Face à l’angoisse écologique : stratégies émotionnelles et engagements épistémiques en sciences de l’environnement

• Main Author: Lucas Brunet
• Format: Article
• Language: fra
• Published: ENS Éditions 2020-06-01
• Series: Tracés
• Subjects: ecological anxiety; eco-anxiety; ecology; emotion; epistemic commitment; anguish
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/traces/11342
• ISSN: 1763-0061; 1963-1812

While knowledge about the ecological crisis is increasingly detailed, ecologists are anxious, saddened by the destruction of natural areas, and powerless in the face of a future that they cannot control and which makes them fearful of serious tragedies ahead. At the crossroads of the sociology of affects and emotions, the sociology of science and the sociology of mobilisations, the article studies the scientists who have worked on the concepts of ecosystem services and ecological offsetting. It shows that these ecologists, as well as their colleagues who study the protection of nature, experience ecological anxiety in different ways and that they develop various strategies to manage this anxiety. An operational definition of ecological anxiety, as well as a methodology for analysing its expression and its management, are presented to this end. Drawing on the notion of epistemic commitment, the article proposes to conceive of knowledge production as an ethical and political commitment, and documents how scientists’ work enables them (or not) to respond to the unpleasant experience of anxiety. According to their epistemic commitments, the scientists involved in the situations investigated can thus : i) put their ecological anxiety into perspective by emphasising the dynamism of ecosystems; ii) convert their ecological anxiety into a hope of reconciling economy and ecology; iii) share and express their anxiety through awareness-raising schemes. The adoption of these strategies reflects the affinity of scientists for specific nature conservation policies.