanity and its environment: the productive, transformative and con-
suming activity of humanity.
The “democracy” that liberals have in mind when they speak of “demo-
cratic ecology” consists of political processes and institutions—mainly of
national government—that are designed to make law and policies gener-
ally reflect the will of the majority, within constraints imposed by certain
constitutional rights. Liberal democracy is neutral with respect to every
substantive policy end. “Liberal political theory,” explains Mark Sagoff
Negotiating Nature 225
agency and value conflict—for example, if democracy turns out not to pro-
tect natural things—it is value that must take priority (ibid.: 120).
Michael Saward (1993: 63–64) worries that Goodin’s distinction could
justify the use of nondemocratic means to solve ecological problems.
Saward’s worries are not merely speculative; eco-authoritarians do exist in
the English-speaking world. Robert Heilbroner and Garrett Hardin are
often mentioned as examples (Press 1994: 12–13; Barry 1999b: 195).
William Ophuls gave eco-authoritarianism what may be its clearest
formulation. Ophuls declared that the technical and scientific complexities
of ecological issues often put them beyond the ken of average citizens.
Placing more power in the hands of an ecologically competent scientific
elite is inevitable. “The steady-state society,” he concluded, “will not only
be ostensibly more authoritarian and less democratic than industrial soci-
eties of today . . . , but it may be more oligarchic as well.”3 (Ophuls and
Boyan 1992: 215)
Such reasoning is exactly what liberals fear. That is why liberal-minded
anthropocentric ecologists search for ways to mitigate the conflict of
democracy and ecology. Typically they highlight the vast array of environ-
mental interests that citizens can bring into collective deliberations.
Creating an ecological society is not only a technical matter. Aesthetic judg-
ments, considerations of justice, and sensitivities to cultural continuity have
to orient the use of techniques to preserve the environment. A democracy
in which ordinary citizens articulated such values could be robustly eco-
logical (Sagoff 1988: 166–170). Maybe, but maybe not, ecocentrists reply.
Anthropocentric reasoning still leaves species and ecosystems as mere
instruments of the popular will, ever vulnerable to the changing whims of
democratic majorities.
Anthropocentrists convinced by that critique take the argument to the
next level and try to establish a noncontingent connection between a more
rigorous ecologism and democracy. Thus Michael Saward (1996: 83–88)
seeks to prove that, like freedom of speech or the right to vote, a right to
health care is a fundamental democratic right. Therefore, in demanding a
safe, undegraded environment, greens are simply exercising that intrinsi-
cally democratic right. Presumably, by arguing for a legally enforceable
right to an undegraded environment, Saward would withdraw much of
environmental policy from the vagaries of legislative decision making.
Negotiating Nature 227
the very same principle that rules out authoritarianism in human commu-
nities: the right of each species to live according to its species life. For
humans, this includes the anti-authoritarian “right to choose their own
destiny.”
Most anthropocentrists and nonanthropocentrists fervently hope that
democracy and ecology are mutually supportive. Still, one senses in their
sometimes tortuous arguments a lingering unease: a worry that ecological
ends and democratic means fit together imperfectly at best. Saward’s
anthropocentric derivation of green democracy from a right to health is
highly contentious from a democratic point of view. An open-ended right
to health might absorb enormous quantities of social resources, thereby
foreclosing other popular policies. It also fails to get at many environmen-
tal issues (e.g., resource depletion and protecting endangered species) that
are not health related. As an ecocentrist, Eckersley tries to maintain that
nonhumans have a right to their species’ life, just as humans have a “demo-
cratic” right to self-determination. But the argument is strained. It is incor-
rect to imply that every human right to self-determination is “democratic.”
Observing the right to religious liberty, for example, limits the legislative
prerogatives of democratic majorities. That is a good thing, but it is not
especially democratic. Anyway, as moral limits of this sort increase in num-
ber, the scope of popular rule necessarily shrinks. If nonhuman species have
a right to self-determination, humans lose their right to govern their own
affairs in some areas. There can be no assurance that broadly participatory
processes will yield decisions conducive to nature’s flourishing. The gap
between democracy and ecology ends up having to be filled by some non-
democratic authority.
In preparation for understanding how French liberals treat green theory,
one other observation is crucial: The centeredness assumption underlies
every position in this debate. It is because anthropocentrists and non-
anthropocentrists are similarly convinced of the distinct identities of
“humans” and “natural” entities that they are so sensitive to the potential
for conflict between democracy and ecology. First, both sides in the ecol-
ogy/democracy debate suppose that nature has a fixed identity. It matters
little whether “nature” consists of evolving, interdependent plant and ani-
mal life processes unfolding in interaction with physical cycles in the earth’s
lithosphere, or whether it is seen as “wilderness,” or whether it is seen as
Negotiating Nature 229
individual biota that are born, grow, live, and die according to their own
manner of being-in-the-world. In each case, “nature” is defined as some-
thing with an identity independent of humanity or as something with an
objective condition of well-being. That is why democracy is potentially dan-
gerous to it: In pursuing their human goals, members of the demos may dis-
rupt nature’s identity. In addition, the two sides take a similar view of
human subjectivity. As ethicists, theorists treat themselves and their audi-
ence as centered individuals. They use their reason to fashion a compre-
hensive, internally consistent framework of rules to regularize and moralize
the domain of human interactions with nature. Centered ethicists tend to
think of reason as a capacity enjoyed by each person to evaluate evidence
dispassionately, to subject arguments to tests of logical consistency, and to
explain events in the world without recourse to unobservable causes. When
confronted with incompatible value claims, they try to assess those claims
impartially. It is because democracy supposes precisely such an under-
standing of human subjectivity that green values might endanger it:
Nature’s good, whatever it might be, seems to trump the values of a being
defined by its ability to fashion and live by its own rules.
That, in fact, will be the French liberal ecologists’ most important lesson.
They make little effort to lessen the tension between ecology and democ-
racy. If anything, they sharpen it. The puzzle is, why do they do so more by
wrangling with English-speaking thinkers than with the theorists of French
ecologism itself?
Marxism. Even as France’s political order became more and more liberal
in practice after World War II, professedly anti-liberal philosophical fash-
ions such as existential Marxism, poststructuralism, and the Situationism
of 1968 attracted the allegiance of many intellectuals.
Thus, it is understandable that when some French intellectuals began to
speak openly in the name of liberalism in the 1970s and the 1980s, they
were combative in their rhetoric and prickly in their defense of democracy.
They were quick—too quick, as we shall see—to interpret new challengers
as if they were among their familiar adversaries. French ecologism has
found itself on the receiving end of those sensitivities.
Among “the new French liberals,” as Mark Lilla calls them, is the author
of The New Ecological Order. Luc Ferry first made his reputation by crit-
icizing “anti-humanist” tendencies in the “thought of sixty-eight.” He
charged that the seeming individualism of the period of student unrest “led
quite predictably in the direction of the disintegration of the Ego as
autonomous will, the destruction of the classical idea of the subject.”
Notions of a personality that is spontaneous and psychically fragmented
replaced the “classical idea” of the ego as something that integrates the self
and masters its contradictory impulses. This, Ferry contends, has dire reper-
cussions for liberal theory: “The Ego that loses self-mastery, no longer tends
to regard other people as other subjects . . . with whom (intersubjective)
relations can take the form of a reciprocal recognition of freedoms.” (Ferry
1985: 64–65) Since the reciprocal recognition of freedoms is the central
philosophical principle of a liberal, democratic society, the “thought of
sixty-eight” endangers the core values of the republic. Ferry’s subsequent
works defend liberal rights and representative government by way of a
Kantian “nonmetaphysical humanism.”
In a more historical vein, Marcel Gauchet’s 1985 book The Disenchant-
ment of the World attracted considerable attention in intellectual circles by
lacing liberalism with worries about the fragility of moral progress. Modern
conceptions of human subjectivity, Gauchet argues, are closely linked to
Christian views that God made man free and relieved him of submission to
pagan gods. Through long struggles between church and state, this view of
freedom has gradually led man to dispense with God altogether. Democratic
individualism stands in God’s place, for good and for ill. Though demo-
cratic individualism is the realization of free subjectivity, it is also danger-
Negotiating Nature 231
Assaults by Marcel Gauchet and Luc Ferry employ a slightly lighter, more
mobile artillery. In a brief essay that gained attention out of all proportion
to the evidence sustaining its argument,4 Gauchet (1990) updated the lib-
eral critique of radical politics most famously promoted in France by
Raymond Aron. For Aron, political radicalism—Marxism especially—is
the expression of an essentially religious (read: irrational, millenarian)
world view (Anderson 1997: 64–67). Until the fall of communism, it was
radical leftists who rejected the world as it was and sought to impose a
vision of perfect harmony in its place. Now ecologists, says Marcel
Gauchet, are taking their place. Today, with democratic capitalism victori-
ous, Red-green critiques of industrial modernity “recycle theological bag-
gage”: they “denounce the satanic pride of a creature that wants to go
beyond its limits and mistreats what does not belong to it.” Gauchet senses
a hatred for humanity in many contemporary expressions of a love for
nature. Greens evoke “the edenic dream of a nature freed from the scourge
of man . . . , the aspiration of a universe returned to its primordial virgin-
ity” (Gauchet 1990: 280–281).
