TY - BOOK ID - 53483756 TI - Politics of nature: how to bring the sciences into democracy AU - Latour, Bruno AU - Porter, Catherine PY - 2004 SN - 9780674013476 0674039963 9780674039964 0674013476 9780674012899 0674012895 PB - Cambridge (Mass.) Harvard University Press DB - UniCat KW - Political ecology. KW - Social ecology KW - Green movement KW - Green movement. KW - Human ecology. KW - Science KW - Science and society KW - Sociology of science KW - Ecology KW - Environment, Human KW - Human beings KW - Human environment KW - Ecological engineering KW - Human geography KW - Nature KW - Ecologism KW - Environmental action groups KW - Environmental groups KW - Environmentalism KW - Political ecology KW - Sustainable living KW - Social aspects. KW - Social aspects KW - Effect of environment on KW - Effect of human beings on UR - https://www.unicat.be/uniCat?func=search&query=sysid:53483756 AB - A major work by one of the more innovative thinkers of our time, Politics of Nature does nothing less than establish the conceptual context for political ecology--transplanting the terms of ecology into more fertile philosophical soil than its proponents have thus far envisioned. Bruno Latour announces his project dramatically: "Political ecology has nothing whatsoever to do with nature, this jumble of Greek philosophy, French Cartesianism and American parks." Nature, he asserts, far from being an obvious domain of reality, is a way of assembling political order without due process. Thus, his book proposes an end to the old dichotomy between nature and society--and the constitution, in its place, of a collective, a community incorporating humans and nonhumans and building on the experiences of the sciences as they are actually practiced. In a critique of the distinction between fact and value, Latour suggests a redescription of the type of political philosophy implicated in such a "commonsense" division--which here reveals itself as distinctly uncommonsensical and in fact fatal to democracy and to a healthy development of the sciences. Moving beyond the modernist institutions of "mononaturalism" and "multiculturalism," Latour develops the idea of "multinaturalism," a complex collectivity determined not by outside experts claiming absolute reason but by "diplomats" who are flexible and open to experimentation. ER -