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Based on an empirical survey of rancher commitment in environmental programs in Southern Arizona, this paper analyzes the evolution of rangeland conservation practices and more broadly of natural resources management in semi-arid areas of the American West. Far from the image of the cowboy conquering and destroying the wilderness, which some environmental organizations still convey, it shows how ranchers get involved in ecological practices, enabling us to consider their social (re)valorization as conservation entrepreneurs empowered to co-produce ecological knowledge. In this perspective, the survey shows, (1) the way in which nature conservation programs no longer valorize the planning of 'wilderness areas', but rather collaborative programs based on working landscapes and, (2) the conditions for valorizing a kind of cowboy ecology that might contribute to the renewal of natural resource management and practices dedicated to nature conservation. The scientific originality of this paper is thus to outreach a 'political ecology of ranching', showing how the valorization of rancher knowledge and know-how fits into the renewal of rangeland ecological science and socio-economic transformations. It demonstrates that this ecological acknowledgment of ranching is due to the specific knowledge of the ranchers, which contributes solutions for the preservation of biodiversity that seem adapted to the environmental constraints of semi-arid areas. More broadly, it invites us to revisit the way in which cowboy ecology is now supported by administrative agents (and even environmentalists) to face ecological risks other than grazing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the economic efficiency of flood protection strategies to aid funding decisions of public bodies. The Brague river is a 68 km2 catchment located on the Mediterranean Sea shore in South East France. It experienced disastrous flash floods triggering costly damages and casualties in the communities of Biot and Antibes. Several possible flood protection strategies using conventional civil engineering measures or Nature-based solutions were tailored mixing engineering and participatory approaches. They were then assessed in terms of i) protection efficacy and avoided damage using numerical modelling, ii) environmental gains or alterations using an indicator on the morphological quality of the river, and iii) willingness-to-pay of the citizens for the various strategies, assessed both by top-down transfer methods, as well as by interviews of about 400 citizens. A dual cost-benefit analysis (CBA) was finally tailored to help the various decision makers involved in the management of the catchment in the context of the Gemapi law (management of aquatic environments and flood protection). A top-down CBA was performed to help national and regional stakeholders decide whether they would support the strategies. In the meantime, a bottom-up CBA was performed to capture the local perception of hazards, the social acceptability of various mitigation measures and to help the basin managers decide on the relevant strategy to be implemented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses, in these times of contestation of conventional agriculture and vertical planning, how a specific way of governing water scarcity for agricultural irrigation in the Marais poitevin area is structured. From the analysis of the elaboration of management schemes to the development of substitution reserves, the aim is to reveal the extent to which public action initiatives and the resulting developments oscillate between managing water scarcity by reducing its abstraction for irrigation, and maintaining an image of its seasonal abundance through the use of substitution reserves. The first part of this paper discusses how water management is ruled by the development of management schemes These schemes organise the management of water from the perspective of its summer scarcity based on two main measures: creation of substitution reserves to store the "abundant" winter water, reduction of the volumes that can be abstracted during the low-water period. Then, in a second step, based on two projects aimed at developing substitution reserves, the article analyses the trajectories of these two projects and their differentiating factors in terms of conflict, namely project governance, political context, timing and compensatory measures [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Singapore, on 19 December 2020, a trendy restaurant served nuggets prepared with chicken meat grown by the company Eat Just. According to customers, this product was similar in taste and texture to 'conventional meat'. In the National Review, journalist Matthew Scully welcomes this innovation and emphasises its re-humanising character. The aim of our paper is to show that this innovation, described by the journalist as a 'civilisational milestone' is based on what Mauss called 'a merchant's moral'. Cultured meat refers to powerful economic issues and generates alliances that are more economic-political than ethical. Far from 'rehumanising' us, it leads instead to replacing the living work of humans and animals with the dead work of machines. In other words, it dehumanises us and enslaves us. To show this, we first question the notion of 'real meat' and the historical dynamics that have led this product to being part of a project of agriculture without breeding. We then question the links between these innovations and the 'defenders' of animals and the planet, and the representations of animals underlying these links. Finally, we show that the morality of the merchant who promotes cultured meat is opposed to the universal morality of gift that has been building our relationship with domestic animals for ten millennia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1980, the famous primatologist Kinji Imanishi published Shutaisei no shinkaron (Freedom in Evolution: Life as a subject, translated from Japanese into French in 2015 and re-edited in 2022). He develops "his evolutionary theory", in radical opposition to both Darwinian and Lamarckian theoretical frameworks, objecting to random variation within species and to the population approach to species. In his theory, the species is the actor of its own evolution: it takes controls of its destiny to which individuals conform homogeneously. This theory is opposed to a nominalist vision since it relies upon species realism, to random variations, to population approaches to living organisms and to the genetic reductionism of the time. Today the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis is emerging, a more integrative approach in the sense that it keeps away from genetic reductionism, while organisms partly participate in building the selective constraints to which the population is submitted. To a certain extent, organisms are actors to their evolution. Should we see there a link with Kinji Imanishi's ideas? This is what the present paper explores. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper discusses the notion of 'environmental subjectivities' developed by Arun Agrawal. Questioning how environmentally conscious subjects appear in regimes of conservation, the author advocates analyzing environmental policies from the perspective of the changing relations between marginalized localities and their institutions. This article confronts his approach with biocultural conservation which acknowledges environmental practices in these marginalized communities, without however delegating management to them. The case of the Seaflower Biosphere Reserve in Colombia, where artisanal fishermen have developed strong environmental identities while resisting conservation in everyday life, highlights the need to analyze plural and competing 'environmental subjectivities'. Built on the observation of the daily practices of fishermen, this article advocates for a re-politicized analysis of how 'environmental subjectivities' vary. Instead of describing the adoption of a common concern about the environment, it describes 'environmental subjectivities' as plural, contradictory, embedded in mechanisms of social distinction and negotiations between administrators and citizens at the margins who seek to participate in the government of the environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rise of the environmental issue in French research institutions since the 1990's coincided both with a strong development of interdisciplinarity, and with an ever growing recourse to history, first as narrative, second as method. This paper aims to analyse this process from the perspective of a situated trajectory, that of the author, a historian who was progressively integrated into the epistemic community formed around the study of the relationships between natures, sciences, and societies, and led to share the heuristic dimension of historical narrative as a means of elucidating 'what happens to time' in the Anthropocene. