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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
- Sprache: Englisch
The legitimacy of environmental policies is an issue of increasing concern for analysts. Ecological stakes are deemed to be global, but global public decisions are rare and implemented with difficulty. Dissensus prevails on environmental ethics and there is little evidence of any greening of policy tools. The global framing of the environment fails to account for how people relate to the ecological realities which surround them. Rather than placing the environment at a distance, Politicization of Ecological Issues advocates for building legitimacy from people's perceptions of singular forms and patterns in their environment. Based on scholarly literature in political ecology and empirical cases of water policy in Europe, the book shows how the qualification of environmental realities has been politicized and translated into motives for public action. Similarly, it argues that theoretical debates addressing the ecological crisis are not only dealing with ideas, but rather advocating for specific environmental forms that are deemed to be motives of hope or worry.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
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Table of Contents
Cover
Introduction
1 How Can We Study Environmental Policies?
1.1. Interests and limits of an approach to the environment through policy instruments
1.2. Defining the environment
1.3. Perception of environmental forms and motives
1.4. Perception of institutions in the environment
1.5. Emerging environmental policy issues
2 Politicization and Institutionalization of the Environment
2.1. Environmental motives between singularity and generality
2.2. Putting motives into politics by greening
2.3. Frames of environmental forms: the contributions of political ecology
2.4. Stabilization of patterns by co-production
2.5. A framework for analyzing the politics of environmental motives
3 Stabilized Motives of Freshwater Quality Control in Europe
3.1. The environmental motives of freshwater control policy
3.2. Use of environmental motives in political work
4 Motives Under Discussion in Two Water Agencies
4.1. The water agencies model
4.2. Two water agencies as reflected by their institutional and environmental motives
4.3. Use of motives in political work in both agencies
5 Motives for Anticipating the Ecological Crisis
5.1. The theory of ecological modernization and its motives
5.2. The forum for political ideas on the ecological crisis
5.3. The Anthropocene motive
Conclusion: For a Political Approach to the Environment
References
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Tables
Chapter 1
Table 1.1. The consistency, temporality and explanatory register of institutions...
Chapter 2
Table 2.1. Policy analysis grid for environmental and institutional motives
Chapter 3
Table 3.1. Consistency and causality of the motives instituted in water policy i...
Table 3.2. Other ontological dimensions of the motives instituted in water quali...
Table 3.3. Political use of the environmental motives of water policy
Chapter 4
Table 4.1. Indicators of mutualist model and incentives in the two agencies SN a...
Table 4.2. Consistency of the non-naturalistic motives mobilized in the politica...
Table 4.3. Political work on institutional and environmental motives in both age...
Chapter 5
Table 5.1. Comparison of the institutional and environmental motives for the gre...
Table 5.2. Comparison of the environmental and institutional motives for the eco...
List of Illustrations
Chapter 3
Figure 3.1. Two French posters advertising laundry detergents in 1989. On the le...
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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“by simply throwing your mind open and letting the readymade phrases come crowding in. They will construct your sentences for you – even think your thoughts for you” George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language”, 1946
Series Editor
Bernard Reber
Politicization of Ecological Issues
From Environmental Forms to Environmental Motives
Gabrielle Bouleau
First published 2019 in Great Britain and the United States by ISTE Ltd and John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms and licenses issued by the CLA. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside these terms should be sent to the publishers at the undermentioned address:
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www.iste.co.uk
John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
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www.wiley.com
© ISTE Ltd 2019
The rights of Gabrielle Bouleau to be identified as the author of this work have been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2019940903
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978-1-78630-481-0
Introduction
The environment is a favorable field for studying the difference between perceptions and representations, because environmental realities regularly surprise our senses and interpretations. Yet political science has long made the environment an issue “like any other”. Classically, it has approached environmental issues by studying how they were framed and supported by political actors, such as the debate on the future of natural sites, pollution, the living environment, etc. The issues were considered “environmental” when actors, especially ecological movements, defined them in this way. Nature was only seen as a social construction. From this perspective, environmental struggles and policies could be studied in the same way as other political conflicts, such as those on education, pensions, crime, housing assistance, etc. Recognizing the environment as having any political specificity was tantamount to taking sides in favor of environmentalism.
