Contenu du sommaire : Écologie et politique, vingt ans après?

Since 2006, France has known a new wave of climate skepticism in the media, initiated by the geochemist and former minister Claude Allègre. The article identifies the main advocates of this skepticism and the common features of their discourses, beyond the diversity of the individual motives. Media climate skepticism is not the expression of a scientific controversy nor a second expert evaluation, but a sophism borrowing with distortion the arguments of the scientific debate in favour of ideological aims. The article offers an analysis of the reasons of its media success, and emphasizes the disconcerting convergence of the climate skeptical positioning and that of some researchers in social sciences who equate scientific statements and social discourses, and turn the science's results down on the interests interplays of its producers and its users.

The journal Natures Sciences Sociétés (NSS) will be 20 years old next year, one year after Écologie & Politique. The author goes back on the historical moment of their birth by reminding the parallelism of their aims : combining the political with the scientific. Interdisciplinarity as a practice around research subjects and issues linking natural sciences and social sciences is at the heart of NSS. Considering only geography, the author tries to take stock of the initial expectations.

At a time when, down the most dramatic economic crisis, what is at stake is nothing else than the future of the biosphere as the carrier of all life, we must understand that the only paradigm likely to last will be the bioeconomic order. “Bioeconomy” is not a new discipline, nor another branch of the economy, but the whole economy subordinated to the respect of the regulating mechanisms by which the biosphere ensures its reproduction.

If we adopt the point of view of the poor, we can interpret the development of capitalism (or general market system) as a Raubwirtschaft (or an economy of continual and increasing plundering) so as to encourage capital accumulation and cover the expenditures of the rich. So considered, the social movements of the poor often have an ecological content (maybe only implicitly) when they try to maintain the natural resources out of the financial, commercial economy, under common control.

The United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development held in June 2012 (UNCSD Rio+20) has disappointed many participants and observers. Its results are seen as somewhat inadequate in the face of the urgency of the ecological, social and economic situations and no clear alternative has emerged. In a context of global financial crisis and of transformation of geopolitical relations in favour of emergent nations, Rio+20 marks a return to the logic of realpolitik. Not only does multilateralism seem exhausted, but an integrated vision of sustainable development is losing steam to the hard form of developmentism still promoted in the deregulated world market. The increasing presence of the private sphere in the modes of management of the environment and the incapacity of the international community of truly taking into account the finitude of resources are manifestations of this political realism. Rio+20 reveals the difficulties that social movements (be they those present at the People's Summit or those accredited to partake in the official conference) have in truly impacting on international politics. Although it is difficult to draw a definitive assessment of Rio+20 so soon after the end of the conference, nothing seems to predispose the structuration – nevertheless urgent – of institutions and paradigms that will facilitate a politics of the Anthropocene.

Resting on the works of Michael Bess, this paper analyses the historical conditions of the modernization of France from 1945; it then dissects the ambiguities of the implementation of a French state environmental policy from 1971, in the context of the emergence of political ecology.

Despite increasing references on the spatial concentration of environmental problems or the economic externalities in various areas, the ecological thought did not really evoke the social inequalities. Since a few years, this thematic invades scientific journals and official reports. But this success lies on an obviously vague definition articulating very diverse scales and issues, and results perhaps from a symptom : the compensation of the impossible decrease of the ecological problems within the framework of the growth economy, by the reduction of the related social inequalities. This article shows what this concept brings and forgets. It insists, on one hand, on the existing holes in the reasoning and the data, and, on the other hand, on the contradictions of a prospect which is likely to lead to a dilution of the nuisances without reducing them, and to much more important social inequalities in the years to come than those that are recorded nowadays.

The pursuit of an ecological and socially virtuous economy requires to carry out five structural reforms in order to modify the behaviours of the individuals and the corporations: passing from plurimoneratism to monomonetarism; getting it over with the limited companies status; changing the accounting rules of corporations; challenging absolute individual property; and finding an alternative to consumerism.

After more than one year of mobilisation against the shale gas, the article goes back on the origin and growth of this protest movement in France. On behalf of environmental protection, this fast mobilization has had immediate success, leading to the creation of a certain political unanimity resulting in some first victories. The article tries to take stock of this movement and identify its specific characteristics.