Once a month, Duty challenges philosophy enthusiasts to decipher a current issue based on the theses of a notable thinker.
Since the announcement, on June 19, by the federal Minister of the Environment, Steven Guilbeault, of the upcoming implementation of an emergency decree to protect three of the thirteen Quebec caribou populations, the rag is burning between Quebec and Ottawa. The Legault government denounced federal interference in its field of jurisdiction. Steven Guilbeault, for his part, reminded Quebec of its obligation to protect this emblematic deer.
At the heart of the tensions, the forestry industry and its jobs, which are the main cause of disruption of the habitats necessary for the survival of the caribou. And while the discussions seem to be at an impasse, it seems appropriate to take a step back to look at this caribou diplomacy with a new eye.
This is what the French philosopher Baptiste Morizot (1983-) invites us to do. A leading figure of these new “thinkers of life” who emerged in France in the tradition of the work of the philosopher Bruno Latour and the anthropologist Philippe Descola, this lecturer in philosophy at the University of Aix-Marseille has been working since about ten years now on the relationships between humans and other forms of life. He seeks in particular to propose a new ontology to our contemporary societies, a pluralist ontology which would recognize the different “ways of being alive”, to use the title of one of his collections published in 2020.
Via media
But the work that interests us here is the one he published in 2016 under the title Diplomats. Cohabiting with wolves on another map of life. This “political ethology investigation”, which earned it the Foundation for Political Ecology Prize the year it was published, looks at the return of the wolf to France and attempts to approach it as a separate philosophical problem. entire: that of the conditions of our cohabitation with other species. And what he proposes directly echoes our problem with the caribou.
The philosopher notes in fact that traditional models for managing relationships between wolves and human beings are neither fair nor efficient. On the one hand, breeders are demanding solutions to protect their herds and in particular the possibility of killing wolves, a protected species, but which they are considering eradicating from French territory. On the other hand, some ecologists are calling for policies to preserve and protect wolves which ignore the traditions of pastoralism.
Now, for the philosopher, it is appropriate to find a “ via media » by establishing “real cohabitation”, that is to say “sharing the uses of the same territory” between humans and animals. To do this, it is necessary to transform our “ontological maps”, in other words the way we think about beings (here living) and their possible relationships.
The exercise is philosophical — we must rethink the place of human beings in nature to better reinvent our conceptions of wolves and our relationships with them — but also practical, since we must create viable modes of cohabitation together. for everyone, for example with the generalization of the use of Patou dogs, shepherd helpers or night enclosures by breeders in lupine territory.
“We cannot think of ourselves as at war with the living, because we are caught with it in constitutive relations,” Morizot rightly observes. Therefore, diplomacy is essential.
Defined as “the art of invigorating the relationships themselves”, this interspecific diplomacy must invite us to come down from our anthropocentric pedestal to consider serious modalities of cohabitation with the other living beings with whom we share the territory.
As is the case in human diplomacy, it is therefore appropriate to come together and consider the needs of each person, so as to find a compromise that can satisfy everyone. This is what the Quebec government seems to be struggling to do with the caribou.
Diplomats
However, there are many diplomats. There are of course the First Nations, who have been around the animal for millennia and who wish to be included in the process of reflection and decision-making on its protection, as requested by the Innus Essipit, Mashteuiatsh and Pessamit, in over the last few years.
There are also the environmental activists who make the voice of this silent deer heard, as well as the scientists who study it and therefore know its needs, its strengths and its vulnerabilities. These people are all the better placed because they do not simply intend to assert the voice of the caribou against that of workers in the forestry and mining industries. They all campaign for the establishment of rules for harmonious cohabitation and respect for deer and humans alike. This is an important nuance.
As Morizot recalled in a 2020 article published in the journal Groundthe diplomat “does not speak in the name of the wolf, nor in the name of the shepherd, like an elected official or a spokesperson”. Indeed, representing “each non-human in conciliation mechanisms paradoxically adds to the divide, it replays and perpetuates the exclusive and contradictory character of interests (theirs against ours)”.
The role of the diplomat is rather to ensure the conservation and recognition of the interdependencies that exist between beings. “If the shepherd takes care of the sheep, the diplomat takes care of interdependencies […]. And that is why he can intercede to remind the camps of the moments when they forget their inseparability with others. He can cobble together solutions, compose the situation so that these interdependencies emerge in all their clarity for everyone to see and are respected, even if they seem to oppose the short-term interests of each camp. »
Because, otherwise, what is the solution? The pure and simple extermination of one camp by the other? Unfortunately, it seems that some are currently ready for it.
Anthropocentrism
Baptiste Morizot already pointed this out in his collection entitled Ways of being alive : the ecological crisis is also a crisis of sensitivity, a crisis of our capacity for interest and empathy towards other living things.
The disappearance of entire species, basically, affects us little, because such are our relationships with other living things: sensitive when they are close – cats, dogs, horses, domestic ferrets perhaps -, indifferent for the rest. However, it is this anthropocentrism, this idea that the interests of human beings take precedence over those of others, that we must abandon if we do not want to influence our ecosystem in an irreversible and tragic way.
It is in fact profoundly immoral, Morizot reminds us, to continue our activities as if nothing had happened even though they contribute to the disappearance of other living beings, in entire species, when they do not directly cause it. Apart from the fact that we maintain constitutive relationships with these other species, and that we thus play a dangerous game of destabilizing the ecological balance which risks coming back to us in the face, these are modes of existence, ways of be unique and in their own right, which thus disappear.
Ecocide is also a culturicide. We therefore have a moral responsibility, an ethical obligation, to “reconcile human uses of the planet with the uses of other species”.
If Baptiste Morizot has been rightly criticized for having a depoliticized approach to ecology, particularly because he constantly considers humanity as a single block without taking into account the numerous inequalities which nevertheless fragment it, it is clear nevertheless to note that his work The diplomats invites us to reinvent our ways of doing politics.
It is in fact no longer possible, today, to govern (and live) without taking into consideration the massive and often harmful consequences of our activities on ecosystems and their inhabitants.
To put it differently and more clearly, if Quebec wants to be a nation in its own right, it is high time that it establishes a diplomacy that matches its ambitions, so that the use of the territory it shares with other peoples, human and non-human, is done with respect and for the benefit of all.