Editorial: Hopes and Fears in Times of Ecological Crisis across the francosphère

Our planet is experiencing unprecedented ecological anomalies of escalating severity. Over the last few years, France has been no stranger to ‘natural catastrophes’ with palpable links to human-caused climate change, which is making them ever more unnatural in scope. In September 2020, Prime Minister Jean Castex’s Office released two decrees confirming ‘l’état de catastrophe naturelle pour près de 220 communes dans 34 départements suite à des inondations, des coulées de boue, des mouvements de terrains consécutifs à la sécheresse et à la réhydratation des sols en 2019 et 2020ʹ (Direction de l’information légale et administrative 2020, paragraph 1). On the global stage, longstanding concerns over such matters have coalesced around initiatives like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C from 2018, in which a multinational team of leading scientists provides an exceptional level of detail about the grave dangers of not reducing unsustainable practices including emissions from heavy industry in the Global North. With particular relevance to UN Sustainable Development Goals 3.9 (‘Good Health and Well-Being: Reduce Illnesses and Death from Hazardous Chemicals and Pollution’) and 13.3 (‘Climate Action: Build Knowledge and Capacity to Meet Climate Change’), the Report’s Summary for Policymakers expresses significant apprehension about the feasibility of curbing increases in temperatures, as recently experienced across France: ‘la température depuis le début de l’année 2020 atteint, en moyenne sur la France, 9.6°C, soit une anomalie de +2.3°C par rapport à la normale 1981–2010. Cette température est la plus chaude mesurée sur la même période depuis le début du 20ème siècle’ (Météo-France 2020, paragraph 1). This stark situation, which is far from the worst instance on Earth, will necessitate a concerted effort to reconceptualize life in industrial nations so that the world does not undergo radical degradation. As highlighted in the Report’s teaser, featuring a thumping soundtrack by Pokki DJ, ‘low energy demand, low material consumption, and low carbon food have the highest co-benefits’ (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 2018, 1:51). This kind of ‘living lightly’, i.e. with care for regeneration and praxis not based on extractivism, will go some way to preventing the worst scenarios modelled in the Report. Yet, a major concern is that little progress has been achieved on such matters since the establishment of the IPCC in 1988. In a commentary for Nature Climate Change, Mike Hulme draws on human geography to address the limits of certain presentations of information, however weighty:

As a result of the IPCC’s heavy lean on natural sciences and economics, the dominant tropes in climate policy discussions have become ‘improving climate predictions’ and ‘creating new economic policy instruments’; not ‘learning from the myths of indigenous cultures’ or ‘re-thinking the value of consumption’. […] The role of story-telling needs elevating alongside that of fact-finding. […] Stories are the way that humans make sense of change, and the humanities understand the practices of story-telling very well. (2011, 177–78)

A failure to engage fully with the story of the climate crisis is a problem requiring expertise in qualitative approaches rooted in the arts, humanities, and social sciences as a counterpart to quantitative methods that are the foundations of the natural and physical sciences. Relations between individuals and environments can be amply illuminated by comparing and critiquing sources pertaining to a variety of contexts, not least ones involving languages other than the scientific form of English entailed in the IPCC’s work.

In light of all the evidence about our planet fast approaching a series of perilous tipping points, this special issue aims to explore diverse representations of climate change with regard to hopes, fears, risks, and constructive responses. Modern & Contemporary France has helped to air issues pertaining to rural policy in the Languedoc (Jones and Clark 2003), France’s Charter for the Environment (Bourg and Whiteside 2007), and ecological issues in contemporary Guiana (Wood 2015). The prioritization of the environmental humanities here chimes with widespread efforts to scrutinize social aspects of tumultuous times that have been shaped by the emergence of biosphere-reworking technological infrastructures. A significant motivation for this undertaking is the pressing need for more creative interventions to ensure a transition to sustainable ways of life that are fair and respectful of varied communities’ experiences and beliefs. Inspired by the fruitfulness of scholarship in the humanities about stories of transformation across a range of places and periods, the studies in the coming pages have the goal of unpacking correspondences between physical and human geographies. My introduction gets going by outlining the evolution of the climate crisis over centuries to the point of the extreme weather that is far too familiar today, with an eye on political, medical, colonial, and epistemic concerns. Then, I focus on successes in climate activism achieved through the toil of individuals and collectives from myriad backgrounds as a counterpart to academic developments at the crossroads of ecological and cultural matters, especially the recent exponential growth of initiatives in ‘écocritique’ and ‘humanités environnementales’. In closing, there is a summary of the issue’s seven articles extending from nineteenth-century France to French-speaking territories in the last few years, followed by a rumination on prospects for a field with a decisively interdisciplinary and global outlook.

