1. science
2. ecology

Anders Blok (abl@soc.ku.dk), work-in-progress – “Verdiar, natur og materialitet”, januar 2011
The many worths of nature(s); or: what qualifies as ecological in political ecology?
Change men’s estimate of the value of existing political agencies and forms, and the
latter change more or less (John Dewey 1927:6; italics in original)
1. Introduction: conflicting ecologies of valuation
During the past 20 years, conflicts over the worth of nature has tended to assume a particular
rhetorical form, that of the market and its discontents. In its intellectual moments, such debates
fly under the banner of ecological economics. Science studies scholars Silvio Funtowicz and Jerome Ravetz (1994), for instance, portray ecological economics as a post-normal science by way of
asking “how much is a songbird worth?”. What is striking is the language of their own reply: while
the worth of a songbird has its ‘monetary aspect’, we are told, it cannot be ‘reduced to a commodity’, because this worth “also lies in teaching us about ourselves and what we want to do with
our lives” (ibid.:206). Just how the songbird will teach us this remains opaque. Even sophisticated
science studies scholars, it would seem, are nowadays at a loss when it comes to articulating nature’s worth beyond market grammars. By extrapolation, frequent allusions in academic social
science to critical categories of the ‘non-market’ – and its ‘non-capitalistic’ relations – clearly
speak more to a widespread sense of collective disorientation, on the part of progressive intellectuals, than to any sense of sustained hope in theory and (its) politics (see Miyazaki 2006).
This paper engage debates on the worth(s) of nature(s) by invoking what is arguably
one of the more hopeful re-workings of social science knowledge in recent decades: the sociology
of justification and critique, as elaborated by Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot (1991). In a peculiar mixture of theoretical modesty and radicalism, Boltanski and Thévenot forges a creative (re)alignment of economics, sociology and political philosophy – all the while pushing the promise of
a much-needed remapping of the social world ahead of them1. Theirs is neither a new theory of
society, nor a new moral philosophy; rather, they provide us with an original vocabulary for registering the repertoires of moral evaluation employed by actors in everyday situations of conflict
and coordination (see Wagner 1999; Boltanski & Thévenot 1999). Some of the freshness of this
approach is suggested by the way it allows us to combine an interest in actors’ situated accounts
– like a ‘materialized’ version of Harold Garfinkel’s ethnomethodology – with a firm view to issues
of the common good, the classical preoccupation of political philosophy (Boltanski & Thévenot
2000). Studies in political ecology stand to gain substantially from this re-working.
The overall question pursued in this paper can be stated straightforwardly: following
Boltanski and Thévenot’s (1991) articulation of six existing grammars of legitimate social bonds
1
I borrow this characterization from sociologist Peter Wagner, who has undertaken to rethink the social
and political theory of modernity in light of Boltanski & Thévenot’s contribution (see Wagner 2008).
1
(the cités), does ecology today emerge as a novel seventh ‘order of worth’?2 In asking about the
exact place of nature(s) in a value-plural social world, this paper enters an already staked-out
intellectual exchange. This exchange emerged in the Francophone social sciences in the 1990s,
across the ‘elective affinities’ that ties together the new French pragmatist scene (see, e.g., Lafaye
& Thévenot 1993; Latour 1998; Thévenot 2002; Godard & Laurans 2004)3. Bruno Latour, in particular, undertook to raise the intellectual stakes, by suggesting a radical re-definition of political
ecology itself (2004). Since then, the combatants left the field. With them, however, important
questions were left hanging: does ecology, after all, designate a novel political project, or rather a
new combination of old moral attachments? How would we go about constructing the test of
nature’s shifting worth(s)? What, indeed, qualifies as ecological in political ecology?4
The main aim of the following is to pick up the tread left hanging, by Thévenot and Latour, in their related but contrastive perspectives on how to interpret the ‘political agencies and
forms’ (as Dewey puts it) of ecology. Setting out this debate as baseline (in the next section), the
paper performs a few additions of its own, suggesting how its parameters can be profitably
switched. Foremost among these, the paper attempts to transpose the debate from one of theoretical (ontological) principles to one of empirical inquiry – or, more precise, of empirical philosophy (or descriptive metaphysics)5. In an important sense, this move adds multiplicity to pluralism:
it is not simply that ‘the ecological’ will be qualified, tested and valued by a number of co-existing
orders of worth at any given social site (as Boltanski and Thévenot’s pluralist model suggests); on
top of this, across a diversity of social sites, different cognitive-moral projects of ecological conflict
and compromise are likely to emerge. While descriptive metaphysics cannot abandon Thévenot’s
and Latour’s search for collective qualifications (and common worlds), this argument suggests
that there are currently several, not one, common ecological world(s).
In order to render this basic claim plausible, the paper turns to a consideration of three
different domains of contemporary environmental politics, cast as social scientific case studies.
First, the case of carbon markets in transnational climate politics is taken to illustrate both the
plausibility and the limitations of Thévenot’s interpretation of ecology as a new order of worth.
Carbon markets, in this reading, represent an inherently unstable ‘compromise’ (Boltanski &
Thévenot 1991) between market, industrial and green orderings, casting doubt on the standing of
green worth as ‘tested’ on sustainability criteria. Second, the case of the world-wide circulation of
urban sustainability ‘best practices’ is taken to illustrate a green inflection of what Boltanski and
2
Throughout the paper, ‘order of worth’ is used when referring, in a general way, to the (six) grammars of
legitimate social bonds identified by Boltanski and Thévenot (1991). Similarly, the term ‘city’ (cité) is employed when emphasizing the proper ‘equipment’ of these orders (as in ‘green city’). The paper generally
assumes a basic familiarity with the theoretical vocabularies of Boltanski and Thévenot’s sociology.
3
For a recent, general discussion of the elective affinities between Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory and
Luc Boltanski’s sociology of critical capacity, see Guggenheim & Potthast (2011).
4
Following Boltanski and Thévenot (1991:359), the verb ‘qualify’ designates here a twin process, simultaneously cognitive and moral, by which actors (including social scientists) ‘categorize’ a being within some
equivalence class and ‘evaluate’ it according to some grammar of the common good.
5
The term ’empirical philosophy’ stems from the work of STS scholar Anne-marie Mol, who uses the label
as shorthand for a ‘philosophical narrative’ developed by drawing on ‘ethnographic methods’ of investigation (Mol 2002:4). Bruno Latour has since adopted this label as self-descriptor. ‘Descriptive metaphysics’ is a
label employed by Luc Boltanski, and it relates closely to the view that political orders of worth constitute
their own metaphysics (Boltanski & Thévenot 1991). A closer comparison of these methodologies is beyond
the scope of this essay; here, I simply note their overlapping ambitions.
2
Chiapello (1999) dubs the ‘new spirit of capitalism’, organized around projects of innovation, mobility and connectivity. Third, the case of biodiversity concerns surrounding whales (and other
charismatic animals) is interpreted to involve a relaxation of claims to ‘common humanity’, akin to
how Latour recasts political ecology. Far from entailing a novel non-humanist green city, however,
this domain show actors to routinely slip beyond justification and into worlds of affective compassion and violent non-equivalence (Boltanski 1998).
