Rémi Beau

Dominique Bourg is a philosopher and honorary professor at the University of Lausanne (UNIL). He is the editor of the online journal lapenséeécologique.com and the author of several books about ecology, democracy and the impact of the market. In this interview he first talks about the initiatives, in teaching but also in university management, he is involved in, mainly in Lausanne. With regards to teaching, he shares his thoughts on how to introduce courses and he argues for a multidisciplinary and transdisciplinary approach of teaching ecological issues, combining the perspective of social sciences with sound scientific knowledge and eco-psychological support. The interview then adopts a broader angle by mentioning obstacles to the « transition », the need to change institutions at different scales, with taking into account long term issues in public decision-making and defining a common baseline for democracy. Finally Dominique Bourg explains which levers he considers most important on the local, national and international scale.

Alain Grandjean is an economist and author specializing on green finance. He is also co-founder and partner of Carbone 4, a consultancy firm focusing on energy transition and adaptation to climate change. The interview first revolves around the academic content Alain Grandjean considers as the bare necessities to be taught in higher education, no matter the curriculum. This should take the form of a basic synthetic training which takes into account the major environmental issues without too much technicality as well as lessons in accounting and economics, which he considers essential. The interview also looks more specifically at engineering and business schools. Then Alain Grandjean shares his views on the effectiveness of different ways to engage for the transition – like radical individual lifestyle transformations and civil disobiedience. He also evokes the roles that trade unions as well as NGOS can play and he talks about collapsology.

Since their emergence in the 1980s, environmental virtue ethics (EVEs) have aimed to provide an alternative to deontological and consequentialist approaches for guiding ecological actions in the context of the global environmental crisis. The deterioration of the ecological situation and the challenges in addressing collective action problems caused by global changes have heightened interest in these ethics. They offer a framework for meaningful individual actions independently of the commitment of other actors. However, by shifting the focus onto individuals, EVEs appear to grapple with the tension between anthropocentrism and respect for nature, as well as between self-flourishing and concern for other living beings. This article argues that this difficulty is rooted in the neglect within EVEs of the communitarian aspect of ancient virtue ethics. Drawing from Baird Callicott’s ecocentric approach and Val Plumwood’s works, this paper explores the possibility of conceiving ecological communities as collective frameworks in which both public and private virtues are defined and practiced.

The wilderness debate that has raged in American environmentalism since the 1990s has led to the valuation of less spectacular forms of nature than wilderness. This increasing interest in ordinary nature brings American environmental thought to an environmental ground more familiar to French ecologists. Although the wilderness idea that has focused on untrammeled places was difficult to integrate into the French philosophical landscape, reaching common ground could foster exchanges between American environmental ethics and French political ecology. More precisely, the renewal of naturalism that emerged from the wilderness debate could inform French political ecology, which sometimes tends to reduce environmental problems to social issues.