However, environmental realities are intrinsically different from other social realities in their spatial dimension and their interactions with living things. Taking these characteristics seriously leads us to study the environment as an unstable and complex material context that political actors seek to circumscribe. In this undertaking, the spatiality and interdependence of environmental elements constitute particular resources to justify this or that framing of reality. Indeed, the contours of environmental categories include or exclude territories, which allows for particular modes of politicization. The environment’s reactivity with living organisms is manifested by singular processes that fall outside the established categories and create opportunities for repoliticization. The environment thus offers specific politicizing modalities. This book proposes a new approach to the environment to understand both what is political in the environment and how political activity transforms the environment.
To do this, we rely on the notions of environmental forms and motives. Environmental forms are spatialized realities which we perceive as shapes in the environment. Environmental motives, on the contrary, are reasons to act in this area. However, the perception of shapes is not independent of motives. The word “motive” has the same etymology as “motif “, such as the motif of a frieze or a fabric, which means a recurrent shape or a pattern. Recognizing both shapes and motives requires learning. Sociology has shown that legitimate motivations in a social context are limited in number. They are specific to each culture and each time. Love or interest are not necessarily recognized as credible drivers of individual action in all social groups. In Henry James’ short story “The Figure in the Carpet” (1896), a character desperately seeks the hidden meaning of a novel. He hopes to discover a known shape. He expects this hidden meaning to suddenly jump out at him, like “a figure in a carpet”, i.e. an immediately recognizable shape. Both environmental shapes and motivational patterns are based on categorization conventions that lead to the inclusion of some things and the exclusion of others. Both motives and shapes are subject to moral and political interpretations. Shapes also have a social history and their symbolic significance depends on the normative investment they have undergone. It is common in environmental matters for the perception of a shape or the observation of its absence to become a cause of action. Finally, shapes and motives are useful to understand how actors categorize and interpret environmental realities whose contours are often contested.
This book revisits the analysis of public environmental policies with these two notions of environmental shapes and motives by studying how actors struggle to impose legitimate motives based on shapes. We adopt a constructivist ontology by focusing our attention on the social processes of constructing reality, but without denying that the materiality of reality also influences perceptions. While there are situations where perception corresponds perfectly to a recognized shape, there are also cases where perceived reality is not coded in the individual’s representations. This mismatch allows the discovery or learning of any new shapes present. However, the relative autonomy of individuals’ sensory faculties from socially constructed categories is not enough to build a universally objectifiable reality that would lead us back to a premise of limited rationality. Our sensory faculties are used in social situations framed by norms that influence the relevant scale, legitimate references and appropriate meaning. Indeed, since environmental shapes are inscribed in time and space, the perception of their contours is sensitive to the scale of observation and that of their temporal evolution depends on the reference situation considered. It is also sensitive to the different senses mobilized in perception (touch, smell, etc.) and to environmental investigation protocols. The political struggles whose stakes are the legitimate representation of the environment can thus be understood on the basis of the forms that each party tries to impose by setting the practical modalities of observation and their interpretation in terms of reasons for action. For example, in the French language, there is a term that exists: environmental motif. It captures both the motive for action on the environment and the forms on which it is based, which the English language distinguishes through the terms motives and patterns or shapes.
The first chapter of this book situates the ontological positioning chosen here in the academic field of political sociology and demonstrates its methodological relevance for the analysis of public policies. We will thus specify what a perception-based approach can bring in addition to the mainstream approach based on policy instruments. We recall the origin of the notion of the motif (motive/pattern) in comprehensive sociology and discuss its links with the notion of affordance in pragmatic sociology.