Rather than pursuing each case in any ethnographic depth, the point lies in their heterogeneous juxtaposition: in each domain, the paper argues, we witness the contours of differently
qualified subjects, things, tests – and natures. In this respect, while the choice of empirical cases is
admittedly idiosyncratic, it is far from arbitrary: each case is taken to illustrate a particular configuration of ecological worth, linked to collective qualifications that are currently widespread
across the sites and scales of environmental politics. Indeed, each configuration is partly stabilized
as a theoretical construct of social science; the constructs, namely, of Thévenot, Boltanski (and
Chiapello) and Latour, respectively. By way of foreshadowing the conclusion, what this suggests,
first, is that we ought to research the multiple worth(s) of nature(s) rather than one situationindependent green worth (whether ‘market’ or ‘non-market’). Second, however, actually existing
ecological compromises do not come in unlimited varieties; rather, new French pragmatism helps
us in important ways to identify recurring grammars of ecological worth.
2. The Thévenot-Latour debate: what ecology, which politics?6
If by ‘political ecology’ we designate the intersection of humans and non-humans in practical political philosophy, then environmental movements should be credited with having reopened crucial questions of the proper ‘equipment’ of our good common world (Latour 2004). In the ‘green
city’ (cité verte), greatness (grandeur) attaches not so much to human persons, collectives or institutions; rather, ecology serves to qualify the worth of natural elements like clean air and water, a
pollution-free atmosphere, and the well-being of animals and plants (Lafaye & Thévenot 1993). As
is well recognized across a diversity of social theories (e.g. Beck 1992; Luhmann 1989; Latour
1993; Urry 2000), such non-human ‘ecological’ entities have been at the centre of increasingly
numerous and important socio-political controversies since the 1970s. Indeed, such a diagnosis of
the rising importance of political ecology unites the contributions of Laurant Thévenot and Bruno
Latour. The question that separates them, however, is how to interpret the diverse modalities of
human engagement with nature(s), and the cognitive-moral competencies implied.
Perhaps the best way of approaching the Thévenot-Latour debate is to adopt what
seems their (almost) common empirical ground: that is, public controversies in France, during the
1990s, as to various proposed ‘developments’ of nature (roads, dams, agriculture) in relatively
‘pristine’ and ‘natural’ areas of the countryside (see Thévenot, Moody & Lafaye 2000)7. From this
6
This is a paraphrase of Latour’s critically-constructive appraisal of Ulrich Beck’s notion of cosmopolitanism,
cast under the heading ‘whose cosmos, which cosmopolitics?’.
7
In the case of Thévenot and his co-workers, the main case in point is a heavily contested road and tunnel
project being built through the Aspe Valley and the Somport Pass in the French Pyrénées. As for Latour, he
refers in particular to a case study of new local commissions of river management, bringing together public
3
shared starting point, Thévenot and Latour each insert the ecological case, as it were, into the
wider trajectory of their respective theoretical projects. To Thévenot, ecology offers a complex
empirical site for his sociology of political and moral ordering – including, as noted, the promise of
detecting a novel ‘green’ order of worth in-the-making (see Thévenot 2002). To Latour, by contrast, ecology serves as a crucial testing ground for his attempt to overcome the ontological strictures of modernity, promising to finally bring the natural sciences into political democracy (see
Latour 2004). The debate thus offers up two ‘ecologies’, mobilized with a view to kindred but
different theoretical interpretations of our current political predicament.
Together with Claudette Lafaye (1993), Thévenot is responsible for opening up this
ecological debate, thus setting the theoretical parameters. Within the framework of his sociology
of moral ordering, three broad interpretive possibilities emerge in confronting the rise of political
ecology. First, while ‘the environment’ may offer a range of novel sites, the justifications and critiques invoked in environmental disputes often fall back on well-established moral grammars. This
is the case, for instance, in frequent invocations of ‘sustainable development’, suggesting the
internalization of ‘natural resources’ into the technical planning characteristic of industrial ordering. Second, by contrast, aspects of environmentalism may represent a political innovation, suggesting the rise of a novel order of worth organized around ecological analysis, renewability, future generations and the planet as an integrated ecosystem (see Thévenot, Moody & Lafaye
2000:241). Third, however, this possibility also pushes against the very limits of public justifiability,
as studied by Boltanski and Thévenot (1991): ‘common humanity’, the shared grammar of humanist political philosophies, is potentially superseded in the direction of holistic biospheres (Gaia),
future generations, non-human subjects (animals) and technocratic expert rule8.
Thévenot’s most sustained attempt to examine these three interpretations (or ‘levels’)
of political ecology is organized as a comparative study of public environmental controversies in
France and the United States (Thévenot, Moody & Lafaye 2000)9. In this study, particular attention is paid to how actors employ or express ‘green’ justifications, either in compromise with other orders or by reference to its own specific repertoire of evaluation. The picture that emerges,
however, is fundamentally ambivalent, in both empirical and analytical terms. Empirically, Thévenot and co-authors convincingly document the wide variety of ways in which ‘natural’ entities –
like landscapes, rivers, and bears – can be qualified for cognitive and moral evaluation in contemporary societies. This empirical complexity holds for both the French and the American case, even
as dominant modes of justification differ; ‘market’ forms of worth (short-term prices), for instance,
are more prevalent in the United States, often in compromise with ‘civic’ (equal rights) and ‘green’
(environmentally friendly) arguments. Overall, then, both cases show how ‘natural’ entities become enrolled in complex patterns of dispute and justification.
More specifically to the question of green worth, the study seems analytically inconclusive. On the one hand, the very notion of compromise implies that actors in the controversies
officials, experts, naturalists and activists. Space prevents a fuller exploration of the possible theoretical
effects of this subtly different constitution of the empirical field by Thévenot and Latour.
8
These four designations of political ambiguity, which are all present in the early work of Thévenot and
Lafaye (1993), correspond closely to Lidskog and Elander’s (2010) more recent listing of four basic challenges to democracy stemming from climate change: space, time, species, and knowledge.
9
In the US context, the empirical reference is to a case study of a proposed hydropower dam project on the
Clavey River, in the Sierra Nevada mountains, near the famous Yosemite National Park.
4
do in fact at times refer to distinctly ‘green’ qualifications, such as the ‘health’ of an ecosystem,
threats to ‘endangered species’, the ‘unique’ nature of landscapes, and so on. On the other hand,
such green qualifications are oftentimes closely entangled into other orders of worth; not surprisingly, for instance, the ‘domestic’ worth of natural landscapes as part of local ‘tradition’ and ‘heritage’ play a prominent role in both the French and American debates. As Thévenot sums up the
situation, the green order of worth “is gaining specificity but is still often used in combination with
other types of justification” (Thévenot, Moody & Lafaye 2000:237). What the comparative studies
document, in this light, is the on-the-ground construction of such a green order – the contours of
which, we might say, still lack theoretical coherence (see Wagner 1999).