How is it possible for greens to be guilty of recycled progressive leftism
and reactionary proto-fascism at the same time? Ferry claims to see through
the apparent contradiction. He argues that greens’ aspirations to exercise
political power could be justified only if they had a philosophy that gener-
ated a new perspective not only on environmental questions but also on the
full range of issues that governments must address. The only candidate for
such a philosophy, Ferry maintains (1992a: 267), is “deep ecology.” Only
deep ecology, with its notion of the intrinsic value of natural things, has a
world view that reorients the evaluation of every issue of governance. What
makes deep ecology politically dangerous, in Ferry’s eyes, is its tendency
either to deny human freedom (by seeing societies as governed by the nat-
ural laws of ecosystems that encompass them) or to impugn it (by accusing
it of wantonly destroying nature).
In a chapter on “Nazi ecology,” Ferry uncovers deep ecology’s philo-
sophical ancestry in laws and writings of the Third Reich. Animal-rights
laws, a sentimental valorization of primitive nature, and a critique of urban-
ism and racial assimilationism all have precedents in Nazi Germany. The
common thread tying such views together with ultra-leftist egalitarianism,
says Ferry, is the hatred of humanist “modernity.” Modernity signifies
Negotiating Nature 233
stands defending regional identities that made them sound intolerant and
potentially authoritarian (Paraire 1992: 31; Nick 1991). But none of the
main thinkers behind French ecologism has the slightest connection to or
sympathy with the traditions of French right-wing thought. The majority
of them come from the political left. And it should be remembered that a
critique of eco-authoritarianism is integral to the works of René Passet,
Edgar Morin, André Gorz, and Jean-Paul Deléage, as well as to the writings
of all the personalists. Jean-Claude Guillebaud (1992: 20) got it exactly
right in his inquiry into French ecological ideas: the ecologists’ interna-
tionalism and anti-racism, along with their epistemologically nuanced use
of ecological science, put them “at the opposite end of the spectrum from
rightist naturalism.”
What, then, accounts for the frequency of liberal charges of “ecofas-
cism”? Bruno Latour offers an important insight. Moderns, he says, under-
stand passing time “as if it abolished the past behind it.” Any reminders of
that abolished past become threatening. “If we aren’t careful, [moderns]
think, we are going to return to the past, we are going to fall back into the
dark ages.” (Latour 1991: 93–94) For French liberals, the dark age is
France’s pre-industrial, ruralist past—a past most recently and most dis-
tressingly embraced by the Vichy regime. Vichy kept alive a rightist inter-
pretation of a “humanized nature”: a nature of tradition and myth,
supposed racial “purity,” immobility (both social and geographical), rela-
tive technological backwardness, a world of “natural” hierarchies in family
and politics.
The point is not only that an ultraconservative interpretation of human-
ized nature is culturally available in France. More important from a philo-
sophical viewpoint, liberals seem bent on reducing alternative ecologisms
to that view, because their own political identity is tied to its rejection. That
is, French liberal humanism gets its meaning by contrast to a rightist inter-
pretation of “nature.” This happens in two ways.
Ferry clarifies the first of these by tracing his intellectual lineage to the
Enlightenment and the French Revolutionaries’ Declaration of the Rights
of Man and Citizen and explaining that man’s humanitas “resides in his
freedom, in the fact that he is undefined, that his nature is to have no nature
but to possess the capacity to distance himself from any code within which
one may seek to imprison him” (1992a: 46). Referring to “any code” allows
Negotiating Nature 235
learn better how to refrain from disrupting ecological processes that are
essential to human welfare (Bourg 1997: 71). Liberal nature, in sum,
remains a passive substratum which humanity continuously and freely fash-
ions in order to suit its purposes.
As unabashed anthropocentrists, French liberals take positions that seem
identical to those of anthropocentrists in the English-speaking world. But
the dualism of nature and humanity plays itself out differently in France,
especially in comparison to countries with long-standing traditions of
wilderness preservation. In North America, for example, calls to “protect
nature” can easily be visualized as a geographic distinction; it is a matter of
isolating certain nonhuman phenomena (territories and species) from
human influence (Van Wyck 1997: 83, 101, 158). In a sense, preserving
wilderness is not a project of society; it is a project of protecting “nature”
from society. English-speaking anthropocentrists and ecocentrists often
agree that wilderness preservation should have a high priority in an eco-
logical politics, even if they disagree over how much wilderness should be
saved and over what sorts of human activity are compatible with main-
taining an area as wilderness. But they think of wilderness as nature endan-
gered by the expansion of human ways that are foreign to it. It is much
harder to think of nature that way in the thoroughly humanized French
landscape. In France, the dualism of nature and humanity takes the form
not of a physical separation of two domains but of politically distinct soci-
eties—different “states of nature,” as Moscovici put it. True, liberals under-
stand nature to “[come] spontaneously into existence, independent of any
human intervention” (Bourg 1995: 121). But its significance always arises
in relation to one social-political project or another. Interpreting that sig-
nificance entails searching for historical precedents, piecing together telling
tidbits of political rhetoric, and extrapolating social consequences out of
tentative speculations. In France, liberals assume that protecting species and
wilderness for their own sake is not really what greens have in mind. In
truth, they believe, ecological debate can only be about choosing among
various models of a humanized “nature” and among the corresponding
types of society—ruralist or “modernist”—that produce them. French lib-
erals associate nonanthropocentric ecologism with fascism because they see
both as social projects that make “nature” a pretext for devaluing human
freedom.
Negotiating Nature 237
“Democratic ecology” (which is what Ferry and Bourg call their alternative
to any project of radical ecologism) unfolds in three movements. It begins
with an assertion of the uniqueness of human autonomy. It then attempts
to reconcile such autonomy to the severity of the environmental challenges
facing humanity. It concludes with appeals to use conventional democratic
procedures—with at most a minimal role begrudgingly accorded to green
political parties—to address environmental issues incrementally.
A liberal approach to ecology starts from an analysis of human freedom
in relationship to “nature.” We have seen that liberals fear that ecologism
would justify curtailing human rights. The fundamental error of deep ecol-
ogists, Ferry charges, is to misunderstand why human beings have a moral
significance that generates duties of mutual respect. Lawrence Johnson
(1991: 116–118) and some other ecocentrists argue that moral significance
is grounded in interests. Since nonhuman things have well-being interests,
they too have moral significance that demands respect. Ferry disagrees.
Moral respect is grounded, he says, in autonomy, which nonhumans do not
have. Following Kant and Rousseau, he maintains that what makes per-
sons into non-animalistic, moral beings is their ability to use their liberty to
check their instincts and egoism. For human beings, autonomy means being
able to create new values and to devise impartial rules of conduct. Truly
moral decisions are made disinterestedly (Ferry 1992: 62).
In a liberal-republican political order, the very notion of citizenship rests
on this understanding of morality. Laws—including environmental ones—
are morally legitimate because they are connected to autonomous citizens
in two ways: they are enacted by a legislature freely chosen by citizens, and
they reflect the citizens’ general interests (not merely the immediate
appetites of some fraction of the population). No plant, nonhuman animal,
or ecosystem can plausibly be said to possess the attributes that confer inde-
pendent moral significance.
In only one respect might there be a need to rethink representative democ-
racy’s humanist foundations. Ferry (1992a: 29, 44–45, 72–73, 126) con-
cedes that Cartesian humanism is too concerned with making man “master
and possessor of nature” to support an environmentally sensitive liberalism.
Cartesian humanists treat everything nonhuman as an unfeeling object
238 Chapter 7
suitable for any human use whatsoever. From that perspective, no moral
objection to bullfights or to experiments on unanesthetized animals seems
credible. Ferry’s alternative to Cartesianism is “nonmetaphysical human-
ism.” This would allow us to protect nature, but only for reasons compat-
ible with the uniqueness of humanity’s intrinsic value. Many of those
reasons, no doubt, will pertain to our interests in our own health, safety,
aesthetic satisfaction, and so on. Still, Ferry admits that such considerations
may seem insufficient to justify moral concern for some nonhuman entities
(e.g., the welfare of animals in general, or perhaps the integrity of relatively
remote ecosystems).
The nonmetaphysical humanist then offers an additional line of defense:
We can be moved to protect parts of nature when we perceive in nonhu-
man things qualities analogous to those we respect in human beings.
Animals and ecosystems display purposiveness, beauty, even intelligence.