Our approach is also based on Virginie Tournay’s book Penser le changement institutionnel (Considering Institutional Change) (2014). The author considers that there are also focal point, observation scale and depth-of-field effects in the ways we approach institutions, and that this influences how we characterize their changes. She suggests that individuals perceive material clues of the presence of an institution (a flag, an alliance, a hymn, etc.), and that they infer logical links that depend on the relationship they have with that institution. If they adopt a distant relationship with the institution, they will be able to question its origin, forms and effects, just as a naturalist studies a living species, with observations that may vary according to the point of view. However, if they feel bound by this institution, questioning its origin and form will seem incongruous to them. What they will perceive, above all, is a bond of belonging as a totem (for a territorial institution, for example), an obligation towards a benevolent spirit (for a convention based on reciprocity, for example) or a proliferation of new links (like everything that is established in relation to a form of modernity). We will show that environmental motives can also be studied in a naturalistic way or experienced as totems, spirits or proliferation.
The second chapter deals with politicization of environmental motives in a generic way, i.e. all motives (forms and motivations) perceptible in the space surrounding the actors, whether these motives relate to society or nature. It seems fruitful to us not to postulate an objective difference between the social and the natural environment but to observe how actors attribute biophysical causes or effects to deemed social motives in order to make them ecological motives. This leads us to approach greening as one of the forms of political work that can be done on a motive. We are mobilizing research in political ecology to identify other ways of politicizing the contours of environmental forms according to what they include or exclude and what their categorization puts in equivalence. We thus identify a typology of how political actors can use environmental forms and motives for their political work.
In the rest of the book, we test the typology proposed in these first chapters to study changes of environmental policies in the long term. It is about paying attention to the environmental forms and motives that have been stabilized by their incorporation into public policies, their future over time and what they have changed for the actors. This approach is used in chapter three to study the evolution of fish and water quality control in Europe. This is a policy that has been very well documented by environmental historians. This longitudinal empirical study relates the institutionalization of six environmental forms that became motives for environmental action, from the 19th Century to the present day: the sacrificed river, self-purification, fish mortality, trout, migratory fish and eutrophication. Each case is both a shape and a source of motivation. Self-purification is a visible phenomenon downstream of a polluting discharge, and it is also an idealized vision of a nature that purifies. Migratory fish are forms that are well known to fishermen and are also a reason to oppose sectoral appropriation of rivers in the name of a European vision of rivers. As institutionalized environmental forms, they shaped the landscape. The material effects of the instituted motive are particularly evident in the example of the sacrificed river, which is not only a motive for justifying wastewater discharges into rivers but also materially translates into the existence of rivers without fish. The longitudinal study illustrates the evolution of the meaning of motives in the context of the policy instruments with which they are associated. Thus, the meaning of fish mortality changes when sacrificed rivers are no longer legitimate. Trout does not mean the same thing when it is used as a currency of exchange in civil and criminal transactions and when it becomes an indicator for monitoring water quality. The appearance and disappearance of certain reasons reflects in the long term an evolution in the way ecological reasoning is taken into account in water policing. Throughout Europe, these six environmental forms and motives were incorporated into policy design in various combinations, in order to regulate discharges into rivers. The comparison reveals that there are different uses of such forms and motives in political work.
The fourth chapter also discusses the use of environmental forms and motives in political work, but with an interest in contested forms and still-discussed motives, which have not yet been established as legitimate, stabilized and recognized patterns. These patterns, which can be described as “hot” as opposed to the “cold” patterns studied in the third chapter, do not have stabilized contours. They are defined or redefined at the same time as they are mobilized and challenged in action. The shaping of such motives is observed here through the discourse of two water agencies that do not have the same financing practices. We show how actors can fight with environmental forms and motives against worldviews that keep the environment at bay.
The fifth chapter of this book discusses the political theories of environmental change. This international debate is structured around an opposition between technological modernism, ecological modernization and ecomarxism. We will show that a form-and-motive approach helps to identify the perceptions on which these theories are based, what constitutes their blind spots and the questions that remain open.