In a sense, Latour’s intervention in political ecology can be understood as an attempt
to provide exactly this theoretical coherence to an original and valuable practice which, as he
notes provocatively, “can’t tell its left from its right” (Latour 1998:222)10. This project, as noted,
reaches to the core of Latour’s theoretical edifice; actor-network theory, as many observe, has
always exhibited a certain ecological sensibility (see Murdoch 2001; Blok 2007). Summed up in his
own succinct terms, what Latour tries to show – in part by using Boltanski and Thévenot’s model
of political disputes as a litmus test – is that “political ecology cannot be inserted into the various
niches of modernity” (Latour 1998:220). Translated into the terms of Boltanski and Thévenot’s
sociology of moral ordering, what this means is that the originality of political ecology can only be
registered by breaking with certain fundamental assumptions of their entire polity model. More
specifically, Latour’s main claim, here and elsewhere (e.g. 2004), is that political ecology forces us
to break away from exclusive modernist attachments to ‘common humanity’, and to embrace a
novel way of handling the objects of human and non-human collective life.
While this point may be easily conceded (especially by scholars enjoying some attachment to science and technology studies), specifying exactly what this novel non-humanist ‘green
city’ entails proves challenging, even to this arch-spokesman of non-humans. In a somewhat surprising move11, Latour returns us to the canonical Kantian definition of morality, as a means-end
relation, only now extended beyond its inbuilt humanism. What political ecology does, Latour
suggests (1998:230), is to “generalize to all the beings of the creation the aspiration to the kingdom of ends”: rivers, animals, biotopes, forests, parks and insects are no longer to be considered
‘mere means’ of human endeavors, but always also as ends-in-themselves. With the ecological
city, then, no entity is merely a means. In the domain of river management, this drama of political
transformation – where modernization gradually gives way to ‘ecologization’ – is easily illustrated
by various engineering efforts to restore previously canalized rivers to their ‘natural’ meandering
state12. In thus allowing rivers to meander again, Latour notes in Aristotelian mode (ibid.:232), we
leave them, as mediators, to partially “deploy the finality which is in them”.
10
Implicit in this statement (itself a quote from the Old Testament!) is a reference to the fraught political
history of ecological thinking, not least the way a certain ‘ecological’ reading of the importance of ‘blood
th
and soil’ served as ideological markers of worth in 20 century Nazism and (other) totalitarianisms.
11
Surprising, because Latour’s philosophy, on all other accounts (including its metaphysics), is so clearly
anti-Kantian (see Harman 2009). In the domain of morality, however, Latour seems engaged in a (partial)
redemption of Kantian thinking; not only in terms of redefining its means-end scheme (see Latour 2002),
but also for its sensitivity to ‘ecological’ qualities avant la lettre (see Hache & Latour 2010).
12
River restoration, and the creation of meandering channels, has emerged as an important activity in many
North American and European settings, as part of policies to improve water quality, enhance aquatic habi-
5
Even as this Latourian reinterpretation of ecological worth seems plausible at first,
once we start submitting it to Thévenot’s model of moral reasoning, it starts to look shakier. First
of all, Latour’s interpretation of political ecology suffers from a certain ‘misplaced concreteness’,
in that it recognizes only singular ecological entities as carriers of moral standing. Indeed, this is
how Latour interprets the practical efforts of environmental movements: it is “always this invertebrate, this branch of a river, this rubbish dump or this land-use plan which finds itself the subject of concern, protection, criticism or demonstration” (1998:221; italics in original). This is surely
a plausible depiction of some ecological controversies; however, it prematurely constricts the
diversity of political ecology. For instance, it downplays the important role of the natural sciences
(and economics) in enacting ‘Nature-wholes’ (like climate change) within bureaucratic and public
domains of environmental action (see Asdal 2008). While Latour is right in warning against tooeasy notions of ‘global unity’ (Gaia, Mother Earth), his own suggestion thus appears too ‘particularist’ to capture the way non-human entities are qualified in ecological disputes.
This criticism relates, secondly, to a more profound ambiguity as to the exact entities
onto which Latour attaches ecological worth – and, importantly, how he envisages such worth to
be demonstrated (or tested) in public disputes? On the one hand, Latour’s Kantian-Aristotelian
language might be said to gravitate towards recognizing the ‘intrinsic’ worth of singular ecological
entities – a well-known proposition, of course, in environmental ethics (see Lafaye & Thévenot
1993). At the same time, however, Latour is at pains to distance himself from such ‘deep ecology’:
in the ecological city, what is worthy is emphatically not to know (as does deep ecology) that ‘everything is connected’, but rather, on the contrary, to “presuppose a deep-rooted uncertainty as to
the nature of attachments” (Latour 1998:232; my italics). As Latour has consistently argued
throughout his oeuvre (e.g. 1993), sharing sociality with things in a common collective does not
entail a move from anthropocentrism to biocentrism, but rather means that we go “from being
anthropocentric to becoming decentred” (quoted in Whiteside 2002:136). The ecological city, in
this light, embodies exactly a state of decentred uncertainty.
Again, while this more-than-human ethics of volatile ecological attachments captures
important dimensions of political ecology, tied to notions of unforeseen consequences, precaution and collective experimentation, it does not seem adequate as a generalized model. More
than anything, Latour seems here to disregard those very requirements of public evaluation –
including the constraining nature of the coherence required for the critical testing of arrangements, ecological or otherwise – which forms a theoretical backbone of Thévenot’s emphasis on
conventions as collective coordination devices (see Thévenot 2002)13. In Boltanski and Thévenot’s
sociology of moral ordering, the available grammars of justification and critique serve exactly this
role of coordination devices, in those specific situations of public dispute where some form of
generalization beyond the immediate (‘familiar’) contingency of interaction is called for (see Bol-
tats, and facilitate human uses such as angling and canoeing (see Kondolf 2006). In my native Denmark, for
instance, the re-meandering of the Skjern River during the late 1990s has been symbolically important.
13
This, indeed, is how Thévenot himself distances his theoretical project from that of actor-network theory,
from which it nevertheless gains considerable inspiration, not least in asserting the importance of nonhumans to collective coordination. See, in particular, the footnotes of Thévenot (2002).
6
tanski & Thévenot 2000; Thévenot 2007)14. How, we might thus ask, will the volatile attachments
of the Latourian green city lend themselves to constraints of public testing?
Tellingly, Latour has in fact provided answers to this question, only in a different context: his ‘parliament of things’ (1993; 2004) is meant exactly to institutionalize the ecological city,
by specifying a set of novel conventions for dealing democratically with ecological hybrids (such as
mad cows, ozone layers, and genetically modified organisms). Regardless of the ambiguities of
how to interpret this Latourian political philosophy and its relation to empirical realities (see Blok
2011), what is particularly noteworthy in this context is the way in which, following John Dewey,
Latour now seems to turn political ecology into a matter of ‘due process’. Hence, beyond granting
ecological non-humans a right to be taken into account – as legitimate ‘matters of concern’ for
the collective – the Latourian parliament of things accomplishes little in the way of specifying the
substantive cognitive-moral attachments peculiar to political ecology. In this respect, the work of
Thévenot, for all its shortcomings, moves us further in the right direction.
On his part of the debate, this is also where Thévenot may legitimately raise objections
to the Latourian reading of his sociology. His orders of worth have always taken into account the
divergent ways in which the world is equipped, or furnished, by material objects; each order of
worth, indeed, integrates and qualifies humans together with other beings in its own specific way.
