Abstract

This essay presents a critical overview of the ideological corpus of the ecological movement, as it has been actualized in the various Green parties. « Environmentalism » relies on a nature-culture dualism, and defines human beings as external to Nature, hence arguing that « human activities » are the cause of damage to the environment. This goes hand in hand with a radical critique of economic rationality, according to which the possibility of a political ecology emerges out of the obsolescence of the economic vision of the world. In fact, I argue that ecological thinking amounts to a heterogeneous ideological construction, which cannot overcome the important gap between theoretical claims and real practices. Lacking a coherent project, these projects are necessarily limited in their impact. From this realization, we can see the necessity of a second era of political ecology, which takes up new objects such as the production of science, and brings together Latour’s critique with Félix Guattari’s hypothesis of a generalized ecology which would add new relations to existing relations. The critique of « productivism » should not be confused with the critique of « antiproduction » which limits the expansion of life, since the goal of political ecology is to give rise to new forms of life.