Contacts between scientific ecology and the various human and social sciences produce (and the movement is far from over) effects that affect both subjects of these sciences, thus creating sub-disciplines
C. Larrère’s investigation seeks in particular to highlight the type of connection that can unite moral theories and insights from scientific ecology. She is not satisfied with philosophical odes to nature, but focuses on approaches that demonstrate concern for “scientific” information. In fact, since Aldo Leopold and his Almanac of a county of sands (1949), the idea that it is important to go to an “ecology in the first person” (like that of Henry David Thoreau or Ralph Waldo Emerson) has been an “ecology in the third person” (p. 101), informed by the findings of scientific ecology. The moral theories that want to be based on ecological knowledge oscillate between an idea of equilibrium (harmony, symbiosis, etc.) and another for which disturbances are the rule in nature, while equilibrium would only be temporary. For C. Larrère, these scientific findings on which moral theories are supposed to be based can therefore be the subject of varied interpretations that challenge the notion of a purely logical connection between moral theories and ecological knowledge. Therefore, the implications that can be considered to qualify these connections denote less logical consequences than “a consistency between a heterogeneous set of beliefs and knowledge” (p. 109). For the author, this means on the one hand that “constant information work” (p. 114) about this knowledge and an adaptation to it is at work, but on the other hand also a return to ecology. The first person is also necessary – learning ecological knowledge is free not of forms of personal engagement. With regard to the interdisciplinary chapters, Wolf Feuerhahn is interested in the “Categories of Ecological Understanding” by leading a patient exploration of the implications of the terms used in the Academy to describe the environment. That of “Mitte” in particular outlines a fascinating political journey: from the deterministic importance that Hippolyte Taine saw in the 19th century as a product of organization rather than an external impertinence), to his more “democratic” rehabilitation in the 1940s by Leo Spitzer ( who suggested “ambience”) and Georges Canguilhem (who kept “environment”). At the same time, “milieu” is also the concept of the confrontation between the emerging French geography and sociology: Paul Vidal de la Blache makes geography the science of the influences of the local or surrounding milieu, while Émile Durkheim opposes it with a milieu. social overhang, supposedly much more complex than the single “telluric factor” it used to taunt geographers. In recent years, particularly after Gilbert Simondon and Gilles Deleuze, “milieu” has come back, weighted with determinism and an overarching or universal character, to denote an environment and necessarily situated experiences. For his part, Grégory Quenet is interested in this “new field of organization of research” that constitutes the “Environmental Humanities”, of which he examines the dimension of “organization of knowledge” (p. 256), linked to the more general context project-related research funding. When the environmental humanities can rely on ad hoc institutes and private foundations, or even access (larger) loans from the hard sciences, it also increases the precarity of young researchers tenfold.
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