Hence Thévenot’s important retort to Latour’s construction of the green city (2002:78): ‘green’
critiques or justifications “are not new insofar as they integrate nonhuman beings into evaluations
but rather because they rest on a different kind of generalized linkage”. In this respect, Latour
should be credited with providing important building blocks to such a novel ‘generalized linkage’:
including non-humans (like animals) in the kingdom of moral ends, and committing to collective
experimentation on uncertain ecological attachments, remain real moral and political possibilities.
What seems less convincing, however, is the claim that Latour should thereby have uncovered, or
theoretically co-articulated, the novel ecological order of worth15.
To summarize, this movement in-between Thévenot and Latour on the question of political ecology leaves us, in a roundabout way, in much the same state of theoretical inconclusiveness with which we commenced – only now, a more reflected inconclusiveness. While there is no
denying the rising socio-political importance of ecology since the 1970s, the trajectory, originality
and importance of this collective moral project (or projects) remains disputed. Here, Thévenot
remains the more cautious theorist: even as he posits the emergence of a green order of worth,
the exact place of ecologically qualified objects in the webs of compromises constituting our political orderings remains open for empirical analysis. Latour, on his part, ascribes more ontological
weight to his theoretical reconstruction of political ecology, in terms of overcoming deep-seated
modernist boundaries between humans and non-humans. When it comes to the question of political qualification and testing, however, Latour remains more equivocal.
In what follows, the aim will be to follow through on Thévenot’s empirical agenda, in
terms of highlighting the place of ecologically qualified objects across a diversity of situations of
14
As Thévenot has shown (2007), such situations of public constraint constitute only the ‘upper’ layer of a
‘vertical’ plurality of cognitive formats, where actors move in-between the familiar and the public.
15
In a revealing moment of self-reflection, Latour once commented in interview that he wanted to be the
Karl Marx of French ecology! Unfortunately, in his view, the ecological movement of the 1990s has since
disappeared, implying that there is currently no movement to think for and with.
7
public environmental controversy and compromise. Drawing in part on Latour, however, this approach redirects attention away from the narrow parameters set by Thévenot – in terms of ‘nature developments’ in ‘pristine’ localities – to encompass a wider diversity in the kinds of ‘hybrid’
ecological matters subject to collective dispute. Inserting the theoretical models into a historical
sociology of environmental controversies, this exposition thus aims to show that, contrary to
what both Thévenot and Latour assumes, we need to distinguish different common grammars (or
worlds) of ecological worth. Much of the ambiguity of political ecology, it will be argued, stems
from the internal tensions between such multiple senses of the ecological.
3. The ambivalent nature(s) of capital – Thévenot on carbon markets
Market evaluations were common in the United States and were often combined with
[…] “green” worth (which is surprising, given the anti-capitalist tendency of some environmental movements) (Thévenot, Moody & Lafaye 2000:262)
Cap and trade is the best option to stop climate change. It limits carbon emissions and
gets environmental results at lowest cost (Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), website)
Since the 1997 Kyoto Protocol agreement, the emergence of transnational markets for trading in
carbon dioxide emissions – known collectively as carbon markets – has come to constitute the
latest frontline in what Bruno Latour (2004) succinctly dubs the ‘war of the eco-sciences’ (see Blok
2011). Political ecology, as both Latour and Thévenot correctly points out, has historically gained
much of its force via strong denunciations of the market world, often cast in the critical civic language of ‘capitalism’ with its in-build contradictions, inequities and self-serving interests. Much
political ecology, as noted, plays itself out along this economy-ecology tension, cast in the grammar of the market and its discontents. With carbon markets, however, and the more general shift
towards market-based environmental regulation since the 1990s, signs of compromise between
market and green orders of worth have become discernible. Such a novel compromise, indeed,
extends well into the ranks of environmental movements (see Jamison 2001).
The standard narrative of carbon markets emphasize that these markets are, to a large
extent, ‘made in the US’ – in the sense that American economists and regulators innovated emissions trading as a policy instrument before globalizing it to the Kyoto Protocol (see Lohmann
2005; Voss 2007; MacKenzie 2009). This is unsurprising, given the observation (quoted above) on
the comparatively well-developed grammar of a market-green compromise in the American setting. Hence, in disputes over a proposed hydroelectric dam on the Clavey River in the Sierra Nevada mountains, Thévenot and co-authors show that both sides of the controversy tended to
judge the project on market criteria. Whereas proponents of the dam framed it as the cheapest
way to meet rising electricity demands, their opponents maintained that other sources would be
clearly cheaper – as well as less environmentally damaging. In much the same terms, and drawing
on a similar market-green compromise, US environmentalists (like the EDF) nowadays routinely
promote carbon markets as the cheapest way to combat global warming.
8
In the wider discourse and practice of environmental politics, this notion of a positive
linkage of market and green criteria of evaluation has come to be known as ‘ecological modernization’ (see Hajer 1995). Contrary to the anti-capitalist denunciations of earlier political ecology,
eco-modernist story-lines of the 1980s onwards casts the ecological problematic as a spur to new
‘green’ markets, equipped with ‘eco-products’, ‘eco-managing’ firms and ‘eco-conscious’ consumers (see Boltanski & Chiapello 2005:447ff). Over time, this market-green compromise has come to
achieve considerable stability, as institutionalized in a bewildering array of organizations both
nationally (like governments) and internationally (like the OECD). While critics associated with the
grassroots movements of the 1970s tend to denounce eco-modernism as ‘selling-out’ to ‘corporate strategy’ (e.g. Jamison 2001), its allure extends well into more professionalized transnational
NGOs such as the World Wildlife Fund (WWF). Indeed, this is obvious from observing the changing
contours of public controversies surrounding carbon markets in Europe.
During the early 1990s, European environmental NGOs engaged in public denunciations of the very principle of emissions trading as an instrument of climate politics, arguing that it
serves to legitimize businesses’ ‘right to pollute’ (see Bomberg 2007). As political conditions
shifted in the late 1990s, however, and as the European Union (EU) developed its own emissions
trading scheme (ETS), NGO evaluations changed, with critical opposition voices diminishing significantly. Instead, major NGO coalitions, such as the Climate Action Network (CAN), started elaborating its own set of justificatory criteria for conditionally supporting carbon markets. Alongside
the market-green compromise thus adopted, CAN stresses that political targets (caps) must be
‘credible and ambitious’, and that the decision-making process should be ‘transparent and open
to participation’ (quoted in Bomberg 2007:252). In the language of Boltanski and Thévenot, CAN
thus adds further layers of value complexity to the situation, by stressing the importance of both
‘industrial’ (ambitious targets) and ‘civic’ (open participation) commitments.
This move by CAN – and echoed by other ‘concerned groups’ critically engaged in carbon market creation (Callon 2009) – should be situated within the different inflections given to
carbon markets, as a market-green compromise, in different political contexts. Whereas in the US,
carbon markets tend to be evaluated mostly for their short-term monetary effects (by both proponents and opponents), European discussions tend towards a stronger emphasis on these markets as part of a long-term planned future. Such long-term planning is characteristic of ‘industrial’
worth, as embodied strongly in the technocratic approach of EU policy-making. Industrial worth,
in this sense, inscribes climate change and carbon markets into evaluative frameworks of policymaking based on the efficiency of investments, technical and scientific competency, and longterm economic growth. In this political context, it makes sense for environmental NGOs to call for
‘ambitious’ targets, rather than critiquing the markets; in this way, targets may be measured (and
critiqued) against criteria of what constitutes a ‘credible’ climatic commitment.