These make them “the object of a certain respect, a respect which . . . , we
also pay ourselves,” says Ferry (1992a: 124). That we should give animals
“a certain respect” does not mean that they have legal entitlements in their
own right or that they have intrinsic value. “It is,” Ferry claims, “the ideas
evoked [in humans] by nature that bestow value upon it.” Still, recogniz-
ing the moral status of ideas evoked through nature’s analogues to human
autonomy avoids the Cartesian habit of dividing the world into humans
(who deserve respect) and nature (which is comprehensively instrumental-
ized). Ferry’s democratic humanism embraces an environmentalism that is
“concerned with respecting the diversity of the orders of reality” (ibid.:
123). Presumably, if certain species and natural sites stir our compassion
or admiration, legislative protection should follow.
Ferry managed to write an entire book on the dangers of political ecol-
ogy while barely mentioning the dangers associated with the environmental
damage humanity is inflicting on the planet. Bourg may disclose more about
the potential of liberal democratic ecology because he is far more attentive
to the severity and uniqueness of our ecological challenges. Recognizing lim-
its in the ability of markets to handle ecological problems, he disputes
directly the contention of economists that there is (or will be) a substitute
for every environmental good (Bourg 1997: 82). Bourg (1996b: 114) sees
that resource depletion and climate change raise formidable questions about
whether today’s democratic citizens are fulfilling their obligations to future
Negotiating Nature 239
environmental costs and risks onto those who did not create them, makes
labor tedious and powerless in the name of “efficiency,” and insists on inter-
national free trade even if it undermines domestic environmental legisla-
tion and exacerbates economic inequalities between nations. Surely one of
the most important questions we might pose to liberal adversaries of French
ecologism is whether their “democratic ecology” must end up tolerating
such effects in the name of preserving individual liberty. In France only a
tiny, minority school offers a clear answer: free-market economists of a
strain that Americans would call libertarian.
“The majority system,” complains the economist Gérard Bramoullé
(1993b: 49), “favors the right to vote over the right of property.” Bramoullé
finds that favoritism completely “abnormal.” Libertarians hold that indi-
viduals express their uncoerced preferences in market transactions
(Bramoullé 1993a: 35). Government regulations—even those backed by a
clear majority—interfere with free exchange. Restrictions on building,
species-protection acts, and waste-disposal regulations trump property
owners’ decisions and threaten violators with coercion. Libertarians need
not deny the existence of environmental problems. They decry situations
where one owner pollutes another’s property. They acknowledge that it is
undesirable for people collectively to exploit a resource out of existence.
Such problems, argues Max Falque (1986), prove only that a system allow-
ing such things to occur does not really rest on private property and the free
market.
In the libertarian perspective, Garrett Hardin’s 1968 essay “The Tragedy
of the Commons” demonstrated that collective goods problems arise
because property rights have been left unspecified (Falque 1986: 42;
Bramoullé 1993b: 38; cf. Barry 1999b: 150). People overexploit resources
when goods are freely accessible to all rather than available only at a cost
to legally specified property owners. The benefits each person receives indi-
vidually exceed the share of costs he or she must bear from overuse. The
existence of external diseconomies is solved by fixing responsibility—by
specifying property rights. When downstream fisherman have a right to
clean water, for example, upstream polluters will have to either reduce their
pollution or compensate the fishermen. Where property rights are clear, the
parties will have the financial incentive to seek the most efficient allocation
of resources.
Negotiating Nature 245
This is not to suggest that Latour or Duclos have cut the Gordian knot of
green theory. Difficult questions are coming. However, for the moment a
simple point is in order. It is that these noncentered theories, questionable or
not, have barely attracted the attention of French liberals. English-speaking
liberals, in contrast, have risen to the green challenge. Some maintain that
an expanded notion of a “commons” protected by public power has con-
siderable purchase on environmental problems (Wells and Lynch 2000:
86–87). Ronald Paehlke (1989: 191–192) argues that, by granting basic
rights to future human generations and to other species, “environmental-
ism can be taken as extension of liberalism.” Such calls for an extended
liberalism take seriously green claims that traditional formulations of an
Negotiating Nature 255
more willing to embrace the idea that moral significance attaches to things
other than the human capacity for self-control (Johnson 1991: 43–96). At
the same time, they assume that this revised reason can coexist with democ-
racy, with respect for human rights to life, with free expression, and with
self-governance. At least, green arguments explicitly rejecting such rights
are rare.
Rationalistic French liberals dare greens to demonstrate the consistency
of such a combination of ideas. Once one argues, for instance, that well-
being interests rather than rationality establish the moral significance of liv-
ing entities, the groundwork is laid, not for democracy, but for paternalistic
governance by elites who can best discern the interests of their mute charges.
Once one adopts the holistic principle that value is diffused throughout an
ecosystem, the notion that rights inhere in each individual begins to
crumble. The danger of ecocentrism, from the French liberals’ perspective,
lies as much in its internal contradictions as in its overt prescriptions.
Unimagined sacrifices loom in some green polities.
In spite of their insight into such philosophical dangers, however, French
liberals remain frustrating. By concentrating their criticisms on “Anglo-
Saxon” variants of green theory, they fail to perform what would be a sig-
nal service in their own linguistic community. If they would redirect their
fire toward domestic greens, they might force them to explain how a case
for democracy can survive an attack on views of a rationally discoverable
nature and on a rationally autonomous humanity—views that have been
used to support democracy since the seventeenth century.
In fact, noncentered theories go even further than centered ones in chal-
lenging conceptions of reason. After all, Latour and Duclos do not argue
that reason can be extended or amended. They doubt that it is capable at
any point of integrating human experience into a self-consistent, morally
comprehensible whole. Latour adopts an epistemology in which disorder,
flux, and random variation are irreducible characteristics of human expe-
rience. Reason does not find sense in this chaos. At best, it makes sense. It
weaves partial, disconnected webs of meaning out of arbitrarily spun
strands of concepts. Duclos too emphasizes the “arbitrary” character of
civility (1993a: 246; 1996: 215). Civility skips among the symbolic regis-
ters of identity, convention, and science. Why it skips must remain unex-
plained and enigmatic; otherwise civility itself would be a social logic with
Negotiating Nature 257
One possible way to reconcile green theory and democracy is to show that
it is liberal democracy, not democracy per se, that copes inadequately with
ecological problems. Alain Lipietz, we have seen, chides liberal democracies
for so anxiously defending private property that they cripple the commu-
nity’s ability to impose effective measures of environmental protection.
Liberal democracies, says Val Plumwood, tolerate economic inequalities
that allow the privileged and powerful to buy their way out of many envi-
ronmental ills; meanwhile, “the most oppressed and dispossessed people in
a society are . . . made to share the same expendable condition as nature”
(Plumwood 1995: 138–139). Liberal conceptions of the public/private dis-
tinction obscure how new political issues, including environmental ones,
take shape as social groups contest the exercise of power in what before
was seen as the private sphere (Hayward 1994: 204).
An increasing number of green theorists advocate deliberative democ-
racy as an ecologically rational alternative to liberal democracy (Brulle
2000). Often inspired by Jürgen Habermas’s discourse ethics, deliberative
democrats criticize liberals for reducing democracy to a process of aggre-
gating people’s existing preferences (Dryzek 1987: 201; Barry 1999b: 217).
They offer reasons and evidence to think that deliberative democracy would
set in a motion a process of preference formation in which green values
would demonstrate their superiority (Gunderson 1995: 10; Torgerson
1999: 120; Dryzek 1994: 192–194). The democratic ideal, they say, should
be collective action sustained by a dialogue that is as free as possible from
partialities and distortions (Hayward 1994: 205). Most of them also agree
that linking ecologism to Habermas’s communicative ethics unavoidably
makes green theory anthropocentric.
260 Chapter 8
Centers Revisited
French ecologists divide into a number of strains of what I have called “non-
centered theory.” But noncenteredness is not a simple or uniform concept.
It admits of degrees and different interpretations—all of which, nonetheless,
stand in contrast to the anthropocentric and nonanthropocentric green theo-
ries encountered in the English-speaking world. A review of this general con-
trast and of the various forms of noncenteredness clears the way for an
encounter between the ecologism of Alain Lipietz and Habermasian theory.
I will use this encounter as an initial test case for determining whether a the-
ory of communicative action can make sense of certain claims that are
asserted, but not thoroughly defended, in the works of some noncentered
French ecologists. Ultimately I want to show that such a rapprochement is
possible because Habermasian discourse ethics itself is not incontrovertibly
Questioning Nature 261
emphasize that those entities shine forth moral “light” in their own right.
Their significance does not depend just on illumination they receive from
humanity. Perhaps the better image is that humanity is just one star in a fir-
mament aglow with cross-lit astral bodies.
But there are two reasons to believe that a spectral center still haunts such
theorizing. Its presence appears, first, in the tendency of nonanthropocentric
theories to end up giving special privileges to humanity relative to the rest
of nature. (See chapter 2.) Suspiciously, one star in the firmament burns
much more brightly than the rest. More important, though, is the fact that
nonanthropocentric theorizing really amounts to a search for new ways of
fulfilling the same ethical function as the old human “sun.”
