1 What is nature’s place within political science? What does ecology mean in geopolitics? This special feature raises the double question of nature as an object of politics and of nature as a potential actor within geopolitics. The geopolitics of nature is obliged to provide a double response—one that, as a knock-on effect, calls into question the very nature of geopolitics.

2 In Europe and elsewhere, ecology has shifted from the periphery to the center of the intellectual debate, because it questions the very possibility of the modern political model and the invention of a post-industrial society. At the national level, ecology is no longer simply the result of various national parties’ political projects; now, it defines their policy matrices.

3 While the politics of “nature” as an object traditionally concerns nature’s integration into national political processes, the geopolitics of nature explores its integration into both national and international political processes. As such, nature is at the core of the European-level Green Deal negotiations, as well as of the global-level Conferences of the Parties (COP) on climate and biodiversity. However, it is now possible to see nature not only as an object, background, resource, or function of politics, but as an agent, [1] actor, [2] or subject [3] of politics.

4 In this new paradigm, the politics of nature is joined by approaches that explore how nature breaks into political processes. For instance, court rulings such as that concerning the Vilcabamba River in Ecuador have allowed natural entities to gain legal status. [4] Philippe Descola’s contribution to this issue highlights the Whanganui River in New Zealand, the Atrato River in Colombia, and the experiments around the Loire in France: “This is a deep shift that raises the matter of the political representation of non-humans. It contrasts with attempts to extend individualism beyond humans alone to a very reduced number of animal species that present certain similarities—whether cognitive or in their sensibilities—with humans. Giving legal personhood to an environment allows us, in my opinion, to break out of the individualism that has developed since the eighteenth century in European political philosophy.” [5]

5 Moreover, numerous contemporary works challenge the very notion of space that underpins the traditional genealogy of geopolitics. The ecological crisis, by definition, questions the idea of a flat, inert, partes extra partes space that lends itself to conquest and extraction, and to the zero-sum games between nation-states. In this issue, Bruno Latour points out how the geopolitical paradigm is built on the assumption that space “exists to be occupied and is exclusive, meaning that if you’re in it, others can’t be too. This perspective is built on the idea of a more or less flat surface, for which the metaphor of a chessboard is often used. In geopolitics, this chessboard doesn’t only define the space within each of the nation-states; each country also has a definition of the exterior. And these definitions of the exterior are constantly in flux. Thus, an exclusive group of people ‘own the space,’ and there is a power that distributes the pieces on the global chessboard. Ecology forces geopolitics to reconnect with the ‘geo’ dimension, greatly complicating the chessboard.” [6]

6 A geopolitics of nature cannot therefore limit itself to examining how nature is integrated as an object into national and international political processes. Instead, it must consider how nature breaks into the frameworks inherited from classical geopolitics, emerging as an actor with the right to political representation and reconfiguring our conceptions of space, territory, sovereignty, enemies, borders, and the state.

7 Are the twin (geo)politics of nature as object and as agent compatible, or are they mutually exclusive? This issue will retrace the steps that have led us from the abstract, singular politics of nature to the concrete, plural politics of nature; from the geopolitics of nature as resource to the diverse geopolitics of nature as agent; from the single, universal cosmopolitics of nature to the varied cosmopolitics of living things; and which finally oblige the geopolitics of nature to tackle the nature of geopolitics itself.

The politics of nature

8 Romain Gary had a laconic anecdote to illustrate the progress made since the last century. Igor Krtolica includes it in the opening of his investigation on the sources of the contemporary ecological conscience, despite its being not entirely substantiated: “In 1956, I found myself at the table of a well-known journalist, Pierre Lazareff. Someone mentioned ‘ecology.’ Of the twenty people present, only four knew what it meant.” [7] Since then, awareness about ecology has grown broader and denser, nourished by a series of texts that Igor Krtolica reviews here.

