p. 232 No culture except that of the West has used nature to organise its political life. Traditional societies do not live in harmony with nature; they are unacquainted with it. Thanks to the sociology of the sciences, to the practice of ecologist, to anthropology, we can understand that nature is only one of the two houses of a collective instituted to paralyse democracy. The key question of political ecology can now be formulated: can we find a successor to the collective with two houses: nature and society.?
Once nature has been set aside, another question arises – how to bring the collective together – that is heir to the old nature and the old society. We cannot simply bring objects and subjects together… we have to consider that the collective is made up of humans and nonhumans capable of being seated as citizens, provided that we proceed to the apportionment of capabilities… leaving to be sceptical of all spokesperson – those who represent humans as well as those who represent non-humans. The second apportionment consists in redistributing the capacity to act as a social actor, while considering only associations of humans and non-humans. It is on these associations and not on nature that ecology must focus . This does not means that citizens of the collective belong to language or the social realm since, by the third apportionment, the sectors are also defined by reality and recalcitrance. The three sets of apportionments allows us to define the collective as composed of propositions. P. 233 To convene the collective, we shall thus no longer be interested in nature and society, but only in knowing whether the propositions that compose it are more or less well articulated. The collective as finally convened allows a return to civil peace, by defefining politics as the progressive composition of a good common world.
… It is impossible of course to go back to the old separation between facts and values, for that separation has only disadvantages, even though it seems indispensable to public order. … We restore order to these assemblies if we distinguish two other powers: the power to take into account and the power to put in order. The first power is going to retain from facts the requirement of perplexity and from values the requirements of consultation. The second is going to recuperate from values the requirement of hierarchy and from facts the requirement of institution. In place of the impossible distinction between facts and values we are thus going to have two powers of representations of the collective that are at once distinct and complementary.
p. 235 There are in fact not one but two arrows of time; the first one, modernist, goes towards ever-increasing separation between objectivity and subjectivity; and the other, non-modern, goes towards ever more intricate attachments. Only the second makes it possible to define the collective by its learning curve – provided that we add to the two preceding powers a third power, the power to follow up, which brings up anew the question of the State. The State of political ecology remains to be invented, since it is no longer based on any transcendence but on the qaulity of the follow-up of collective experimentation. It is on this quality, the art of governing without mastery, that civilization capable of putting an end to the state of war depends.”
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