In Serres’ The Natural Contract published initially in 1990, there was a tendency to think in terms of a contract with nature. His later writing avoids this. Why? In many ecology movements, it is common to talk about finding a new relationship ‘with’ nature, or as a recent GARN podcast says, ‘with Mother Earth’. I don’t think it is pedantic to question this. ‘With’ implies that nature is out there, or at least that we are not part of nature. Even to say ‘with the rest of nature’ which I have used sometimes, implies this separation.
We need to find ways of thinking that underscores our (tiny) place in nature, a nature that has miraculously emerged for nearly 4 billion years. Serres later clarified that his proposal for a natural contract was of all nature which includes ourselves. Everything is already connected or contracted to everything, a set of alliances, codes, attractions that sustain life on earth from gravity, to elements, to atoms, molecules, cells and all living things. Serres believed this insight could be transformative.
Thank you for your thoughtful engagement with Serres’s ecological philosophy. In The Natural Contract, Serres initially uses the language of a juridical contract with nature to provoke us into reimagining our political and ethical responsibilities. However, his later writings move away from the idea of a contract “with” nature because such language continues to presuppose a separation between humanity and the nonhuman world. Serres comes to insist that we are not separate parties negotiating terms, but rather participants in an ongoing, all-encompassing set of relations—alliances, codes, and attractions—that underpin the very possibility of life on earth.
For Serres, to speak of a relationship “with” nature still risks reinforcing the illusion that we stand outside of or apart from it. Instead, his later philosophy underscores our utter entanglement within the complex networks that sustain both humans and nonhumans alike. He seeks to move us beyond binary thinking and toward a vision in which everything is already connected, not by choice or contract, but by necessity and origin. The transformative potential of Serres’s insight is precisely this: recognizing that we are always already within nature, called to rethink our politics and ethics as embedded, not external, to the living, evolving world we inhabit
Thanks Chris that is very helpful.
I can read French. Where would best book to start to give an introduction to his thoughts on the climate crisis? Thanks