Melki Slimani - Towards a Political Education Through Environmental Issues

– local and global environmental politics initiatives (Blanchon et al. 2009) in response to local social movements denouncing situations of environmental injustice, such as exposure to an environmental impact, as well as situations of unequal access to environmental resources and the marginalization of inhabitants around protected areas (Blowers and Leroy 1994; Dozzi 2008; Faburel 2008; Gobert 2008; Gardin 2012);

– other social movements of environmental politics are responses to global initiatives that introduce social equity into environmental protection. These movements use political ecology as a theoretical tool (Robbins 2012). Political ecology also provides a theoretical basis for discussing issues of “democratization of environmental explanation” in scientific practice between scientific expertise and public participation as a factor of environmental governance (Forsyth 2003).

Epistemologically, these two types of environmental politics initiatives demonstrate two conceptions of justice: justice as an essentially local struggle and fight characterized by the bottom-up approach deriving from the North American current; and justice as the governmental top-down approach illustrated mainly by increasingly less sectoral environmental public policies (Gardin 2012).

According to Fol and Pflieger (2010), in the academic context, debates on environmental justice have diverged into two main areas:

– distributive justice dealing with the identification of team beneficiaries and services with high environmental efficiency, such as public transport, sewage treatment plants and other infrastructure. It seeks to distribute justice in the light of environmental harm and effects according to social categories;

– corrective justice dealing with the correction of the effects of actions and policies causing harm.

These two dimensions appear complementary because this academic debate on distributive justice is geared towards the implementation of corrective environmental policies. According to the authors (Fol and Pflieger 2010), several criticisms are made on the uses of the notion of environmental justice. These criticisms reflect the debate between the political and anti-political realm within environmental politics.

Environmental governance has not escaped the risk of “depoliticization” through the claim that this type of social interaction on environmental issues is apolitical (McCarthy 2013).

Green economy and ecological modernization discourses are basically depoliticized (or post-politicized) environmental discourses because they advance a view by some dominant actors that certain issues of environmental degradation such as climate change cannot be a subject of debate nor democratic decision-making. The choice between certain mechanisms of political practices, such as market practices to avoid adverse environmental effects, constitutes a neoliberal mechanism for the depoliticization of environmental politics. This mechanism makes it possible to maintain power relations brought about by the market by trying to make them unquestionable by representing the environment as external to society (Felli 2015).

In the field of political theories, several authors agree that climate change discourses and research are “symptoms of a post-political condition” (Swyngedouw 2010; MacGregor 2014a; Pepermans and Maeseele 2014; Maeseele 2015). The post-political perspective, aimed at building social, rational and moral consensus on climate change problems and solutions, is criticized by a second politicized perspective that sees climate change as inherent to representations that are the result of conflicts and power struggles (Kenis and Mathijs 2014a, 2014b; Kenis 2016; Pepermans and Maeseele 2016). Moreover, these authors propose the urgent re-politicization of environmental issues, especially those related to climate change, as only the critical perspective is capable of providing tools for socio-ecological change.

Environmental ethics is a value system that aims to guide human action in the environmental field. In terms of power relations, while environmental ethics has focused on the relationship between humans and nature, this has mainly been by criticizing the vision of humans dominating nature (Ballet et al . 2013).

A meta-ethical analysis of environmental ethics (Létourneau 2010) shows the presence of two positions: principled positions and situational (contextual) positions.

Larrère (2010) identifies biocentrism and ecocentrism as the two main currents of principled position in environmental ethics:

– biocentric ethics is opposed to a position that recognizes moral dignity only for human beings (anthropocentrism). Its ambition is to show that natural entities possess intrinsic value, by substituting a multiplicity of individuality for the anthropocentric duality of the opposition between humans and things. It insists above all on the principle of the equal status of all living beings;

– ecocentric ethics considers that value should be given not to individual entities but to the biotic community as a whole by advancing the formula that “something is right when it tends to preserve integrity, the stability and beauty of the biotic community. It is unjust when it leans in the opposite direction” (Leopold, quoted by Larrère 2010, p. 408). Unlike biocentrism, ecocentric environmental ethics emphasizes the interdependence of elements in biotic communities: it is indeed a holistic ethics that opposes the individualism of biocentric ethics.

The main characteristics of biocentrism (intrinsic value) and ecocentrism (biotic community) are also at the origin of the criticisms put forward for these two trends in environmental ethics. For biocentrism, Larrère (2010) raises the question of the capacity of such an overly individualistic approach to respond to the needs of a nature protection policy that necessarily involves choices between several possible scenarios and where the protection of the environment is not a priority and where the protection of nature necessarily implies the consideration of complex entities such as populations, ecosystems and landscapes.

For ecocentrism, the consequentialism adopted, which measures the quality of an action by its effects on the biotic community, tends to sacrifice individuals to the common good of the community, whereby humans are doubly sacrificed as individuals and as a species.

Both of these trends in environmental ethics are based on the condemnation of anthropocentrism. They are opposed to a narrow vision of the conception of instrumental value that does not take into account the diversity of instrumental values.

The monistic vision of value is replaced among pragmatists by a pluralist and rational vision within a democratic framework defining a new position of environmental ethics: the pragmatist posture of applied ethics (Larrère 2010).

The contextual posture corresponds to the pragmatism of applied environmental ethics.

This pragmatic approach uses the democratic foundation of “value pluralism”: the solution to an environmental moral problem corresponds to a hierarchy of values derived from public deliberation and debate for the justification of environmental action.

This ethical orientation has the advantage of going beyond the limits of the anthropocentric approach (instrumental value ethics), the biocentric approach (intrinsic value ethics condemning anthropocentrism and which is principally deontological) and the ecocentric approach (mainly consequentialist, where the value of action is measured by its effects on the biotic community). In fact, at the heart of ethical pragmatism are the democratic values of value pluralism that promote democratic deliberation on the “appropriateness” between certain moral positions and scientific positions (Larrère 2010). This ethical deliberation is modeled by Legault (2003), who assumes that any ethical decision is worked out in two stages. This has two inseparable aspects: the first consists of deciding on the end objectives, and the second on the means of achieving the desired objectives. This conception implies that the reasons for the decision must take into account both the ends and means by allowing for a pluralism of moral action in concrete decisions (Legault 2003). Ethical deliberation on the values of the environment, which makes it possible to go beyond the limits of deontology or consequentialism, is thus rich in political teachings.