Contenu du sommaire : Revenir à la terre ?

The so-called global land rush has drawn new attention to land, its uses and value. But land is a strange object. Although it is often treated as a thing and sometimes as a commodity, it is not like a mat: you cannot roll it up and take it away. To turn it to productive use requires regimes of exclusion that distinguish legitimate from illegitimate uses and users, and the inscribing of boundaries through devices such as fences, title deeds, laws, zones, regulations, landmarks and story-lines. Its very “resourceness” is not an intrinsic or natural quality. It is an assemblage of materialities, relations, technologies and discourses that have to be pulled together and made to align. To render it investible, more work is needed. This Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers Plenary Lecture uses an analytic of assemblage to examine the practices that make up land as a resource. It focuses especially on the “statistical picturing” devices and other graphic forms that make large-scale investments in land thinkable, and the practices through which relevant actors (experts, investors, villagers, governments) are enrolled. It also considers some of the risks that follow when these large-scale investments land in particular places, as land they must.

This paper examines the epistemological differences between the theoretical frameworks of conventional agronomy and agroecology. The analysis focuses more specifically on their methods for administrating living's variations, meaning ecological, evolutionary and behavioural dynamics. Through a synthesis of the historical conditions of the emergence in France, of agronomic sciences, we attempt to isolate more precisely the postulates and protocols which have led to the institutionalization of conventional agronomy as the dominant model. We also try to emphasize how this historical structuration of agronomic sciences in a nomological-prescriptive paradigm is a condition of possibility for an objective alliance between agronomy and industry. As an alternative to the dominant model, this paper hypothesizes that a specific form of ecological inquiry, historical and situated, which structures the various agroecologies, and particularly permaculture, could be a better way to inform renewed agricultural practices, answering both political and scientific erosion of the dominant agronomic model, and the systemic ecological crisis it is partly responsible for.

This article intends to formulate an environmental grammar in terms of diplomatic cohabitation with living beings, on a land understood as home to biotic communities: as the ground we inhabit, and which constitutes the basis of our livelihood. This grammar is outlined as a narrative genre of local and circumstantial stories, destined to reconfigure challenging ecological situations and to free the practical and theoretical imagination of social actors, sometimes enclosed by Modernity's grand narratives about man and “nature”.

« Ecological solidarity » has been promoted as a conceptual tool for rethinking ecological and social interdependence and for sketching new relations between humans and non-humans. In so doing, the promotors of the notion challenge the division between subjects and objects which structures the juridical architecture of our modern legal and property order. Ecological solidarity is a multidimensional phenomenon: it is based on the recognition of the interdependences between natural organisms and their physical environment, but it also tends to express a political sense of solidarity (solidarisme) that gives humans the responsibility to become representatives or spokespersons for non-humans. This paper sets out to demonstrate that other forms of ecological solidarity have historically existed, that were neither based on the will of individuals nor on political representation, but were rooted in material forms inscribed in things. Such material solidarities are best observed in the management of water in France after 1789: local institutions, namely associations of private owners that outlived the Revolution, granted rights to pieces of land rather than human subjects; the commoners of these water associations were not humans but pieces of land. Such institutions occupy a privileged place in Ostrom's literature, where they are presented as integral to any lasting management success for land and resources by local or regional communities: Ostrom described them as “empirical alternatives” to the “Tragedy of the Commons.” Distancing itself from the property system imposed during the nineteenth century, which put the subject's will at the heart of the relation between man and land, this historical inquiry shows a reverse image of the relation between man and nature. Contrary to man's traditional representation as master and possessor of nature, the inquiry shows that human actors inscribed themselves within a generational chain and can be viewed as heirs and guests of a previous ecological and social system.

In 1931, in order to defuse fierce peasants' struggles in Uttarakhand (Indian Himalayas), the British colonial state transferred the administration of some common lands from the State to local populations. This paper analyses recent changes in this local policy in the village of Sarmoli. It shows how individuals from the urban elite, recently arrived in the village, set up an informal management committee that sought to deal with the crisis faced by the official management structure. Whereas the commons used to be a system of resources managed by a community of users, they became a collective practice of self-institution and self-government. Yet, by not taking into account all of the inequalities within the village society, the administration of the commons by these new actors have created fresh social distinctions and economic hierarchies in Sarmoli.

This article offers a typology of the back-to-the-land migrations today in Sardinia (Italy). It is based on the assumption that the crisis in the cities of Southern Europe has accelerated the process of upgrading rural areas and agricultural activity. Building on a qualitative investigation, mixing interviews and participant observation, the article distinguishes different trajectories of return to land that show how the crisis acts rather as a trigger, as a catalyst of vocations within diverse profiles of new farmers. Addressed on an individual scale, these back-to-the-land migrations show thus different relationships to land and urbanity.

Associated with the idea of a safe operating space defined by the planetary boundaries, the anthropocene threatens to prevent humanity from returning to Earth, as human consumption and Earth's biocapacity become incommensurable. Against this idea, a group of researchers, named « ecomodernists », invites us to hear the call of the Earth in a different way and to accelerate the decoupling of humanity from nature, for the sake of human well-being, prosperity, and the freedom of wild nature. This ecomodernist narrative nevertheless raises serious issues.

Agrarian Justice is a short book first published in 1797 by Thomas Paine. It exposes both a philosophical reflexion on land property and its political consequences, and a practical plan designed to counterbalance the inequalities caused by this system. In the context of the French Revolution, the author shows that private property of land tends to increase the gap between those who benefit from rent, and those who are excluded from it. Paine's inclusive and egalitarian conception of politics, and his philosophical principles grounded on natural law, lead him to consider as a necessity to fix those inequalities, so the process of civilisation is not hindered. He proposes a universal income law, made possible by a tax on inheritance, to compensate for economic inequalities inherent to modern societies based on private property.

In 1797 Paine published Agrarian Justice, a text in which he defined the conditions of what he called a “state of civilization”, that is, a republic: this requires that the natural right to the existence of the weakest is guaranteed. In this text, Paine criticizes the process of land appropriation that has dispossessed a part of human kind from what was originally a common property. As a compensation and a mean to eradicate poverty, he suggests establishing a universal and unconditional allocation.

Rediscovering land is a speculative exploration of the political and conceptual issues related to the place of soil and land in the redefinition of how we consider the present. This paper confronts three points of view by philosophers Pierre Charbonnier, Bruno Latour and Baptiste Morizot. As a starting point, the dialogue acknowledges a tension that permeates the current political landscape: we share the conviction that land matters again in the face of industrial modernization and the damages it wrought but we also want to resist the conservative, identity-based injunctions of some “back to the land” movements. From this starting point, the three authors sketch the outline of a political thought and sensitivity attuned to the current conjunction of massive global inequalities and climate change.