We Have Never Been Wild: Towards an Ecology of the Technical Milieu

Abstract

Oddly, many of those who have pioneered the philosophy of political ecology in France (André Gorz, Cornélius Castoriadis, Félix Guattari, Serge Moscovici in particular) have usually dismissed both expected terms “Nature” and even “environment.” This distinctive feature is due to the choice French scholars have made to closely intertwine ecology and the questioning of technology, leaving aside concerns for environmental ethics. This chapter aims to clarify the distinction between ecology of nature and what we call “ecology of technology,” and to better grasp the idea of an ecology against Nature. Then it turns to the key distinction between the concept of environment and that of milieu in order to reconstruct the long and non-unequivocal historical path which led a number of French philosophers from the philosophy of the technical milieu to a political ecology. This chapter has been written in French for this volume and translated by John Stewart, University of Technology Compiègne.