Contenu du sommaire : Le rapport à la nature

Jean-Paul Deléage, Daniel Hemery, From Ecohistory to World Ecology From prehistoric times human activity has transformed ecosystems. But it has been since the rise of industrial capitalism that a certain historical threshold has been reached. At the end of the Twentieth Century the creation of a world productive space implies the ecological unification of the world. The accelerated destruction of living species, pollution of the oceans, and the hole in the ozone layer threaten the planet Earth. These developments parallel previously existing environmental tensions such as deforestation and desertification. In creating a world economy, capitalism in its classical forms as well as in its « socialist » incarnations has projected societies into a new relation with nature, that of a world ecology.

Monique Chemiluer-Gendreau, International law and the relations between modern societies and nature Whether domestic or international, law is deficient in as much as it pertains to nature. For a long time, awareness of the phenomenon remained localized. Since the 1970s, international law has developed an abundant but ineffectual discourse in this field. It is necessary to reflect about the possibility of integrating juridical concepts of the international protection of the environment with logical systems of positive law. For a long time nature has been a source of law (natural law) rather than the object of its regulation. The conception of natural harmony provided a philosophical foundation for economic liberalism. The image of nature as a victim needing protection developed very late, and engendered a legislation of reparation rather than a legislation of prevention. The objective of such legislation is, in fact, less the protection of nature than the protection of financial interests. The domestic and international juridical mechanisms have developed as means of insurance. Consequently, they are not well-equipped to deal with ecological disasters as challenges or crimes or to apply a system of sanctions rigorous enough to have a preventive effect.

Bernard Charbonneau, Ecology, geographical space, and historical time The originality of ecology is that it is a synthetic science studying complete, natural ecosystems. It has inspired an « ecology » movement, denouncing the threats that the industrial system poses to nature defined as the planetary ecosystem inhabited by humankind. Two other synthetic disciplines could complement an ecology limited to nature : geography and history. Geography studies natural and human systems within the framework of local and planetary space, as history does within the framework of time. But the accumulation of information forces geography and history to become more and more scientific, technical and specialized. These disciplines risk betraying their mission of synthesizing knowledge within space and time. Can ecology, geography and history be combined in the development of a living, natural and cultural understanding of the environment ? Is this possible given the present state of scientific research ? Is this the affair of the sciences only ?

Alain Bihr, Ecology and the labor movement Centered on the analysis of the relations between the labor movement and the ecology movement, this article first sums up the issues of the ecological crisis : the long term survival of humanity, the functioning of « industrial societies » and the short term implications for democracy. The second part of the article shows how the ecological crisis is rooted in the process of the reproduction of capitalist productive relations, in particular in the subordination of utility value to exchange value, and in its productivist « logic». This analysis leads to the conclusion that the struggle for a healthy environment must be informed by an anticapitalist perspective and that the labor movement must be aware of it. However, and this is the third part of the article, such a struggle will not be possible until the labor movement overcomes the narrowness of its perspective. The labour movement must entertain more sophisticated models of a post-revolutionary society and must change its culture from one which conceives the technical domination of nature to one which aesthetically appropriates nature.

Jean Paul Deléage, Daniel Hemery, Marxism and Ecology-Critiques of Political Economy Nature is a blind spot common to diverse economic theories. However, all economic phenomena have three dimensions : economic, sociocultural and natural. Bioeconomy reveals conflicts of logic between economic constraints and ecological regulations. While in all former societies production met its limits in consumption, with capitalism economic regulation by exchange value does not present any break on the exploitation of nature. In the so-called socialist societies, the accumulation of capital under state direction proceeds from a comparable logic, just as incompatible with natural constraints. After having dissected the mechanisms of the exploitation of the workforce, marxists must integrate the findings of bioeconomy and ecology with the critique of political economy.

Andrei Monine, Stagnant Waters in the USSR The closing of the straits of Kara-Bogaz, the catastrophe of the Aral Sea, the transformation of millions of acres of land into marshes — these are some of the most tangible results of absurb, bureaucratic management of water resources in the Soviet Union. It is a management which has not produced any positive results. These ecological catastrophes however have not convinced the partisans of major hydralic projects in Siberia to give up their destructive plans. Non-treated waste from the large cities and from industry, such as cellulose by-products from Baikal, like the run-off from the use of chemicals in agriculture, poisons water and accelerates the eutrophization of the lakes. It is urgent that a commission be empowered to carry-out on of the most noble combats of our time, the combat fur the ecological security of our planet.