Findings about humanity’s long-term impact on the world go back decades. Twenty-five years ago, geophysicists were substantiating industrial societies’ ecological footprint: ‘CO₂ growth is attributed to fossil fuel CO₂ release that began about 1850 A.D. and biospheric CO₂ releases from land use changes that began about a century earlier’ (Etheridge et al. 1996, 4124). Global warming has been driven by the exponential uptick in the consumption of carbon-based matter as fuel in the Global North since the nineteenth century. Contributing factors also include massive alterations to land for habitation and agriculture, the spread of resource-intensive modes of transportation, and the devastation of indigenous cultures due to colonization. From the perspective of the history of science, environmental matters are a perennially thorny issue, as discussed by Julien Vincent in Romantisme:

Au cours du XIX^e siècle, l’idée d’environnement oscille entre plusieurs définitions rivales que saisit un lexique peu stabilisé. Qu’on y voie un ensemble de ressources ou un paysage, un ‘milieu’ ou un ‘climat’, un organisme vivant ou un produit de l’intervention humaine, elle est le point d’appui d’une diversité de rationalités et d’imaginaires, de dispositifs matériels et de sensibilités, de pratiques sociales et de discours. (2020, 5–6)

Visions of the world ranging from a supply of resources to a living organism have added to the complexities of practices responsible for the current situation—even if only a handful of privileged groups have shaped the world to their liking, it falls upon everyone to deal with the consequences. With the sorts of causes and effects at play here, affairs of space and time intersect in intricate ways. In the words of the human geographer Nathalie Blanc,

Bien que de nombreux processus récents liés aux changements environnementaux se produisent à des échelles temporelles bien au-dessous ou au-delà de la portée de la perception humaine, […] lorsque des systèmes complexes sont perturbés, les pressions qu’ils subissent peuvent être décalées […] jusqu’à ce que, lentement, ils atteignent un seuil critique. (2017, 75)

There is a substantial problem of perception regarding links between behaviours and consequences that can occur at different distances in geographical and temporal terms.

Throughout the francosphère, the harshness of the climate crisis is being felt without much prospect of a respite. From Corsica to New Caledonia, rising temperatures and unstable weather patterns are imperilling ecosystems and every being in them. These circumstances are getting their due in Le monde: ‘Paris, Bastia, Nouméa, Besançon, Le Mans ou Fort-de-France, la température moyenne de plus de 70 villes françaises s’est élevée de 2°C à 3°C durant ces dernières décennies’ (Breteau 2018, paragraph 1). Warming locations as diverse as Martinique and the Swiss border represent a warning about far-flung consequences of actions in one place or time. According to World Weather Attribution, the mercury is rising to extreme heights:

The all-time temperature record at a station in metropolitan France (old record 44.1°C in Conqueyrac, Gard) was broken on June 28, with a new record of 45.9°C […] at Gallargues-le-Montueux, Gard, near the city of Nîmes. […] In Switzerland[,] new June records were confirmed at more than 40 stations, and new all-time records were confirmed at 6 altitude stations. (van Oldenborgh et al. 2019, paragraph 1)

Severe conditions are a chronic danger to all forms of existence, with southern France's scorching summers constituting just the tip of the iceberg. Variations once deemed unseasonal are also becoming commonplace because of limited tackling of activities that are worsening our planet’s atmosphere. In the opinion of Climate Action Tracker, policymaking continues to be insufficient in countries that should know better: ‘Switzerland is in the final stages of a significant revision of its CO₂ Act, […] a ratcheting up of the required domestic emission reductions to 37.5% below 1990 levels, […] remain[ing nonetheless] well below the level of action needed for Swiss emissions to be on a Paris Agreement compatible 1.5°C pathway’ (2020, paragraph 4). Although a target such as the one under consideration might sound ambitious, much more needs to be done. A major attempt to legislate around global warming came in the form of the international treaty adopted by consensus at Le Bourget on 12 December 2015 during the 21^st Conference of the Parties of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, except the lack of an enforcement mechanism means that signatory countries can play quite fast and loose with promised mitigations. France 24 reveals that hosting the proceedings responsible for the Paris Agreement has not led to significant progress on the home front:

La France a déjà émis, au 5 mars, 80 millions de tonnes de CO2 depuis le début de l’année, […] pour atteindre […] le […] ‘Jour du dérèglement’. Autrement dit, la France a déjà émis la totalité des gaz à effet de serre qu’elle pourrait se permettre de relâcher dans l’atmosphère en un an si elle respectait son objectif de neutralité carbone. […] La France a […] reculé la date du ‘Jour du dérèglement’ de 3 jours en quatre ans. Ce qui est très loin d’être suffisant. (Seibt 2020, paragraphs 1–6)

It is untenable for one of Europe’s foremost industrial powers to spend five-sixths of the year emitting carbon dioxide in excess of a level conceived to ensure a safe world. An improvement in performance of 1% over four years—a paucity attracting little in the way of regulatory penalties—means that changes in climate in many areas are set to go on posing threats to health, with new levels of magnitude in the offing.

