The Comb Lab letter : Looking at nature
The brevity of the title says it all: when faced with nature, we can only look at it. But are we looking at nature or at landscapes? And does facing nature mean that we are outside it or that it is outside us? Basically, the question that remains is how to clarify what we mean by nature. And this involves educating our eyes.
In Europe, major technical developments changed the way people looked at rural landscapes. At the beginning of the 15th century, the introduction of perspective into Florentine painting encouraged walkers to « look at nature only through the eyes of visual artists ». 1 A century later, the transformation of marshland into polders by Dutch engineers provided a lasting incentive to look at wilderness as an area to be conquered. Then came the tunnels under the mountains, and the roads and railways crossing endless continental plains. Dominated by these technical feats, the great natural obstacles became a « field of analysis », setting up a « confrontation between Nature and human nature ».
These days, we appropriate « nature » as a place to recharge our batteries away from the pace of urban life, as wild spaces available for construction, as a hunting reserve or as agricultural production areas. It’s worth noting that the American myth of the frontier remains alive and well among those who want to take over neighbouring countries.2 In short, at a time when, stronger than foolish denials, the implacable physics of natural phenomena shows a direct relationship between the greenhouse effect, melting ice, rising sea levels and devastating meteorological events, nature continues to be undermined by extractivism!
The « social and ideological construction »3 of the idea of nature therefore stretches between two poles of interpretation. The economist pole conceives of nature as an appropriable good as a free and unlimited reserve of primary resources (cf. Jean-Baptiste Say’s Traité d’économie politique published in 1803). The naturalist takes care of Nature’s ecosystem, whose sophistication allows complex species to live.
So why not take a utilitarian view of nature (as an exploitable reserve or, conversely, as a fragile ecological niche to be pampered)? But we still have to agree on the purpose of this utility. The economic utility consists of satisfying the « felt need » to capitalise on more dividends by pursuing the logic of extraction with diminishing returns (it takes more and more barrels of oil to extract a single barrel). Does naturalist utility safeguard satisfactory living conditions, for example by renouncing the superfluous? A manifestly insolvent economic model – what an oxymoron! – first fascinates, then intoxicates and ultimately corrupts those involved.
The biophysics of the Earth system will sooner or later (too late?) impose itself on the protective rearguard of the current destructive economic model. Forecasts seem to agree that wind patterns will change and the number of days above 30°C will increase. These two factors will increase the evapotranspiration of trees, plants and spring grass.
The result is an increase in local sensitivity and vulnerability to the intensification of windy, heatwave or rainy episodes. In this deteriorating context, should we interpret the virtual abandonment of the Green New Deal by the United States and the European Union as a veiled incitement to transfer some of the resilience processes to a local level? Without forgetting to link local resilience with larger-scale programmes, of course!
Moreover, the number of rural localities in transition/resilience is likely to increase. This is because the abandonment of transition programmes is compounded by the fact that the European economy is falling behind in international competition.4 Supporters and detractors of the dominant economic system will all experience a decline in the average level of wealth. Many urban dwellers will repopulate the countryside. They will then have an ambiguous view of nature: a refuge, certainly, but a windy, slushy or scorching refuge. Sometimes even arid.
The head-on encounter between the neglect of transition policies and the intensification of meteorological phenomena has given rise to a new urgency: how to link the temporality of political institutions, the temporality of economic players and the speed of transformation of biophysical conditions. Shall we find the answer to this question in time?
We’ll come back to this later…
1 Hans-Georg Gadamer L’Héritage de l’Europe Translated from the German by Philippe Ivernel. Paris, Seuil, Bibliothèque Rivages 1996, p. 60.
2 Jean Michelin Mythe et réalité de la frontière dans l’espace américain. Source Cairn https://shs.cairn.info/revue-inflexions-2020-1-page-117?lang=fr
3 Ibid., p 97
4 See reports Letta and Draghi