What this situation amounts to, we might say, is a widespread agreement amongst European environmental elites – in government, science, business, and NGOs – that climate politics
necessitates a new market-industrial-green compromise, organized around the simultaneous ‘sustainability’ of economic growth and the planetary ecosystem. Much of the critical tension in European debates on carbon markets revolves around actors emphasizing different aspects of this
compromise (‘more market or more green’); however, public debate seldom moves outside of
such parameters. Contrary to what Thévenot implies when associating sustainability closely with
9
tests of green worth (Thévenot, Moody & Lafaye 2000), this observation thus confirms a widespread perception that ‘sustainability’ remains a constitutively fragile formula, torn in-between
(at least) the worlds of market, industrial and green worth16. For the purposes of public qualification, then, there simply is no stable way of currently assessing whether carbon markets contributes or not to an ecologically ‘sustainable’ climate politics of the future (see Callon 2009).
In more analytical terms, what this does is to cast doubt on just how solidly grounded
Thévenot’s green order of worth really is – at least when it comes to the ‘global’ territory onto
which climate change concern is inscribed. While ideas of planetary-atmospheric sustainability are
clearly present, enacted most strongly by scientific voices of the IPCC, such ideas currently seem
rather detached from any meaningful conventions of prudent collective ecological action. In its
stead, ‘sustainability’ is dispersed among a plurality of value-orders, allowing multiple (and often
mutually contradictory) actors to claim climatic grandeur for themselves – but little means of testing such claims in credible ways. Here, the difficulties posed by carbon markets show themselves
as part of a more widespread ambiguity. This ambiguity is not simply a moral-political issue, but a
cognitive one as well: as is well recognized in STS (e.g. Edwards 2010), the techno-scientific complexities of mediation needed to enact representations of ‘the global climate’ – let alone its ‘sustainability’ – impose considerable constraints on public debate.
In sum, climate change seems to vindicate a Latourian definition of the green city: the
situation enacted on and around carbon markets, we might say, presupposes a deep-rooted uncertainty as to the nature(s) and value(s) of our non-human attachments. When I drive my car
(even the ‘eco-friendly’ type), should I perhaps be held responsible for the slow sinking of the
Maldives into rising seas? Will it be legitimate for me to ‘offset’ my climate-damaging tourist trip
to Taj Mahal by subsidizing the market-based transfer of treadle water pumps to poor Indian farmers?17 However, rather than hailing such widespread climatic ‘perplexity’ and controversy as a
state of ecological greatness – as Latour (1998; 2004) might be caricatured – it seems more sober
to recognize, alongside Thévenot and others, that we currently find ourselves in urgent need of
new ‘green’ coordination devices, adapted to our climatic predicament. Without such cognitivemoral innovation, we are left with few possibilities to assess the paths open to us, via markets or
otherwise, in taking steps toward climatic sustainability (see Thévneot 2002).
4. The sustainability of hopeful projects – Boltanski on green urbanism
It is precisely because the project is a transient form that it is adjusted to a network
world: by multiplying connections and proliferating links, the succession of projects has
the effect of extending networks (Boltanski & Chiapello 2005:111)
16
Clearly, sustainability tends to also raise critical issues of civic worth, as hinted by CAN when arguing for
more ‘participation’ in carbon market decision-making. At the same time, and quite contrary to what CAN
implies, debates on sustainability at times raise fundamental questions around basic civic commitments,
including to ‘democracy’ as such (see Lidskog & Elander 2010). This debate is beyond the scope here.
17
This comment builds on a real-world controversy, involving British and Indian actors on the so-called
voluntary carbon market. For an extended analysis and contextualization, see Blok (2011a).
10
We aim to inspire and engage in conversations about sustainable cities with people,
communities and organizations from all over the world (Sustainable CitiesTM, website)
If carbon markets point to the emergence of certain market-green compromises of an ‘underqualified’ kind – in the sense of inherent ambiguity in cognitive-moral formats – the domain of
green urbanism might be said to point in the direction of an ‘over-qualified’ ordering. Unlike carbon markets, to which even the most optimistic liberalists attach only moderate expectations,
urban sustainability is currently invested with substantial hopes for the future, even a sense of
vital energy (see Harvey & Knox 2008). Working towards urban greening within local partnerships
and transnational networks not only promises to move the world onto a path of ‘low-carbon transition’ (e.g. Hodson & Marvin 2010). In the process, it simultaneously evokes a range of utopian
imaginaries, from capitalist dreams of nurturing ‘green’ creativity and innovation, to communitarian aspirations of improving the health and well-being of excluded urban minorities (e.g. CABE
2010). In short, if carbon markets represent a ‘reluctant’ compromise, urban sustainability aspirations rather works as a ‘green attractor’, drawing energy from all sides.
Even this short (and admittedly oversimplified) description points in the direction of an
important analytical question, one that is arguably insufficiently dealt with by both Thévenot and
Latour in their takes on political ecology. In classic social science parlance, we may think of this as
the question of ‘motivation’: beyond a pure commitment to ‘green’ values, how might we explain
the apparent attraction of ecologizing projects to socio-political groups in some domains – and
their relative absence or marginality in others? Given the stakes of political ecology, this is clearly
an important question. Unfortunately, the question is also seriously over-determined, not least by
social science: as in other social realms, ubiquitous reference to ‘interests’, ‘power’, ‘ideology’
and ‘symbolic capital’ all too often constitute start- and ending-points of social scientific views on
the greening of societies18. As Boltanski and Thévenot (1991:340ff) has rightly pointed out, such
conceptual markers point to a baseline relativism running deep in social science – and blocking
the project of taking seriously actors’ situated sense of the just.
If such questions were left pending in his work on justification, they have come back
full force in Boltanski’s subsequent work, together with Eve Chiapello, on the emergence, since
‘1968’, of a new ‘connexionist’ spirit of capitalism (2005). As is well known, this new connexionist
world – or, following the polity model, the ‘projective city’ – is a world of networked and globalized firms, organized around transient project-work, and one in which ‘flexibility’, ‘creativity’ and
‘mobility’ has been elevated to the highest common good (Wagner 2008)19. Analytically, what is
particularly noteworthy in Boltanski and Chiapello’s work is the very notion (famously adopted
from Weber) that capitalism needs a ‘spirit’ to keep its unlimited accumulation running. As a set
of widespread social representations – indeed, in this sense, an ‘ideology’ – the spirit of capitalism
18
The examples here are too numerous to list, drawing on long-standing ‘critical’ traditions in the social
sciences of Marxian-Frankfurt School, Nietszchean-Foucauldian and Lacanian-Zizekian incarnations. My
purpose is not to single anyone out, but to point to broad formations of social-scientific ‘common sense’.
19
Somewhat confusingly, Boltanski and Chiapello (e.g. 2002) sometimes speak of the projective city as the
seventh justificatory regime (following the six from On Justification). This framing not only disregards the
work of Thévenot on the green city (also hailed as the seventh regime!); more importantly, it downplays the
important theoretical differences introduced with this regime. More on this in the text.