Countries suffering the brunt of the climate crisis do not hold the lion’s share of the responsibility for the perilous state of affairs, which is at its worst in the Global South. Philippe Hamman provides a sociological critique of prevailing models of economic development that transpire to be at quite a remove from sustainability: ‘les critiques adressées au paradigme du “développement durable” sont devenues nombreuses: continuité du primat d’un référentiel économique, permanence d’injustices sociales, voire production de nouvelles inégalités environnementales entre ceux qui auraient les moyens de bénéficier d’innovations techniques et les autres’ (2019, 428). Privileged nations like France have disproportionate culpability for our planet’s altered ecologies, but populations are not engaging with climate change as much as necessary, perhaps because people are rather distracted from the unsustainable systems inherent in many aspects of everyday existence. Astrida Neimanis, Cecilia Åsberg, and Johan Hedrén make an argument in Ethics and the Environment that ‘any policy or action aimed at ameliorating environmental problems must take into account human desire, motivation, and values; a deep understanding of environment cannot be divorced from human imagination, culture, and institutional and social practices’ (2015, 80). Hope still abounds for collective action on the largely preventable array of dangers facing all life on Earth. When adopting the resolution for an annual International Day of Clean Air for Blue Skies on September 7^th, the United Nations’ General Assembly recognized that ‘air pollution is the single greatest environmental risk to human health and one of the main avoidable causes of death and disease globally’ (2019, 1–2). In view of spiralling threats to public health because of ecological problems, efforts to tackle a global predicament are gaining traction in arenas from intergovernmental policymaking to hyperlocal activism.

Correspondences between environmental and medical problems are gaining in starkness by the day. Unsound conduct driven by the elite of the Global North is very much at fault for the global pandemic of COVID-19, as Andreas Malm mentions in an interview with The New Institute:

Global sickening and global heating […] share some driving factors, mainly deforestation, which is the second most important driver of greenhouse gas emissions in the world. Global heating will drive more zoonotic spill-over, it will push animals to migrate, including bats that carry viruses. […] We have to transform something like the extreme summer of 2018 into a crisis for fossil fuels and the fossil fuel industry. (2020, paragraphs 1–11)

Human alterations to land, sea, and air in pursuit of resources have jeopardized bionetworks at length, but effects have rarely been felt as close to home as a months-long respiratory contagion requiring unprecedented international containment measures. This situation is a bleak corollary of activities like deforestation for agriculture on a colonialist basis, which is the root of the model of the Plantationocene (Haraway et al. 2016, 557). Such processes are harmful to all creatures, not least animals that can transmit viruses like SARS-CoV-2 to humans, as is an escalating problem because of inveterate extractivist behaviours. From the standpoint of zoopoétique, Anne Simon emphasizes the necessity of heeding ‘une relation universelle des animés au monde’ (2017, 12), since each being—large or small—implicates others in shaping our planet. Certain groups, principally in the Global North, exhibit dangerous confidence in a false division of nature/culture that overlooks connections between the constituent elements of Earth’s past, present, and future. The clinical ethicist Andrew Jameton, writing in Journal of Medical Humanities, brings up the extent to which wellbeing is inseparable from the state of the world: ‘many cancers have their origins in exposures to environmental substances in the air, soil, and water, many of them by-products of agriculture and industry’ (2002, 46). The grave implications of polluting activities due to high-tech manufacturing and food production epitomize injustices associated with power imbalances that have centuries-deep roots. There are clear-cut portents of today’s problems in a speech to the Académie royale de médecine by the public health specialist Dr François Mêlier from 22 April 1845:

Au premier rang des causes qui tendent à modifier l’homme, dans cette vie de continuel labeur, telle que la civilisation l’a faite, se placent l’industrie et les professions. Elles créent […] des conditions spéciales, des rapports nouveaux, et […] une sorte de climat particulier au milieu du climat général […]. À cet égard, la position d’un ouvrier, abordant pour la première fois certains ateliers, a quelque chose de comparable à celle du voyageur qui se trouve […] sous un ciel nouveau et différent du sien; […] il a à supporter des impressions inaccoutumées, à se façonner sous l’action d’autres élémens. (1845, 241–42)

Privileged humans were having an enormously detrimental impact on their less fortunate counterparts well before the Industrial Revolution, but the forces of steam and fossil fuels brought new lows. The idea of a ‘climat particulier’ attendant upon capitalist technologies relates not only to workers being destabilized by the bodily and psychological demands of heavy industry, but also to environmental changes that quite literally bring about ‘un ciel nouveau’.

