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Politics of nature
Latour
,
Bruno
Latour
,
Bruno
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Pol_Nat.pdf
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Abstract
"To begin with, speaking about a ‘politics of nature’ might appear simultaneously strange and obvious, terribly new and terribly old. On the one hand, that ‘nature’ in relation to ecological issues has become increasingly present in the political agendas of rich and poor nations is obvious to anyone who cares to read the newspapers. But nature has also entered the political realm in another and more troublesome sense. Until recently, we have been in the habit of saying that while politics is about conflicts, power struggles, ideologies, emotions, inequalities, and the distribution of resources and wealth, the turn from politics to the natural realm meant a move from endless conflicts to certainty, from human centered passions to object centered reason. This is no longer the case. What has happened in the recent past is that issues about natural entities*tigers conservation, the monopoly over rare earths, dam constructions, the planting of Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) cotton, genetics of race, alternative energy sources, and so on and so forth*no longer play the role of calming cold reasons, but have become some of the hottest topics of public controversies. It is as if nature and geopolitics had been conflated. We only have to think about last year’s climategate or the recent shaky deal in Cancun over nonbinding CO2 reduction to witness a political controversy about a formerly natural question: that of the climate itself."
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2011
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Creative Commons Copyright (CC 2.5)