“What is to be done with political ecology? Nothing. What is to be done? Political ecology!” Bruno Latour begins The Politics Of Nature with this provocative statement (p. 1). What follows is a creative reconceptualization of the relationship among nature, science, and politics with profound implications for the future of ecological change, traditional right/left ideologies, and modern political processes, including globalization.

Since political ecology does not yet exist conceptually, Latour's project is best understood as the act of its production. This production process partly involves the rediscovery of ancient meanings. The author defines “political ecology” as “the right way to compose a common world, the kind of world the Greeks called a cosmos” (p. 8). Multiculturalism and, more recently, multinaturalism make it possible for politics and the sciences to work together today to articulate the common world in radically new ways. His argument is motivated by a concern that humanity might miss the current moment, might refuse to slow down enough to reflect on its possible futures, and might instead rush from twentieth-century totalitarianism to twenty-first-century globalization. According to Latour, both phenomena involve similar processes of exclusion; they create collectives that prematurely juxtapose a universal humanity to an external nature.

Latour develops his argument through a discussion of successive dichotomies—nature/culture, subject/object, and fact/value—each informed by a more fundamental distinction between human beings and nonhumans. In Chapter 1, he employs Plato's Cave allegory to describe how contemporary constitutions create a public life with two houses: science (as distinct from various sciences) and politics. As the object of science, nature remains outside politics and simultaneously becomes its essential reality and toxic dump. Only when humans abandon the concept of nature does Latour think we can begin to consider what matters most, that is, the multitude of nonhumans and our associations with them. Political ecology directs humans toward the urgent task of re-presenting interactions between humans and nonhumans. It supports the creation of new political institutions that replace the old “two-house collective” with a “collective without outside recourse” (p. 37). In Chapter 2, the author argues that bicameral constitutionalism has reinforced a combination of multiculturalism with mononaturalism. He proposes replacing this “politics of subjects” and “science of objects” with “an assembly of beings capable of speaking” (pp. 61–62). The various natural and social scientific disciplines are charged with finding ways to make formerly mute objects speak. He asks: “How can we go about getting those in whose name we speak to speak for themselves?” (p. 70).

In Chapter 3, Latour begins to outline the terms and institutions of his new separation of powers. In place of the fact/value distinction, itself an artifact of prior distinctions between nature/culture and object/subject, he proposes a new categorical imperative: “Thou shalt not simplify the number of propositions to be taken into account in the discussion” (p. 104). (“Proposition” or “well-articulated actor” is Latour's term for “citizen,” which transcends the latter's human connotations.) In his new Constitution, the first house has the power to take into account, to ask—and answer—the question: “How many are we?” The second house has the power to order society in response to the question: “Can we live together?” (p. 109). Only after nature is denaturalized and people are resocialized can we begin consciously to form a common society with an explicit process of representation and sense of reality.

Latour names this process of self-reflective association “composition,” and in Chapter 4, he describes the various skills different disciplines contribute to it. Most important, he urges politicians, scientists, and moralists to work together to produce the voices of a multitude and to articulate a “we.” Once the upper house produces this “we,” then the lower house can create the world—the cosmos—we hold in common. According to the author, the supposed rationality as well as the continuing violence of modern politics short-circuits the learning processes required for the composition of society. By doing so, modernity temporarily (he hopes) “paralyzes” the body politic. Political ecology offers an antidote, a multinaturalism that refuses the metaphysical outside and the shadowy inside of the Cave, bringing nonhumans and humans together in a fully democratic politics.

As even this brief overview suggests, Latour's argument is as complex as it is creative. In addition to Plato and Aristotle, he alludes to Hobbes, Rousseau, Kant, Lenin, Jürgen Habermas, and, among the most intriguing, Charles Fourier. Latour supports his challenging text with a glossary of new terminology and a brief summary “for Readers in a Hurry,” for those who cannot afford (or think they cannot) the slowness reflection requires. Although I am reluctant to jump to critique, I will offer some reflections of my own, specifically, on the production of voices.

As Latour quite rightly claims, “the modernist Constitution never had the courage to ‘motivate its decisions to reject’” (p. 169). As a corollary, it remains largely unaware of what Iris Young (2000) in Inclusion and Democracy labels processes of internal and external exclusion. To his credit, Latour takes seriously Habermas's stricture that everyone affected by a decision must participate in making it. What I question is his claim that “without the work of production of voices, there would no longer be voices at all” (p. 145). He seems to assume that voices are only produced—and productive—as speakers and writers. But what of active, reflective listening? What of the sounds—cries and screams of suffering (as well as joy)—already produced by the all-too-human voices of oppressed groups? Latour too easily relegates such calls for justice to the identity politics of cultural recognition. However, when nonhuman nature is exteriorized, so are the human beings most closely associated with it. He admits: “Once the question of the number of collectives is reopened, the Other is going to change form…. [A]lterity is going to change: it too has become altered” (p. 209). Yet what if the cosmos is already en-chanted? Sonorous? (Jane Bennett, The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics, 2001). Although Latour acknowledges his logocentrism, he presents it as an artifact of his disciplinary location. What matters, he claims, is what follows from political ecology. I would also ask, what follows whom? Man-kind? What I sought was greater attention to how political ecology alters the propositions of dehumanized humans, as well as denaturalized nonhumans.