Clamour is mounting about France’s role in damaging ecologies and health across its former empire. Troubles in places thousands of miles from the primary seat of decision-making in Paris are coming under scrutiny from BBC News:

Prostate cancer […] is commoner on Martinique and […] Guadeloupe than anywhere else in the world. And scientists blame chlordecone, a persistent organic pollutant […] authorised for use in the French West Indies long after its harmful effects became widely known. […] Chlordecone stays in the soil for decades, possibly for centuries. […] 92% of Martinicans have traces of chlordecone in their blood. […] It was only in 2018—after more than 10 years of campaigning by French Caribbean politicians—that President Emmanuel Macron accepted the state’s responsibility for what he called ‘an environmental scandal’. (Whewell 2020, paragraphs 3–16)

The use of an insecticide for decades after the identification of its highly toxic properties is far from an isolated incident in Overseas France and similar territories that continue to suffer deeply from colonialism. Even though recognition of the violence done to land and people is a critical step, there is a long way to go on a whole host of reparative affairs. Christie Margrave illuminates how ‘imperialist attitudes [have] not only scarred the colonial landscape, but also caused trauma for indigenous and transplanted populations’ (2019, 171). Human and more-than-human legacies of exploitation take a vast amount of time and care to process, which is only possible where people feel empowered to take a stand against degradation and displacement. The intersectional nature of the crisis facing our planet requires concerted efforts to trace and tackle systematic inequalities that crystallize in environmental dynamics as much as interpersonal ones. Elizabeth Povinelli’s Geontologies makes an anthropological case for ‘the global nature of climate change, capital, toxicity, and discursivity immediately demand[ing that] we look elsewhere than where we are standing. We have to follow the flows of the toxic industries whose by-products seep into foods, forests, and aquifers’ (2016, 13). Rogue actors have disproportionately affected places and communities with limited means to organize effectively against a deluge of toxicity that extends from disregard for indigenous rights to poisons suffusing precious water, air, land, and comestibles. Now is the time for people with the clout to ameliorate unsustainable practices to demand change through direct intervention, policymaking, and the like.

Action against the climate crisis continues to encounter hurdles, despite considerable awareness of pathways to overcoming challenges. Stephanie Posthumus elucidates the dilemma of climato-scepticisme:

The history of anti-nature and anti-ecological sentiment in France […] see[s] the emergence of three important characteristics: (1) the use of a sarcastic, at times, persifleur tone to critique pro-nature sentiment; (2) the dismissal of ecological science that becomes too embroiled in political affairs; (3) the method of doubt as central to scientific and intellectual thinking. (2019a, 183)

The homeland of René Descartes is by no means exceptional insofar as earnest attempts to turn the social order away from risky practices in favour of ecologically sound living are prone to faltering in the face of mockery, misgivings over politicization, and distrust of firm conclusions even where evidence has the distinction of incontrovertibility. Over and over, opponents of environmental justice muddy the waters when there is an attempt to build consensus on steps towards a brighter future. In addition to groups overtly or surreptitiously taking a swipe at climate action, progressives do not always have an easy time coalescing around a compelling strategy, as is discussed in environmental sociology: ‘formed in 1984, the Verts sought to make a lasting impact as a structured political party. However, […] the heterogeneous mix of anti-nuclear protesters, nature conservationists, regionalists and others besides did not gel into a single movement’ (Blühdorn and Szarka 2004, 308). The diverse interests of those aligned with a green agenda can pose problems for pursuing a unified approach with enough weight to make an enduring showing in mainstream political contests that only on occasion setgreat store by ecological matters. Nevertheless, there is abundant potential for drumming up support from individuals with concerns ranging from Breton identity to a national reliance on nuclear power. Since Les Verts merged with Europe Écologie into Europe Écologie—Les Verts in 2010, popular expressions of environmental discontent have surged into the political sphere with renewed vigour. Pierre Schoentjes, in a discussion of the stakes of l’écopoétique, declares that ‘la problématique environnementale s’est imposée aujourd’hui au plus grand nombre. À une époque de méfiance envers les idéologies politiques, l’écologie constitue sans doute aujourd’hui en Europe le plus grand idéal fédérateur’ (2016, 81). The likelihood of a sustainable future based on international collaboration looks to be gaining momentum under Ursula von der Leyen’s presidency of the European Commission, with the allocation of hundreds of billions of euros to the European Green Deal to achieve climate-neutral status for the continent by 2050, though that target really needs to be achieved a lot sooner.

Frustration with the lethargy and indecisiveness of domestic and international policies about ecological problems is leading to pro-environmental outpourings and coordinated efforts among members of the public in serious numbers. In terms of ‘geographies of hope’ (Anderson 2006, 741), movements like 350.org (@350) are working to build consensus around community-led strategies in places such as Benin and Burundi that will ensure ‘interdependence rather than hyper-individualism, reciprocity rather than dominance, and cooperation rather than hierarchy’ (Klein 2015, 462). A big part of this undertaking revolves around empowering adversely affected groups to weigh into discussions with powerful stories, as in the case of ‘Rise’ by the Marshallese poet Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner and the Inuk poet Aka Niviâna:

We demand that the world see beyond

ACs, SUVs, their pre-packaged convenience, their oil-slicked dreams;

beyond the belief that tomorrow will never happen—

that this is merely an inconvenient truth.

