ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the destiny of political ecology.1 It is very much influenced by the French political situation and the continuing marginality of the country’s various green parties. It relies on three different strands: first, a very interesting model to understand political disputes devised by two French sociologists, Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot, in a book that is not yet available in English (Boltanski and Thévenot 1991); second, a case study by the author on the recent creation by law of what could be called ‘local parliaments of water’ (Latour and Le Bourhis 1995);2 third, a long-term project in philosophy to develop an alternative to the notion of modernity (Latour 1993) and to explore the political roots of the notion of nature. The point of the chapter can be stated very simply: political ecology cannot be inserted into the various niches of modernity. On the contrary, it requires to be understood as an alternative to modernisation. To do so one has to abandon the false conceit that ecology has anything to do with nature as such. Disabused of this notion, political ecology is understood here as a new way to handle all the objects of human and non-human collective life.3