9 In the scientific realm, Silent Spring by Rachel Carson “warns of the damage that the use of synthetic pesticides causes to ecosystems, in the water, soil, air, and living organisms,” while Limits to Growth serves as an example in the economic sphere. In philosophy, we see Arne Næss, “who spearheaded critique of modern Western anthropocentrism,” and Peter Singer, whose Animal Liberation is the “first anti-speciesist manifesto, contributing both to the growth of the animalist movement and to the development of environmental ethics.” [8]

10 To these, Igor Krtolica adds a work that he describes as one of the forgotten matrices of contemporary ecological thought: The Roots of Heaven by Romain Gary. Themes of social ecology run deep in this work; “the idea that it isn’t humans or humanity in general that are responsible for destroying living environments, but the capitalist and materialist economy of industrial societies, and the ideology of technological progress that comes with it, culminating in the nuclear threat.” We also find the theme of decolonial ecology, and “the idea that the representation of nature is a representation typical of modern Western people from industrialized countries, nostalgic about a fantastical wild nature, which those in the US call wilderness.” Finally, the ecofeminist argument holds that “the domination and exploitation of nature in the modern age is the fruit of a masculine logic of power, which makes feminist struggles and ecological struggles into a common cause.” [9]

11 These literary, scientific, economic, and philosophical works contribute to an ecological awakening whose ramifications have trickle-down effects. Some of these are specific to the (geo)political field. On one hand, the global nature of the ecological crisis forces individuals, capitals, and states to shift their gaze toward the exterior, as it reveals its own cosmopolitical horizon with its own possibilities [10] and limitations. [11] On the other hand, the contemporary ecological awakening is manifested in the return, in intellectual debate, of the relationship to place, to anchorage, and to dependence at the local level, which reshapes concrete political frameworks. [12] These two viewpoints are quite different from one another, but they are not contradictory. In fact, the approaches explored in this special feature attempt to think of them concurrently.

12 Despite the relative weakness of the tools at its disposal to understand this double mutation, geopolitics must try to do so—or risk cutting itself off from changes happening in the world. To this end, it is worth borrowing the learning points from a comparison used (in a different context) by Gilles Deleuze in an interview recorded for posterity. [13] In it, he explains that in the vast majority of cases, mailing a letter in Europe involves writing the recipient’s name on the envelope, followed by the street, city, region, and country—which isn’t necessarily the case elsewhere. Mailing addresses outside the West rarely go from the small political entity to the large. In China, Korea, Japan, and Taiwan, for example, they start with the country, followed by the province, city, and street number. The individual’s name comes last. [14]

13 In one part of this posthumously broadcast interview, Deleuze points out that politics, too, can start from the individual and proceed outward, or take the reverse route. Deleuze’s comparison had a different goal and context: reflecting on individuality, he aimed to distinguish two ways of doing politics based more on a different perception of the world than on an ideological framework. However, the example of the mailing address may still serve to distinguish two similar geopolitical perspectives: one proceeding from interior to exterior, and the other from exterior to interior.

The cosmopolitical horizon

14 In this context, the contemporary ecological awakening first and foremost brings into play a cosmopolitical horizon, as described by Catherine and Raphaël Larrère: “Nature is understood through the medium of social networks, which are international. […] [T]his social construction—which is not a baseless invention—has made the climate into a global object. An object that wasn’t always a given: the need to harmonize measures of the quantity of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere required an international agreement among experts and, as a result, social and political conditions.” This social and scientific construction is borne by civil, institutional, and political bodies such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), or the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). [15]

15 Lucien Chabason highlights the extent to which this cosmopolitical awareness is at once social, scientific, and political: “Protection of the biosphere and of its constituent elements, which are indissociable from human life, is a necessity that can rarely be contained within national borders, whether it concerns major river basins, seas and oceans, migratory species, or massive tropical forests. In parallel, globalization and its different components—such as climate change, trade, energy, tourism, transport, or large-scale distribution of chemical substances—are factors […] that affect the living world. So it makes sense that protecting the biosphere, among the common goods, has become a legitimate area of international cooperation. Collective responses to transnational ecological challenges necessarily involve organized cooperation hinging on the rules and institutions established by states over time, and which form the basis of international governance. This latter fundamentally rests on cooperation between states, even if it has expanded over recent decades to include other actors within civil society. […] As such, cooperation for the biosphere becomes a component of global political ecology and is, in turn, subject to the unpredictable forces of international political life.” [16]