[…]

Let’s watch as Miami, New York, Shanghai, Amsterdam, London, Rio de Janeiro, and Osaka try to breathe underwater.

You think you have decades before your homes fall beneath tides?

[…]

[L]ife in all forms demands the same respect we all give to money[.]

[…]

None of us is immune

And […] each and every one of us has to decide if we will rise. (2018, 4:09–5:27)

This video-poem—watched on Vimeo more than 48,000 times—won the People’s Choice Award for Climate Change Communicator of the Year at the Climate Communications Awards organized by Climate Outreach in Oxford in 2019. The call to correct ecological injustices not only is a compelling riposte from a subaltern outlook, but also chimes with Al Gore’s remarks in An Inconvenient Truth (2006) and the thirty-eighth quatrain of Percy Shelley’s response to the Peterloo Massacre on 16 August 1819: ‘Rise, like lions after slumber, | In unvanquishable number, | Shake your chains to earth like dew’ (1832, 20). In Montréal, risings are occurring by the hundreds of thousands, involving large numbers of school pupils under the banner of Fridays for Future (@FFFCanada), especially on 27 September 2019 in the presence of Greta Thunberg (Riga, Feith, and Curtis 2019). Along comparable lines, Extinction Rebellion (@ExtinctionR) grew from modest origins in the United Kingdom in 2018 to bring key areas of London to a standstill through ten days of non-violent resistance and civil disobedience in April 2019, which led to more than a thousand arrests (Marshall 2019). XR followed up their achievement with a widely shared satirical short about climate change in which a fictionalized senior Conservative MP is caught out exclaiming that ‘people aren’t ready for the truth!’ (Extinction Rebellion 2020, 7:14–17). Across the Channel, many individuals’ eagerness to grapple with the truth is plain to see with respect to Extinction Rebellion Belgium (@XR_Belgium) and Extinction Rebellion France (@xrFrance), whose headline-grabbing activities stretch from Brussels to Bordeaux (Schneider 2019; Despre 2019).

During Macron’s ecologically controversial presidency, Paris is proving to be a highly contested site of environmental activism. Major commotion has been achieved by Action non-violente COP21 (@AnvCop21), Friends of the Earth (@amisdelaterre), and Greenpeace (@greenpeacefr) on occasions like the blockading of buildings at La Défense containing EDF, Société générale, Total, and the Ministère de la Transition écologique et solidaire on 19 April 2019 (Barroux 2019). Similar successes on the part of home-turf collectives including Désobéissance Écolo Paris (@ecolo_paris), Libérons le Louvre (@Liberons_Louvre), and Youth for Climate Paris (@ParisYFC) are leaving big businesses and the government with less and less wiggle room around making strides towards a just transition. In the course of a conference on ‘L’énergie et le changement climatique’ at the Parisian headquarters of the Conseil économique, social et environnemental on 27 February 2020, a roundtable featuring Edmond Alphandéry (ex-Minister of Finance and ex-President of EDF), Marine de Bazelaire (HSBC), and Sylvie Goulard (Banque de France) identified that ‘il convient […] d’interpréter le risque climatique comme constituant un risque financier’ (Franco-British Council 2020, 4). Given the graver and graver risks associated with ecological tumult, sectors such as high finance are being confronted with the writing on the wall about bucking up their ideas. The Paris-based environmental activist Lucie Pinson, awarded the Goldman Environmental Prize for Europe in 2020, points out the value of agile and multifaceted methods for taking agents of severe climate change to task: ‘dans les campagnes, […] on réfléchit, quelle va être la meilleure stratégie, les meilleures tactiques, à mettre en place pour pousser ces grandes institutions financières à adopter des politiques de sortie des énergies fossiles’ (2020, 3, 30–45). Years-long grassroots campaigning is bearing fruit, with the likes of Crédit Agricole and AXA committing to total divestment from extractivist projects related to coal and tar sands. On a legal front, L’affaire du siècle (@laffairedusiecl) has garnered swathes of support for obliging the State to honour responsibilities about reducing emissions. On 3 February 2021, the Tribunal administratif de Paris made a landmark judgment about ‘un préjudice écologique lié au changement climatique’ regarding ‘la carence partielle de l’État français à respecter les objectifs qu’il s’est fixés en matière de réduction des émissions de gaz à effet de serre’ (Demurger 2021, paragraph 1), which compounded an analogous determination by the Conseil d’État on 19 November 2020: ‘ça ouvre la voie à d’éventuels autres recours, y compris dans d’autres domaines, pour faire condamner par exemple des actions qui vont à l’encontre des objectifs de réduction de gaz à effet de serre’ (Hannotin 2020, paragraph 10).

