Territorial Analysis of Environments (eBook)

Etienne Cossart, Anne Rivière-Honegger (Autoren)

eBook Download: EPUB

2024
327 Seiten
Wiley-Iste (Verlag)
978-1-394-33225-0 (ISBN)

Infos

Territories are currently faced with a wide range of environmental challenges, but suffer from a lack of access to the information and biophysical data that characterizes these challenges.
Territorial Analysis of Environments sheds light on how the data produced on environmental change needs to be processed, completed and disseminated so that local players can take ownership of it. The aim is to present methods for developing local, regional or even global indicators of the changes underway, as well as to understand the logic of the players acting in a given area.
To this end, this book places great emphasis on the notions of systems and the modeling approaches used to formalize them. It also presents the data available, and the methods for developing an analysis of their spatial dimension. This is based on a wide range of case studies, combining environmental data and stakeholder games.

Etienne Cossart is a university professor and Director of the Environnement Ville Société Laboratory at the Université Lyon 3, France, specializing in physical geography.
Anne Rivière-Honegger is a CNRS Research Director on environmental management and related collective practices.

Textauszug

Introduction

Etienne COSSART1 and Anne RIVIÈRE-HONEGGER2

1 EVS, UMR 5600, CNRS, Université Jean Moulin Lyon 3, France

2 EVS, UMR 5600, CNRS, ENS Lyon, France

Exploring spatial regularities, one of geography’s objectives, reveals the existence of space-organizing systems, none of which, however, hold value applicable across all times and places. The presence of human freedom objectively precludes Laplacian determinism from being universally operative within our discipline.

Olivier Dollfus (1985)

I.1. The environment – a privileged subject in geography

Current environmental issues, driven by strong social demand, stimulate a broad scientific community encompassing both experimental sciences (e.g. Earth, atmospheric and climate sciences) and environmental humanities (e.g. history, sociology and law). It is currently observed that, within this multidisciplinary framework, geographers occupy a minority position (Blanc et al. 2017; Cossart 2023). However, the legitimacy of geography in addressing environmental issues lies in the very foundations of this academic discipline which, at the beginning of the 20th century, was the only human science that did not detach itself from the study of interactions between societies and the environment they inhabit, as evidenced by numerous works of the Vidalian school of thought. Such a trajectory is interpreted in part to have resulted from the internal subdivisions of the discipline, which during the 1980s and 1990s led to the development of distinct schools of thought: one focused on studying biophysical processes through approaches akin to experimental sciences (physical geography) and the other emphasizing social, cultural and territorial aspects, particularly through constructivist approaches (human geography of the environment) (Lespez and Dufour 2021). Undoubtedly, the strained relationships between members of these communities initially hindered intra-disciplinary cooperation, which could have facilitated the integration of both biophysical and social aspects of environmental issues within geography (Cossart 2023). Furthermore, these tensions undeniably diminished the visibility of geography at a time when environmental issues were becoming increasingly prominent. One primary objective of this book is to bring together authors from both major research modalities in environmental geography, a term we use here to encompass both physical geography strictly speaking and human geography of the environment. This endeavor is not unprecedented and aligns with previous efforts to merge these two approaches (Mathevet and Godet 2015; de Bélizal et al. 2017; Dufour and Lespez 2020) or, at the very least, to survey possible positions between these two spheres (Chartier and Rodary 2016).

NOTE.– The term “environment” is used here in its etymological sense of circumfusa (the surrounding things), closely aligned with the meaning employed by hygienists in the 19th century: to understand how surrounding elements such as water, air and soil influence health, well-being and, to some extent, human activities. Current research in environmental geography articulates three objectives: monitoring changes in environmental quality (physical, chemical, biological, ecological and social); assessing the extent to which these changes are attributable to human activities and initiating conservation and environmental remediation efforts (Cossart 2023).

To ensure that this book contributes an additional brick to building this interdisciplinary consolidation, we aimed to position it based on another observation made (albeit less emphasized) regarding environmental geography. One critical hypothesis explaining the decline of geography compared to other environmental sciences is the perceived lack of generalization in the contributions of the discipline and, more broadly, deficiencies in conceptualization (Pumain 2002). This deficiency was already noted in the 1980s when Fernand Joly (1989) and Olivier Dollfus (1993) discussed the need to move beyond the notion of a “transversal” or “synthetic” science and to continue refining the formalization of the functional relationships between societies and their environment, akin to the work of Georges Bertrand and Jean Tricart (Bertrand and Tricart 1968; Bertrand and Bertrand 2014).