We conclude with the interest of capturing the environment with forms and motives as it exists, by articulating scientific and lay perceptions, by focusing our attention on territorial scales and concrete objects. This approach also has a heuristic interest that goes beyond ecological issues. There is indeed a political responsibility to make certain forms more or less visible and to include or exclude certain realities in established motives. This leads us to emphasize the responsibility of the scientist in the reasons they choose to question.
1How Can We Study Environmental Policies?
Environmental policies are difficult to circumvent. In a book on environmental conflicts in the Everglades, Gail Hollander (2008) shows that the opposition between environmentalists and sugar cane producers in Florida is not just a private conflict of interest, but that moral and political considerations on sugar have been at stake since the 18th Century. Florida’s sugar industry was indeed built as a condition for the political autonomy of the United States from the British, Spanish and French empires and then as a factor of political adherence to the country’s economic model when sugar became a key ingredient in mass-produced food. But to fully understand the success of this political economy, it is also necessary to study the competing products of sugar cane (sugar beet, sweeteners derived from corn), the strategies developed to fight cane viruses and the effect of the futures markets on sugar price volatility. Finally, this competition is not just about food. The governance of the sugar industry and its environmental effects in Florida now depends on the geopolitics of biofuels, which can also be produced with sugar cane. In the face of this network of interdependencies, how can we assess the importance of each of these factors on Everglades’ environmental policies?
The proliferation of issues poses a methodological difficulty for any investigation into environmental politics. For the social sciences, it is not only a matter of identifying a theme or terrain, but also of constructing an object of analysis that is relevant to what the literature on the subject has highlighted. How to define this object of analysis? How can we make sure we do not forget any actor? Which scenes to observe? How far back in time can we go? One solution consists of addressing them through policy instruments (laws, incentives, contracts, etc.) that have been adopted to regulate the environment. This makes it possible to abstract from the singularities of each issue in order to construct a general diagnosis on the evolution of environmental policies. However, as discussed in section 1.1, these governance tools reflect only a small proportion of political issues in an area that is difficult to govern (Weale 1992, Theys 2003). To fully understand the meaning that the environment has for actors, it is necessary to take better account of the ordinary categories that describe it and understand what makes them unstable, prone to controversy and uncertainty. This is the purpose of the rest of this chapter.
1.1. Interests and limits of an approach to the environment through policy instruments
Two factors regularly reconfigure the networks of actors involved in the production of environmental policies and make it difficult to carry out an exhaustive investigation: the production of new knowledge1 and the instability of political agendas in the various political arenas of the territories concerned (Jordan 1998, Richardson 1994). There is no clear and sustainable convergence of interests in this area of public action. The environment concerns local residents, experts, industrialists (Bonnaud and Martinais 2017, Michel 2012), activists (Lascoumes 1994), elected officials, and others. Public action is highly fragmented; networks are complex and recompose over time. Political exchanges take place in mediation spaces that are difficult to observe, very diverse and sometimes informal, whose access is often controlled by a few actors (Gilbert and Henry 2012). It then becomes particularly tedious to assess the whole scope of a change by following all actors, whose involvement constantly varies in the manufacturing or implementation process of public policy. Studying actors does not make it possible to conclude in a general way on the results of their mobilizations: do the regulatory instruments adopted make it possible to reduce waste production and avoid pollution?
The study of policy instruments (Moisdon 1997, Lascoumes and Le Galès 2004, Linder and Peters 1990, Howlett 1991) may then appear to be the solution to overcoming the methodological difficulty associated with the dispersion of actors. An instrument (law, contract, consultation mechanism) is in fact a stable, instituted form, which offers a means of circumscribing the analysis. The construction of the instrument gives rise to official meetings with written records that make it possible to identify those present and those absent. Its content embodies the power relationships that forged it and conveys the frameworks that influence its implementation. The evolution of instruments is considered “an excellent indicator of change” in political relations and legitimacy (Lascoumes and Simard 2011). However, the instrument approach does not highlight a significant change in the way the environment is taken into account, whereas an approach based on environmental motives does.