16 This interlacing of biotic, abiotic, political, economic, technical, and diplomatic interests raises a fundamental question: If we want to protect the environment, is it better to act, or not act? At the COP26 in Glasgow, Greta Thunberg branded the summit a failure, because “it should be obvious that we cannot solve a crisis with the same methods that got us into it in the first place.” [17] And yet, the question is much more complex. Instead of setting up an opposition between intervention and abstinence, we ought to understand the different modes of intervention and identify the potential of each. The case of climate geo-engineering, problematized here by Sofia Kabbej and Élise Doumergue, brings this complex dilemma into focus. Can we use the problem to find the solution? According to the authors, “the Anthropocene, the geological period in which human activity has a global incidence on Earth systems greater than all other natural factors, is at once reinforced and tested by geo-engineering.” [18]

17 The global outlook of the scientific, political, and diplomatic communities therefore has its own power of action and explanatory potential. European politics, both in its study and its conduct, has for a long time approached things the other way round: interior first, followed by exterior. The European Union of the twenty-first century starts from Brussels and extends outward to the periphery. European states of the twenty-first century start from their capitals and move outward. Equally, the large-scale historical trajectories explain why twenty-first century Europeans tend to start with the individual as a political, economic, and moral criteria, expanding outward from there. Reversing the perspective can therefore open the door to other spaces, other territories, and other sovereignties. To break the political deadlock, young Europeans have encouraged the European Union to “curb its damaging institutional infighting and be more prepared to look at issues from the outside in—rather than from Brussels out.” [19] The ecological challenges posed by climate change similarly oblige national chancelleries to work counterintuitively: from the bottom up and from the outside in, rather than from the top down and from the inside out. As an antidote to radicalized individualism, new kinds of communities and commons are springing up across the continent. This reversal of perspective may well rekindle the development of public policies at all levels.

The politics of nature

18 The cosmopolitical aim nonetheless comes with its own set of difficulties. According to Catherine Larrère, the global scale of the issue engenders a “double incapacity. First, a political incapacity—because there is no world government, and therefore no way to directly impose binding measures that all states must respect. […] Also, for many reasons, with greater generalization comes greater loss of democracy in political institutions. Aside from this, there is an epistemological dimension: global knowledge becomes less precise as soon as you go down in scale. This is clear at the climatic level, and it’s even clearer at the level of biodiversity.” Raphaël Larrère adds: “All the IPBES and the IPCC can do is alert decision-makers—who have often already made the decision to do nothing—and by doing so, appeal to a world governance that doesn’t exist. With its data on biodiversity, the IPBES thinks of species like stocks that vary over time and according to major geographical regions. But if I want to intervene to protect biodiversity in a particular region, of course I need to know which species are present; even more so, what their interactions are […] and what factors are weakening them. In one place, the major weakening factor could be neonicotinoids or pesticides in general, and in another, something else. The action and the political struggles we can engage in are therefore necessarily at a relatively local level.” [20]

19 For some of the impasses faced by the cosmopolitical aim, this means reversing the lens and inverting the motion, designing “politics that start from real movements rather than imposing a global vision from the top, which is both cognitively reductionist and politically powerless.” [21] Yet we also don’t want to start from “individuals” to build collectives, as we saw with the mailing address metaphor. Both Bruno Latour’s and Philippe Descola’s arguments in this journal describe nature’s local intelligence and the need to find ways of seeing the world and of living on Earth that “localize the global”: “It’s not about forgetting the global, but about understanding it from the starting point of the local. […] It isn’t just ‘think global and act local,’ it’s thinking about the global within the local, at another scale. That scale could be the state, but not the world level—already at the level of Europe, it’s problematic. And then, in the epistemological realm, we have seen how catastrophism runs riot as soon as we start talking globally, [22] while it is hardly ever found locally.” [23]