Klaus Schlüpmann, Nature and Greening : the Green Opposition in the German Federal Republic In Germany the ideology of nature has deep roots in the whole history of the country's industrialization. The society in general and the working class movement in particular have consistently been confronted with an ideology centered upon a return to nature and shared by the populist right and the eco-socialists. Beginning in the 1960s the new social movements raised again problems of citizenship and sovereignty in relation to new technological risks such as those posed by nuclear power. In the regressive political context of the German economic miracle, the emergence of the Greens was the sign of the opening of a real laboratory of cultural and political opposition which was soon followed by important electoral successes. Without denying the importance of the Greens' social and ecological analysis, upon which their activity is based, any social science worthy of the name must go beyond the present orientation of the Greens in order to deal with the necessary resocialization of political life focused on the deepening of the concept of nature as a social category.

Jean-Louis Margoun, The difficulty of being « green» in a green country : environment and land use planning in Malaysia The idea is now accepted that ecology is not a « problem of wealth », or that it is peripheral to economic questions, but rather that it should be viewed as being at their center. This is especially true for a rapidly « developing » country like Malaysia where the authorities must make quick decisions, good or bad, affecting the future of the country. The present picture is rather bleak. The accelerated destruction of the tropical forests wastes an important natural resource and ruins the habitation of indigenous populations. Industrial pollution has assumed dramatic proportions on a local level, including the desecration of coastlines and the uprooting of fishing communities. As far as large cities are concerned, the imitation of North-American standards of urbanization, like the weakness of environmental controls, makes most of them difficult to live in. It is a good thing that a combination of the action of NGO specialists and elements among the concerned populations have provoked a nex consciousness of the seriousness of the situation.

Magda Zanom, Environment and Development the Ecology Movement in Brazil Since its colonization in the Nineteenth Century, the land and soil of Brazil have been subjected to an uninterrupted series of ravages : cycles involving extraction of wood resources, sugar cane and cotton, gold, coffee, hevea, and soja. In the second half ot the Twentieth Century, the new paths of development inaugurated by different governments follow a model of agro-industrial exportation which has dramatically accelerated previously established patterns of environmental destruction. This process is culminating today in grandiose projects such as the colonization of the Amazon and the construction of huge dams (Itaipu, Tucurui) whose potential for ecological and human destruction is mind-boggling. The Brazilian ecology movement has fixed a double objective in refusing to separate the defense of the environment from the development of the well-being of the immense majority of the people.

Christine Fauré, The Wild Woman and Natural Law Philosophy in the Eighteenth Century The discovery of a young, wild girl in France was an event which, twenty years after her capture, inspired an account bearing similarities to popular tales. This account, contemporary to the publication of Rousseau's Discours sur l'origine et les fondements de l'inégalité, aroused much interest at the time. Did the existence of wild men and women prove the claim that a « state of nature » exists ? Rousseau did not go that far, but his point of view in this area remained problematic and paradoxical. The poet Louis Racine and Voltaire, on the contrary, incorporated the event into their philosophical speculations in exactly this way. However, the reality of the event lies in the formulation of a scientific and experimental discourse about the limits of the human, and not in the field of natural law. According to Rousseau and Condorcet, the wild woman, as opposed to the wild man, cannot be seen as a precursor of the social and political environment.

Claude Maillard-Chary, The Surrealists' Sense of Nature Analysis of the sense of nature on which the surrealists focused in order to define it involves the history of their biological thought in relation to natural history in general and evolutionism in particular. First of all, a rereading of the book of Genesis reveals that, through its rejection of traditional systems of classification and its call for a different interpretation of life, surrealism has contributed to the emergence of a new sensibility of which contemporary ecology could be the ultimate product.

Alain Manville and Ulysses Santamaria, Time, History and Revolution The historical vision of the philosophical tradition has always been constructed on a metaphysical and representative concept of time. Marxism is no exception to this abstract representation. However in Marx we find a nex understanding of time, a materialised concept of time which restores to it its true historical dimension, without which the whole project of world transformation is doomed to failure. It is this revolutionary concept of time which refers to the concrete activity of men in which Marx see the principium of all reality which this text attempts to reveal in the most authentic thought of Marx.