Academic initiatives to tackle the climate crisis are developing in tandem with the concerns of many French citizens about topics including biodiversity. Within the Centre national de la recherche scientifique, the Macron-backed programme on ‘Make Our Planet Great Again’ is seeking foreign researchers with a focus on ‘des sujets particulièrement importants, par exemple la compréhension de l’impact du changement climatique sur les ouragans, la compréhension de l’effet des nuages dans les modèles climatiques, l’impact du changement climatique sur la pollution et réciproquement, sur les implications sanitaires du changement climatique’ (2018, paragraph 4). It is timely to reflect on the potential of the humanities to complement the sciences with reference to matters such as the communication of ecological issues beyond a pure transmission of facts. Both fictionally and factually minded narratives from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries comprise a rich repository of localized insights about geographies and existences altering in ways attributable to industrial power. A cultural history of such forms of expression opens up possibilities for fathoming links between occurrences and conditions that might not be apparent on the surface. Rachel Bouvet and Stephanie Posthumus observe, based on investigations in Plant Studies, that ‘the network seems to be the best theoretical model to think and represent the intricate relations of space and individual beings (vegetal, animal, and human) in and out of texts’ (2020, 1). Recent decades have seen considerable progress in this area due to the work of ecocritics predominantly rooted in the Anglosphere.

Ecocritical approaches have a venerable record of elucidating ecologies via the arts, particularly literature. A dialogue between Serenella Iovino and Shaul Bassi at the Center for the Humanities and Social Change in Venice emphasizes that ‘ecocriticism […] is not only something which helps us better read narrative texts; […] ecocriticism […] is also a key to consider the world itself as a text, as an eloquent text’ (2020, 17:50–18:19). Close reading through the lens of materiality offers a means of expounding the intricacies of objects existing in representational and physical spaces. Perceptions of matter-as-story are taking on new dimensions in French-speaking circles as ecocritical methods are slowly but surely being welcomed alongside time-honoured critical practices. In an état présent on écocritique, Stephanie Posthumus perceives that ‘écocritique has spread more through teaching networks in France and […] its theoretical development has happened largely outside France’ (2019b, 600). For the francosphère, home-grown initiatives in ecocriticism remain something of a rarity when compared to the flourishing of geocriticism or geopoetics, despite the popularity of references to the likes of Gilles Deleuze/Félix Guattari/Michel Serres among scholars at all levels in places ranging from Australia to North America. Questions around language being a sticking point are brought to the fore by Pauline Goul and Phillip Usher in Early Modern Écologies: ‘the “texture” of contemporary eco-theory could have been otherwise—and could still be. Had contemporary theorists such as Timothy Morton and Bruno Latour developed their thought around French-language sources instead of English-language ones, things might have looked a little different’ (2020, 12). Since the Anglophone foundations of a large part of ecocriticism have inclined the field away from French sources and scholarship, there is plenty of scope for geographical diversification that would bring germane experiences and voices into a somewhat monolingual conversation. On the topic of ‘Ecological In(ter)ventions in the Francophone World’, Anne-Rachel Hermetet and Stephanie Posthumus draw attention to the value of multiplicity and openness to code-switching for inter- and intracultural understanding: ‘l’écocritique ne peut être que plurielle, attentive aux phénomènes de métissage, aux questions de genre, aux processus de mondialisation et à leurs conséquences. […] Dans le seul monde francophone, il apparaît nécessaire d’ouvrir les corpus et les travaux vers une plus grande prise en compte de la diversité linguistique’ (2019, 7–8). The rewards of embracing heterogeneity are apparent in the pioneering deductions that have arisen from the mix of disciplines besides literary studies within the broad church of the environmental humanities.

Biosemiotics, ecofeminist science and technology studies, ecosophy, environmental history, and ethnobotany are just a handful of the subjects flourishing in the cross-pollinating field of the environmental humanities in French-speaking contexts. Aurélie Choné, Isabelle Hajek, and Philippe Hamman introduce their Guide des Humanités environnementales by chronicling ‘un décloisonnement des disciplines pour prendre en compte la complexité des enjeux de la nature et de l’environnement, et la montée en puissance d’une dimension critique à l’endroit des relations entre cultures et pouvoir’ (2016, 15). With the climate crisis adding fuel to the fire of attitudes and situations with intersectional implications, the effort to address human-caused alterations to the world is taking on broader and broader significance. For Fabien Colombo, Nestor Engone Elloué, and Bertrand Guest, the time is ripe for overturning monolithic notions with a toxic heritage: ‘dans le projet des Humanités environnementales, […] [i]l y est question de penser une humanité plurielle et une pluralité des histoires humaines pour répondre à l’illusion d’un “Homme” unique, véhiculée par la récente mise en avant de la notion controversée d’Anthropocène’ (2018, 8). Scholars in the environmental humanities are nuancing the universal model of the Anthropocene postulated by geologists to highlight large variations in people’s experiences of and responsibility for our planet’s grave circumstances across generations. Per Bénédicte Meillon’s synopsis in Ecozon@ of this wave of ecologically minded research,