The function of a center is to give things a transitive ordering in a scheme
of values. Cartesian anthropocentrism gives us reason to believe that we
humans have automatic and uncontestable pre-eminence over all of nature
and can decide the fate of natural things strictly as a function of our pur-
poses. Nonanthropocentrists reject that moral scale, but they hasten to put
a new one in its place. They accept the assumption that the main task of
green theory is to offer ideas about how to manage tradeoffs between
human desires to consume and reshape natural things and the moral stand-
ing of those things themselves. Whatever moral scale the nonanthropocen-
trist proffers is designed to situate humanity in relation to nonhuman things
with which our values might conflict, and to offer a priori reasons for
resolving the conflict in a certain way. A nonanthropocentric scale of moral
considerability is the new center. Yes, many things, humanity among them,
now shine with moral light. They do so, however, for the same reason that
objects outside Plato’s cave dazzle the enlightened prisoner: because they
reflect the illumination of the Good.
A center, then, is a metaphor for moral relations that conveys three
fundamental ideas:
• There is a need for a comprehensive ethical system to apportion value
A closer examination of how Alain Lipietz does (and in some cases, does
not) answer these questions exposes how his path converges with that of
Jürgen Habermas’s communicative ethics. Habermas works out in a more
complete sense a variety of claims that are integral to Lipietz’s regulation-
ist ecologism. A demonstration of this convergence has significance beyond
the bounds of Lipietz’s theory. Serge Moscovici, Edgar Morin, and other
French ecosocialists follow substantially similar routes.
Recall that Lipietz’s regulationist ecologism pictures a green program as
the precursor of new compromise designed to control the socially and envi-
ronmentally destabilizing tendencies of liberal productivism. In a regula-
tionist model, such a stabilizing agreement gets forged only through the
struggles of diverse groups to impress their needs on reluctant political and
economic elites. In chapter 6, I also noted, however, that Lipietz’s empha-
sis on the contingency of compromise, his unwillingness to invoke any
notion of historical progress, and the difficulty he has explaining how eco-
logical demands arise according to a regulationist model leave the ethical
basis of his green contract mysterious.
Much of the mystery would disappear if regulation theory could be plau-
sibly interpreted as a concrete application of Habermasian communicative
ethics. Communicative ethics distinguishes between compromise under-
stood as “a balance of power” and compromise as an agreement incorpo-
rating “norms [that] express generalizable interests” (Habermas 1975:
111). So does Lipietz’s theory. Interpreted in Habermasian terms, Lipietz’s
proposed compromise could be seen to issue from a respect for individuals
Questioning Nature 267
An ecocentrist is now sure to cry foul on the ground that I have defended
the intelligibility of a noncentered ecologism by smuggling a center back
into the analysis. Habermas’s green sympathizers (indeed, Habermas him-
self) agree that communicative ethics is anthropocentric (Hayward 1994:
208; Whitebook 1996: 284; Habermas 1982: 247). As an ecocentric critic
puts it: Habermas’s theory “privileges human emancipation vis-à vis the
emancipation of nonhuman nature” (Eckersley 1992: 110). There is a
straightforward reason for this charge: In a communicative ethics, inter-
subjective norms arise through unconstrained deliberations of human
274 Chapter 8
now maintain that many of the claims that qualify the French as non-
centered show up in Habermas’s theory too.
It is important to recognize the modesty of Habermas’s teleology. As
Thomas McCarthy explains (1978: 239), Habermas’s “theory of social evo-
lution . . . requires neither unilinearity, nor necessity, nor continuity, nor
irreversibility in history.” A teleology that is so relaxed should cause no
alarm in a theorist such as Alain Lipietz. It does not deny human freedom.
It does not confer dangerous authority upon a prescient political vanguard.
It does “relativize” notions of reform and revolution, as Lipietz prefers. In
contrast to ecosocialists who treat “capitalism” as if it had only one form,
Lipietz—like Habermas—insists on recognizing “the existence of a variety
of capitalist development models,” some of which respond better than
others to social inequality and environmental damage (Lipietz 2000: 78).
Habermasian evolution certainly does imply “a conception of cumulative
processes in which a direction can be perceived” (McCarthy 1978: 239).
But this is no different from Lipietz’s assertion (2000: 72) that “political
ecology defines progress only as a tendency—defined in terms of certain
ethical or aesthetic values (solidarity, independence, responsibility, democ-
racy, harmony).”
To be convinced of the modesty (and the relative noncenteredness) of
Habermasian teleology, one need only compare it to the theory of “dialec-
tical naturalism” that underlies Murray Bookchin’s social ecology. Social
ecology, according to Bookchin (1989: 37), “establishes a basis for a mean-
ingful understanding of humanity and society’s place in natural evolution”
by building on a “conception of nature as the cumulative history of more
differentiated levels of material organization . . . and of increasing subjec-
tivity.” Human critical reflexivity is the culmination of nature’s becoming
self-conscious. Ecological awareness, for Bookchin, has arrived when
humanity builds into its own social practices the characteristics of nature
itself: equality, not hierarchy; differentiation, not uniformity; cooperation,
not competition. An egalitarian ecological society would, like ecosystems,
be self-regulating through decentralized processes of dynamic interaction
(Bookchin 1982: 345–353). Habermas’s teleology is humble indeed next to
this vision. For present purposes, the essential difference is that Bookchin
postulates a telos that constitutes a particular model for human communi-
ties to follow, whereas Habermas hypothesizes only a cumulative learning
276 Chapter 8
are marginalized. Social order differentiates itself into three distinct cultural
value spheres—science and technology, morality and law, art and litera-
ture—each with its own “specialized form of argumentation” (Habermas
1984: 163–165, 236–240; 1988: 95). Scientists invoke truth in their stud-
ies of nature; citizens invoke normative legitimacy in consensus-oriented
debate; individuals invoke authenticity in discussions of aesthetic phe-
nomena. This differentiation of argumentative modes marks a decisive
improvement in the learning capacity of humanity as whole. Scientific,
political, and aesthetic institutions become better able to adapt to new
circumstances as their different types of validity claims get separated from
one another.
But, Habermas thinks, Western modernization has been “one-sided.”
Institutions from one of the three available spheres of discourse have
become predominant. Under capitalism, market relations and the state
administrative institutions corresponding to them have expanded to the
point where democratic and aesthetic institutions are less and less signif-
icant in steering social evolution (Habermas 1987b: 186–187). Market
and administrative relations have now “colonized” so many sectors of
life, and have subjected so many decisions to the impersonal logic of eco-
nomic efficiency and bureaucratic categorization, that they endanger the
very independence of the lifeworld. The subjugation of the lifeworld to a
restricted set of steering mechanisms risks the obliteration of modernity’s
capacity for critical renewal and adaptation. In relation to ideas encoun-
tered in the French context, two things about this analysis are noteworthy.
First, a Habermasian analysis of our environmental predicament and
André Gorz’s analysis have a strong mutual resemblance (Little 1996: 24;
cf. Bowring 1995). Gorz sees political ecology as a response to extensions
of economic and administrative rationality that come at the expense of
the lifeworld (1993); his contractual ecosocialism rests on the hope that
ecological issues can be addressed in a more fully rational sense if we can
bring the cultural resources of the lifeworld to bear on them through
deliberative political processes. Since Gorz is an acknowledged influence
on Dumont, Lipietz, Deléage, Duclos, and many other French ecologists
(Roose and Van Parijs 1991: 81–82; Jacob 1999: 297), and since
Habermas has become a reference point for more and more English-
speaking ecologists (not to mention German ones), Gorz’s common cause
278 Chapter 8
knowledge claim that Habermas’s own theory rules out. If the only nature
we can know is constituted by our pragmatic engagements with the world,
then we have no grounds for saying that human interests arose in the
“natural” history of the human species, for that nature is nature-in-itself
(Vogel 1995: 29–30).
In addition to these two interpretations of external nature, Habermas’s
critical project demands a third. He refers to “internal nature”—that is, to
the instinctual organization of the human psyche. He argues that we over-
come the non-intentional, “natural” causality of unconscious motives and
distorted perceptions by subjecting them to deliberative examination. If we
are to escape illusion and neurosis, our sensations, needs, and feelings must
be integrated into structures of linguistic interaction where they can be gen-
eralized and evaluated (McCarthy 1978: 315). We do not control inner
nature by treating our psyches as technically manipulable objects. Dialogue
in which people both define their separate identities and coordinate their
intentions with others is the condition of a communicative rationality that
masters natural compulsions.
In summary: Habermas invokes three “natures,” each with different
functions in his theory. Objective nature is the complement of our practical
interest in freeing ourselves from the arbitrary forces of physical existence.