11
is what provides actors with reasons for committing to the system (Chiapello 2003)20. This idea
seems to carry purchase also in the context of commitments to green urbanism.
Put simply, the hypothesis pursued here is that the domain of urban sustainability provides a vivid illustration of what a ‘green’ inflection of the new spirit of capitalism looks like; or, in
other words, offers up a view to new compromises between projective and green orders of worth.
What this highlights is that most representations of urban sustainability – as produced in-between
the social worlds of urban planners, architects, city administrators, green-tech firms and community movements – are heavily invested in grammars of networking, sharing project experiences,
and working towards ‘innovative’ and ‘creative’ green solutions. In fact, the dominant cognitivemoral format for organizing urban sustainability effort is that of creating and circulating examples,
cases and demonstration projects, cast in the language of ‘best practice’. Apart from being shared
within the many transnational urban sustainability networks that have emerged since the 1990s,
these best practice projects are also visualized and stored in a range of digital archives, aimed at
specialized audiences of ‘greening experts’ (see Bulkeley 2006).
Much like the management literature studied by Boltanski and Chiapello (2002), such
digital archives of urban sustainability projects thus allows us to trace the modus operandi of an
influential avant-garde – only this time, a ‘greener’, more ‘expert’, and more self-consciously
‘global’ avant-garde. To take one specific example, the Danish Architecture Centre (DAC), a knowledge hub for urban architectural development based in Copenhagen, hosts a database of worldwide urban sustainability projects, known as Sustainable CitiesTM, launched during the International Architecture Biennale in Venice in 2008. In its own words, the database aims to “inspire
politicians, architects, city planners, businesses, NGOs and citizens all over the world to learn from
each other and to collaborate with each other”, in order to transform the world’s “less sustainable cities” into “more sustainable cities of the future”. Here, the language of inspiration is telling:
mediated through what Boltanski and Chiapello dub ‘artistic critique’, the new projective city borrows part of its self-description from the ‘inspired’ order of worth. Conceivably, this is part of
what makes belonging to the projective-green avant-garde exciting.
As Boltanski and Chiapello have themselves pointed out (2005:447ff), ecological critiques of ‘industrial production’ and ‘consumer society’ present since the 1970s may be regarded
one of the current refuges of artistic critique, organized around nature as a site of ‘aesthetic’ and
‘authentic’ value. Much like other aspects of the artistic critique, however, rather than challenging
the continued existence of capitalism, such ‘aesthetic’ ecological commitments have been widely
internalized in the grammar of its new connexionist spirit. The corollary of such incorporation, as
noted, is the commodification of ecology, as ‘green consumerism’ has emerged as the dominant
market-green compromise. In the assessment of Boltanski and Chiapello, however, this redefinition of capitalist ideology fails to assuage critical tensions; commodification, they note (ibid.:449),
is “enough to cast doubt on the reality and value of eco-products”. Nature, they seem to suggest,
remain a source of critical ‘surplus authenticity’ (my term).
20
As Chiapello (2003) explains, the notion of a ‘spirit of capitalism’ is meant to overcome the separation of
two contrasting views on ideology: the Marxist tradition of ‘distortion and dissimulation’ and the culturalist
tradition of ‘socially integrative representations’. It does so by reworking the Weberian notion of ‘legitimation’ in the direction of ‘legitimacy’, by way of accounting for the crucial role of criticism.
12
In sum, this reading may lead us to hypothesize that, at this particular historical juncture, urban sustainability emerges strongly as a ‘green attractor’ by usurping such surplus authenticity – and by casting it in the attractive grammars of projective-green worth. When planting
green roofs on top of Tokyo skyscrapers, installing solar power on new Copenhagen buildings, or
preparing the path for bicycle lanes on Manhattan, actors from a range of social worlds – including worlds of activism – tap into vital energies that reach well beyond the narrow confines of capital itself. Put simply, such activities have come to seem self-evidently ‘right’. Of course, hardcore
anti-capitalists fail to be impressed: as Slavoj Zizek notes (2008), ecological visions may well have
become the new ‘opium for the masses’ – and, we should add, mostly the urban-Northern
masses21. Whether addictive for better or worse, the world of urban sustainability projects, cast in
the grammar of a new ‘inspired’ and ‘networked’ environmentalism, seemingly attracts much of
what is around in terms of utopian hopes for a greener future.
5. Wild natures beyond justification – Latour on whaling controversies
What would a human be without elephants, plants, lions, cereals, oceans, ozone or
plankton? […] Less than a human. Certainly not a human (Latour 1998:230)
I place whale eating on the level of cannibalism as barbarous behavior (Paul Watson,
Sea Shephard director, website)
If the domain of green urbanism illustrates how networked capitalism usurps surplus authenticity
from ‘ecology’, then this sense of authenticity quickly fades (to ‘light green’, as it were) when set
against the domain of natures inhabited by ‘wild’ animals. Overall, rising Euro-American concerns
with biodiversity since the 1980s most likely index the way ‘global nature’ has come to be seen as
a preserve of aesthetic and organic differences, whose proliferation – in accordance with Thévenot’s green order of worth – is to be treasured in itself (see Macnaughten 2003; Boltanski & Chiapello 2005:447). Tellingly, in the climatic domain, for instance, the energies of green urbanism
dwindle in comparison to the visual investments made into the sad plight of polar bears, acting as
non-human messengers from a melting Arctic (Yusoff 2010). Most of the time, then, public concern with biodiversity is channeled towards those few select larger-than-life animal species, who
are themselves iconic carriers of the wider ecological cause: pandas, elephants, white tigers, bald
eagles – and, of course, whales (Bowker 2000; Thompson 2002).
Since the 1970s, global assemblages of ‘whaling controversy’ has arguably provided
one of the most striking experimental sites of public action that renders the Latourian more-thanhuman interpretation of political ecology socially plausible (Blok 2007; 2011b). In the contemporary world, few non-humans give rise to affective compassion and political turmoil comparable to
that of whales, as animal quasi-subjects long since invited into the kingdom of ends-in-themselves
21
The question, of course, is whether Zizek’s own grammar of revolutionary events, orchestrated by the
urban poor of the world, carries much social force, beyond marginal groups of ‘climatic radicals’?
13
(see Latour 1991). Within international law, most whale species nowadays enjoy a de facto right
to life, since the 1986 adoption of a moratorium on commercial whaling – and against the fierce
protest of recalcitrant ‘whaling nations’ such as Japan, Norway and Iceland. Meanwhile, in widespread Euro-American public imagination, whales have emerged as near-sacrosanct, intelligent
and friendly creatures (Blok 2008). When it comes to whales, in short, Latour’s singular ecological
beings have indeed become carriers of significant moral standing.
