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In Le Retour au contrat naturel (2000), French philosopher Michel Serres asserts that the Earth, a global object since we have been able to observe it remotely from space, has progressively become a global political subject, entering into international discussions because of such phenomena as climate change and ozone holes that demand action on an international scale.[1] Without denying the significance of Serres’s interpretation of the Earth as global subject nor the relevance of his concept of the natural contract, I want to explore some of the cultural differences that influence the way in which a group dialogues with the Earth. In this article, I will concentrate on French perceptions, understandings and discussions of the environment.


To begin, it is important to note the ambiguity of the word “environnement” as used in France. While originally meaning any enclosed space (“enceinte”), the word was reintroduced into the French language in the 1960’s as a translation of the English word “environment” to refer more precisely to the group of elements that make up the natural and social conditions in which human beings evolve.[2] Yet the word is not accepted unanimously; Michel Serres, for one, critiques the human centredness of such a term, refusing the Anglophone concept as well as the North American environmentalism associated with it.[3] According to Kerry Whiteside, French political ecology distinguishes itself from Anglophone environmentalism because it refuses to centre (bio-centric, eco-centric, or anthropocentric) a new human ethics of care for nature. In short, nature and the human are seen as ultimately, always and necessarily intertwined.


A recent restructuring of the French ministries transformed the “Ministère de l’Écologie et du Développement durable” (2002) (formerly, the “Ministère de l’Environnement” (1971)) into the “Ministère de l’Écologie, de l’Énergie, du Développement durable et de l’Aménagement du territoire” (2007). What may seem to be a simple evolution of the political scene is, I would argue, a “gallicization” of an environmental movement imported from North-America. While the French initially tried to follow the North American example, founding their first national park in 1963 (Yellowstone National Park was founded in 1872), their current political policies reflect the history of maintaining natural spaces in France, where issues of ecology and environment are bound up with questions of culture, property and economic planning.


An essential element of this history is the role of human perspective in re(con)figuring natural spaces. Following the protection of historical monuments in France (1887), similar laws were instituted to protect – not unsettled, wilderness regions as in the U.S.A. – but rather landscapes as natural monuments. Under the influence of landscape artists and writers, these laws aimed at restoring the beauty of a particular vista that often included human elements.[4] As Larrère explains, the French were concerned with preserving cultural heritage (“patrimoine”) for future generations (forests, coastal areas but also farmed fields, village squares).[5] Nature was and continues to be framed in terms of landscape and cultural heritage in France. (See, for example, the work of theoretical “paysagistes” Augustin Berque and Alain Roger who insist, sometimes fiercely, that what the French must work to (re)create is “landscape,” not “environment”).[6]


What this means for environmental ethics is that there is no specific branch of philosophy that operates under the title “environmental” in France.[7] Yet there are many philosophers whose work is explicitly ecological: Félix Guattari, Bruno Latour, Catherine and Raphaël Larrère, and Michel Serres, to name a few. Bridging the gap between French eco-philosophy and North American environmental philosophy, Catherine Larrère upholds many aspects of Aldo Leopold’s land ethics, yet she includes both the biological and the cultural in her ethics of diversity. On what may seem a very different note, Bruno Latour argues for a more technicized, more humanized, more cared-for nature. Yet his cry for an engaged use of technology to better care for nature echoes in many respects Larrère’s appeal to the “bon usage” (good/wise use) of nature and Serres’s natural contract as a way of re-equilibrating humanity’s relationship to the world.


So what to make of the virulent critiques of green politics and philosophy by French thinkers such as Jean Baudrillard, Gérard Bramoullé and Luc Ferry? Their attacks seem to be an interesting form of misidentification (and oversimplification but I’ll leave that for a much longer article). Baudrillard, Bramoullé and Ferry all mistake French ecophilosophies for a deep ecology à la North American that views humans as superfluous on the road to restoring nature to its “original” state.[8] The strong reaction of these three French thinkers to any sort of “greening” clearly demonstrates how deeply humanism is engrained in the French psyche. In a negative way, they too demonstrate French ecodifference that resists exclusion or extraction of the human from a view of the world.


It is this principle of human integratedness that may explain the curious lack of interest in ecocritical approaches on the part of French literary scholars and theorists. While ecocriticism, the study of cultural representations of nature from an ecological point of view, has become an important alternative theory in North America, it has gone almost unnoticed in France. One might first suppose that ecocriticism is so rooted in North American views of the environment that it is unable to cross national boundaries. And yet there are now groups of ecocritical scholars in Europe (Germany in particular), India, Japan and Korea. So why has France remained an exception?


In one of ecocriticism’s founding theoretical texts, Lawrence Buell advocates for a new literary realism that pushes ecological representations of the natural world as the central focus of literary writing. Such an enterprise may seem misguided to French literary theorists steeped in the tradition of “le nouveau roman” and “l’ère du soupcon” and so highly suspect of any literary theory claiming to reestablish a transparent, simple connection between the world in the text and the world outside of it. In fact, the few French literary scholars working on American nature writing insist on its rhetorical and narrative aspects, as if to remind the reader that language remains an irreducible construct.[9] The French reading of American nature writing is another reflection of this eco-cultural difference that retains the human frame when considering relationships to the world.