Inner, subjective nature is the complement of our need for individuation
and social integration. And nature-in-itself, as Joel Whitebook says (1996:
293), is “a theoretical posit which must be made to indicate the external-
ity, contingency, and facticity of nature, which conspire to confound any
arbitrary interpretations we seek to put on it.”
Nonanthropocentrists will maintain that none of these natures is suffi-
cient to allow Habermas to escape anthropocentrism. Nature-in-itself is
unknowable and so cannot play a role in setting an ecological agenda. But
then Habermas’s view of nature-for-us makes it understandable only as an
object of possible technical control in relation to human material needs
(Vogel 1995: 298). And inner nature leads straight back to a human-
oriented discourse ethics. If our inner natures make us seek to gratify our
desires in mutually incompatible ways (for some, consuming the world; for
others, simply admiring its beauty), then we can coordinate our actions only
by seeking a rational consensus on generalizable forms of gratification.
Only human interests count. Rational consensus provides no guarantees
282 Chapter 8
for the survival of the natures that are not readily interpretable as matters
of human interests.
Some green theorists who are generally sympathetic to Habermas have
taken these criticisms to heart. For them, three natures are not enough.
Henning Ottman concludes that Habermas’s lifeless, freely exploitable
nature-for-us is really only nature-for-us-moderns—i.e., that it arose along
with industrial-technical culture in the West. Today, however, increasingly
frequent experiences of environmental disruption are overturning that
nature. The new nature “reveals itself to be a purpose-for-itself, in the face
of which the will-to-control has to impose limitations on itself” (Ottman
1982: 89). Ottman seeks a communicative ethics that finds a “compromise”
between a nature that we control and one that transcends control.
John Dryzek argues that the idea of communicative rationality should
be made to encompass “agency” in nature. True, nonhuman entities have
neither language nor self-awareness. Still, they communicate in the sense
of sending signals (e.g., the gestures of animals, chemical messages sent
between plants, signs of distress in an ecosystem) to which we can pay
attention and even accord respect. Whereas liberal democracy depends
on aggregating human preferences, deliberative democracy defines itself
in terms of undistorted communication. An ecologically amended
Habermasian perspective allows us to imagine institutional designs that
are especially adept at interpreting nature’s signals accurately (Dryzek
1995: 24). Ecoanarchist ideas for communities scaled to the scope of eco-
logical problems and proposals for invigorating civil society could inspire
such designs.
Whether discourse ethics really can take on these amendments is ques-
tionable. Much depends on further elaboration of the ideas of agency and
purpose that they invoke. Even if one grants the debatable assertion that
the language of purposes is appropriate in describing the end-orientation of
nonhuman things, surely the ethical implications of running up against
those purposes cannot be same as encountering the purposes of human
beings. In a communicative ethics, clashing human purposes get subjected
to a deliberative process in which all parties involved seek to justify their
action in universal, principled terms. Nonhuman purposes (e.g., homeo-
static processes in an alpine ecosystem that maintain a constant pH in lake
waters) are not set forth as truth claims or normative principles, so how
Questioning Nature 283
can they become part of a process of discursive testing that might redeem
or reject their “claims”?
Moreover, if signal-emitting entities cannot engage in the give and take
of discursive testing, how are humans supposed to treat their “purposes”?
Certainly we cannot grant them automatic deference. Even in the context
of interhuman relations, we do not just defer to others’ purposes. We bend
our objectives to make them fit into a legitimate framework of action with
others. But nature’s “purposes” are inflexible, dogmatic, and uncompro-
mising. They are what they are. Who can “negotiate” with such a partner?
Anyway, automatic deference would utterly incapacitate human action,
since nature’s purposes are everywhere. If “compromise” between nature-
in-itself and nature-for-us is advisable, it is nothing like compromise with
another purposive being. Most likely it amounts to an anthropocentrically
motivated adjustment in our relation to external nature.
Dryzek’s “rescue” of communicative ethics from Habermas seems more
promising. In a declaration that is unusual in the world of English-speaking
ecologism, Dryzek (1995: 18) explicitly states his intention to “downplay
‘centrism’ of any kind.” Yet there is reason to suspect that his rescue mis-
sion slips deeper into centered territory than he wishes. The idea of “respect-
ing” signals emanating from the nonhuman world seems to suppose that we
can distinguish real signals from the noise of the world. Before deciding
whether Dryzek’s position is tenable, we would need know how to differ-
entiate between, say, an animal’s cry of pain and light waves emitted when
an atom’s electrons move from a higher to a lower state of energy. Surely
the latter is not a signal in an ethically relevant sense. If what makes a sig-
nal ethically relevant is the life of the signaler, we seem to be back on the
path to biocentrism. Then again, Dryzek also speaks of signals from ecosys-
tems. Ecosystems contain life, but it would be highly controversial to say
that they have their own life. If excited atoms do not communicate with us
in any ethically relevant sense, how can ecosystems be said to do so? One
might try to work up criteria for identifying all morally considerable enti-
ties, as ecocentrists do. But the point was to downplay centrism.
There is no easy way out of these conundrums, and I do not mean to
imply that French ecologists have found one. But I do think that their per-
spectives offer some decidedly noncentered strategies that could reinforce
a green discourse ethic.
284 Chapter 8
The study of French ecologism suggests that the very need to multiply
natures is a clue that “nature” fills a number of incompatible roles in our
understandings of our selves, our communities, and the inexhaustibly rich
context in which both exist. Nature is not an agent in any ordinary sense.
Nor can it be reduced to a collection of things, however complex their inter-
relations. In its most general sense, nature is what a human society meets
at the “limits of its agency and autonomy” (Hazelrigg 1995: 160). That
definition suggests that, necessarily, nature both correlates to our practical
activities and lies beyond them. Thinking of nature as something that tran-
scends our control—as that which resists systematization, as whatever con-
founds our expectations—gives discourse ethics a vitally needed addition:
a skeptical dimension. It is in this dimension that French ecologists are at
their strongest.
like Rousseau, they decry the smugness with which elites assume that their
values are the “natural” ones. Looking inward, skeptics cultivate an aware-
ness of the complexities of the human heart. Like Montaigne, they see
within themselves not so much a core or a universal nature as a multitude
of contradictory dispositions that constitute their individuality.
French ecologists are skeptics in all these ways. They are epistemologi-
cal pluralists who deny that scientific or economic experts enjoy special pre-
rogatives in defining the understanding of nature that should guide political
ecology. That was Serres’s argument: that our understandings of the phys-
ical world have been shaped—and rightly so—by confrontations between
scientists and the city in civil tribunals. A critique of economic expertise
underlies Saint Marc’s denunciation of the “ultraliberal” marketplace. Gorz
and Charbonneau distrust accumulated power—including that of the lib-
eral democratic state. As a skeptic, Duclos sees potential for cruelty and
exclusion even in the supposedly most rational arguments for the social
contract. When evaluating the rightness of social practices, skeptics insist
on listening to the testimony of all who feel concerned or victimized—all the
participants in Latour’s parliament of things, for example—not just to
accredited specialists and pre-legitimized representatives of the law. One
answer to a rationalist’s demand for an autonomous, rule-creating, logic-
wielding center of evaluation is that what we are (as subjects), and what
nature is in relation to us, vastly surpass the ken of any rational knower. In
skeptical recognition of that fact, we learn the virtues of restraint, toler-
ance, and genuine reverence for life.
At an institutional level, skeptics are too cautious to offer social blue-
prints. But they are not completely at a loss for ideas. Morin opines that an
ecological society would require an “acentric organization” whose virtue is
to leave room for uncertainty and disorder. Some disorder allows a society
to be receptive to sources of creativity (Morin 1980: 326–328). This is an
important clue to the skeptic’s social strategy. Skeptics seek to reposition
us so that we see the humanity-nature nexus differently and have new
opportunities to act on our perceptions. Deléage’s hopes for organizations
that develop environmental “counter-expertise” clearly fall under this
description.
So too does Latour’s parliament of things. This parliament is best under-
stood, I think, not as a particular legislative chamber but as a multiplication
286 Chapter 8
of sites throughout a society where citizens can challenge every stage in the
process by which “hybrids” are created and disseminated (Latour 1999b:
222). For Latour (ibid.: 99), disagreements among scientists over the real-
ity of global warming and other ecological problems motivate the first
skeptical lesson for participants in the parliament: “to know how to
doubt” those who speak on behalf of things. From the personalists’ region-
alism to the ecosocialists’ advocacy of new social movements, the French
ecologists’ proposals lean toward decentralized political structures and vig-
orously contestative nongovernmental bodies. But the purpose of decen-
tralization as envisaged by French ecologists is not to pick up on “feedback
signals emanating from natural systems” (Dryzek 1995: 24). French pro-
posals aim to keep in the foreground the contestable social and knowledge-
forming processes through which communities develop their conceptions
of nature.
