Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy

This difficult and challenging book provides a vision of a whole new politics, and, more important, a whole new "common world"--the totality, the cosmos, that we humans and nonhumans all share. The book begins inauspiciously, at least for English-language readers, by misusing the term "political ecology" rather badly, and doing some mild slander in the process. For instance (p. 20): "It [political ecology] claims to defend nature for nature's sake--and not as a substitute for human egotism--but in every instance, the mission it has assigned itself is carried out by humans and is justified bythe well-being, the pleasure, or the good conscience of a small number of carefully selected humans--usually American, male, rich, educated, and white." From this and further points, it becomes obvious that Latour is talking about old-fashioned environmental politics of the 1950s and 1960s, and insultingly mischaracterizing even that. Women and European thinkers and indigenous peoples and others excluded by Latour were actively involved from the beginning. More to the point, "political ecology" has a definite meaning in English: the branch of anthropology (and, now, geography and political science) that studies, generally from a critical point of view, political impacts on indigenous people and their environments, and on the global community. This field arose in the 1970s in reaction against many of the very things Latour denouces. Latour never discusses this field at all. He also denounces Science, without making clear until later that he means not actual scientific practice, but the sort of dogmatic, ex-cathedra, It's All Facts stuff that the media love and that real scientists often hate. Finally, he admits to a skeptical position about Facts. This has led to his being labeled a wild-eyed constructionist in some quarters. He pulls sharply back from such a position, explaining that he is fine with reality; the problem is that all the interesting questions in environmental politics are not yet to the "fact" stage. In regard to genetically modified organisms, to take an extreme case, we don't have a clue what these new life forms will do to humans or to the planet; the scientists are mystified, and cannot speak with authority. Other current world problems--stopping AIDS, dealing with global warming, understanding the role of biodiversity--are also very much in play. So sciences evolve in the midst of public discourses. Finally, Latour shares two vices with many French philosophes: he writes in a turgid and neologistic style, and he buries much of his best stuff in the footnotes. Do not under any circumstances miss the footnotes if you read this book! Even if you skim it! Readers, do not be put off. Persist. There is good stuff to come. First, Latour destroys the concept of "nature," i.e. the unity of stuff that isn't people and thus is objective and has no voice. He sees "natures" instead: all those disparate things out there--elephants, rivers, stars--that have their own identities, and that have a voice or need a voice in the collective. Next, he does the same for science: he speaks of sciences, not Science. Certainly, whatever may have once unified physics, political science, and everything in between is now rather worn. Sciences is indeed preferable usage. Then things get really interesting. If all those natures have their voices, and all those sciences can give them a voice that other humans can understand (i.e. explain what they are and what they might need), we can take them into account in politics. Politicians will have to figure out how to include them in the collective enterprise. Economists will have to re-do economics to take into account the principle that nonhumans are (in some sense--to be debated) part of the action, not mere objects of action. Most interesting of all, moralists will have to face the disappearance of a "nature" that is beyond and indifferent to the ethical universe. Nonhumans will have to be treated as ends, like humans (Latour is a Kantian, at least at some level). How much we can do to them will have to be decided democratically in the future; the point now is that we can't just trash them for no good reason. (At first I was afraid, when he talked about eliminating the facts/values distinction, that he really meant that; no, he means we have to take both into account at every stage in ongoing debates and researches. Medical researchers do that already. At least the good ones do.) Latour analogizes life to parliament. We have had a bicameral legislature with Nature as one house, Society made up of various cultures on the other. (He takes anthropologists to task for believing in this, and opposing a chaos of relativized cultures to a "mononature." Not quite fair. Most of us in anthro are somewhat beyond that.) We humans and nonhumans now need an upper house of perplexity and consultation--i.e., trying to figure out what is going on--and a lower house of hierarchy and institution--i.e., of prioritizing and deciding what to do (given what is going on, and our inevitable uncertainty about it). The cosmos, the common world, gets built by constant work by these two "houses." I like this image. After discussing in detail what the scientists, moralists, and all can bring to this, Latour ends with an all too vague overview of the future. The shining city on the hill is visible only through mists at a thousand miles' distance. Maybe, at this stage, we can do no better. Latour ends with some notes on anthropology, including remarks on how similar his vision is to that of the Amazonian Native Americans. I, too, am struck by similarities; Latour's view is strangely like that of the First Nations of the Northwest Coast of North America. For them, every animal, plant, and rock has its spirit, and all these spirits are part of society, just like humans. We constantly interact and communicate with them, and have to take them into account (a Latourian phrase) as persons--not human persons, but real persons nevertheless. Shorn of the literal belief in spirits, this is pretty much Latour's view. Many Latour-like ideas are appearing, perhaps in more prosaic and tentative form, in other writers' work. The latest issue of SCIENCE has a number of articles on bringing sciences, politics, and values together in an ongoing exploration. Society seems really to be groping toward Latour's common world.

I just want to give some words of caution to the future buyer. I bought this book out of intellectual curiosity. I wanted to learn more about the relationship between politics and nature. At the time I bought this book it only had favorable reviews. I read the first two chapters of the book with much difficulty. I found Dr. Latour's writing hard to understand and make sense out of. His writing is fantastic in the sense that he knows what he is talking about but it was extremely difficult for me to understand it. I am not sure if this had anything to do with the translation.After the two chapters I gave up the reading and picked up another book to read (one of R. Dahl's). Now I do not want to blame Latour or his translator for my lack of making sense of the content, but for those who do not have an appropriate background on Latour's translated work, this book might be of extreme difficulty to grasp.However, because I wanted this book to be known to other people I ended up giving it to a retired college math professor who might understand or appreciate Latour's work.

There is a very common French political discourse in which the writer takes the position of Guru Who Will Reveal Truth through Cryptic Raving. Latour is very good at this discourse, but it is really just Garbage Talk. Garbage Talk is a method in which one says the trivial and the well-known, but crammed with neologisms, and repeated many times in different cryptic ways. Well, in fact the Emperor Has No Clothes. The two reviews of this book on Amazon are light years ahead of Latour in cogency and promise.Latour starts the book off as follows: "What is to be done with political ecology? Nothing. What is to be done? Political ecology!" This is the essence of Garbage Talk, and it is all downhill from there.Neologism is at the heart of Garbage Talk (Discours de Poubelles in French). On p. 10 Latour defines "Science* as the politicization of the sciences through epistemology in order to render ordinary political life impotent through the threat of an incontestable nature." Latour's Garbage Talk replaces reason and logic with epithet and bombast. This is not okay. I am not free to define Science in such a stupid a derogatory way, and neither is Latour. In fact, there is a serious literature on the relationship between science, politics, and social policy, but none of this comes through in Latour's ravings.The content of this volume is a rehash of Rouseauian romantic populism, with absolutely no new insights. True to Garbage Talk form, there is virtually no analysis of any issue in political ecology, and it is quite impossible to pin Latour down on any point.

a different perspective. thought prevoking

Recommended for anyone interested in the ecological crisis and how we might respond to it.Scientists, Social Scientists, Philosophers and Artists should read this book.