Latour & Science/science

In "Why Political Ecology Has to Let Go of Nature," Latour argues that proponents of "political ecology" are correct in practice and not in theory when they take on sociopolitical and socioeconomic problems related to the environment. He has hope that they will drop their allegiance to a totalizing "nature" and the desire to instrumentalize science in service of political ideology.

Latour states that supporters of "political ecology" should not rationalize their actions according to a holistic idea of nature (and some even thinking of "nature" as something devoid from humans, or separate from humans), and take on a fragmented, more historically materialist perspective. "Nature" - and by nature I take him to mean the biological and physical world, not the "essence" of something, as per a more philosophical definition - is rooted in social relations and actions. He says, "Nature is not in question in ecology: on the contrary, ecology dissolves nature's contours and redistributes its agents." (21) Agents in this case may be non-human (Latour is one of the founders of ANT (Actor-Network Theory) and things like "rules, apparatuses, consumers, institutions, mores, calves, cows, pigs, broods"-- are all part of the problem. And the problems of nature and the political are interrelated and messy. The relationship is unstable, non-linear. He compares how we might now consider objects in nature as "risky matters-of-concern" that coexist with old scientific ideas, or objects that are constructed as "matters-of-fact".

What does this say about the human desire for scientific progress? Are our scientific endeavors still an attempt to take this idea of "nature" and harness it for our own? This seems rather 19th century, yes? What about the current desire to restore some sort of equilibrium? Was there never any kind of equilibrium to begin with? Is Latour speaking to the idea that humans can never agree on anything, including nature, and that my idea of "the environment" might completely different from someone else's, and perhaps both ideas are equally valid and worth investigating?