Contrary to popular belief, most conceptions of nature include humans. art_inthecity/Flickr
In this diversity, a particular representation of nature is today often criticized – and sometimes caricatured – by an entire generation of thinkers, in the wake of Philippe Descola and Bruno Latour, passing through the deep ecology d’Arne Naess.
It is nature seen as opposed to the human (and therefore to the spirit, politics, history), a material nature, passive and radically external to us.
This nature is called “naturalistic” or “modern” by these authors, because it seems typically Western: it is seen as a simple reservoir of raw materials, which we come to exploit or contemplate, but always with the idea that human beings and their societies are not part of it, developing on their side, in urban or agricultural spaces which would be exclusively a matter of “culture”.
But is this vision as hegemonic as we think?
A creative process that embraces us
Indeed, the vast majority of definitions of nature, whether we look for them in Western history or in other cultures, tend rather to include man in nature, and to see in it a creative process that embraces us rather than an inert material whole.
This was also the case in ancient Greece where the Phusis it is a creative principle of development, of which humanity is an integral part.
We find a similar idea in the etymology of its equivalents in many languages, such as Hindi Prakṛti (meaning “proliferation”), the Slavic nature (“generation”), Hungarian nature (“vegetable push”), or the Finnish nature (“hidden power”).
Finally, only the Semitic term Obviously (“imprinted imprint”) explicitly expresses a fissist and passive vision of nature, which seems closely linked to monotheism. A very minority vision, therefore, but which has experienced an extraordinary expansion through the Abrahamic religions.
Preserve the natural “heritage”.
This definition of nature as an external and fixed whole has historically been used in the context of nature conservation, modeled on the 19th century.And century on heritage protection; there has often been talk of the protection of “natural monuments”, the ancestor of the concept of “natural heritage”.
With this in mind, the protection of nature had to adopt the techniques and objectives of the conservation of historical heritage: to keep an object in a certain state to prevent its degradation (every evolution being perceived as such), be it a cathedral or a mountain.
We find this vision among the first American environmentalists of the generation of John Muir (1838-1914), and up to Aldo Leopold (1887-1948); the goal is to limit the excesses of industrial society, forcing it to leave some spaces in their initial appearance while exploitation is unleashed elsewhere.
The rapidity with which the great spaces of the America of the pioneers then disappeared under the teeth of the promoters impelled these militants to conserve here and there, on the margins of galloping exploitation, the “ruins” of this bygone America, savage, vestiges of a mythical soon glorified in literature – by James Fenimore Cooper in particular – then in cinema. The logic is openly the same as the ancient remains of old Europe.
But it’s also a view that makes little sense except in America, where colonization led to brutal conquests, accompanied by a creationist ideology that suggests that the wild landscapes so consumed had remained intact since the origin of the world. .
Conservationism vs Conservationism
This conception of a nature “put under glass” largely triumphed for much of the 20th century.And century: this current is called “preservationism”, which seeks to keep areas preserved from any human activity, in a state that one would like to believe to be “virgin”.
He opposed “conservationism”, understood as the rational and sustainable use of biological resources, especially wood, which remained a strategic resource until the Second World War. Gifford Pinchot, creator of the US Forestry Service, was its symbol in the United States.
There are therefore already two conceptions of nature, and of its protection, which collide: one that thinks of nature for human beings, and another that thinks of humanity and nature as two separate worlds.
In Europe, Martin Heidegger’s analysis of a dam on the Rhine, in the question of technique (1954), also compares two conceptions of nature which partially embrace this dichotomy.
Nature – here, the river – is conceived on the one hand as a wild process with its own agent, and on the other, from the point of view of the dam, as a “reserve” which allows the extraction of water and energy.
From laboratories to industrial agriculture
“Nature” as a reserve of resources capable of being rearranged and rearranged for its exploitation finds philosophical justification in Descartes, for whom nature existed extra parts parts : in parts foreign to each other, and inanimate. Descartes also defended the idea that animals are analogous to machines: nature is for the Cartesians a great mechanism.
This is still how engineering sciences – and hence industry – see the world. Indeed, it is on the basis of this paradigm that they have transformed our living environment.
This “extractive” or “productivist” conception of nature, understood as a set of inert resources to be “explored”, is regularly criticized by ecologism, which for its part seeks to place the human within a nature considered as a complex and dynamic system, whose balance is threatened by an exploitation blind to its subtle functioning.
If socialism has set itself the goal of fighting the ravages of the industrial paradigm that treats humans like machines, environmentalism does the same with nature.
Because while the productivist view of nature applies superficially well to inanimate resources, which make up most of our daily contact with nature, in processed form: plastics (oil), concrete (sand, limestone), metals (minerals), etc . – applies less well to the living, as it is animated and embedded in a network of interactions, and cannot be easily manipulated without causing cascading consequences that often go beyond its instigator.
However, the reductionist approach (where life is considered only as a physical-chemical phenomenon), which is often that of laboratory sciences, also remains that of industrial agriculture, which struggles to think about the indirect consequences of its practices over time and in space.
This approach is also at the origin of the limits of this model: an agriculture that exterminates biodiversity and destroys the soil; soils which, despite increasing contributions, end up mineralizing and losing their fertility…
A new synthesis
Some social actors, such as the peasant agriculture network (FADEAR), are bearers of another vision, in which the living (human and non-human) coexist, coevolve.
In terms of ideas, it is a question of developing an ecology of reconciliation, which, like non-European cultures, places humanity at the center of a nature crossed by dynamics, rather than facing an inert stock as the West has imagined for too long.
Far from being a step backwards, ecology rather offers a new synthesis.
Serge Moscovici, one of the founders of French ecology, already stated in the 1960s that it was the productivist vision of nature that gave birth to scientific ecology, and not the other way around.
Scientific ecology proceeds by trying to put nature into equations, to think of it no longer as a set of stocks, but as a system of dynamic flows in permanent interconnection.
He believes that all civilizations determine differentiated “states of nature”, which explains why what they call “nature” is never identical; in industrial society the chicken becomes the most widespread bird on Earth…
When will mechanistic vision end?
These different conceptions of nature coexist or exclude each other depending on the case, and are inscribed in a succession that follows the evolution of society and the challenges that oppose it – from an ontological point of view the living being is sometimes life, chemistry and mechanism .
The reasons for proposing one or the other are epistemic, but also ethical: since humanity is an intimate part of it, should nature be treated simply as a means, or also as an end? itself, to use Kant’s famous formula ?
It’s easy to see, however, why the mechanistic definition dominates: it reflects most of our day-to-day interactions with nature, and it’s the one that benefits the industrial economy.
But, as we see on a daily basis, limiting our worldview to short-term economic rationality benefits no one and, ultimately, not even the economy…
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