“What Is the Nature of the Earth?”, Implications for Environmental Knowledge and Policy

CANCELED

HiPhiS (History & Philosophy of Science) Lecture by Sébastien Dutreuil, historian of Earth and environmental sciences and a CNRS research fellow at the Gilles-Gaston-Granger Center (CGGG UMR 7304), Aix-Marseille.

Founded in 2009, HiPhiS is an interuniversity seminar organized by the universities of Montpellier and the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme de Montpellier. It offers high-quality popular science presentations on the interdisciplinary and philosophical issues of contemporary science, bringing together perspectives from various disciplines.

Conference Summary

The Gaia concept had been presented not as a mere hypothesis, but as a new conception of the Earth: this different way of seeing was intended to give rise to a different way of conducting science and of considering the political and moral norms that shape our relationship with the natural world. The ontological question of the “nature of the Earth”—concerning what the world is made of—was thus placed at the center of these reflections. But what, in practice, were the consequences of this emphasis on ontological questions and a “global” framing of the environmental problem?
I will attempt to answer this question by drawing on two areas of research:

• The Gaia hypothesis in the natural sciences: Lovelock’s philosophy and politics; the development of Earth system science (Anthropocene, tipping point, etc.) and its implications for the “climate regime”;
• More recent developments within the social and human sciences with the emergence of environmental humanities: here, too, priority has been given to the question of the nature of the Earth, with epistemological implications that have sparked political criticism.