These cultural developments are not lost on Thévenot’s construction of the green order of worth; nevertheless, in this particular domain, his theorizing does seem to fall short of adequately capturing the full implications of ‘non-human charisma’ (Lorimer 2007). In the empirical
cases studied by Thévenot, in France and in the USA, distinctly green justifications often invoke
threats to ‘endangered species’ of animals, and even to the ‘health’ of fish stocks. Analytically,
however, Thévenot subsumes all moral extensions of the community, by which it comes to include the good of non-human natural entities (like whales and other animals), under that particular version of green evaluation known as ‘deep ecology’. In this view, calls for ‘animal rights’ constitute a ‘moral crusade’ that has proven particularly strong in the United States – but one which
breaks fundamentally with established moral requirements (see Lafaye & Thévenot 1993). Indeed,
in this strong version of deep ecology, it seems telling that such arguments only show up, in
Thévenot’s French case, in the guise of an ironic mockery of disproportionate American preoccupations with ‘saving whales’ (Thévenot, Moody & Lafaye 2000:256ff).
While revealing, this analysis also has its analytical shortcomings – and this is where
Latour seems justified (initially, at least) in critiquing the too strong humanist attachments of Boltanski and Thévenot (Latour 1998). In purely empirical terms, Thévenot’s construction of green
worth simply leaves little room for understanding the widespread reality of human attachments
to whales and other charismatic non-humans. Partly, at least, this shortcoming seems attributable
to an overly ‘cognitive’ conception of human engagement with things, portrayed by Boltanski and
Thévenot (1991) as mainly employed in tests of public argumentative credibility. Against this view,
any account of human-whale relations need to pay attention to their often significant affective
charging of public spaces – whether expressed in the aesthetic joys of whale-watching, or in visceral attachments to whale meat eating (Blok 2011b). Far from being a-political, such affective
attachments arguably form the backbone of contemporary whaling disputes; and as Latour notes
(2004), political ecology thus involves a new direction for political passions.
The redirection of political passions onto non-human animals is nowhere more obvious
than in the coordinated efforts of environmentalists, led by Greenpeace, to turn the Japanese
hunting and killing of whales in the Antarctic Ocean into a global media spectacle. Here, dramatic
images of whales in death throes, red blood pouring into the surrounding blue water, is brought
onto television screens and internet websites around the world, orchestrating its own public of
the ‘visually affected’. This setting resembles, in many ways, the social scene analyzed by Luc Boltanski (1998), whereby contemporary Euro-American television viewers are confronted with the
moral exigencies of witnessing the ‘distant suffering’ of the world’s poor and starving populations.
Whereas the distant ‘victims’ in question are here non-human rather than human, the moral registers available when witnessing whale suffering seems much the same: one may denounce the
‘cruelty’ of the Japanese ‘whale slaughterers’, express one’s ‘sadness’ at the sight of ‘innocent’
14
whales dying a ‘painful’ death, and so on22. In such a situation, to be left entirely cold, and to treat
whales as ‘mere objects’ of human disposal, would quickly seem misplaced.
In the vocabulary of Boltanski (1998), then, the political ecology of whale attachments
has, to a significant extent, become a politics of compassion. Initially, as noted, this public assemblage seems to vindicate the Latourian model of political ecology, according to which we would all
be implicated in an open-ended experiment on the proper distribution of ‘greatness’ and ‘smallness’, among humans and non-humans alike, in the new green city. From this Latourian point of
view, it comes as no surprise that such experimentation proves globally controversial, nor that it
introduces considerable uncertainty as to the appropriate moral conventions. This, after all, is
exactly the value of political ecology, according to Latour: to justify the green city, we need to
suspend the certainties of both science and politics, objects and subjects, in search of new ways
of dealing with their mutual attachments (Latour 1998:233). In this process, the ontological forms
of the whale have indeed changed quite dramatically (see Blok 2011b).
At this point, however, Latour’s relative disregard for the constraints of public qualification comes back to haunt his political ecology of non-human attachments. His shortcoming manifests in an inability to distinguish, within the new green city, between situations calling upon a
principle of common equivalence – the basic two-tier metaphysics of justice – and situations, such
as those of love (agape) and violence, characterized by the non-equivalence of involved parties
(see Boltanski & Thévenot 1999). As Boltanski makes clear (1998), a politics of compassion – such
as the one enacted around whales – is an inherently composite situation: owing to the irreducible
distance separating spectators from suffering parties, the ‘world’ (cité) in question tends to elude
any conventional tests of justice. With few available means of closure, this implies that, in compassionate politics, “there is a risk of the controversy becoming interminably unstable” (Boltanski
1998:70). This, indeed, is exactly what has happened with ‘whaling controversies’; and on its own,
Latourian political ecology possesses few means of bringing such (potentially) violently clashing
protagonists back into his parliament of things (Epstein 2003; Blok 2008)23.
In sum, what the experimental site of heated whaling controversies demonstrates, arguably, is the insufficient elaboration – on the part of actors and on the part of theory – of the
collective protocols needed to test the grandeur of particular human-nonhuman attachments
according to the Latourian green city. Perhaps, then, we might plausibly read this as manifesting a
state of transition, from modernization to ecologization – with whales serving, in this narrative, as
a non-human avant-garde for the moral extensions of the more-than-human collective. Even if we
grant this much to Latourian political ecology, however, his theorizing still leaves us short of specifying the character of those “inevitable compromises”, as he puts it (1998:235), into which his
new political ecology must enter with other established worlds of moral sentiment. This is where
the theoretical construction of Boltanski and Thévenot (1991) seems justified in distancing itself
22
Without claiming more than anecdotal status, this is a paraphrase of widespread environmental NGO
language on whale politics, organized according to what Boltanski calls the ‘topics’ of suffering. Hence, the
first part of the sentence illustrates the topic of ‘denunciation’, whereas the second part refers to the topic
of ‘sentiment’. The extent to which an ‘aesthetic topic’ is also at work in public whale rhetoric (beyond my
own invocation of the ‘spectacle’ of whale suffering) is left open for further exploration.
23
So far, like the compassion, most ‘violence’ in whaling assemblages attaches to the non-human participants (the whales); outside of constraints of public civility, however, actors in whaling disputes routinely
make comments of a ‘de-humanizing’ (e.g. racial) character as concerns their (human) adversaries.
15
from the ‘immanentist’ actor-network theory. On his part, however, Latour usefully reminds us
that not everything in the environment is subject to cognitive testing: if it is to mean anything,
political ecology must also entail a new ‘ecology’ of collective passions.
6. Conclusion: on living with/in multiple ecologies?
This paper aims to explore the multiple senses of the ecological, in order to assess how worth is
distributed within, to paraphrase John Dewey (1927), the existing agencies and forms of political
ecology. It does so by invoking an important intellectual exchange from the new French pragmatist scene of the 1990s. Basically, this exchange concerns the trajectory, originality and importance
of ecology as an emerging political project of the 1970s – and it led to (at least) three different,
but partly overlapping, interpretive models. First, Laurent Thévenot set the initial stage, by proposing the emergence of a novel (seventh) ‘green’ order of worth – following his identification,
together with Luc Boltanski (1991), of six historically ingrained grammars of legitimate social
bonds. Boltanski, on his part, went on, with Eve Chiapello (2005), to depict ecology as part of the
contemporary drama, following ‘1968’, of a new spirit of capitalism and its internalization of artistic critiques centered around ‘authentic nature’. Meanwhile, Bruno Latour (1998) undertook to
raise the theoretical stakes further, by dignifying Boltanski and Thévenot’s sociology of political
ordering as a stepping stone towards his own non-humanist political ecology.
