Democracy and Nature: Speaking and Listening

Abstract

This article is about the nature of democracy in environmental politics, with special reference to the issue of representation, and to the issues of speaking and listening. It is argued that politics has always been regarded as concerned with ‘speechifying’, and that this has created problems for politicising environmental issues, many of which have to do with ‘dumb nature’. The work of Bruno Latour is examined in this context as a way of including nature in politics without resorting to extravagant claims about ‘nature speaking’. Latour's epistemological approach to ‘politicising nature’ is discussed, and attention is focused on the importance for the political (and especially democratic) process of ‘listening’ as well as ‘speaking’.