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Political Ecology and Modern Politics
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 March 2020
Abstract
The increasingly pressing need to politicize ecology depends on our capacity to conduct a critique of modern politics, reexamining its fundamental concepts and its history. This thesis, developed in Bruno Latour’s most recent book, Facing Gaia, raises the question of what kind of critique is best adapted to this end. This article seeks to address this question by tracing the arguments of Facing Gaia and its recomposition of the relations between science, politics, and religion. These relations, which are constitutive of the experience of modernity, appear differently depending on the conception of collectives that one emphasizes and how one understands their anchoring in their environment. Unlike Latour, this essay argues that it is within the framework of modern societies, understood as an entirely new kind of collective whose history has been distorted and ignored by modernist ideology, that a conception of a specifically ecological justice must be formulated. The critique that is necessary to the politicization of ecology implies a new way of determining the actors involved in the environmental crisis, breaking the particular ties that modernity has forged between societies, the forms of self-awareness they produce as they develop, and the expectations of justice that result from them.
- Type
- The Anthropocene
- Information
- Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales - English Edition , Volume 72 , Issue 2 , June 2017 , pp. 247 - 272
- Copyright
- © Éditions EHESS 2019
Footnotes
This article was translated from the French by Amy Jacobs-Colas and edited by Chloe Morgan and Stephen Sawyer.
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Warm thanks to Antoine Lilti and Gildas Salmon for their readings and wise remarks.
References
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Linked content
This is a translation of: L’écologie politique et la politique moderne*