Repenser la nature à la lumière des Humanités environnementales

Abstract

Using a Franco-German comparison, this chapter examines the status of the Environmental Humanities: is it only a new fashionable buzzword or does it refer to a profound paradigm shift in the social sciences? In a first section, we define the Environmental Humanities’ uneasy position at the crossroads between conceptual and practical dimensions, then a second section raises the issue of how to think nature today in the age of the Anthropocene and global environmental challenges, focusing on the ways knowledge about nature is produced and disseminated across disciplines and national and cultural spaces. This leads, in a third section, to challenge anthropo- and Euro-centric ways of thinking. Indeed, the move from questioning the idea of nature to recognizing its necessity as a concept entails not only drawing new (cross)disciplinary configurations and boundaries, but also overcoming the reflection/action divide. In other terms, how can man live with nature, as far as representations but also uses and practices are concerned? This third section highlights the fact that reflective approaches and engagement in action and the social world are necessarily intertwined.