To put my analytical conclusion in the sharpest possible form, what the preceding exercise of empirical and theoretical juxtaposition aims to show is that, in their own ways, Thévenot,
Boltanski and Latour all succeed in elaborating plausible models of ecological worth. Contrary to
what the protagonists themselves imply, however, none of those interpretive models quite add
up to a satisfying, context-transcending depiction of the novel ecological order of worth. Rather,
each theoretical construct, so the argument goes, needs to be carefully situated within a set of
more circumscribed, and more partial, spaces of common ecological qualifications – spaces tied to
divergent cognitive-moral developments of ecological conflict and compromise. In other words,
we now need to distinguish analytically between different, co-existing, and partially overlapping
grammars, or common worlds, of ecological worth. One important way of doing this, in turn, is to
note how each grammar has been articulated in social scientific work; giving rise, that is, to the
theories of Thévenot, Boltanski and Latour, respectively.
If, as noted, this argument aims to add multiplicity to pluralism – and to do so in the
domain of the ecological – then it will be important to end this paper by further specifying these
terms and their implications, as best we can. The obvious place to start here is with pluralism, and
more specifically value pluralism, since this is what Boltanski and Thévenot’s sociology of moral
ordering contributes, more than anything, to political ecology. To be sure, the value of nature may
have its ‘monetary aspect’, as Funtowicz and Ravetz (1994) claim – to the extent, that is, that it is
actively qualified (in part by ecological economics) according to a market world of prices, goods
and customers. But nature’s value is equally present in the other orders of worth: as a ‘natural
resource’ to be rationally exploited (industrial); as a ‘collective good’ of equal citizens (civic); as
part of the local ‘heritage’ (domestic); as experiences of ‘sublime grace’ (inspired); and as com-
16
municative signs of ‘trendy popularity’ (fame)24. Even before raising the question of specifically
‘green’ worth, Boltanski and Thévenot (1991) presents us with a useful model of political ecology,
build around the inherent value-pluralism of socio-natural arrangements.
The contributions of Thévenot, Boltanski and Latour on questions of green justification
may all be understood as extensions of this in-build pluralism – albeit to different effects. Thévenot, firstly, adds ecology on top of existing moral orderings, as a novel order of worth; at the same
time, however, he keeps open, as a matter of empirical contingency, the exact degree of specificity of this emerging green city. Boltanski, secondly, depicts ecology – with its ‘aesthetic’ and ‘authentic’ nature – as part of that more general artistic critique of capitalism which has come to
feed, in turn, its new connexionist and projective spirit. Much like Thévenot, however, Boltanski
is ambivalent on the exact implications for a contemporary project of political ecology; except for
claiming that such cannot be fully subsumed under the commodity form. Latour, thirdly, performs
by far the biggest theoretical rupture, associating ecology with a radical overcoming of modernist
ontological strictures. Somewhat incongruently, however, he still holds open the prospect of a
pluralist ‘compromise’ between modernizing and ecologizing projects.
Working further on molding these theoretical constructions of the green city, the paper goes on to situate each of them in dialogue with different domains of contemporary environmental politics, cast as compressed accounts of social scientific case studies. Here, the rise of
transnational carbon markets is seen to resonate with Thévenot’s depiction of a (US-centered)
green-market compromise; the circulation of urban sustainability best practices provides Boltanski’s connexionist spirit of capitalism with a green inflection; and protracted controversies over
whales as charismatic animals lends social plausibility to Latour’s non-humanist political ecology.
Deployed in turn as empirical philosophy, each case also conjures analytical shortcomings: carbon
markets cast doubt on Thévenot’s depiction of ‘sustainability’ as a testable criteria of green
worth; hopes invested in urban sustainability projects suggests a ‘surplus authenticity’ of nature
not accounted for by Boltanski; and the ‘compassionate politics’ of whales dramatize Latour’s
relative neglect of the constraints imposed by conventions of public testing.
This brings us, then, to the theme of multiplicity – the end-point, as it were, of the preceding arguments. Following John Law and Annemarie Mol (2002), multiplicity is taken here to
suggest questions of how modes of ordering (including green ordering) are embedded in language
and materiality – and, importantly, in social science theorizing. Such themes, including the affinities among practical and theoretical work of plural political philosophies, are indeed strongly
present in Boltanski and Thévenot’s sociology. Still, what the notion of multiplicity adds to this
equation is a keen interest in those exact places where different modes of ordering join together,
interfere with each other, and create new complex tensions – as ‘zones of awkward engagement’
(Mol & Law 2002:10; Tsing 2005). Put simply, this paper argues that political ecology is just such a
place. The multiple, in this depiction, is not simply a matter of plural value orders; rather, ecology
itself – the ecological city, that is, of Thévenot and Latour – emerges as a zone of internal overlaps
and tensions. Green worth, in short, is inherently multiple.
24
The importance of the world of fame to contemporary political ecology would be obvious, for instance, if
analyzing the role of popular celebrities as carriers of ecological messages in the mass media.
17
Recast in this light, the theoretical conversations of the new French pragmatist scene,
with which this paper has engaged, may be seen to diffract, in complex ways, a number of internal
tensions within and between the different practical projects of political ecology today. Hence,
Thévenot’s depiction of a green-market compromise resonates with, but may also critically reflect
upon, the widespread moral project of ‘eco-modernizing’ societies’ use of natural resources. Boltanski’s dialectic of capitalism and its critiques, mediated through the new projective spirit of mobility and innovation, speaks to well-known dilemmas of professionalized and ‘networked’ environmentalism. In turn, Latour’s construction of green worth enters an existing territory, shaped
not least by ‘non-anthropocentric’ environmental ethics, of working towards a radically novel
distribution of affective and moral passions in a more-than-human world threatened by ecological
collapse. As such, each theoretical model helps us, in important ways, to articulate more clearly
the moral and political potentials embedded in situated ecological projects.
What, finally, does this conclusion imply about the likely fate(s) of political ecology?
Clearly, no definitive answer can be provided here; but two modest proposals suggest themselves.
First, if the depictions of this paper are anything to go by, then political ecology is a less coherent,
more internally varied, and more morally diverse ensemble of projects than what is commonly
assumed – including by Thévenot, Boltanski and Latour. Learning to differentiate senses of green
worth, and to apply their justifications and critiques according to situational opportunities, would
then be an important task for practical political ecology. Second, and reflexively, social scientists
will need to attend more closely to such divergent senses of ecological worth – or, paraphrasing
Mol (2002:164ff), to the permanent possibility of alternative ecological configurations. The question of ecological worth is as yet unsettled, a project for the future. Once we accept that “reality
leaves us in doubt” (in Mol’s nice phrase), it becomes all the more urgent to seek, justify, critique,
and otherwise live the ecological good – in this, that, or the other of its guises.
7. References
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Blok, Anders (2011b): ‘War of the Whales: Post-Sovereign Science and Agonistic Cosmopolitics in
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18
Boltanski, Luc & Thévenot, Laurent (1991 [2006]): On Justification: Economies of Worth. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Boltanski, Luc (1998): Distant Suffering: Morality, Media and Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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