Politics of Nature

A major work by one of the more innovative thinkers of our time, Politics of Nature does nothing less than establish the conceptual context for political ecology-transplanting the terms of ecology into more fertile philosophical soil than its proponents have thus far envisioned. Bruno Latour announces his project dramatically: "e;Political ecology has nothing whatsoever to do with nature, this jumble of Greek philosophy, French Cartesianism and American parks."e; Nature, he asserts, far from being an obvious domain of reality, is a way of assembling political order without due process. Thus, his book proposes an end to the old dichotomy between nature and society-and the constitution, in its place, of a collective, a community incorporating humans and nonhumans and building on the experiences of the sciences as they are actually practiced.In a critique of the distinction between fact and value, Latour suggests a redescription of the type of political philosophy implicated in such a "e;commonsense"e; division-which here reveals itself as distinctly uncommonsensical and in fact fatal to democracy and to a healthy development of the sciences. Moving beyond the modernist institutions of "e;mononaturalism"e; and "e;multiculturalism,"e; Latour develops the idea of "e;multinaturalism,"e; a complex collectivity determined not by outside experts claiming absolute reason but by "e;diplomats"e; who are flexible and open to experimentation.