Within the European Union, the vast majority of environmental regulations are adopted at the European level and then transposed into a national law. What the authors who have studied the policy instruments show is that, at the European level, there have been no new instruments likely to give more power to environmental authorities (in particular more information) or to destabilize the vested interests of polluting industries (Halpern and Le Galès 2011). Environmental directives are a classic community decision-making process that produces uniform standards. Two developments limit their binding nature. On the one hand, the sanction for failure to achieve the objectives set by these directives remains dependent on the case law of the European Court of Justice. The first environmental convictions with financial penalties date back to the 2000s and concern directives adopted more than 10 years earlier2. France, for example, has been convicted several times for non-compliance with European environmental law, but none of these convictions has yet given rise to the penalties due in the event of “failing to comply with earlier judgments”. So far, France has managed to regularize its situation before a second conviction for the same offense3. The time lag between the adoption of a text at the European level and the accountability of Member States for its effectiveness thus favors a slow and negotiated transcription at the national level. On the other hand, the obligations imposed by the directives are increasingly procedural. They define how to set objectives according to areas. The result is a “two-tier system of negotiation”, the European level for the adoption of directives and the national level for its implementation (Halpern 2011, Halpern and Le Galès 2011). According to Charlotte Halpern and Patrick Le Galès, this system has enabled national actors opposed to better environmental protection to negotiate the application of texts (by focusing on those that cost them little) without those procedures involving the public increasing, in return, the steering power of European institutions. They also note that the European level has not created specific instruments for environmental policy, but that it recycles instruments that have a history in a Member State. This is particularly the case for zoning, tax incentives and eco-labels, which were first introduced in France. Their generalization to the European Union would therefore not be a guarantee of change in France insofar as French actors have already implemented strategies to adapt to these tools. The authors then conclude that the European policy has little autonomy vis-à-vis member countries and international organizations that have also inspired most of its instruments.
The instrument approach does not reveal any changes at the national level either. Rather, research concludes that neocorporate strategic logics are still at play (Nilsson 2005). Environmental policies would leave too much room for interpretation for actors, at the risk of no longer having an effect on the environment. Regulatory modes where economic sectors co-decide with public authorities are dominant (Barré et al., 2015, Rumpala 1999, Berny 2011, Larrue and Chabason 1998). Environmental issues would be aligned on managerial logics and diluted under the term sustainable development (Villalba 2009). Magalie Bourblanc has identified local public policies which, in order to reconcile environmental principles and principles of intergenerational equity between farmers, set up parallel accounting systems for agricultural land, which do not make sense even for the agents responsible for implementing them (Bourblanc 2011). Finally, the selective transcription of European directives negotiated at the national level would favor technical-managerial instruments mastered by the sectoral actors in place (coalitions between industrialists and major state technical bodies) or even neutralized by political will at the national or local level.