Such institutional ideas, one might say, are designed to be particularly
sensitive to expressions of doubt: doubt about risk assessments, about
expert reassurances that pollution levels are safe, and about claims that
goods always better serve society when they are exchangeable in a regime
of property rights. Duclos showed why turning our ear to those human
expressions counts as political ecology. Behind people’s doubts are divided
natures—the scientists’ objectified nature, the pre-political nature from
which we escape through the social contract, the inner nature of instinctual
pleasures. These natures assert themselves against contemporary trends that
tend to homogenize values and behavior. That is why seemingly strictly
“human” issues (e.g., rampant commercialism and workplace hierarchies)
are integral to green practice. Our approaches to those “social” problems
turn on conceptions of “nature” that are inseparable from the conceptions
of nature through which we frame more obviously environmental issues.
Institutions that give these doubts a hearing not only counteract what
Habermas calls the “one-sided” development of modernity; they also pro-
tect the divisions that keep our multiple “natures” alive.
These ideas, if kept within measure, do not contradict a discourse ethic.
They supply it with an essential complement. Communicative ethics needs
a skeptical dimension because no rationality can bring order to all our
moral conflicts and truth to all our understandings of nature. What happens
when a claim about legitimacy spills out of the moral-legal realm and runs
Questioning Nature 287
into the domain of scientific inquiry? That is just what happens when greens
charge that our understanding of the potential dangers of genetically mod-
ified crops is skewed by the influence of agribusiness money on programs
of university research. What happens when an aesthetic claim collides with
a moral one? That is just what happens when a personalist ecologist asserts
that standing awestruck before a natural scene develops in the individual a
type of “wild” freedom that a just society has no right to repress. Though
each of modernity’s cultural spheres can be rationalized on its own terms,
there is no higher logic that settles conflicts between validity claims that
cross the spheres. In the final analysis, according to White (1988: 135),
Habermas admits that differently institutionalized forms of argument can
only be “balanced.” However, this implies that—in even the most rational
society—actors must be able to move between discourses without being
able to explain fully why they do so.
That is why Duclos (1993c) calls for “a new definition of nature . . . that
can ground ‘non-action,’ . . . restraint, respect for discontinuities, free
spaces, differences.” In effect, skepticism offers green theorists a way to
rethink the very notion of “ecological limits.” Centered thinkers conceive
of limits as scientifically verified thresholds of ecosystemic health or as
respectable identities of nonhuman things. Skeptics, in contrast, suggest
that avoidance of environmental destruction depends not on observing
precise boundaries but on practicing considered restraint.
The skeptical orientation of noncentered ecologism demands that a the-
ory of universal pragmatics face up to its own peculiar danger: the danger
of pushing for action beyond the limits of its own justification. Commu-
nicative ethics is action oriented to the core. The very purpose of discursive
testing is to remove distortions in communication that impede our ability
to coordinate our actions with those of others. But if we must “balance”
various spheres of communicative action, there must be instances when it
would be wrong to move ahead simply because action had been fully justi-
fied in one sphere. And that is Duclos’s argument: There must be instances
of “non-action”—spaces where we remain free from the demands of social
coordination. Skeptics urge us to see that there are times when we must “let
beings be” out of recognition that our cognitive and ethical schemata, while
enabling our action, incite us unwittingly to destroy what they cannot
encompass.
288 Chapter 8
Yes, skepticism can be pushed too far. In this, I think, Habermas is right.
Skepticism can become a refusal to argue. Such a refusal, Habermas
contends (1990: 86), can only be an “empty gesture,” because the skeptic
“cannot drop out of the communicative practice of everyday life” and its
“presuppositions of argumentation.” French ecologists, by and large, do
not extend skepticism to the point of undermining all knowledge. Not one
of the theorists discussed in this book disregards ecological science. None
proposes simply to abolish markets and their attendant logic of economic
efficiency, and each assumes that democracy legitimizes community activ-
ity better than any alternative. Moreover, each of these theorists, in taking
a noncentered perspective, actually hopes that his own writings can make
us conscious of ecologically beneficial opportunities that, without his the-
ory, we would miss. Noncentered ecologists, in other words, do aim to alter
our action orientations through argument—even if the alteration is some-
times to stop us in our tracks.
Conclusion
aspects of reality that escape its grasp. Taking advantage of such opportu-
nities is a matter of having an exceptional facility at deploying knowledge
across the spheres. Skeptics are intrepid travelers who dare to move among
worlds as different as those of the risk-assessment specialist, the poet, and
the molecular biologist. The traveling does not make them doubt all com-
munication. Like seasoned translators, they believe that much meaning can
pass between differing communities of discourse. But their experience mov-
ing between languages tells them also that some nuances of meaning
inevitably escape translation. Skeptics try to find the language to convey to
each community why the other expresses some—only some—of the truth.
The only way to respect that fact is to cultivate an appreciation of the lim-
its of our social logics. This appreciation is not the negation of rationality
but rather an essential condition of it. Noncentered ecologism challenges us
to develop a paradoxical ideal: an ideal of skeptical expertise.
That ideal helps explain, I believe, one of the most beguiling but also one
of the most mysterious ideas encountered in French ecologism. Michel
Serres’s work on the natural contract (1991) culminates in praise of a figure
whom he calls the tiers-instruit—the “educated third.” Serres (1990:
147–148) envisions a person who is “expert of cognizance, formal or exper-
imental, versed in the natural sciences of the living and nonliving . . . , trav-
eler of nature and society, lover of rivers, sand, winds, seas and mountains
. . . , solitary sailor across the North-West Strait, latitudes where positive
mixed knowledge communicates in a delicate and rare manner with human-
ities . . . , more distant from power than every possible legislator . . . , capa-
ble of recognizing and understanding failures . . . , and finally, and above all,
burning with love for the earth and humanity.” The “third’s” distance from
power suggests a capacity to make judgments that do not fall wholly under
the logic of legitimization. At the same time, her understanding of “positive
mixed knowledges” and the humanities gives her perspective on every point
where “knowledge communicates”—and where communication fails. She is
more familiar with the natural sciences than most humanists, more deliber-
ative and more cognizant of the cultural inflections of nature than most sci-
entists, and (thanks to the human sciences) more skeptical about social
dogma than political activists have been in the past (Serres 1992a: 257–265).
As our technological power increases, everything—landscapes, oceans,
species, the temperature of the earth, our own genetic identities—becomes
Questioning Nature 291
Introduction
1997: 210) and the Netherlands (Keulartz 1999: 87–91), whose territories have
been humanized at least as much as France’s, nonetheless have spawned ecological
thinkers who are determined proponents of “wilderness.” The virtual absence of
such thinking among prominent French ecologists alerts us to something distinctive
about the French context.
9. For historically detailed accounts of the French ecology movement and the swirl
of ideas surrounding it, see Sainteny 2000; Jacob 1999; Shull 1999; Prendiville
1993.
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
9. Not all French ecologists agree. Henri Chevallier (1982: 129) associates
Rousseau with Jacobinism, not with the sorts of decentralization preferred in the
ecology movement.
Chapter 3
1. In more recent years, Passet has been a professor at the Université de Paris I and
the director of the Centre économie-espace-environnement.
2. Passet’s writings in favor of a “multidimensional economy” (1989: 4–5) indi-
cate that his position has not changed.
3. The volumes are (I) La Nature de la Nature (1977), (II) La Vie de la Vie (1980),
(III) La Connaissance de la Connaissance (1986), and (IV) Les Idées: Leur habitat,
leur vie, leur moeurs, leur organisation (1991).
4. “We must understand,” Morin (1990: 257) writes, “that what I call method can
be considered as a meta-method in relation to the scientific method. It does not can-
cel out scientific methods; on the contrary, it admits and recognizes them. But it
questions, criticizes, checks and at times goes beyond scientific methods by its will
to reflexivity.”
5. See, e.g., Devall and Sessions 1985: 96–98.
6. Myron Kofman (1996: vii, 2) views Morin’s work as “a revival of Montaigne’s
scepticism” and “the voice, if not the prophet, of a new humanism.”
Chapter 4
9. Schaffer (1991: 182) accuses Latour of the heresy of hylozoism: “an attribution
of purpose, will and life to inanimate matter, and of human interests to the non-
human.”
10. Works of English-speaking ecologists showing the marks of poststructuralism
include Atkinson 1991; White 1998; Hayden 1997; Bennett and Chaloupka 1993;
and, most notable, Conley 1997. Conley offers one of the rare discussions in English
of French ecologists Michel Serres, Luc Ferry, and Félix Guattari. As such, her work
forms a valuable complement to the present study. However, I disagree with her
claim that “the driving force of poststructural thought is indissolubly linked to ecol-
ogy” (Conley 1997: 7)—if that is meant to describe the significance of postmodern
ecologism in France. Some of the thinkers she examines (e.g., Derrida, Lyotard)
have written only minimally on ecology. Paul Virilio consistently uses the word
“ecology” (e.g. 1978), but his ruminations on the effects of information and trans-
portation technologies on human consciousness barely engage with concerns over
“nature.”
