Ecology/Ontology a Contribution to Historical Naturalism

Contemporary debates in political ecology tend more and more to be held on the on-tological level, where they are recomposed around the following alternative: should one conceive of nature as the order of reality that transcends society and that should be pro-tected from the excesses of the latter? Or should one renounce the very partitioning of nature and society itself in order to imagine new, more sustainable, ecological arrange-ments? Examining both Bruno Latour’s and Jason Moore’s takes on this alternative we argue that it should be overcome in favor of a naturalist and historical ontology of socie-ty inspired by the young Marx’s Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. In this historico-naturalist perspective, social relations indeed appear as both determined by their environmental conditions as well as determining the uses of a collective make of its environment. The interest in this approach is to allow one to conceive of social alienation and environmental destruction as two sides of a same process which should therefore be conjointly addressed.