20 Catherine Larrère and Raphaël Larrère draw a distinction between destructive globalization on one hand and diversity-respecting mondialisation on the other. “Globalization is the unifying perspective characteristic of the philosophy of Western history: a perspective of homogenization through the market, but also the perspective of the IPCC and international institutions, which comes from the top down.” This likewise entails a top-down history of the environment, “that of a unified scientific community, along with international organizations and negotiations.” Meanwhile, “mondialisation […] is attentive to diversity […]. Its process comes from the bottom up. […] It follows that we need two histories of the environment, because the story we know today is the one that came from the top down. […] The history of struggles, of the methods that collectives invent in order to live and produce differently, to live on Earth differently, to jointly change relationships to nature and to humans, is a history that remains to be written.” [24]

21 The writing of this alternative history of the environment has been in the works since the second half of the twentieth century. Igor Krtolica distinguishes four main veins, which he calls anthropocentrism, pathocentrism, biocentrism, and ecocentrism: “Sometimes, it seems that humans’ only object of moral consideration is humans themselves, and that any responsibility toward nature is actually nothing more than an indirect responsibility toward humans; that of preserving the rights of humans (anthropocentrism). Sometimes, it seems that any animal that can suffer is the object of our moral consideration, that all suffering is wrong because it denies the animal’s effort to live (pathocentrism). Sometimes, it seems that life as a whole has its own intrinsic value: that of every living thing, both plants and animals (biocentrism). And sometimes, it seems that the biosphere itself, that is, the whole of nature, is the object of our concern (ecocentrism).” [25] These distinctions shed light on the motives underlying the shift from an abstract politics of nature, in which nature is an object, toward a local politics of nature, in which it is a “subject.”

The geopolitics of nature

22 Geopolitics is not immune to today’s growing ecological awareness, despite its limited capacity to understand it correctly. In fact, these current shifts cast doubt on the very underpinnings of classical geopolitics, starting with the notion of space as a flat surface to be conquered and dominated. Bruno Latour evokes the recent situation involving French submarines and the cooperation treaty signed by the US, the UK, and Australia in the Indo-Pacific [26] to argue that the traditional metaphor of the chessboard has lost its explanatory potential: “Realists would say that we absolutely must continue to explore these questions, and I am sure they’re right, but if the chessboard is going to be impacted by the arrival of the new climate regime, we can’t be sure that it serves a purpose.” He cites Adam Tooze, who wrote that “new US warships are being built in military bases next to the sea, which will be flooded before the new ships are usable. This is a neat illustration of how the chessboard is now just one element within a completely different system. […] [I]f the chessboard now exists within a world that is, itself, in transformation—caused by your own actions—classical geopolitics becomes very difficult to pursue.” [27]

23 As a result, the geopolitics of nature calls into question the nature of geopolitics because the notion of “nature” is in fact “the term we used to designate the exterior and space when partitioning the world into nation-states. And these nation-states needed the notion of ‘nature’ because, for them, it designated the world of objects; the world of resources; the world to be conquered, comprehended, discovered.” [28] And this is a “gross simplification.” A geopolitics of nature must therefore take into consideration the “elements traditionally lumped together in the word-object ‘nature’ but that actually go further than nature; they are entities that react to our actions. They include rivers, the atmosphere, animals, viruses, etc. None of this can be easily integrated into the notion of geopolitics.” [29]

24 As such, the work of constructing a geopolitics that integrates the developments made within political ecology and Earth systems remains to be done. Can Europe contribute to this work, or is it condemned to classical geopolitics? As its birthplace, must it also remain its prisoner? This is not an easy question to answer. Philippe Descola recalls that “initiatives to give rights or legal personhood to living environments are on the rise. There is something fundamental in this movement: the ability to exercise a right for a human in a place is no longer connected to their personhood, in line with the definition of human rights that has dominated for two centuries. Instead it is connected to their dependence on a place, the place being the legal source of the legitimacy of the occupation of a space. It’s a reversal of the theory of appropriation, which is interesting in that it is no longer humans who appropriate Earth, but Earth that appropriates humans. And it’s what they’re saying at Notre-Dame-des-Landes: ‘We’re not defending nature, we are nature defending itself.’” [30] These experiences force Europe and Western naturalism to face their contradictions.