Scholars have also identified several mechanisms for neutralizing greening instruments. Some of them are at a very early stage of public action when defining the public problem at stake. Claude Gilbert and Emmanuel Henry (2012) have identified discrete scenes where the assignment of public problems to a particular department is played out, which subsequently provides officials in that department with a monopoly on legitimate expertise to select and implement appropriate policy instruments. Sectoral actors (agricultural, industrial, urban) are also able to divert regulatory instruments such as limit values (amount of pollution not to be exceeded) and zoning, by negotiating the nature of regulated discharges, exemptions (Bourblanc 2011) or more favorable implementation deadlines4. Neutralization (Le Bourhis and Lascoumes 2014) is also played out in the production of environmental information, in order to mask degradation diagnoses. To counter the monopolization of the definition of public problems, nature protection associations have called for an independent environmental information agency (Lascoumes et al., 2014). Several authors thought that the European Union would play this role, because of the obligation on Member States to provide environmental information available to the public, which would act as resources for mobilizing the judicial forum (Dezalay 2007, Kallis and Nijkamp 2000). However, an indicator on the state of the environment is not necessarily an indicator to protect the environment (Le Bourhis 2015). Unsustainability indicators constructed by the Institut français de l’environnement (IFEN) before 2007 were subsequently drowned in a bureaucratic statistical production in which it has become difficult to find resources for pro-environmental action. Even though some controversies testify to a wear and tear on technocratic strategies (Michel 2012, Sébastien 2013) and suggest that these neutralization mechanisms do not always work, the dominant observation in the literature is that of a strong inertia in favor of sectoral policies to the detriment of environmental action. The objectives of environmental policies would remain unclear, soft regulations and flexible trade-offs (Lascoumes 2012).
However, this pessimistic observation by political scientists on the integration of environmental issues into public action is based on analytical tools that adopt an institutional definition of the environment, i.e. what is classified under environmental sections by law, professions or political organizations. Of course, these sections were standardized from ordinary categories for government purposes. The institutions that govern the environment, such as the Ministry of the Environment created in France in 1971, were built by aggregating these codified categories (preservation of the natural and cultural heritage, living environment, nature, pollution, risks, etc.), themselves based on inventories of species, objects and activities (Charvolin 2003). However, these inventories lose important characteristics of the environment, which are its dynamics and interdependencies (Carter 2018, Guimont and Petitimbert 2017). These definitions do not exhaust the diversity of things perceived in the environment and struggle to account for its presence, forms and consistency for the actors.
1.2. Defining the environment
Institutions can be seen as both aggregating and integrating principles, i.e. both rules for allocating resources and legitimate ways of giving meaning to the collective and its context (March and Olsen 1989). We place ourselves here in the more integrative tradition of analyzing institutions to reflect an environment that can never be reduced to clearly identified resources. The environment includes nature, artifacts, human behavior and hybrid things. It is neither clearly defined nor bounded. Individuals can call on institutions whose role is both distributive and interpretative to bring order to this multiple reality.
The challenge of this book is to understand how ordinary perceptions of the environment can influence public decisions and vice versa how public decisions can make some environmental realities more or less perceptible. To do this, we need to redefine the term “environment” to better grasp how actors experience and make sense of it. In everyday language, the environment is an ordinary way of capturing the space and temporality that surrounds us, without precise delimitation. It is a vague term that has the same root as the noun “environs”. Unlike other contextual terms such as “society”, “entourage” and “relatives”, which also lack precise boundaries, the environment is not restricted to humans and their interactions but includes “natural” elements, i.e. elements that, from the viewpoint of the observer, are at least partially escape human intention. We propose the following definition:
DEFINITION 1.– Environment. The environment, for individuals or social groups, is the surrounding biophysical reality that we perceive through our senses, and which results from human and non-human actions. We can address the environment in general or focus on a specific one such as professional, family or natural environments.
This definition of the environment as a perceived biophysical reality goes beyond the scope assigned to it in nature policy, but this expansion is necessary to understand what an environmental issue means for actors. Indeed, the distinction between society and nature is changing, so we need a definition of the environment that is not restricted to what is considered natural at a given time, but that accepts this distinction between natural and social as one of the characteristics of a given environment. What seems purely artificial and social here and today may be associated with ecological considerations tomorrow. For example, the pill has long been considered as a purely human and social issue. It is only recently that hormones used for female contraception have been accused of being endocrine disrupters for aquatic wildlife. Conversely, what is described as purely material and environmental also has a linguistic, and therefore social, existence. Although contingent, the ontological separation between the natural and the artificial is the most widespread way in the Western world to understand reality, as Philippe Descola states (2005). This “great divide” continues to have currency, not only in science. Overcoming this dichotomy, as Bruno Latour (1997), for example, proposes, requires us to get away from the meaning experienced by most individuals. This effort is never made on a routine basis, it requires an analytical effort. Our definition of the environment grasps altogether social and natural elements in any context.