Si les Lettres et Sciences Humaines en France ont longtemps boudé les questions écologiques, le XXI^e siècle a lui opéré un brusque changement de cap, en mettant l’accent sur les questions environnementales […]. En France, la dernière décennie a connu un essor fulgurant du nombre d’études, de collectifs et d’événements écopoétiques et écoféministes. (2020, 19)

Environmentally oriented French thought in the arts and social sciences has extensive roots that are a basis for growth in response to the tumult of the twenty-first century. Frameworks such as ecofeminism, formulated by Françoise d’Eaubonne in the early 1970s, are coming home in force after finding fertile ground far afield during the 1980s to 2000s, especially in North America. From a sociological perspective, Florence Rudolf discerns that ‘les humanités environnementales investissent le champ de l’interdisciplinarité par l’entremise d’enjeux hybrides, au croisement des logiques sociales et écosystémiques. Elles sont attendues dans leur aptitude à se compléter, voire à dénouer des controverses qui relaient des publics opposés ou tout simplement non alignés sur des positions communes’ (2018, 235). French-speaking communities are certainly seeing the fruits of drawing together distinctive strands of knowledge to bridge gaps in understanding. Thriving initiatives in research and teaching designated as ‘humanités environnementales’ are to be found in Brussels (d’Hoop, Woitchik, and Zitouni 2020), Chambéry (Pety 2020), Fribourg (Wallimann-Helmer 2019), Ghent (Schoentjes and Barontini 2018), La Réunion (Thiann-Bo Morel 2016), Lausanne (Barras, Fernandes, and Gilliand 2018), Marseille (Méral 2021), Montpellier (Fache et al. 2020; Formoso 2021), Nantes (Nail and Ostolaza 2020), Paris (Demeulenaere, Feuerhahn, and Semal 2018; Puschiasis, Coumel, and Huchet 2020; Roudeau, Murail, and Ouillon 2020), and Perpignan (Meillon 2019).

The present issue is composed of seven articles addressing the complexities of physical and human geographies in modes that offer longitudinal insights into the challenges facing our planet. A methodological position paper by Keir Waddington at the intersection of the environmental and medical humanities sets the scene for pieces shedding light on ecological facets of landmark prose fiction spanning the 1800s (James Illingworth; Arthur Rose; Daniel Finch-Race), from which there is a leap to studies of texts and films produced around the start of the twenty-first century that account for major events encompassing frictions between human and more-than-human ecologies (Beatrice Ivey; Frances Hemsley; Kasia Mika). By way of an opening premise, Waddington’s ‘A Flat Past? History, Environment, Topography, and Medicine’ thinks with topographies as a means of bringing nuance to entanglements of an enviro-medical nature. In addition to appreciating the contours of France’s landscapes as a determining factor for health and cultural identity, Waddington ruminates on the potential for deepening historical practice based on texts’ dimensions beyond the superficial flatness of a printed page. ‘George Sand’s Volcanic Imagination’ has Illingworth fleshing out the sociopolitical and discursive importance of volcanic tropes in Sand’s prodigious output over the best part of thirty-five years. Informed by ecofeminism, Illingworth underscores differences in representations of volcanoes that possess the potential to upend male-privileging hierarchies of exploitation whereby femininity and the natural world are lumped together. With ‘Elemental Ecocritique of Normandy’s Industrial-Era Coast in Zola’s La joie de vivre’, I look to demonstrate the fruitfulness of bringing clued-up mimetic fiction into dialogue with elemental ecocriticism for the purpose of grasping Earth’s interconnected nature. My scalar thinking about water, air, earth, and fire in the novel’s littoral microcosm points up the significance of the local for confronting the macrocosm of global warming. A focus on the Rougon-Macquart saga persists in Rose’s ‘Coal Politics: Receiving Émile Zola’s Germinal’, which draws on issues of breath, dialectical images, and the philosophy of history to connect levels of meaning from nineteenth-century politics to twenty-first-century ecological thought. From the standpoint of sedimented chronologies and geographies, Rose dissects the long-term consequences of fossil-fuel reliance alongside the political economy of mining with respect to the debilitating effects of coal dust. Catastrophes in Algeria and Mauritius come to the fore in Ivey’s ‘Remembering Disaster and Ecologies of Affect in Nina Bouraoui’s Le jour du séisme (1999) and Nathacha Appanah’s Le dernier frère (2007)’, in which human and more-than-human matters are approached in embodied and gendered modes. Through the prism of affective remembrances of trauma, Ivey evokes the manner in which experiences of disaster-stricken places broach a form of bearing witness to violence in contexts ranging from the colonization of Algeria to the Holocaust. In ‘Spectres of “Development”: Francophonie, Agricultural Coloniality, and Genocide Memory in Scholastique Mukasonga’s La femme aux pieds nus and Inyenzi ou Les cafards’, Hemsley scrutinizes the weaponization of disease-cleansing ideas and language associated with racialized agronomy in Rwanda as a precursor to the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi. Hemsley’s explanation of the political motives behind agricultural development and environmental management draws attention to an insecticidal pretext for eliminating people resettled in areas infested with flies. ‘Documenting Hurt: The UN, Epistemic Injustice, and the Political Ecology of the 2010 Cholera Epidemic in Haiti’ sees Mika discussing investigative films about how the arrival of United Nations Peacekeepers after the violent earthquake of 12 January 2010 unleashed a spate of cholera for which it took more than half a decade of pressure from a range of activists and professionals to secure even a limited declaration of responsibility. In Mika’s judgment, attunement to suffering voices is a cardinal waypoint on the journey to epistemic redress regarding the sociopolitical basis of ecological and medical vulnerabilities, not least in terms of repudiating the notion of an ingrained disaster zone.