Chapter 5
11. See also Charbonneau 1980: 99. Saint Marc (1994: 372–373) proudly defends
his endeavors.
12. Saint Marc quotes the Bible regularly and devoutly invokes “history, which
reaches its completion in God” (1978: 200; cf. 1971: 98).
13. In the words of the French theologians Hélène and Jean Bastaire (1996: 69):
“Safeguarding creation begins with an internal decentering that . . . leads each per-
son to stop seeing reality from his own point of view in order to see it from God’s.”
14. Source: interview by K. Whiteside, March 3, 1999.
15. Even when Lacan says that the “law” of language superimposes “the kingdom
of culture on that of nature,” “nature” cannot mean what it does for Duclos, some-
thing “surpassing the determinations of human language.” Compare Lacan 1977:
66 and Duclos 1993a: 67–68. For Lacan, “reality” is “what resists symbolization
absolutely.” Resistance comes not from a physical world, but from the “dead let-
ters” of signification that are sedimented in language (Lacan 1988: 66).
Chapter 6
1. Ecofeminism, explains Robyn Eckersley, “exposes and celebrates what has tra-
ditionally been regarded as other—both woman and nonhuman nature—in the con-
text of a far-reaching critique of hierarchical dualism and ‘masculine culture’”
(1992: 64). Although feminist sympathies clearly show through in the work of many
French ecologists, the absence of a strong current of ecofeminist theory in France is
somewhat puzzling. None of the standard surveys of ecological thought in France
(mentioned in chapter 1) treats ecofeminism as a significant element in green ideol-
ogy. Luc Ferry at least mentions what makes this omission so odd. A French woman,
Françoise d’Eaubonne, originated the term “ecofeminism” (1974). In attacking
ecofeminism, however, Ferry immediately moves on to its English-speaking propo-
nents such as Karen Warren and Carolyn Merchant (1992: 220–236). Conley is to
be recommended for highlighting ecological themes in the works of Hélène Cixous
and Luce Irigaray (1997: 123–140). Even Conley grants, however, that their work
is so lacking in a practical dimension that it risks being “consigned either to history
or to a lower rung on the ladder of ecofeminism” (1997: 140).
2. For further discussion of the idea of the body-subject, see Whiteside 1988: 22,
50.
3. Duclos’s (1991b: 15–16) research on environmental and safety issues at the fac-
tory level suggests that workers are hardly immune to tendencies to defend their
jobs by minimizing workplace dangers.
4. Source: interview with Jean-Paul Deléage, April 22, 1991.
5. Here and in chapter 8, I draw on some of my earlier writings on Lipietz. See
Whiteside 1996.
6. Frederick Taylor’s Principles of Scientific Management (1911) spelled out meth-
ods to increase the productivity of laborers, including separating those who design
Notes to pp. 215–246 299
Chapter 7
1. Translating “liberal” and related ideological terms is a task fraught with poten-
tial confusion. Ferry and others whom English-speakers would call “liberals” (i.e.,
theorists of human rights and limited, representative government) often avoid talk
of “liberalism,” preferring “democracy” instead. “Libéralisme”—in the eyes of
French critics, at least—is often equated with advocacy of free markets. Meanwhile,
French libertaires (libertarians) usually see themselves in the anarchist tradition.
They are critics of pervasive market relations, not (like American libertarians) their
most ardent advocates.
2. See also Grosser 1991 and Allègre 1990: 377.
3. Ophuls tries to mitigate this conclusion in his revised edition by calling for a
transformation in individual values to favor steady-state principles.
4. See Alphandery et al.: 1991: 198; Theys 1993: 63; Duclos 1996: 4; Oudin 1996:
209.
5. Bourg’s survey of ecologism does have the merit of discussing certain forms of
“democratic ecology” (represented by André Gorz, Ivan Illich, and Philippe van
Parijs) that Ferry ignores.
6. Thomas (1992: 165–173) asserts a filiation running from Barrès’s Les Déracinés
[The Uprooted] (“starting in 1897, the bible of young people torn away from the
country”) to Pétain (who declared “The earth does not lie”) to the ideas of a cou-
ple of contemporary greens who clumsily defended regionalism. For a more sober
evaluation of such a lineage, see Alphandéry et al. 1991a: 243–249.
7. Tazieff is a well-known vulcanologist and former French Secretary of State for
the Prevention of Major Risks (Cans 1991). A critic of those who predict ecologi-
cal catastrophes (Tazieff 1992), he has also done much to publicize environmental
problems in France.
8. There is nothing uniquely ecosocialist about Lipietz’s arguments in this regard.
For the same ideas cast in liberal terms, see Wells and Lynch 2000: 106 ff.
9. For a time, Allègre was also Minister of Education in Lionel Jospin’s socialist-
green coalition government.
300 Notes to pp. 247–271
10. Oudin (1996: 24–29) doubts that chlorofluorocarbons are causing the “ozone
hole.” Lenoir (1992) minimizes the likelihood that human activities are provoking
global warming.
11. The liberal Olivier Postel-Vinay (1998) confirms Duclos’s suspicion. Postel-
Vinay recommends the principle of precaution because it demands that “scientific
experts” and “economic experts” meet for a “healthy discussion” in which “com-
mon sense” can prevail over “fundamentalisms” (i.e., either green or libertarian
views).
12. Ferry’s (1992: 216–217) criticism of Guattari’s notion of a democratic right to
“dissensus” foreshadows such a charge but does not apply it widely.
Chapter 8
1. In fact, in his 1999 book Qu’est-ce que l’écologie politique? Lipietz suggests for
the first time that Habermasian discursive ethics offers one of the two “respectable”
paths that lead to political ecology. The other, he argues (p. 33), “is rooted in the
great religions, embodied in our day by Emmanuel Lévinas or Hans Jonas.” Lipietz
does not choose between these two paths.
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Bibliography 311
Decentralization, 94, 201, 204. See centered, 8–13, 18, 43–46, 66–68,
also Regionalism 75–76, 84–87, 105, 137, 243,
Deep ecology, 110, 142, 232–235 260–264, 274, 278
Deléage, Jean-Paul, 15, 74, 187–188, noncentered, 3, 8–12, 46, 71, 88,
208–212, 222, 248 102–103, 136, 191–192, 207, 224,
Deleuze, Gilles, 205 254, 264–266, 275–279, 283, 288
Democracy personalist, 12, 14, 42, 58, 151–153,
deliberative, 259–260, 276, 282 158–163, 166–173, 176–179, 252
and ecology, 15, 24, 98, 223–229 Economics, 23, 88–91, 104, 159,
and economic interests, 138–139, 164–165, 247
145, 277–278 Ecosocialism, 14–15, 95, 164, 186,
liberal interpretation of, 237–241, 265
259 contractual, 188, 202, 208–222, 277
as part of ecological program, 35, 94, French penchant for, 187
204, 218, 248 Third Worldism in, 30, 187, 192,
and psychological basis of ecologism, 198–202, 218–219
251–254 utopianism in, 200–202
and techno-scientific decision mak- Ehrenfeld, David, 72
ing, 137, 144, 183, 249–251 Ellul, Jacques, 154, 184
Descartes, René, 1, 3, 72, 75, 121, Ethical pluralism, 78, 90, 93, 110,
224, 237–238, 243, 261, 272 188, 204–208, 220, 276
Descombes, Vincent, 118 Evernden, Neil, 69–70
Devall, Bill, 72
Discourse ethics. See Habermas Falque, Max, 244