The biophysical reality perceived around the actors is not limited in space and time. The environment is not a well-framed object. Its division into categories is neither unambiguous nor perfectly stable. The social classifications that serve as benchmarks are often challenged. While polar bears and brown bears were considered as two distinct species, melting ice forces polar bears to move out of snow-covered areas, which favors a natural hybridization with brown bears. This has been observed since 2006 in the Canadian Arctic zone, whereas previously it had only been observed in zoos. The distinction between the two species is fading. Unlike a smartphone interface where each icon corresponds to one and only one application and has been designed to be immediately identified and distinguished by anyone, individuals do not perceive the same shapes in the environment. By changing the observation tool or conventional definitions, it is always possible to bring out realities in the environment that have not been perceived before.
1.3. Perception of environmental forms and motives
People perceive concrete forms in the environment: objects, animals, plots, clouds, ponds, cracks, fissures, smells, color spots, textures, sounds and combinations of sounds, smells, textures, colors and flavors. All of these forms produce stimuli for an individual who will recognize them, put them in order and align them with known categories. These categorization operations are the result of learning and vary according to the socio-cultural context, and they can also be debated. Henry Dicks (2012) points out that the category is a way of showing something in the public space through language. Etymologically, the term comes from the Latin categoria, derived from the ancient Greek κατηγορία, katêgoria (“accusation, category”) derived from κατηγορέω, katēgoreō (“accuse, speak out against”) from κατά, kata (“against”) and ἀγορεύω, agoreuō (“speak”). The category is a way of seeing or accusing that confronts others in the public space through language.
The categories used to describe the environment give meaning to material forms. The “river” category captures the continuity of water flowing through a valley, beyond the discontinuity of urban and rural areas, fast-flowing sections and slow waters. This “river” category also makes it possible to account for the physical discontinuity that separates two banks. To describe the environment, individuals have at their disposal a repertoire of forms (vocabulary of geography, flora, fauna, color chart, musical repertoire, etc.). They can learn to recognize these forms in the environment because they meet them several times. Forms repeat themselves; they look like a standard ideal. In English, a recurrent shape is called a pattern. In French, to capture an ideal type, whether in visual, textural, sonic or olfactory form, the term motif is sometimes used: a fabric motif or a musical motif. In this sense, an environmental motif is a form (figure, pattern) perceived in the living space. It may be a landscape motif (Béringuier et al., 1999), but here it is given a broader meaning to also include physical forms of the social environment (concrete marks of distinction, stigma, etc.).
To share an environmental “pattern-motif” with others, you have to name it. Learning the form is not just an intentional chain of events that classifies experiences according to linguistic entries5. The process of encoding this form is also part of the body of individuals and its recognition may become unintentional, even irrepressible, and therefore pre-interpretative. This is the case, for example, with reading. It is no longer possible for those who have learned to read to perceive letters without reading the words, because the writings are then part of a lived and incorporated environment. Learning environmental forms involves the education of the senses and language and becomes routine.
The recognition of a “pattern-motif” is a source of emotions. Consider Proust’s madeleine. Madeleine and herbal tea are tasteful motifs in the French culinary environment. This common reference makes the situation described by Marcel Proust in Du côté de chez Swann relatively familiar to the reader who is familiar with herbal teas and madeleines. However, only the narrator experiences such a strong and unexpected emotion in recognizing this motif that it opens the door to happy memories, closed for too long. Magnified by the novelist’s prose, the individual emotion becomes a collective aesthetic motif that in turn generates an emotion in the reader. Among naturalists, Rebecca Ellis observed how the senses of perception are sharpened by repeated observation. She explains that when amateur naturalists are able to identify a species at first glance, this rapid alignment between the known category and the being in question gives them a great joy that amateurs call among themselves the “jizz” (Ellis 2011). While administrative and scholarly discourses on the environment keep emotions at bay, it must be recognized that environmental forms can convey passions (Roux et al., 2009) and emotional logics (Bauman 2013).