The challenge lies in the fact that these functional relationships are manifold: as soon as a human dimension is introduced into a geographical explanation, the freedom of action creates a diversity of potential strategies, a diversity that is difficult to model (Dollfus 1985). The reasoning being that addressing environmental issues thus grapples with the formalization of cause-and-effect relationships: they oscillate between two distinctly different notions of logic. Firstly, strict causal relationships can be employed, meaning the so-called “necessary and sufficient” conditions. However, they ultimately lead to a problem of determinism, viewed here as a constraining, generalizable causal system between the characteristics of the environment and the societies that inhabit it. On the contrary, many explanations require the combination of conditional relationships, characterized by a level of probability, leading to a problem of probabilism, namely the inability to achieve a level of certainty, but only to probable propositions. In short, between probabilism and determinism, achieving a higher level of generality is a challenge when developing geographical reasoning applied to environmental issues.

The aim of this volume stems from this observation, which is why the perspective is resolutely methodological. This book cannot be exhaustive; its more modest aim is to present a corpus of methods and frameworks to aid in developing a geographical and territorialized reasoning of environmental issues. The challenge lies in being able to encompass biophysical processes and social facts, and thus study their proper articulation.

I.2. The environment – a complex spatial system

I.2.1. Systems, structures and flows

One of the objectives of this book is to avoid separating processes related to human activities from biophysical processes, but rather to consider them as part of the same spatial system. This system is complex, according to the theory of complexity (Morin 2005): it is characterized by numerous interactions, varying in time and space, which can serve as both drivers of environmental evolution and guarantors of homeostasis. The essence of geography lies in identifying regularities in the arrangement of environmental phenomena and understanding the extent to which these arrangements result from interactions between objects of various natures, whether biophysical or anthropogenic. Depending on the geographic perspective, these objects may share a location or interact according to the laws of spatiality (such as distance friction, attraction or repulsion effects), thereby generating flows. Flows serve as excellent indicators of the forces driving a spatial system (Figure I.1): they hold a prominent position in this book, encompassing flows that drive the biophysical environment (such as water, species and sediments), as well as flows of matter influenced by the activities of societies within a territory or city, thereby defining urban metabolism (Barles 2009).

Figure I.1. Flows as indicators of the spatial structuring of the biophysical environment (adapted from Feuillet et al. 2019).

The flows driving the evolution of biophysical environments document their reactions to environmental changes, whether due to climate forcing or anthropogenic modifications. Spatial analysis of these flows aims particularly to comprehend factors that facilitate or impede them: in landscape ecology or geomorphology, they organize according to a landscape and territorial structure. This structure’s framework supports the flows, and its geometry, comprising both strong and weak links (see Figure I.1C), determines how these systems respond to external stimuli. Building upon this, numerous studies debate the extent to which human activities prompt a reorganization of these circulations (Bourgeois et al. 2017).

I.2.2. Opening black boxes

In a systemic analysis, defining the constituent elements of the system is a prerequisite that demands great rigor: it entails opening black boxes (or at least defining ambiguous terms). This vigilance, although conventional, is especially critical in the environmental domain, where the lexicon includes numerous “suitcase words” that impede scientific reasoning. Terms like Human, Nature, Vegetation and Water are examples of these overly broad terms, necessitating a nuanced characterization of their state to be effectively incorporated into a demonstration. The goal of this definitional effort is particularly to adopt a nuanced perspective on issues that may initially easily sway opinion (evaluate, manage, protect, save the planet), whereas they actually require critical scrutiny (sometimes coupled with temporal reflection) (Beringuier et al. 2015).

As an example, vegetation is an element with an often idealized role in environmental studies when not described in detail. There is a risk that, through broad strokes of “vegetation cover rates”, the more qualitative aspects (multistratified nature of a formation, ecological...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 31.10.2024
• Reihe/Serie: ISTE Consignment
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Technik ► Bauwesen
• Schlagworte: biophysical data • environmental analysis • environmental challenges • environmental data • global change • territorial analysis
• ISBN-10: 1-394-33225-4 / 1394332254
• ISBN-13: 978-1-394-33225-0 / 9781394332250