Dobson, Andrew, 6, 44 Ferry, Luc, 2, 58–59, 74–75, 109–110,
Dorst, Jean, 24–25 116–117, 122, 223, 225, 230–242,
Dryzek, John, 282–283 246, 249
Dubos, René, 48 Fordism, 215–217, 270–271
Duclos, Denis, 9, 14, 58, 74, 174–184, Foucault, Michel, 141–144
251–257, 265, 279–280, 285–287 Fournier, Pierre, 26, 40
Dumont, René, 18–19, 29–35, 38–39, Freedom, 65, 97, 159–161, 166, 230,
187, 198–202, 218 234, 237, 241, 247, 255
Durkheim, Émile, 130 French ecology movement, 13, 18–19,
26–28, 32–42, 46, 55, 79, 202. See
Eckersley, Robyn, 2, 6, 46–48, also Les Verts
227–228
Ecocentrism. See Gaia, 85, 93–97, 262
Nonanthropocentrism Galileo, 124
Eco-fascism, 224, 229–236 Gauchet, Marcel, 230–232
Ecological limits, 30, 37, 40, 84, 97, Goguel, François, 240
155, 157, 160, 189, 194, 217, 287 Goodin, Robert, 10–11, 225–226
Ecologism Gorz, André, 58, 147, 187, 192–198,
anthropological approach in, 67–68, 201–202, 219, 276–278, 285
100–101, 118, 127–128, 138, 146, Green party, French. See Les Verts
168 Group of Ten, 87–88, 93, 97, 107
Index 321
Guattari, Félix, 74, 188, 203–208, Lalonde, Brice, 25, 28, 32–33, 36,
219, 231, 233 39–40, 155, 205
Guha, Ramachandra, 200 Lascoumes, Pierre, 143–145
Guillebaud, Jean-Claude, 234 Latour, Bruno, 14, 58, 114, 117–118,
127–141, 147–149, 182, 234,
Habermas, Jürgen, 15, 204, 221–222, 249–257, 276, 279, 285–
259–260, 266–282, 286–289 286
Hainard, Robert, 22 Lebreton, Philippe, 28, 37–38, 40
Hardin, Garrett, 226, 244 Lefebvre, Henri, 174
Hastings, Michel, 26 Leopold, Aldo, 3, 59–60, 66, 69, 84,
Hayward, Tim, 6, 63–66 91
Hegel, G. W. F., 81, 100, 111 Les Verts, 33–34, 185, 202, 205, 209,
Heilbroner, Robert, 226 212, 223, 231
Heim, Roger, 23 Liberalism, 15, 164, 223–247,
Hervé, Alain, 28 254–257, 259, 284
Hobbes, Thomas, 132, 138 anthropocentrism of, 224, 236
Holism, 61–63, 85–86, 105 economic, 164, 201–202, 243–247
Hughes, H. Stuart, 1 Libertarianism, 18, 26, 35, 42
Human interests, 136–139, 145, 159, Lifeworld, colonization of, 194–195,
237, 274. See also 277–278
Anthropocentrism Lilla, Mark, 230
Humanism, 23, 71–75, 85, 89, 95–97, Linguistic community, 4–7
110, 161, 166, 168, 222, 234–235, Lipietz, Alain, 15, 25, 36, 58, 74,
254, 262, 290–291 187–189, 212–222, 242–248, 259,
Cartesian, 3, 237–238 266–275
multidisciplinarity of, 57–58, 104, Lovelock, James, 4, 85, 93, 105, 262
148–149, 210, 290–291 Lucretius, 119–121, 279
skeptical, 3–4, 15, 75–78, 111–112, Lyotard, Jean-François, 141
284–288
Hybrids, 131–134, 182, 249, 251, Maritain, Jacques, 172
279, 286 Martell, Luke, 191
Martinez-Alier, Juan, 200
Jacob, François, 83 Marxism, 17, 36, 39, 171, 188–192,
Jacob, Jean, 1, 36, 42 203–204, 207, 230, 232, 269
Johnson, Lawrence, 62–63, 66, 182 Mathews, Freya, 85–86
Jouvenel, Bertrand de, 23–24 May 1968, 17, 25, 27, 100
Juquin, Pierre, 188, 203–204, 209 McCarthy, Thomas, 275
McCloskey, Herbert, 64
Kant, Immanuel, 75, 230, 242, 255, Mills, Mike, 227, 251
284 Modernity, 131–133, 141, 182,
Katz, Eric, 43, 64 232–234, 268, 274–278
Kitschelt, Herbert, 35 Montaigne, Michel de, 75, 77,
284–285
Laborit, Henri, 87–88 Montesquieu, Charles Louis de
Lacan, Jacques, 176–177 Secondat, Baron de, 252
322 Index
Morin, Edgar, 13, 74, 81, 87, and land ethic, 59–60
100–112, 147, 149, 257, 265, wilderness orientation of, 18, 64
272–273, 285 Nonhumans, representation of,
Moscovici, Serge, 9, 13, 17–18, 48–58, 132–136, 139–140, 144, 279
67–78, 128, 134, 155, 187, Norton, Brian, 10–11, 63–64, 86–87
191–192, 235, 248, 261–262, 265,
272–273, 278 O’Connor, James, 190
Mounier, Emmanuel, 14, 22, 152–153, Odum, Eugene, 79, 84–85
164, 172, 183 Onfray, Michel, 231
Muir, John, 19, 80 Ophuls, William, 113, 226
Mumford, Lewis, 157 Ottman, Henning, 282
Oudin, Bernard, 231
Nash, Roderick, 19
Natural contract, 113–125, 182, 249, Paelhke, Ronald, 254
279 Parodi, Jean-Luc, 17
Nature Pascal, Blaise, 75, 116, 126, 284
cultural interpretations of, 5–6, 91–92 Passet, René, 58, 80, 88–99, 265
French conceptions of, 1, 12, 17, Pasteur, Louis, 128–129
20–22, 47–48 Pelletier, Philippe, 231
human, 40, 68, 101, 106, 161, 281 Pelt, Jean-Marie, 74, 152, 155,
humanized, 48, 73–74, 78, 167, 234 163–164, 167–173, 184
intrinsic value of, 10, 13, 60–62, 65, Pepper, David, 191
67, 70–71, 80, 85–86, 91–92, 108, Pinchemel, Philippe, 47
190, 192, 224 Pinchot, Gifford, 20, 45
mastery of, 1, 54, 72, 107, 125, 182, Plumwood, Val, 259
272–273 Political parties, 27–34, 57, 183–185,
politicized conceptions of, 11, 113–114, 240–241
120–121, 124–125, 131–132, 141, Politics, 28–32, 89, 99, 114, 185
144, 171–172, 234–235, 249, 265 Postmodernism, 14, 114–115, 141–148
psychological underpinnings of, Power (puissance), 175, 179–182, 257
162–163, 176–182 Pragmatism, 10, 90–91, 135
variable interpretations of, 3, 7–9, 13, Pragmatogony, 129–130, 134–135,
40–42, 49–54, 69–70, 130–131, 138
135, 191–192, 196–197, 212, 250, Precaution, 239, 253–254
262, 276, 280–284 Prendiville, Brendan, 42
Nature-protection societies, 21, 26, 29 Preservationism, 19–20
Nonanthropocentrism, 2, 43, 59–64 Productivism, 18, 23, 36–41, 55–56,
anthropocentric tendencies in, 63, 76, 165, 189
142 Puissance, 175, 179–182, 257
and anthropocentrism, 3, 8, 10, 15,
43–46, 59, 74, 80, 85–87, 189, 191, Rationality
200, 225–229 deliberative, 92
and biospheric egalitarianism, 61–63 ecological, 13, 195, 255–256, 272
critique of humanism in, 72–73, 104 economic, 194–197
and holism, 62–68, 105, 255, 263 liberal conception of, 235, 256, 284
Index 323
in noncentered theory, 13, 15, 77, Technocracy, 24–25, 98–99, 143, 196
106–107, 111–112, 256–257, Technology, 51–53, 57, 107, 125, 131,
279–280 136–138, 170, 174–175, 193, 235
scientific-technical, 143 Thoreau, Henry David, 19, 80
Reflexivity, 99, 111, 148–149, Tocqueville, Alexis de, 47
272–273, 275 Todorov, Tvetan, 77
Regionalism, 155–158, 165 Touraine, Alain, 27, 174
Regulationism, 213–218, 220, Trom, Dany, 35
266–272
Renouvier, Charles, 151 Van Wyck, Peter, 142
Risk, 174 Viard, Jean, 20
Robin, Jacques, 87–88, 97, 99 Voltaire, 284
Rosnay, Joël de, 74, 80, 93–99, 149 Voynet, Dominique, 33–34
Rougement, Denis de, 154–161
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 3, 24, 34, Waechter, Antoine, 28, 33–34, 38,
75–77, 124, 231, 237, 247, 185, 202, 231
284–285 Weber, Max, 220
White, Stephen, 271–272, 287
Sagoff, Mark, 90–92, 224–225, 265 Whitebook, Joel, 281
Saint-Hilaire, Isidore, 21 Wilderness and the wild
Saint Marc, Philippe, 74, 152, in English-speaking ecologism,
163–168, 172–173, 184, 285 18–20, 64–65, 70, 72, 91, 142, 167,
Sale, Kirkpatrick, 156–158 182, 236
Saward, Michael, 226, 250 in French ecologism, 12, 22, 47–48,
Serres, Michel, 58, 114–127, 130, 55, 77, 135, 165, 167, 182–183,
140–141, 146–149, 182, 231, 279, 236, 252
285, 290–291 Williams, Raymond, 198
Sessions, George, 72 Winner, Langdon, 136–139
Shklar, Judith, 76 Wissenburg, Marcel, 255
Simmonet, Dominique, 40, 42, 55, 81 Work
Snyder, Gary, 289 and “nature,” 52–53, 56, 73,
Social constructivism, 70–71, 189–192, 280–281
129–130, 137 in ecological program, 39, 58, 193,
Stengers, Isabelle, 120 195, 198, 201
Symmetrical study, 114, 127, 129, organization of, 215–216, 270
138, 148
Systems approach, 13, 52, 78–112 Yellowstone National Park, 19
influence of in France, 80, 115,
118–120, 152, 168–170
potential authoritarianism of, 94, 98,
106–108