“What is the nature of the Earth?”, implications for environmental science and policy

CANCELED

HiPhiS (History & Philosophy of Science) Lecture by Sébastien Dutreuil, historian of Earth and environmental sciences and 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 challenges of contemporary science, bringing together perspectives from various disciplines.

Conference Summary

The Gaia concept was presented not merely as a hypothesis, but as a new conception of the Earth: this different way of seeing was expected to give rise to a different way of conducting science and of approaching 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 priority given to ontological questions and to a “global” framing of the environmental problem?
I will attempt to answer this question from two perspectives:

• the implications of Gaia theory in the natural sciences: Lovelock’s philosophy and politics; the development of Earth system science (the Anthropocene, tipping points, etc.) and its consequences for the “climate regime”;
• more recent developments within the social sciences and humanities, particularly 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 drawn political criticism.