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to question the reducing of the process of molecularization of life to its informational dimension from the 1970s and 1980s through reintegration of a chemical ontology of life. The characteristic feature of this chemical ontology is the centrality of production issues and a high proximity with industry. Our paper investigates the visibility and characterization of chemical molecularization of life from the birth and stabilization of a little-known scientific field, namely metabolic engineering. To this end our work combined a scientometric analysis of a corpus of 6,288 scientific papers, archives from a research center and a series of semi-structured interviews with several key figures in metabolic engineering. Through the study of this scientific field, we describe a chemical molecularization of life process, a) based on classical entities in biochemistry (enzymes, metabolic pathways), b) supported by innovation policies inspired from chemical engineering and c) involving scientists highly committed with industry, as in chemical engineering. Chemical molecularization has expanded in the shadow of informational molecularization, which is not ignored, but 'integrated' as resources for maintaining the competitiveness of existing industries, innovation policies and scientific practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper questions the notion of 'local' as applied to food provisioning and its social, spatial and political dimensions. The aim is to understand how the different actors involved in local and 'localized' food circuits think, use and apply this notion. By following the diverse representations of locality – from the actors' discourses to urban planning texts – and the practices that implement them, the authors (an anthropologist, a geographer and an urban planner) examine the variability of this notion in order to analyze the way it is appropriated and reconfigured according to the arena in which it is mobilized. This text also aims to reflect on the limits and contributions of a multidisciplinary approach to these issues. The challenge is to show that the summing of these three approaches brings out new elements that do not emerge from each individual analysis. The notion of 'local' is part of an administrative, spatial and ideological reality that is being constantly recomposed according to political, social and economic processes. Questioning this notion by involving three dimensions and three disciplines, enables our reflection to avoid the impasses of scientific literature in which the meaning of what is local seems to be self-evident while remaining fixed in specific disciplinary frameworks, and to show its shifting nature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we shed light and analyze a very broad consensus that exists among economists regarding green investments. Beyond some divergences, mainstream and heterodox economists present green investments as a necessary and first condition to solve the ecological crisis. The main part of our research focuses on the pitfalls of what we call the Green Investment Paradigm. We highlight the reductionist, normative, ahistorical and depoliticizing vision, a consequence of a problem-solving framework. We finally discuss what is outside of the box and highlight some of the debates that need to be invested to contribute to a serious assessment of the causes of ecological crises. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper provides a critical review of the predatory journals phenomenon, which affects the field of scholarly communication in the Open Access era. It offers an analytical account of the debates, the research being done and the methodologies used, and discusses the multidimensional definition of predatory journals and of the new market for lists of 'legitimate' and 'illegitimate' journals. The article identifies the main ethical and scientific issues that predatory journals raise in the Open Access publishing era and reports on the contexts that lead researchers, both young and senior, to publish in these outlets. By linking predatory journals to the field of scholarly communication, the article highlights the main issues and establishes them as research topics. The article concludes with research avenues that contribute to the analysis of mutation in digital scholarly communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Toulouse studies in political ecology (Atécopol) was created in October 2018 as an informal network of scientists. This group was later acknowledged as an "expertise platform" by the Toulouse University and CNRS Maison des sciences de l'homme et de la société. It brings together a diversity of disciplines and professional statuses, the aim being to create bridges between scientific knowledge and social and political debates at regional scales and beyond. The purpose of this paper is to illustrate, through the Atécopol initiative, both the positive outcomes and the challenges of adopting a political ecology posture and of claiming, as scientists, a moral position. Atécopol considers that researchers hold a responsibility both in the current state of ecological upheavals and in the failures to offer imaginaries beyond the technological paradigm. Atécopol therefore intends to transform local organizations and institutions within the research community, and more broadly within society as a whole. It emphasizes that even though individual agency is instrumental in ecological transformation, the central issue is to question the structures that reproduce the system of thinking and acting. The actions undertaken so far by Atécopol include knowledge circulation (training, communication, scientific events...), public interpellation (opinion columns, petitions...), as well as challenging research policies. The Atécopol experience meets growing success and is rich in challenges and lessons related to the democratic, political and moral dimensions of research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper reports on an international conference on territorial studies which all distance themselves from an industrial narrative and turn to the social history of petrochemical concentrations —the "corridors"— which questions the ecological, health, environmental consequences and social aspects of their location and highlights the sources of contestation of the populations subject to these nuisances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The circular economy concept is currently being used in multiple ways. For some academics and organizations circular economy can be identified as a long term goal of achieved green growth while others argue that circular economy is fundamentally different from green growth. In this paper, we explore the conditions allowing green growth to be compatible with the concept of circular economy. Our model explicitly takes into account the possibility of a dematerializing of wealth production and raw material recycling through a green growth framework. We show that the reconciling of green growth with circular economy requires: (i) a fast decrease of the raw material intensity of economy far removed from present and past trajectories, (ii) the absence of a physical limitation to this decrease. This seems to indicate that green growth is essentially different from, and incompatible with the concept of circular economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]