The geopolitics of the living

25 And yet, notions of land and territory have always been present in European thought and have always brought the political, geopolitical, and cosmopolitical realms into coexistence. This is why Europe might also be the birthplace of other versions of the ideas of space, territory, and sovereignty. As Philippe Descola explains: “We sometimes forget that, before the Peace of Westphalia, Europe was a series of archipelagos, with the Hanseatic League, Venice, Genoa and their trading posts, monastic networks, military orders, etc. Before the nation-states were solidified, Venice was a kind of multinational, like Microsoft today, and the merchant cities of the North were analogous to the first common market.” During the medieval period, the sovereign powers of the lord, the king, and the pope were superimposed like a palimpsest: “You only had to travel a few kilometers on your horse to find a system quite different from the one you’d left, going from a city-state to the pope’s territory. There were common institutions, but even the relationships to the territory were different. We have lost this habit for diversity.” [31]

26 At the same time, Europe sought to export the nation-state beyond its own borders. One of the difficulties brought by the “generalization of the ‘state’ form is that this causes us to think in simplified terms about how we conceive of a political space.” [32] Finally, the Old Continent invented a semi-supranational institutional framework that took the form of the European Union. Bruno Latour sees Europe as the site of a “painful and bureaucratic experimentation” that remains the most interesting cosmopolitical test ground: “It doesn’t exactly represent a move beyond nation-states, nor is it a movement toward the international. In fact, I think ‘a mess’ sums it up quite well. It’s a very strange kind of power […]. We’re at a great advantage to have the experience of Europe as a means to explore future alternatives to this profound reshaping of space.” [33]

27 Taking contemporary experimentations as a starting point, how do we then fashion a geopolitics that will reignite a questioning of notions of space, territory, and sovereignty? One that could integrate our dependence on temperatures, soya, water, and biodiversity? According to Bruno Latour, this “obsesses everyone, from those opposing the use of lithium in Chile to those fighting for the communal agricultural policy within Brussels. No one still believes in a simple definition of chessboard disputes. As we’ve seen with the submarine business between France and Australia, such disputes still exist, but as a kind of chessboard layer of geopolitics slotted inside a larger geopolitics with multiple entry points.” [34] He further points out that Carl Schmitt “saw that space is never a geometric space, but always a space of conflict. […] It follows naturally that the idea of an isotropic space within which power relations are situated appears to be a complete fallacy: rather, it is power that creates the spaces and distributes them.” [35]

The cosmopolitics of living things

28 Philippe Descola connects this new conception of geopolitics more specifically to the various ways in which humans occupy their environment: “The most important question is that of the relation between the different niches and those who occupy them.” Within animism, the existence of collectives does not presuppose a human monopoly on politics, nor a separation of politics from nature: “What we see is human and non-human collectives—with their own adornments, costumes, habitat, houses, tools, and language—that differ from one another as species and that, especially for humans and animals, have to coexist in a single space that includes them all while occupying different living environments.” [36]

29 But this doesn’t resolve the question that a new geopolitics of living things poses to cosmopolitics: How do we connect the different scales, politics, and world views within systems that are likely to coexist? In this issue, Philippe Descola starts to flesh out the idea of a cosmopolitics of living things: “It involves constructing worlds based on different formulas from those we have used for two centuries and, at the same time, ensuring that the forms of world-construction are compatible with one another. In contrast to what we currently see, it is crucial that we avoid any one of these forms becoming dominant and acting as a steamroller that ends up subsuming all other forms into its own space. That’s the major challenge: how to allow ontological pluralism. […] How can we build a cosmopolitical pluralism that doesn’t result in a generalized conflictuality between entities of distinct size and nature (egalitarian communes, multinationals, states, Mafia organizations, etc.) caused by disparities in military and demographic force?” [37]

30 This is undoubtedly one of the key challenges facing contemporary geopolitics. Unlike Ariadne in the labyrinth, it doesn’t have a thread to lead it through the pluralism of these world views, to help it fathom a cosmopolitical coexistence of living things. The Roots of Heaven urged us to “take up and take further that vital creative movement that dates from the time before humans, and promises freedom from the human condition” [38]—which, perhaps, gives us the beginnings of an answer. ■