Where do such considerations lead in terms of promising futures for this world of ours, in addition to the environmental humanities? Given that a gamut of injurious conduct is the basis of Earth’s predicament, the benefits of plumbing the depths of the human condition have never been clearer. The process of scrutinizing cultural imaginaries provides deep insights into places and communities undergoing transitions at many levels, not necessarily willed. There are lessons to be gleaned about managing risks, protecting the vulnerable, and avoiding trade-offs that are practically and ethically dangerous, including overconfidence in technological solutions along the lines of last-gasp geoengineering. A honed sense of how ecological matters influence and are influenced by human behaviour is a precious asset in working towards sustainability and equity for all, as opposed to perpetuating a pecking order that is advantageous for a privileged handful in the Global North whose unsustainable stances are imperilling our planet. This state of affairs warrants solutions grounded in diverse kinds of practice and thought that can bridge gaps between people with widely varying interests and levels of expertise. A detailed understanding of the road to such a historic juncture is helpful for everyone, especially when it comes to co-producing trajectories involving due care for wellbeing as a whole, which tends to be overlooked in value systems that have prevailed in dominant cultures for too long. In sum, the environmental humanities are primed to play a prominent role in informing attitudes and decisions that will determine the fate of the francosphère and much more besides.

Acknowledgments

This issue arises from ‘Enviro-Medical Approaches to Modern Francophone Culture’ and ‘Post-16 French Enrichment Day on Environmental and Medical Issues’ on 10–11 May 2019 at the University of Bristol’s School of Modern Languages, which had logistical support from the University of Bristol’s Centre for Environmental Humanities, and the University of London’s Institute of Modern Languages Research. Besides the authors of the coming pages, the events engaged the talents of Joseph Ford, Sarah Jones, Holly Langstaff, and Gina Robinson, as well as teachers and pupils from Bristol Cathedral Choir School, Colston’s Girls’ School, Marling School in Stroud, and the Commonweal School in Swindon. Pivotal encouragement came from Susan Harrow and Gino Raymond, who backed my proposal to the journal’s editorial board. Gill Allwood, in her capacity as Executive Editor, was a fount of support and expertise. I am very grateful to the sixteen reviewers from Canada, England, Scotland, Sweden, and the USA whose detailed comments helped each contributor to great effect. It was a real treat to hone ideas at the Knowledge Frontiers Symposium on ‘The Anthropocene’ under the auspices of the British Academy and the Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen. Special thanks go to Arthur, Beatrice, Frances, James, Kasia, and Keir for input including feedback on each other’s drafts.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

Much-appreciated backing for the initial gathering came from the Association for the Study of Modern and Contemporary France (Schools’ Liaison and Outreach Fund) and the British Society for Literature and Science (Small Grant).

Notes on contributors

Daniel A. Finch-Race

Daniel A. Finch-Race FHEA (he/il/egli) is a research fellow in the Center for the Humanities and Social Change at Ca’ Foscari University in Venice, following teaching/research fellowships in Southampton, Durham, Edinburgh, and Bristol. His solo publications include articles in Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, Modern Language Review, and Romance Studies, as well as an issue of Nineteenth-Century Contexts (‘Poetics of Place’, 2019). As co-editor, he worked with Jeff Barda on Textures (Peter Lang, 2015), with Stephanie Posthumus on French Ecocriticism (Peter Lang, 2017), with Julien Weber on issues of Dix-neuf and L’esprit créateur (‘Ecopoetics’, 2015; ‘French Ecocriticism’, 2017), and with Valentina Gosetti on a double issue of Dix-neuf (‘Ecoregions’, 2019). During 2019–20, he was the treasurer of the Society of Dix-Neuviémistes, and a founder of the special interest group for early career academics within the University Council of Modern Languages.