Not all “pattern-motifs” are as recognizable as Proust’s madeleine, and reality often presents itself in equivocal contours. These ambiguities have delighted the authors of Gestalt theory who have become masters in the art of interweaving two forms in the same drawing to create an effect of surprise when the spectator who has recognized the first meaning discovers the second interpretation. More generally, in the environment, the association of a set of perceptions with a “pattern-motif” is never exclusive. Where some will associate the presence of a crowd with a political demonstration, others will see it as a gathering of no political significance. Interpretative plurality is the rule rather than the exception. There is room for debate, and individuals are not trapped in the forms they perceive irrepressibly6. Beyond first impressions, other continuities or discontinuities of reality can be highlighted individually or through debate because perception is objectifiable and sensitivity can be improved. In our example, the presence of banners with a political slogan or the concentration of crowds at the entrance to a shopping center may help to separate opposing perceptions.
Emotions generated by “pattern-motifs” can give rise to private or public commitments and motives for action, in the sense of motivations. For ecologist John Muir (1838–1914), the fine texture of sheep’s wool was both a form and a reason to celebrate the superiority of wilderness over domesticated nature7. For biologist Rachel Carson (1907–1964), the silence of spring was not only a noticeable absence of birds, but also a cause for concern and mobilization against pesticides (Carson 1962). In Mouscron, Belgium, it was the desire to distinguish the olfactory motif produced by a slaughterhouse from that produced by an incinerator that motivated local residents to organize themselves into a network of “noses” that ensured vigilance over their local environment (Melard 2013). The notion of environmental motive thus makes it possible to grasp, on the one hand, the form and meaning (pattern) that the actors give to their environment (representations, arguments) and, on the other hand, the emotions and motivations (motives) that they associate with this perception.
DEFINITION 2.– Environmental motive. An environmental motive is a form or set of forms perceived in the environment, with contours (discontinuities) and associated with representations, arguments, emotions and motivations.
Individuals perceive environmental patterns by their shape(s) or outline(s). The outline of a shape pattern is defined by the limit of the extent beyond which its presence is no longer seen, felt or heard. Sometimes form is perceived first and motivation comes second. At other times, motivation reconfigures the perception of the environment. For those who are tired, any flat surface is perceived as a potential resting place.
Motivation too is perceived because individuals have learned to associate it with patterns that reflect its presence. It has long been known that to understand the abstract motivations of others, i.e. their reasons for action, you need to know the codes of their social environment. For Max Weber, behavior is perceived by relating the elements that compose it to “a typical configuration of meaning” that constitutes its motivation, “its meaningful reason” in a particular context, “according to average habits of thinking and feeling” (Weber 2016, p. 104). Charles Wright Mills (1940) adds the inseparable link between the interpretation of conduct and language: “motives are words” (p. 905). According to Mills, a vocabulary of motives can be learned in a situation at the same time as behavioral norms. He quotes the adult who says to the child “do not do this, it is selfish”, linking in the same sentence the condemnation of an act and its imputation to a motivation. This vocabulary of motives constitutes the social environment in which we are caught. Even the sociologist is obliged to interpret the behaviors he observes according to the vocabulary of credible reasons available to society in general or to his profession. When a word provides a definitive answer to the question “why does such a person behave in such a way?”, it means that this word is part of the vocabulary of motives in the social group here considered. For example, we might say that such an action was done “out of love” or “for money”, “out of loyalty” or “out of revenge”. These motivations have a performative dimension when they are expressed. Presenting one’s actions with reference to the vocabulary of current motives “in force” makes them acceptable, reduces conflicts and ultimately facilitates their realization. We also become accountable for the motives we have