The obvious question remains: Why? Where does such difference come from? Is it a result of geographical distinctions, France being the Old World, settled long before the discovery of the New World? Or is it a matter of linguistic differences as the well-known and yet much disputed Sapir-Whorf hypothesis might suggest? Or is it rather a question of philosophical traditions that have shaped different nationalist identities, France being the defender of universalist, humanist values and North America the embracer of less traditional forms of thought?


Tentative answers to these questions have already been put forward. Philosopher Catherine Larrère suggests that there has been no real development of environmental philosophy in France because environment is seen as being a scientific/technical problem. Rather than inspiring a new ethics, ecological issues are reduced to the realm of “common sense” and “reasonable/rational action”.[10] Sociologist Jean Viard develops the hypothesis that Catholic and Protestant lines divide France and North America and that nature preservation is a distinctly Protestant affair.[11] Both Larrère and Viard recognize the severe limitations of their hypothesis as their explanations cover only one aspect (ideological and sociological respectively) of a multidimensional, ever-changing phenomenon.


Rather than attempting a more complete explanation of French eco-difference (which would require an interdisciplinary team of scholars), I will extend the question further to include the problem of globalization. Have the differences explained earlier in this article become less prominent because of global economic, political and social forces? Or have they become more pronounced as national identities are forced into frequent close contact?


An interesting case in point is that of José Bové who first attracted international media attention in 1999 because of his leading role in the taking down of a local McDonald’s. At first, Bové appears to incarnate the typical, distinct French spirit of resistance in order to retain local identity. Yet Bové is a world-wide traveller who attempts to bring together different local agricultures in their fight against the use of genetically modified organisms. Examining more closely Bové’s identity, one discovers that his techniques of resistance when demonstrating against American neo-liberal globalization are based on Henry David Thoreau’s model of civil disobedience. (Bové has written, with journalist Gilles Luneau, a book entitled Pour la désobéissance civique, that draws from Thoreau’s On Civil Disobedience.) This is not a clear-cut case of French vs. American, nor of antiglobalization vs. pro-globalization, but instead an illustration of the complex forces that play into the formation and transformation of French eco-difference. (One last note: Bové is an important figure of “alter-mondialisation,” a movement originating in France, regrouping various leftist positions, and pushing for more democratic, more ecological, less economic forms of globalization.)


So what does the future hold for French eco-difference? As Guillaume Sainteny notes, the Green Party (“les Verts”) has all but disappeared from the political scene in France.[12] But this disappearance does not mean that the French have no concern for environmental issues. Instead, a general greening of both right and left parties has been taking place in France as concern for the natural world is integrated into general social policies and programs. Such integration reinforces the idea that humans are part of nature, both products and producers, just as nature is part of the human. But what is the nature of such an integration, merely political or also ethical? Can it bring about the type of change needed on an individual, social and national level to establish a more sustainable way of life?


Notes

[1] Michel Serres, Le retour au contrat naturel (Paris: BNF, 2000).

[2] Robert Delort and François Walter. Histoire de l’environnement européen (Paris: PUF,
2001).

[3] Michel Serres, Hominescence (Paris: Le Pommier, 2001).

[4] Jean Viard, Le tiers espace. Essai sur la nature (Paris: Méridiens Klincksieck, 1990).

[5] Catherine Larrère and Raphaël Larrère. Du bon usage de la nature. Pour une philosophie
de l’environnement (Paris: Alto/Aubier, 1997).

[6]Augustin Berque, “Paysage, milieu, histoire”, in Cinq propositions pour une théorie du
paysage, ed. Augustin Berque (Paris: Champ Vallon, 1994), 11-29 and Alain Roger, Court traité du paysage (Paris: Gallimard/nrf, 1997).

[7] Catherine Larrère, “Éthique de l’environnement”, Multitudes 24.1 (2006): 75-84.

[8] Jean Baudrillard, “L’écologie maléfique.” L’illusion de la fin (Paris: Galilée, 1992), 115-28; Gérard Bramoullé, La peste verte (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1991); and Luc Ferry, Le nouvel ordre écologique: l’arbre, l’animal et l’homme (Paris: Grasset, 1992).

[9] Michel Granger and Tom Pughe, “Introduction.” Special Issue: “Écrire la nature.” Revue
française d’études américaines 106.4 (2005): 3-7.

[10] Larrère, “Éthique de l’environnement”, p. 75

[11]Viard, Le tiers espace.

[12] Guillame Sainteny, L’introuvable écologisme francais? (Paris: PUF, 2000).

Special issue: environmental justice
Tags: eco-difference, ecology, France, Michel-Serres, stephanie-posthumus

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